Two indie SaaS founders—one just getting off the ground, and one with an established profitable business—invite you to join their weekly chats.
Similar Podcasts
Android Bytes (powered by Esper)
Android Bytes (powered by Esper) is the podcast that dives deep into the engineering and business decisions behind the world’s most popular OS. https://www.esper.io
Android powers over 3 billion devices worldwide and is the platform of choice for over a thousand companies. You’ll find Android on smartphones, tablets, watches, TV, cars, kiosks, and so much more. How does Google architect Android to run on so many form factors, and how do companies fork AOSP to make it run on even more devices? These are the kinds of questions the Android Bytes podcast considers each week.
Join cohosts Mishaal Rahman and David Ruddock, two journalists with extensive knowledge covering the Android OS platform and ecosystem, as they speak to system architects, kernel engineers, app developers, and other distinguished experts in the Android space.
Get in touch with us at Esper.io if you’re looking to use Android for your product — we have the experience you need.
The Laravel Podcast
The Laravel Podcast brings you Laravel and PHP development news and discussion. Season 5 consists of Matt Stauffer interviewing the creators of the most popular packages in the Laravel ecosystem.
Founders Talk: Startups, CEOs, Leadership
In-depth, one-on-one conversations with founders, CEOs, and makers. The journey, lessons learned, and the struggles. Let’s do this! Host Adam Stacoviak dives deep into the trials, tribulations, successes, and failures of industry leading entrepreneurs, leaders, innovators, and visionaries.
Applying the Five Steps to Finding an Audience
Michele Hansen 0:00 The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners.This episode is sponsored by Bella Scena.Are you making the best use of time in your meetings? Do you ever feel like your meetings are groundhog day where you talk about the same things week after week? Bella Scena helps you get a handle on your meetings to make the best use of your time. With Bella Scena, meetings are a process. Bella Scena make it easy and visual to:1. Plan and collaborate on agendas- whether ahead of time or in real time. Make sure you are having the right conversations.2. Track and share meeting notes and follow ups- create one version of what happened in the meeting.3. Give you peace of mind of who owns what follow ups. Check it out at meetbellascena.comThank you again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit balsamiq.com/go/software-socialMichele HansenHey, everyone, so we're gonna do something a little bit different this week, Colleen is moving. And so we decided that was an opportunity to bring on one of our listeners to workshop their business challenges this week, and hear all about what they're working on. So I am so excited to have a guest with us today. Do you want to introduce yourself?Rosssveth Lopez 1:29 Yes. Hello, everyone. I'm Rossveth with. I'm from the Philippines. So I'm really, really excited to be here. And it's an honor to be on your podcast.Michele Hansen 1:45 I'm so excited to have you. So can you tell us a little bit about what you're working on?Rosssveth Lopez 1:50 Okay, so actually, it's been just the several weeks that I've started. So I've had this idea, or maybe a little bit of a background. I've always wanted to bootstrap a business. And I, like, signed up for blogs, you know, the money making bags, and I stumbled across selling, selling printables, like digital designs on Etsy. And so I ventured in that. And being a non graphic designer, like art is not my main thing. So I can come up with designs, but it really, it takes me a while to even select fonts. So it's one of my pain points. And I, and I figured you know, this could be improved or my process could be more efficient. So I researched, like, font viewer tools. I guess some of you have seen, like, the famous ones, web apps, but I feel like there's something more that could be done. So I've used those tools, actually. So I select the fonts that I like, but then when I go back to my design, I still think that I need to do, or I need to select a few more. So, I keep going back and forth, and, and that's, that's when I thought of this idea. Like I could do a font viewer, but it would be more. So it would be you could preview the fonts, but it would be against your background. So you would have your, your background or your design and you have the selected fonts already, like five or 10 of these. And you can see it in one place. So, and then in like, in an instant, or just for a few seconds, you can already see how the font, like, would look with your design. And then you can select from there. So all the tools I'm saying, Oh, it's only been, like, plain texts.Michele Hansen 4:03 Gotcha. So just to recap, so you, you had an Etsy store where you were selling printables, like custom printables. I think we were talking about this earlier, and I bought some Christmas ornaments, for example for family members who had lost pets last year. And I was able to customize them with the text on it, but I wasn't able to see what it looked like. And so basically your idea is that if Etsy store owners can have a tool on their shop to show customers or themselves just what one of those custom pieces would look like before they purchase it that maybe people would buy more from their shops or it would simply be easier for Etsy store owners to make proofs for their customers. Is that right? Rosssveth Lopez 4:55Exactly. So, so my plan is the basic one would be it would be for the sellers, for the sellers themselves, the ones who do the design, it would help in their process with the designing. And then that would be the added feature when you can share that design or share your customized designs with your, your customers, your clients, so they could see that, so they could see it themselves. I actually came across several sellers who had experiences where their customers wanted a refund, because they did not like how it turned out. And yeah, so it, that's one, one, like, problem that that can be solved. And I, I’ve tried to research. They, some stores, each had their own websites, just to put the, their designs and with the fonts that they like, that they were offering. So they created their own. And I thought like why not, you know, offer this as a service. I've seen services like you do the designs on their platform. And you could share that, the links, but this, what I'm thinking of would be different. It would be your designs, you can create them from anywhere. And then you just display the fonts that you offer. So, yeah.Michele Hansen 6:30Yeah, that makes sense. I guess we should probably back up a little bit and talk about your, your background a little back. So you're a developer, right? Rosssveth Lopez 6:38Yes, yes I am. So.Michele Hansen 6:38 Yeah, how did this come about? Rosssveth Lopez 06:45Okay. Well, I've been in the software industry for like, 14 years or something. I recently resigned from my corporate job about three years ago, after I had my third son. So it's, it's been a goal that we had as a couple that we would, like, we would stay at home, take care of the kids, but then pursue also a business. So I've just been stuck with finding that idea, that $1 million idea to start to work on. And it was only like very recently that I learned about indie hacking and bootstrapping. And so the blogs that I signed up for, those were just like the ways I wanted to get ideas how to, how to start my own business. And, and that's, I've never heard of Etsy before. And like you could sell printables as a passive income you created once, and then you can sell it forever. And so I was like, amazed with the idea. And, but when I, like I, I also stumbled across tech Twitter and how the people left and right, were creating businesses, like simple projects, and they were making money. So that really, really amazed me.Michele Hansen 8:16 It sounds like that was really like a lightbulb moment for you.Rosssveth Lopez 8:19 Yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't know, growing up, I've always wanted to start a business. But you know, you compare it with, like, tech giants, like, like the big companies being famous all around, having these great ideas impacting the world. But I never really know, or maybe I did not come across it in my, like, experiences or with my colleagues about just, you know, starting a business, starting a bootstrap business that you can do it on your own. Michele Hansen 9:02 How long ago was it that you discovered the idea of bootstrapping?Rosssveth Lopez 9:06 I think it was like, late last year, probably. October, November. Just very recently.Michele Hansen 9:13 Awesome. And so you are, you're hitting the ground running. And so I want to, I want to dive in a bit more on this idea for this sort of, I guess, what, what do you call it? The, the principles preview tool, what is your name for it?Rosssveth Lopez 9:31 Actually, like, I already have a domain, like, I bought it in December.Michele Hansen 9:38 Ok. Buying domains is like, the first thing, like, before, we've talked to any customer, written anything, like, done any sort of research on it, it's like, hold on, let me buy a domain first and then, and then we all have, we all have a closet full of domains.Rosssveth Lopez 9:54 So I don't have a specific name for it. I know it’s a font viewer, but it, it's more, more than a font viewer. I asked, actually also planned to, to include like a font storage on a cloud. So they upload their fonts. And they could organize it as part of their account.Michele Hansen 10:18 So someone could use this, like, to run their business like, repeatedly, like that kind of like, sort of keeps, that sounds like that would be sort of a sticky feature feature that would make them come back to using this tool, but also sort of creates, you know, the need for this to be an ongoing subscription. If they are, you're basically hosting something for them. And then whenever they get new clients who want to preview what they've ordered, they go back to the same tool, and all of their fonts and maybe images or whatever are already, like pre-loaded for them, basically. Does that sound right? Rosssveth Lopez 10:57 Yeah, exactly. Yep.Michele Hansen 11:00 So it sounds like you've talked to a couple of people about this, or you, you came across Etsy sellers who were encountering this problem, can you tell me a little bit more about that?Rosssveth Lopezer 11:11 Actually, it's more of a passive, passive research. I've just been stalking Facebook groups, learning about their problems, and I looked at their stores, how they were managing it. So I saw, I saw them, like, hire people to create the website specific for that, to showcase their customized designs. But yeah, yeah, they actually hired someone, because,Michele Hansen 11:40 Like, they went and hired a freelancer to build them a website for what you want to make as a service. Oh, that's interesting.Rosssveth Lopez 11:48 Yep. Because most sellers, like, especially during the pandemic, there were really new ones who went into crafting. And, and they're, they're not, I mean, they're, they're excited with the idea, but they're not familiar with all the technologies yet. So. So, so, so, so.Michele Hansen 12:12 Oh, that’s so interesting.Rosssveth Lopez 12:13 Yep. Yeah.Michele Hansen 12:15 It sounds like you're taking the approach that, like you know, Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman propose of the sales safari, where you're going, looking at places online. Arvid Kahl is also a champion of this approach, specifically with Facebook groups. It sounds like you've been doing a lot of research to try to figure out what their, what their process is, and also experienced it yourself, too.Rosssveth Lopez 12:39 Yeah, exactly. Actually, I will be using this, I mean, for my business as well. But I really think that the, that this niche is very underserved in terms of, in terms of this aspect. There are, like, tools for Etsy sellers for, like, research and SEO, but I haven't seen a lot, like, on design-specific and customized things. So last week, I actually posted on Reddit, also, like, I was telling them about my problem, how it took me, it takes me so much time selecting a font, like, does anyone, could anyone relate to this problem? And I had very good engagement there. So yeah, yeah. So it was fun. Like, many people were, were, could relate, like, and they also do the tools themselves. I didn't propose my idea yet. It was just getting feel of what they were trying to achieve, how they solved it. So.Michele Hansen 13:51 So did you come across other people who are also paying to solve it? Whether that's like, having a freelancer build it or, or something else? Or just simply with their time?Rosssveth Lopez 14:02 No. I, I only found a few of that. But I haven't, like, reached out to them directly yet. I just, like, saw them post on message groups.Michele Hansen 14:17 Are you planning to reach out to them?Rosssveth Lopez 14:23 Yes. Yep. As soon as I have this up and running, or maybe, I don’t know. Michele Hansen 14:31 Do it before. Because that’ll help you figure out, like, how to price it. And I think it would be, it'd be really interesting if you can kind of quantify either, like, how much time people are spending on this, like, it sounds like it is fairly time consuming. And so being able to speak to, you know, save hours of, you know, managing and selecting fonts, or someone paid a freelancer for this and they spent a couple 100 or $1,000 for that website, right? Like, that's a really, really interesting signal. And it could kind of help you figure out like, okay, what, what are the features I have to launch with versus what can come after?Rosssveth Lopez 15:16 That's a really good suggestion. Yeah, I’ll look that up again, the ones I encountered. I’ll reach out to them.Michele Hansen 15:24 So from this Reddit thread, it sounds like that, like, went well. And like, other people were saying that they had this problem. I'm curious, like, was there anything that came up in there that surprised you?Rosssveth Lopez 15:36 Um, not really. I think what I got there was like, people were just, like, satisfied, like, like, they were just, they acknowledged a problem. But they, they were not looking for ways to improve it. But they acknowledged that it was really a pain, like it was time.Michele Hansen 16:06 So they, basically, they, it has not occurred to them that there could be a way to solve this another way. Except for their time.Rosssveth Lopez 16:15 Yeah, exactly. Yeah.Michele Hansen 16:18 Yeah, it's kind of interesting thinking about this market. Because I wonder if, in this context, Etsy sellers are more like, B2B, or B2C? Which like, like, do they behave more like consumers or more like businesses? And like, how could we find the Etsy sellers that are, you know, behave more like a business? You know what I mean?Rosssveth Lopez 16:43 Um, yeah, I haven't really thought of that yet. I see them more as some, like B2B. I know several are willing to, to subscribe to tools that would help their stores. Like, like, there's SEO tools, writing tools. There's websites that you can purchase fonts, which is a monthly subscription, fonts and graphics. Yeah. And they, and they, and they spend, like, they spend money for those. Michele Hansen 17:28 Okay, okay. So that’s a good sign. So, so you said, like, in the last couple of weeks, you're kind of getting closer to launching it. And, of course, you got the domain first. So, so talk to me a little bit about, like, you know, the, the process of building it and trying to get towards something that you can launch.Rosssveth Lopez 17:46 Okay, so, um, so I'm a developer, but I've always been, like, with Java or Android. So that was my previous job, mobile applications. And the tool I'm creating is web, web-based. And I haven't had much experience of that. But I've always wanted to learn about it. So I've, I've done some courses. I'm using React, and a bunch of other tools. And so far, I've been loving it. But that is one of the challenges I have right now. So web is, like, basically new to me. I mean, I know programming, I know development. But web is entirely different, like platform. So I am still getting the ropes. But I think I plan to just provide an MVP, like the simplest product I can launch because I want really want to validate if, if people will use this, and if they are willing to pay for it. So I have started with a framework already. I have the app running, but I still have some problems with font management. So I'm working on that, that part, but I think, oh, I hope I hope to be ready in a few weeks earlier.Michele Hansen 19:22 It's challenging, you're not only building a business and trying to figure out whether people will pay for that, and what that product should have in it. And then also learning a, you know, a new set of tools to build that.Rosssveth Lopez 19:40 Yeah. So, so, I mean, I’ve read that you should be able, I mean, you should start somewhere where you're familiar with, but I felt like the mobile approach is, is not a good fit for this idea. So, although I plan I have other ideas, I have other projects that are mobile based. And, but yeah, I really, I guess wanted a challenge.Michele Hansen 20:17 You are familiar with the Etsy seller side of it, though. And, you know, I think the, the valuable thing that also brings here not only some customer understanding and ways of finding those potential customers, but is also that you probably have some familiarity with running the business side of it too, just in terms of the sort of operational things about, you know, accounting and the, you know, those more things that that can also be sort of an unexpected challenge and a new skill for people to learn.Rosssveth Lopez 20:54 Yes. This would be hard for me if I didn't know about, like, running an Etsy shop, or, or the ins and outs of having a printable business. So having that shop really gave me that insight, as well as being involved in the groups, like, knowing their, their behavior, how, like, what are the issues that they have, and that I've experienced as well in my own shop. So, so that's why this idea, I, is something that I, like I'm really close to, I actually did Arvid Kahl’s Finding an Audience for your Side Business. He had, like, this step by step guide, how to select your niche and identify your projects or ideas for that, and this came out, came out on top. So, so that was what like, like, a sign to me that I should push with this.Michele Hansen 22:02 Oh, so you had other ideas that you were working through, and trying to figure out which of them you should pursue? And then Arvid’s guide helped you do that? Can you say? Like, like, what are, more about that?Rosssveth Lopez 22:16 Yeah, I can't, sorry, I can't remember all the steps. But he had five steps. And it's on his blog in the Bootstrap Founder. So you identify the different niches. And then you, you give a score, like, which ones are willing to pay, which ones have, like, problems that are solvable, and which ones that you would be, like, be able to provide value more. I think there, there were five, but, but like those steps, and reading and having the score, and then you rank them, and the overall score, you get the top, and then you, you, you, you select the, the idea that comes out on the top. Michele Hansen 23:19 That makes sense. Something you were saying earlier, I would be so interested if you could get this in front of someone from those Facebook groups, like maybe the, you know, the people who are already paying for things for their business. Like if there's some way that you could either like, screen share with them, or just get them on a quick call and do some of that validation work while you are also working through building it.Rosssveth Lopez 23:47 Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, maybe I can do that. And get their insights beforehand, even before the, okay. I’ll add that to my list.Michele Hansen 24:06 And, you know, asking people like, how much they would pay for something is always challenging. Because I think when we're, you know, there's always a sort of this, this feeling, it's like, it's a kind of a social situation, and you say, oh, would you you know, pay, you know, whatever for this. And people may not want to disappoint us by saying no. But I find if you ask, like, what are they currently paying for this, like that person who hired someone to build them a website for their portfolio of different options, or they're, you know, they're paying in terms of their time, and their time has value and especially when they're, you know, crafters and they may only be able to work on one item at a time. It like, like that, that their time has a real cost to them. And so seeing if you can somehow quantify that, and seeing, well, what are they charging for the item? And then if you can save them a half an hour per item, you know, what is that worth to them in terms of other sales they can make? And like, coming up with your pricing that way?Rosssveth Lopez 25:18 Yeah, yeah. And those are really good points. I haven't even thought about my pricing, pricing yet. So yeah, I’ll take note of those.Michele Hansen 25:29 Pricing is a complicated and tricky topic. Like I think it's, I think of it as one of the hardest parts of having a business and trying to figure out, okay, you know, there's, you know, you can go the approach of, well, this is what it costs us, and then let's put a markup on that. But it's really, it's like, Okay, what, what is the value someone is getting out of that? And then how do we use that to inform what the, what the price is? I think trying to see how much, how much time they're spending, or if they're hiring other people to do this right now could be a starting place to give you some ideas. What else are you still trying to figure out?Rosssveth Lopez 26:13 Well, um, one of my challenges would be the payment merchant, the, the gateway. So I'm still researching what's best. I really wanted to go with Stripe. Unfortunately, it's not yet available here. So yeah, that's one big challenge. They have a program if you are from outside the US, but I'm still trying to figure out if the cost would be, I mean, I can handle the cost. So.Michele Hansen 26:54 Oh, that's challenging to, yeah, I feel like stripe is kind of the default for everyone, us included. But if they're not in the Philippines yet, then that is a problem. Oh, interesting. So it sounds like there isn't. Rosssveth Lopez 27:07 They have what they call a Stripe Atlas, where you pay them so they can create, like an LLC, or, I'm not sure if it's an LLC, a company in the US on your behalf.Michele Hansen 27:32 Oh, yeah. So there's also, you can also use Firstbase. Yeah, Firstbase.io, yeah, to incorporate in the US. And so I guess if you were incorporated in the US, and you took payments in US dollars, could you like, could you use stripe? And then like, would you still have a way to transfer them? I guess yeah, you could probably just put them in a US, you need a US bank account, which I guess Stripe Atlas gives you, and then you just use TransferWise to get it out of your US Bank Account to the Philippines. Which is one of those weird, like, we're dealing with this too. It's like dealing with exchange rate risk like this, which is normally something that you know, only like large international corporations who, like, deal with exchange rate risk, right? Like, it's like, no, like, small businesses dealing with this.Rosssveth Lopez 28:23 Yes. So yeah, I've looked at Firstbase as well. I think they can also create a bank account for you. But yeah, I haven't dug deeper on that yet.Michele Hansen 28:39 Yeah, that's, that's complicated.Rosssveth Lopez 28:45 Yeah, cuz it would be a bummer if I can’t like, I mean, I could put that as a call to action. Are you interested, but then I can’t, like, provide them the payment service. So. Yeah, yeah.Michele Hansen 29:02 Yeah, I mean, the other thing, if like, you know, sort of, from a product perspective, like, if it's ready, like, I mean, you could kind of do like a free trial period, for, you know, like, just like, have a sort of beta period, basically, and get a couple of people using it. And, you know, getting feedback from them while you're dealing with all of the sort of administrative stuff to get the payments set up. And then you could, you know, get more feedback. And, but, but not be sort of actively developing as you are now, which sounds like that's, you know, you're using a sort of a whole new set of tools, and so that requires a lot of mental energy. And all of this sort of administrative stuff also requires a lot of mental energy, but in an entirely different way. And I'm wondering if it might, if you could kind of stagger those and use that as an opportunity to get more feedback and also, you know, build some like early you know, happy users who could champion the product to the rest of the, you know, creator community. Maybe that could work.Rosssveth Lopez 30:11 Yeah, yeah. I've thought about that, having a beta first. And, but yeah, right now I just really need to work out on the development side. So I could have a product back and I can offer us a beta.Michele Hansen 30:39 Yeah, so, I'm curious, like, Is there anything that you were hoping to ask me that we haven't covered?Rosssveth Lopez 30:52 Let me see. So I signed up to your newsletter, but I haven't gotten to them yet about the customer aspects stuff. So I might, I mean, if it's okay with you, I will, I would love to go deeper on that. Like, because that's one of the topics you're really master with. So, right now, yeah, I haven't read a lot on it, on it yet.Michele Hansen 31:21 That's okay. I've, I've had a couple of people tell me that they are kind of like saving them and would rather like, read them as a PDF, like as a book. It makes sense to me. And that's kind of my little bit of my thinking is, it's like kind of writing a book. But if I tell myself, I'm writing a book, it's going to feel overwhelming. So I was like, I'm just writing a blog, it's fine. It's whatever, like, it's not a big deal. And then I'll probably sort of slap them all together into a PDF and send that to people whenever I've gotten through this, like, burst of writing. Like, cuz I'm publishing two or three a week right now. And I think once I get everything sort of drained out of my head and onto paper, that I won't be writing nearly as much. So that, like, that totally makes sense to me. I think, I've, you're not the first person who has said, like, you know, I'm saving them to read them all in one go.Rosssveth Lopez 32:15 Okay, so, so while you were saying that, I actually thought of a question. So you and your husband are, are bootstrapping your business, and been doing for years. Any tips on time management? It's one of my, like, challenges right now. I only get like, one to two hours a day, I wish I could do more. My two year old, they're all boys. I have three boys, and it's just crazy. So yeah, any tips to time management?Michele Hansen 32:57 So we launched Geocodio when our daughter was four months old. So, I, I definitely sympathize with you on the time management thing. You know, I found that, you know, the thing about having a young child is that you, you really only have an hour or two to yourself a day. And so, I found that that made me more motivated, because I was like, okay, if I only have an hour to myself a day, like, I need to get the most out of it. Um, and for me, that meant working on side projects. Now, I'm not gonna say that everybody should do that, or if that was necessarily, like, mentally healthy at all times. Um, but that I mean, that definitely is a challenge and finding that space and I think as long as it's something that you're excited about, that you enjoy looking forward to, I think you'll find the time for it. But it's, it's, it's possible to start a business working on it an hour a day. Like, we did it, I don't know if everybody, like, it would work for everybody and um, you know, I can only speak from my own experience, right? Um, but you know, we did it and I mean, it took a long time like for that to become a full time business like, it was, it was three and a half years later that I went full time. Like, that was a long time and we had full time jobs so we could be sort of patient with it. And not everybody is in that position of having a full time job and being able to be patient with it. I mean, something that did help is what we would trade off with each other. And so, you know, on Saturday mornings, I would take our daughter to an art class or something and then take her to the grocery store. So we were out of the house for three hours so my husband could get some work done and then you know, in the afternoon he would you know, they would go on these long trips to like get an ice cream at IKEA, which was an hour drive away, like, just so that like I could have time like, to work during the day? Um, I mean, it was definitely a balancing game, and I don't, you know, it was not, I don't know if it was always easy or healthy. And I don't know if this answer is at all helpful for encouraging you. Um, I mean, I think that's why I'm so, like, passionate about getting involved with things like Earnest Capital that helps people go full time faster. Because it's like, it's it's hard, like making that jump from having a side business to a full time business is, is hard and finding the hours for it is hard. And it's mentally and physically taxing. Um, I guess my, I guess my advice for you is that you're not the only one who finds it hard. And I don't know if that brings you any comfort at all. But that it is normal to only be able to work on it an hour a day. But there are businesses that are, you know, quote, unquote, real businesses that were, that were launched and run on an hour or two of work a day.Rosssveth Lopez 36:10 Thank you. Thank you for sharing. So, yeah, I really need to have that focus. Yeah, I'll be improving more of that, especially now that I've started with my project already. So I need, I need more of that.Michele Hansen 36:26 Sounds like you have a lot on your plate, so I will let you get back to it.Rosssveth Lopez 36:33 Okay.Michele Hansen 36:35 I really enjoyed talking to you today.Rosssveth Lopez 36:38 Thank you so much. It's really been an honor to be on your podcast. Thank you.Michele Hansen 36:44 So when it's launched, whether that's the beta or the full launch, definitely let us know. And we will happily share it out. And similarly, if anybody else listening is, you're launching something or you've already learned something like, just, like, let us know and we're happy to, you know, retweet you and help you get the word out in our own small way. So, thanks so much for listening. And Colleen will be back next week. So we'll talk to you then.
Customer Interview Part 2: The Debrief
Listen to The Customer Interview: Part 1 https://softwaresocial.dev/episodes/customer-interview-part-1-the-interviewColleen Schnettler 0:00 The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners.This episode is sponsored by POW!, usepow.app. POW! is a privacy-first menstrual cycle journal for people with periods and those who care about them. Whether it's for health, productivity, or part of trying to conceive, POW! is a flexible way to privately track periods. Check it out at usepow.app.Thank you again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit balsamiq.com/go/software-socialMichele Hansen 0:31 Last week, we interviewed a user of Colleen's product, Simple File Upload. And this week, we are going to talk about that interview. So, Colleen, to help me What do you think you're after that?Colleen Schnettler 0:48 Oh, my gosh, it was so much fun. It was so hard for me. So I turned off my video, and I muted myself, which was good, because I got very excited during the interview. And like, it was like, I was like sitting on my hands. I was like, Colleen, you have no lines. You have no, you may not speak. I just thought it was it was really great. Some of the things I noticed that he talked about that kind of surprised me, was actually one thing that surprised me a lot was he was struggling with his current storage solution for three days.Michele Hansen 1:27 Yeah.Colleen Schnettler 1:28 And then when offered, offered when when he remembered I guess, like that I have a thing. He didn't it was almost like there was an emotional attachment to the struggle that he had already put in that he didn't want to throw that work away right away.Michele Hansen 1:43 Yeah. sunk costs. Absolutely.Colleen Schnettler 1:46 That really surprised me. Yeah, yeah. I was really surprised about that. I didn't see that coming. You know, there were several times I thought to while you were doing the interview, where if I had been doing the interview, I would have been like, Okay, great. Like the end. I feel like you were able, I think the interview was about 2030 minutes. I feel like if I had been interviewing him, it would have been about seven. Because I would have been like, hey, do you like simple file upload? And he would have been like, Yeah, it's great. Like, okay, cool.Colleen Schnettler 2:20 Like, that's how I I mean, even writing down these questions. I I still just it's I usually, I don't know, I struggle with like the the circling back. Like, there was one point where you like circle back, I think to something he had said earlier, like re asked the question, and you got more information from him? Yes. That was solid work.Michele Hansen 2:47 Yeah. So that is something we do to basically like, rephrase what someone said, and then just say, like, do I have that? Right?Colleen Schnettler 2:55 Yeah.Michele Hansen 2:57 I actually know people who will do this, they will purposefully mistake what someone said so that they correct them and add more detail onUnknown Speaker 3:04 interesting. Yeah,Michele Hansen 3:06 yeah. And actually, when I first started interviewing, basically, I would think of this as effectively playing dumb, which I think was in some context was effective. Like, for example, especially when I was interviewing, you know, if I was interviewing, say, 80, or 90 year old men about their retirement, most of them didn't take me very seriously in the first place. And so I could use that to my advantage. And basically like, oh, like, what do you mean by that? I don't even know what you're talking about. Yeah. And it like it worked really well. But then being a founder, like you don't want to, like, you don't want people to think you're, you're done. Really well, like, I sort of like matured out of that strategy. But yeah, but it's saying like, Oh, so I just heard us like, you just said that you struggle with that for three days. And then you just say that, and then they add things to it.Colleen Schnettler 4:06 Yes. I mean, things we've talked about before, but what I really noticed in this interview is you were very, you were very call and very quiet and slow. Which is I mean, I don't mean that in a bad way. But like, it seems like you're very you're you're you're almost monotone in your tone of voice. And you left huge gaps, which we're not going to edit out so you can get the full experience everyone listening, but like huge gaps. And I'm like over here, like she gonna say something like, Is he gonna say something? Giving him really the opportunity, I think, to expound on whatever it was he was talking about.Michele Hansen 4:47 Yeah, I think, like, I like to think that. You know, I see the interviews aren't like acting. They're not a conversation. Rise. You almost want the other person Forget that you're a person like that you have opinions that you have thoughts about things like you are just there to absorb whatever it is they have to say and to help bring that out. And it's it's so funny that you say I was so calm and like, because I mean, like, you know me like, I'm not like that, like, if you get me at my most truly relaxed, like I am, like, bouncing off the walls, like I'm interrupting people. I'm excited. I'm making puns all the time. Like, I am very much not sitting there like quietly listening, which is, which is why I think that if I can learn how to do this, anybody can learn how to do this.Colleen Schnettler 5:42 Yeah, I think and I think I mean, I think for me, it's just gonna take practice. But like, one of the things he said, that really struck me, and there were so I think it would have been hard for me because he said so many things, which were literally the reason why I built it. So I would have been like, so excited. Like when he was like I just he said something like, I just wanted to build my product. I didn't want to, you know, waste any more time on file uploading, I want to be like, yes, that's why I built it. You know, like, actually, I was fortunately I was on mute. So you guys couldn't hear me. Real noisy over here. So, you know, that, I think is a founder. And then and I wonder too, like, you're almost an impartial third party here. I wonder at when you do interviews as a founder, do people treat you differently? Because I know it's your product?Michele Hansen 6:39 Yes, and no. I mean, so obviously I haven't I haven't had the experience you've just had of having somebody interview one of my customers while I'm there and seeing how differently they take it. Yeah, um, I don't I don't think it's been a detriment. Like, you know, to what I was saying earlier about, like, people not taking me seriously, like, I don't run into that issue anymore. Right. Like, I don't I, I have been in scenarios where I was treated dismissively, or even insulted. Thankfully, it's not that many like that, like, the actual number of interviews where I've been truly insulted was like, two out of the 1000, or whatever I've done. Um, so I, I don't feel like that. Because again, like, these things are fairly like, you're just asking questions about someone's process. And that process is like, digging into that process is going to be the same. And if anything, actually, when I like I've had a couple of times where I interviewed someone, and I think they appreciate it so much that they asked me if, like, it could become a testimonial afterwards. Oh, wow. Which never happened when I was in neutral third party, which where I think this is just it's so powerful when the founder themselves, does it because people like, wow, this is a company that actually listens to people which, right. We're just used to not being listened to. Yeah, I don't think it's been I don't think it's been a detriment.Colleen Schnettler 8:16 Okay, cool. So some of this was good. Oh, you go ahead. I was gonna say some of the questions you asked, I wouldn't have thought to ask, do you have? Had you worked out a lot of those questions beforehand? Or did you just have some, like, extra questions if it got too quiet?Michele Hansen 8:32 So I, I have a script. So if you're, you see my newsletter, it is the relatively new customer script. So I just threw that in a Google Doc. And I can, I mean, I could probably just scan it and put it with the podcast, just so people can see it. But so I took notes as we were going for each question. So I started at the top. And then those questions in the in the article are purposely as bullet points, because sometimes just the flow of the conversation, you end up needing to jump around. And so I actually skipped a bunch of questions. Like I skipped, like, a couple because or, um, it came across another another questions, so I didn't have it. Like, I didn't have to go and ask that question. Again. Um, it would be interesting to see whether like, the number of things I said, like, which of those were actual questions, and which of them were just follow ups, like, as you said, like, you know, the sort of, can you tell me more about that type of follow ups?Colleen Schnettler 9:34 Yeah. Yeah. It'll be fun to go back and re listen to it. Like I'm looking forward to that to kind of watch or to listen to how you did that again. And, you know, it was great because I got so much useful information out of it. Like one of the things he said, which I thought was kind of hilarious was he was like, he didn't believe it was that easy.Michele Hansen 9:55 So I have the I don't know if you can see this, like I haven't written down here. I have that underlined because like this is one of those scenarios is like, this should be the headline on your website is, it really is as easy as it seems. Yes, I'm gonna write like, that is like, like that is a sort of a perfect example of finding something very actionable that we can pull. Like, out of this out of this interview. The other thing was like he was talking about, like, he knew he needed to find something else. Or he was, he was like, resisting the idea, he needed something else. But he was like, getting to be open to it cuz he was really frustrated. But then he looked at all of your competitors, and their pricing was so complicated, that he couldn't figure it out. And he, he was, you know, anxious about moving forward with those because you had no idea what he would be charged. And so that's something that's really powerful that we can also use it when you're talking about your pricing is, you know, that it's, there's sort of some peace of mind with it. Right that like, you know, they're, you know, be charged for it. Um, yeah, it's so interesting how he said, Is it really this easy, because you'd heard other people talk about issues with s3. And he, I think, maybe this is a scenario because he knew you were on the phone that he maybe didn't want to say how doubtful he was, but it was really, like, I felt like I had to like work to pull that. Yeah. But that was that doubt was definitely there. Yeah, that and it makes sense. Like, it's not like he spent three days working on it. So it makes sense that like to then believe that this is something that can be done in five minutes is like that, in and of itself is sort of a disappointment, right? Like, what do you mean? So he's excited that it that he was able to solve it in five minutes, but also, he had spent three days working on something and then it turns out, it could have just taken five minutes like that, like, so I was I was purposefully being kind of careful around that to like, so there are times in an interview where I was like, Okay, I really want to dig into this doubt, I really want to like, I really want to pull all of that out. But it's like, okay, there's there's this disappointment there too. And I purposely didn't dig too much into that. Yeah,Colleen Schnettler 12:15 I yeah, I did not. That was I think the biggest thing that surprised me was that I didn't, I've never considered I totally get it now that he said it. But I didn't really consider that if you've worked on something for a day or two days. And it's not working the way you want it to, to walk away from it. There's probably some emotion surrounding that, like, Oh, this other thing, oh, wow, I spent two days on this. And it could have been 10 minutes, five minutes. And there'sMichele Hansen 12:40 a social component to like, he mentioned that there was like sort of a, I don't know if it was a meeting or conversation or whatnot, where like, he was talking about it with his team and talking about, you know, this isn't working, we're having problems like we need try something else. And and then there was a group, sort of informal decision about whether they should move forward with something else. But like that required him to go to his team and say, like, I can't get I tried to do this. And it didn't work. And even though no one would blame him for that. Like there's also this social component involved in switching products, which is why these questions around. Did you talk to anyone else before you considered using it? Or was there anyone else who had to weigh in on whether it was something that you could use, like, those sorts of social elements are really important? Like, if he was in a big company, we could have heard? Well, I had to go talk to procurement first. And it's like, well, if that's a six month process with procurement, like that might kill us as a little as a little company. Right? Um, but so like, those sort and like those sorts of things, I feel like, we as like technical people, like we have a tendency to overlook the emotional and social side of things, sometimes absolute, and just focus on like, Oh, it's only about the product features, or it's only about how it performs. And it's it's not it's about this complicated human situations we find ourselves in whether those are in our own brains with the work that we've done, or with the people that we work with, or our broader peer community on Twitter or on slack communities.Colleen Schnettler 14:14 Yeah. Yeah. And I also got out of that, that he was kind of unsure that it really worked as as described, because it sounded too good to be true. And so he used the code pen, and the code pen is like, buried in my documentation. Like, while he asked he said that I pulled up my website and it's like, three clicks, and you have to know where to look. So I feel like that's super actionable, too. I should put that I should put a demo on the main page. LikeMichele Hansen 14:45 you're like the age like one should be it really is as easy as it seems. And then try it rightColleen Schnettler 14:51 right now. To that, how have I not thought about before,Michele Hansen 14:57 I don't know it's okay that you didn't think about it, but you surface Get through an interview like this, and we get thingsColleen Schnettler 15:02 in front of other people. Right? That to me, it was huge. That was a really big revelation to that. He He's a developer he wants to see at work. Of course he does. And soMichele Hansen 15:13 I should your reaction to that reminds me of a couple of weeks ago, when you said that the first thing you do before you're going to use a product is to read the FAQ. That had never ever occurred to me, because I never read FAQ. So it's so funny, like, and so it's just but we don't find these things out about how to other people make decisions about things. We talk to them about it, because the way we make decisions is, you know, every human is different. Yeah. And so I'm, I'm curious on another topic. So at the end, when I asked the reaching for the door question about, you know, is there anything else you think I should know? And he asked this question about a specific feature. Yeah. And I'm curious, how would you have responded to that question?Colleen Schnettler 15:59 Haha. Okay, so I almost I really that's what that was the first time in the whole interview, my finger was hovering over the mute button. I was like, it's a question for me. It's a question for me. I would have, I would have responded differently. I would have said I would have asked clarifying details. But I think it would have just been like, like, sure, like, What do you want? Whereas you said, How do you like, Why? Why do you want this feature? And what the thing I really liked, because he's describing the feature he wants, and I still didn't get it. And then you said, how will that help you achieve your goals or something like that?Michele Hansen 16:39 Yeah, I said, like, What is the situation when you when you when youColleen Schnettler 16:42 need it? Because he's trying to describe this feature? I'm like, What is? I couldn't really figure out what he was talking about. But if I had answered it, yeah, I would have been like, I would have immediately started thinking of like, the technical details, how would I implement that? Is that something I can do for him?Michele Hansen 17:00 Which makes sense,Colleen Schnettler 17:01 right,Michele Hansen 17:02 like, but the question we'd like, like, whenever somebody brings a feature request to us, like, our question is always like, oh, like, can you tell us a little bit more about like, like, why, why you would need this? And like, what kind of situation you would need it in?Colleen Schnettler 17:15 Yeah, because he's describing it to you. And I'm still kind of confused. But like I said, I want to take it in a different direction, I would have said, Sure, you know, I could let you tag your image. I mean, to be so easy, I can totally do that. Right, I can let them add a tag on to their images. And then I can segment them in the dashboard. But imagine I had based on that conversation gone and spent however many hours to implement it. And then I implement it. And they don't even use it because they don't really need it. Because it was just an idea they had you know what I mean?Michele Hansen 17:43 Yeah, I wasn't able to dig into like whether they wanted to do it, or they thought it was required, or, like it was kind of it was kind of unclear to me too. And I think when those things come up in an interview, you can always put a pin in something right? Like, yeah, we got some information about, you know, the sort of activity where they would need this thing, and we got some details about it. We can always email him a week later and be like, hey, like, you have that idea. Last week for this way to tag files. Can we get on a call for like, 15 minutes, and I just want to understand that a little bit better. Also, like, I don't think people will mind. In fact, they might feel complimented, that you remembered what they said. And now they're you're reaching out to them again, for like more details about this great idea they had.Colleen Schnettler 18:28 Yeah, yeah.Michele Hansen 18:31 I think that's one thing that we have tried to be so purposeful about is that whenever people bring a suggestion to us, like, we're really appreciate it, right, because like, someone went to the effort of like thinking about that, and then if they're emailing you like that was work on there. And like, maybe it was only two minutes of typing something out, but like, they had an idea that they thought was worthy enough to send you. And that deserves to be recognized. And again, like going back to like being a company that listens to people, like those, like small things, like make a difference, right? Like, I mean, how many times have you requested a feature and then you never heard something? The reply you got back was, well, actually, like, yes, you know, this is why it wouldn't work, right? Like instead of someone just saying, oh, like, definitely tell me about why you would need that or when you would use it.Colleen Schnettler 19:26 Yep. Yep.Michele Hansen 19:28 I know basically all of the like bad customer experiences I have myself, like my personal mission to do the opposite of them.Colleen Schnettler 19:39 I mean, I think we're not perfect but like, my biggest takeaway from this interview with Drew is, so he is someone who is using my service and is happy with it. So I have had, you know, customer interviews with people who are using my service and are happy with it and they have lasted five to seven minutes, every time. Cuz every time I go in with a list of questions, but like, I don't know, I think I think I'm just too excited, or I'm too quick to wrap up. I don't think I'm waiting for the silence quite enough. Because if it had been me, Andrew, it would have been like, I don't know, I probably would have been like, Can you tell me how you're using it, he would have told the thing about allowing companies to upload their logos. And then I would have said, how does it work for you? And he would have said, great, I love it. And that would be the whole thing. So the takeaways for me from this are to be quiet. That's my big takeaway, like you're doing right now being quiet.Michele Hansen 20:40 You also want to you know, you're asking questions specifically about the product? Yeah, the questions I were asking are, what did you try before this? Right, what are the other alternatives? You looked into? Who were the other people, you talked to you about alternatives? Like you had these expectations for how the product worked? Now that you've used it, did it actually do that? Like, would you use it again, like, like, because all of those sort of situational factors that are beyond the product like like, this is the really important thing is thinking beyond your product, like our products are inevitable? They're just one stop that somebody is on in order to get this broader project or work or job done? Yeah. And how do we build out our understanding of what the rest of that story looks like? That they're going through?Colleen Schnettler 21:35 Yeah. Yeah, I'm excited to practice. I mean, you've done 1000s. I mean, you've done hundreds, if not 1000 of these, right, like you've been doing this forMichele Hansen 21:43 I have no idea. laughs I've Yeah, it's probably it's in the 1000s. Wow. Okay. Yeah. This was so fun. Because, like, I was going into this, and I was like, I actually like, I mean, I talked to you about your product, but I don't really know that much about it. Um, and so it was like, like, not being an expert in the product I was talking to you about someone was so fun for me, because, like, I got to be genuinely curious about his process, because I have no idea like, what what that process would look like personally. Yeah. And I think that's the thing about these. doing interviews is kind of like suspending your own understanding of something, and then just like just plunging into what it looks like from somebody else's perspective. And like, imagining that you are hearing about this process for the first time. And like going into it sort of wide, childlike eyes, man. Oh, like, so why did you do that? Oh, and then you try that. Okay. But okay, then what did you do there and sort of just sort of slowly painting the picture of like, what this whole thing looks like from this person's perspective. I like I genuinely enjoyed it.Colleen Schnettler 22:52 That's awesome. That's awesome. It was great. I'm so glad we did it. Like I said, I got so much usable, valuable information from him, especially like things I can do immediately. In terms of up the headline website. Yeah, the headline, the headline and the code pen code. I'm also gonna ask him if I can put him as a testimonial on my website.Michele Hansen 23:15 I think Yeah, idea. When he said, I had it working in five minutes, and I would have shouted from the rooftops or the mountaintop, Georgia, not the rooftop. Like, like that is that is a good testimonial. And but the key about it is that when he said that, it's like, Oh, great. Like, I'm so glad to hear that. Like, can you tell me why you felt that way? And then it's again, it's a couple of days later, we say, hey, like you said the other day, that you had it working in five minutes? Like, is there any chance that I could put that on my website with, like, a picture of you and your, you know, your name? Like, is that okay? Like, like, we asked about it afterwards, because during the interview, we want to keep that complete feeling of trust, and like, we don't want to like sort of break that's like the equivalent of breaking the fourth wall, which we like, we don't want to ask for the testimonial or for, you know, get talking about like implementation details of a feature request, or or say, you know, yes, we can do that. No, we can't like, all we want to say is, tell me how you would use that. How would that work for you? Like, why do you need that?Colleen Schnettler 24:23 Interesting.Michele Hansen 24:24 It's really, really, really important. Like, it's the same as like, you don't want to like you can't try to sell someone on one of my calls, which is so tempting. And I have been in that situation. I mean, so many times where I want to be like, Yeah, actually, we have this product that does that. And like you I can send it to you like right now and like, does it solve the problem you're talking about? Like, but then it's like, wait a minute, the fact that they don't know about the product that tells me something? Is that something about our marketing? Is that about where that product is placed on our website? Like, how can I use the fact that they don't know about it, to build more understanding of how they perceive the product or the problem or like why is it they haven't come across it yet? Or where would they expect to find that? Like, because maybe where we've put it is not where they would expect to see it. Like, is there something about their process? We're not understanding? Like, anything they say is is, should we take in with curiosity and trying to learn more, rather than turning it into an action? I guess that's kind of the better way to summarize. Yeah,Colleen Schnettler 25:28 that's actually a great, you know, that's a great way to summarize it, what they are saying, don't immediately turn that into an action and try to solve the problem in your head, because that's, that was a big thing, while I'm listening to him, listening to him that I wanted to do was like, Okay, how do I solve that problem for you right now. And the key takeaway is, you don't need to do that right. Now. That's something that can happen later. But right now, we're just we're just receiving information.Michele Hansen 25:58 Yeah. And I think it's hard to suspend that, you know, especially if you're someone who cares about other people. And your way of helping them is by creating things for them and solving things for them. It's so hard to suspend that. Yeah, like, let me just do it for you right now. Like,Colleen Schnettler 26:19 the weird, let'sMichele Hansen 26:20 talk about it. Let's dive into it.Colleen Schnettler 26:21 The weirdest thing is this doesn't sound hard. Michelle, like, like I can take direction like we have talked about this before. And it's just, it is a surprising challenge I have found, because I love people. I love talking to people, I thought I would be like epic a customer interviews. And to be fair, I've only done a handful and I'm not terrible. But I definitely This is a whole different, like you said it's not a conversation like this is a whole different way of approaching your customer. And it's actually in practice, it's harder than I thought it would be.Michele Hansen 26:58 But if somebody who is as ADD and bubbly as I am can manage to tamp themselves down to do this, then anybody can do it.Colleen Schnettler 27:10 Yeah, no, I think I can get there. I just, I just seem surprised. It's been this hard. How about that? Like, I'm surprised. It hasn't been easier. And I just think it's a skill. I think that's the difference. Like, I'm not just having coffee with my buddy, right? Like, this is a skill. So it's a skill you can improve upon with practice.Michele Hansen 27:30 Yeah, I mean, and like you have not had the opportunity to observe someone like this is really the first time I know, it was so exciting, by the way, observe something new. And when I was learning how to interview, first of all, I was learning in a very high stakes scenario of like talking to people about their finances, which is something we hold, you know, pretty close to our chest and like, don't talk about with people. So we really had to do it. Right. Yeah, the second thing is, like, I probably observed, like, I don't know, 15 or 20 interviews before I was actually on them on my own. And like, the people I was observing were, I mean, they're genuine experts in this one of them basically has a PhD in user experience design. Like, they're genuine experts in what they do. And so, like, I had the opportunity to learn with them, and then be paired with them on interviews for I mean, I don't know, like probably another 50 or 100 interviews too, and like doing partner interviewing as well, which is easier than then doing it all on your own. So it is a hill to climb, like and I think you should give yourself credit for trying to learn this whole new skill without having, you know, basically a coach there to stand with you and and help you through it like, but I think you can do it.Colleen Schnettler 28:48 Yeah. Well, and that was the best part of doing this is because I thought about what I would say in response to everything he said, I was trying to be really cognizant of what I would have said in response. And so it was interesting to counteract that with what you were saying. To kind of, you know, show me kind of guide me on maybe a different path.Michele Hansen 29:13 Yeah, so I mean, it sounds like you you were able to pull a lot from this.Colleen Schnettler 29:17 Oh, yeah. This is super great. Like I'm super pumped now to go practice who wants to be interviewed? Send me.Michele Hansen 29:25 I sent out a practice scripts the other day that you can use on anyone does not just about your product like you could I tell you, I guess it's hard during like COVID times, you'll have to find someone who will get on a call with you. But like just interviewing someone about the last product they bought. Oh, it doesn't have to be something technical. Like I did this. I in a workshop a couple of years ago, those co workers that I mentioned that we did interviews together. We ran a meetup for a while and we did a workshop on teaching people how to interview because it is hard. And it is weird, right? Like it's not a conversation. And and we just did it, you know what, what was the last product you bought, and I ended up talking about a bottle of shampoo. And, and even though the person interviewing me had like she was kind of nervous about it, she didn't really know how to do it. She was able to pull out all this information about like, why I had gravitated toward this particular shampoo and what I was hoping would solve for it. And she told me about why she was she'd switched phone plans. Like so you know, it. Those are fairly like innocuous things to talk about. But there's like, there there is we don't change anything we're doing in life unless there is struggle, right? Unless there is a reason. Yeah. And so when someone has just switched to a new product, what we're trying to find out is what was that struggle? And what made them like this product, click and like what were they thinking? And then we can pull out those aha moments? Like, is it really as easy as it seems? Spoiler alert, yes. Like, that's really where this stuff comes up. But so like, you don't have to start on your customers, which might understandably freak you out. Like, you can just start on, you know, a friend of yours or whatever. And just because because like the the flow of the of the conversation is just is very, very different.Colleen Schnettler 31:24 Yeah. Awesome. Well,Michele Hansen 31:28 I guess that wraps us up for this week. Thank you so much for listening. This has been a really fun little series to do. And definitely let us know what you think how your own customer interviews are going if you've tried them after listening or reading my newsletter, and we'll talk to you next week.
Customer Interview Part 1: The Interview
Michele Hansen 0:00 The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners.This episode is sponsored by RosieLand. RosieLand is going meta and building a community for community builders through a newsletter community of course and soon to launch podcast. RosieLand brings together community builders for conversations wherever we can have them. And Rosie Sherry would love to chat with anyone who is building a community. Check it out at Rosie.Land. Thank you again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit balsamiq.com/go/software-socialMichele HansenHey, everyone. So we're doing something a little bit different this week. We've had a lot of conversations lately about doing customer interviews. And so we thought that it might be helpful to do a demo of one so that you can all understand what goes into one. So we have someone who has agreed to be interviewed. Who is using Colleen's product, Simple File Upload. And so I'm going to interview them today. Alright, so here we go. We're gonna get started. Michele HansenHi, Is this Drew?Drew 1:24 Yep, this is Drew.Michele Hansen 1:26 Hi, Drew, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I really appreciate it.Drew 1:30 No problem. Thanks for having me.Michele Hansen 1:33 So before we get started, I just want to ask if you had any questions for me?Drew 1:38 I'm not off the top of my head. I'm sure I'll find some along the way.Michele Hansen 1:42 Okay, feel free to ask any questions that might come up. Drew 1:45 Okay. Michele Hansen 1:47 And just before we get started, I just want to make sure that it's okay, we record this interview.Drew 1:51 Yeah, absolutely.Michele Hansen 1:53 Okay, so um, so just to get started, Could you just tell me a little bit about like, how you came to even needing something like Simple File Upload in the first place?Drew 2:05 Well, I'm, I'm building a product that is going to play currently has a, it's a job listing platform. So we wanted companies to be able to upload their logo, you know, to sit next to their listing. But our stage two of that we're actually adding in some more verbose user accounts, where users will have avatars, they'll be able to upload resumes and stuff like that. So we just really, we really saw that we were gonna need something that would allow us to upload all the files and handle them easily.Michele Hansen 2:42 Yeah, that makes sense. Um, I'm curious, have you tried anything else to do this?Drew 2:51 Yeah, we were using Firebase Storage, because we were using firestore as our database. So we started using Firebase Storage. Just because, you know, they, they were right next to each other seemed like an easy enough fit. And it was working at first. But we recently started going through a big migration to next js, which has, which is you know, some things are just handled a little differently from a code perspective. And Firebase Storage just did not work as easily. As it was, we found ourself running into a lot of walls, jumping through a lot of hoops just to make the simplest things work.Michele Hansen 3:36 Can you tell me a little bit more about those hoops and, and walls that you ran into?Drew 3:44 I'm trying to think a specific case. So we were we're really just trying to load the image before the component was loaded. You know, so it would be there when, when the page did load. But because of because of how they give you access to it with promises, and you know, all that fun stuff. I don't know if it's because we were implementing it wrong. Or maybe they just weren't ever really meant to work hand in hand, but we would get we were getting errors that, you know, it couldn't it couldn't do what we were asking because the data it needed, wasn't there yet when it was asking for it. And we really started to feel like we were just putting band aids on things to make something work. And this was really kind of our big push to make the platform more stable, not less. That was probably the biggest one.Michele Hansen 4:45 Sounds like that was like frustrating. A lot of like, fits and starts for you guys.Drew 4:51 Yeah, it really was because there we had it working. And it you know, it took a little bit of work to get it working that first time and Most every other piece of the code kind of just transferred one to one for the most part. And this, this part just did not. And we already had, you know, we had a decent amount of files in the stores that we wanted to get to, but for whatever reason, be it user error or stored there. It just wasn't happening.Michele Hansen 5:24 Yeah, I'm going to do remember, like how long it was, like from from the time when you just started, decided to start using Firebase Storage? And then until you decided, like, wasn't going to work? Like, how long was that?Drew 5:42 Oh, we started, we started using it around a year ago, the it was working fine. We started, we started working on this big rebuild about maybe a month and a half ago. And that was probably when we started realizing that it wasn't gonna work. And I think it was, I think I spent probably three days trying to wrestle it before I've just relented.Michele Hansen 6:08 Oh, man.So it took six weeks of try of trying to get it to work, and then you intensely worked on it for three days, and then it still wouldn't work.Drew 6:21 Well, the six weeks wasn't fully working on trying to get it to work six weeks was, you know, getting all the components moved over. And all that other stuff set up for the new environment. And then, but you are correct, it was three intense days of trying to make it work.Michele Hansen 6:37 Man, there must have been super frustrating.Drew 6:41 It was and I was I was at my wit's end.Michele Hansen 6:48 So when did you start thinking like that, maybe use something else.Drew 6:57 Almost immediately, I wanted to use something else, but I didn't know what else would be out there at the pricing model that they provide. Um, but I guess, free free always comes with caveats. And I found those caveats early on.Michele Hansen 7:12 Oh, so Firebase Storage was free if you were using firestore.Drew 7:17 Yeah, they have their, they have this whole platform set up where it's, it's free up until X amount of requests, but that number is like really high. So it's really, it's really enticing when you're trying to just, you know, when you just want to get something up and moving. The widget, we just kept hitting brick walls with the storage.Michele Hansen 7:38 Yeah, it sounds like it. So. So you were, you had like three days of intensely trying to work on this. You wanted to use something else? And then you you didn't know what other options there were? Did you start researching other options? Or like, Can you can you walk me through that a little bit.Drew 7:59 Um, I didn't really researched too many options. Just because where the product we're building is, you know, it's not generating any revenue, and it's kind of a side project first status. So I wasn't really, I wasn't really seriously considering anything that had a paywall on it was, I wasn't sure that it would ever, you know, pay itself back off. I knew I knew there were I knew there were other options out there that would either require moving our storage and our database altogether, which didn't really seem appealing, or having or having two different services, one to manage each, but then the storage still being just as complicated only somewhere else.Michele Hansen 8:51 It sounds like you had a lot of things you were trying to like wave back and forth about whether you should sort of try to plunge forward with this thing that was already being very frustrating. Or then all of the, you know, the the negative effects of switching and all the complications that that would introduce. Drew 9:10 Yeah, I really, I really didn't want to spend a whole lot of time investing, you know, building up a new infrastructure for a new product. Or, you know, for new servers to handle this one thing that I think the most frustrating part was that it worked in now. It doesn't.Michele Hansen 9:27 Yeah, that's such a letdown. So, I just want to ask about something you said you said you didn't want to consider anything with a paywall. And when you say paywall Do you mean like something that has like a free tier and then it goes to to like pay as you go or something that you have to pay for upfront or just, I'm just wondering if you can see what you meant by that.Drew 9:54 Um, but the ones the other options that are newer out there usually had like Up front paywall that I'm not well, I guess not a paywall, it was kind of a pay as you go, depending on what you use. And I didn't know what those numbers would equate to. So where we were in the project, I didn't want to invest too much mental overhead, and you're trying to figure that out, I really wanted to stay focused on just building the thing.Michele Hansen 10:26 That makes sense. Yeah. So it sounds like the like the pricing models, like, based on what you were doing, it was unclear what you would have to pay for those if you had to pay for them.Drew 10:40 Yeah, exactly.Michele Hansen 10:42 And you were already kind of, you just wanted to get this thing that you thought was gonna be easy. Out the door, and kind of just the thought of doing all those calculations was was not really where your head was at.Drew 10:55 Yeah. Yeah.Michele Hansen 10:57 Yeah, that makes sense. Um, so so let's jump to so simple file upload, can you can you just let me know how you how you heard about it.Drew 11:14 I heard about it through two different ways. I heard about it in a virtual coffee community I'm in. And then I also heard about it through the twitterverse.Michele Hansen 11:27 And so can you tell me when you first heard about it? Like, what what did you was this around the same time that you were trying to wrangle this whole Firebase thing? Or was it after? Or is it before? Or?Drew 11:42 It was? It was a little bit before? So I think I first heard about it, when we were at the very beginning of the big, you know, I guess it was a it was a framework migration is what we were doing. So it was kind of at the beginning of that when I heard about it, but at that point in time, our current solution worked. So I wasn't really, at that point. I wasn't really looking for anything else.Michele Hansen 12:10 That makes sense. And then going into you had those sort of three days of struggle. And and then it occurred to you at some point that you could maybe use simple file upload for that, does that right?Drew 12:26 Oh, no, it never occurred to me, I was gonna continue banging my head on the keyboard. But a friend in the virtual coffee community said, Hey, why don't you just try this thing? Because I'd already heard about it in the virtual coffee in virtual coffee had already seen heard about it on Twitter. And at that point, I was so like, you know, white knuckling to holding on to our current solution that the thought hadn't even registered. Yet, so someone else recommended. And as soon as they said it, I was like that. This is it. This works.Michele Hansen 13:05 It sounds like you, like you put so much work into trying to make the other thing work that you were like, he really wanted that to work. Like you didn't want to have to, like walk away from all of that frustration that you went through.Drew 13:20 Yeah, I did. Yeah. I was being very stubborn.Michele Hansen 13:24 That That makes sense. I mean, it sounds like you poured a lot of effort into it. Um, but then so this friend that you heard about simple file upload from like, had they used it themselves? Or?Drew 13:39 I'm not sure if they I'm not sure if they use it themselves. I know he and Colleen both work with Ruby. So maybe they were just maybe he was more familiar with it because they had they chatted about it from that perspective.Michele Hansen 14:01 Did you like look for you said you had heard about it through these groups you're in? Did you look for any other places for information about it before you decided to use it?Drew 14:16 I looked at the website and kind of like skim the documentation as somehow we came across a think it was a code pin or some type of like little code snippet that let me like kind of test drive it. And based on that, I was like, if it's really this easy, then I don't see why I wouldn't use it.Michele Hansen 14:41 So before you started using it, was there anything you were like sort of like it sounds like you were unsure if it was actually as good as it seemed? Is there anything else that you were unsure about? Or like what like you weren't able to figure out before you used it.Drew 15:01 Um, I was I don't want to say unsure of how like the the Amazon s3 buckets and stuff worked like I knew I knew that that's what it connected to and like, that's how it worked. But I've heard a bunch of people get frustrated about how complicated that would be. So I was I guess I was curious as to whether or not it actually made it that simple.Michele Hansen 15:29 It sounds like you were almost like, doubtful whether it could be that easy.Drew 15:36 Yeah, probably just, it seems like from what I've heard about s3 buckets, that that's such a big problem that it'd be, that wouldn't necessarily be an easy thing to wrangle into a simple solution.Michele Hansen 15:50 So have you gotten the chance to use it yet? Drew 15:54 Oh, yeah. Michele Hansen 15:55 Okay, so how did it go?Drew 15:58 I think I had it working in five minutes.Michele Hansen 16:02 And how did that make you feel?Drew 16:05 Oh, man, I was I was elated. But I would have if I didn't live in South Georgia, I would have shouted it from the mountaintops.Michele Hansen 16:17 I think you still could.Drew 16:18 Yeah, absolutely.Michele Hansen 16:22 Wow. And so and so you were able to sort of drop it in where you previously were using the the Firebase Storage?Drew 16:32 Yep, there took a I don't even really think there was much configuration needed. I get the. So I'm specifically using the React component version of it. So I just kind of got my account set up, dropped in the React component. And there really just worked.Michele Hansen 16:53 And so it sounds like it's it's really work for you. And you had looked into some other things. And I'm curious, like for the, the site you're working on, or you're working on that with other people?Drew 17:09 Yeah, so there's, I guess there's, there's a team of five of us. But we're, are we call it a side project, first priority last thing that we're working on. So there's five of us that work on it, but no, one of us may be full tilt for two weeks straight, and then you won't hear from us for a month or two.Michele Hansen 17:34 Gotcha. So when you were, you know, sort of in that in that period of knowing that what you were doing wasn't going to work, even though that was sort of hard to admit to yourself, understandably, and then deciding to switch to simple file upload. Was there anyone else you talked to about that decision? within the team, or the company?Drew 17:57 Um, I mentioned it, I mentioned it to everyone. I guess I guess, was never really put to the table for a vote. But I was just kind of like, Hey, we're, we keep running into problems with this current thing. I'm going to give this a try and see what happens. And I think I think everyone, I think everyone on the team had already heard about simple follow up load because they're in the same virtual coffee community. So I want to say it was a it was a unanimous, yes.Michele Hansen 18:31 And Was there anyone like outside of the team who needed to weigh in on that or, or anything like that?Drew 18:39 I'm not really we're kind of a it's a. Right now. It's a small project, small team. SoMichele Hansen 18:52 gotcha. So you've gotten to implement it. And to so you have it working on the site now with the the logos.Drew 19:04 Yep. It's working. It's up and working. And it's beautiful.Michele Hansen 19:11 Yeah. Yeah. So do you think you're going to use it for the the applicant photos as well?Drew 19:22 I believe so. Yeah. We haven't working in this instance. Or we haven't working in the way we need it now. So I can only see it making the other places we need. File Upload. Better.Michele Hansen 19:37 Cool. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me and I, I've learned so much from you. Is there anything else you think I should know? Drew 19:54 Um, I guess maybe maybe now that we've been talking about I do have a question around. And is there would there be this would probably end up being like, a feature request more than anything. But is there plans in the future to, from the simple file upload dashboard to be able to, like, section off different stuff from? You know, maybe this is type A files is type B? Or is that already they haven't seen it?Michele Hansen 20:24 So I can't speak to that, because I don't work on it and myself, but I, could you walk me through, like how that would like, fit into your process, or like how that would help you.Drew 20:37 Um, we're going to be rolling out some user accounts, there's gonna be two different types of accounts. And so one of the account types is going to have avatars and PDFs. Um, it may or may not even be necessary, because at the end, all we just need is the URL anyways. But if for whatever reason, we do need to go to the dashboard to see those files, it would be nice if they could be sectioned off from you know, these are our user accounts. These are our company accounts.Michele Hansen 21:16 Oh, got it. So the first one, are the users like people uploading resumes that right? And then the second one is the companies and then all the images associated with the companies.Drew 21:28 Yeah.Michele Hansen 21:29 Which will be the logos.Drew 21:31 Yeah. And that may not even be necessary. So because we're really just taking the URL and piping it in somewhere?Michele Hansen 21:38 Yeah. Could you like, could you just like, tell me a situation where you would, you would need to do like, like distinguishing between those files like what what would that help you do? Like, what's a situation where that would be helpful?Drew 21:55 I can't think of one off the top of my head. But when when we first started working towards the getting user accounts someplace that was actually a question. One of the one of my team members brought up was, you know, when we send this too simple out file upload, do we really have to specify that it goes to this file or this followers that all those same places? And it's kind of got that? That's a good question.Michele Hansen 22:23 And did that person want them to be differentiated?Drew 22:28 I don't think they necessarily wanted them to be differentiated. As much as they were just making sure that they weren't doing it the wrong way by not specifying somewhere.Michele Hansen 22:39 Gotcha. Gotcha. They wanted to make sure they were using the tool, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. You had mentioned with Firebase that you guys were kind of unsure whether it was like user error, versus the limitations of the tool. And so it, like it kind of makes sense that you would have questions about like using it, right.Drew 23:04 Yeah, because we're, we're mostly junior developers building this. So we're making it up as we go.Michele Hansen 23:12 We all are.Cool.Was there or is there anything else? Did you have any other questions or?Drew 23:26 No, I think that's everything I have.Michele Hansen 23:29 Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to do this today. I really appreciate it.Drew 23:35 Thank you. It was my pleasure.Michele Hansen 23:37 All right. Thank you so much. Drew 23:39 Thank you. Michele Hansen 23:41 Bye.
Communication, Empathy, and Flexibility
Get Michele's free newsletter on customer research: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/mjwhansenMichele Hansen 0:00 The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners. This episode is sponsored by Koody. Koody helps under 35 in the UK make the most of their money. Koody's website houses free money management tools, expert guidance and financial advisors. Koody's online community is the place to be if you need help with your finances, or are a finance expert, check out their website at www.Koody.co. Thank you again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit balsamiq.com/go/software-socialSo you remember a couple of weeks ago how I was reading the Jobs to Be Done Playbook?Colleen Schnettler 0:59 Yes, I sure do. Michele Hansen 1:01 I'mstill reading that book. But I'm also reading another book. And I want to talk about that other book.Colleen Schnettler 1:07 Okay.Psychology of MoneyMichele Hansen 1:09 So I finally started reading the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.Colleen Schnettler 1:15 Okay.Michele Hansen 1:16 Which has been on my to-read pile for about, I don't know, about six months or so now, since it came out early last fall. And it's such a good book, like I mean, even if you're not a finance person are particularly interested in personal finance, like, it's a book about money that's not about money. And it's and it's so good. So but there's just one quote and that reminded me of stuff that we talk a lot about together. So I'm just gonna read it to you. "In a world where intelligence is hyper competitive, and many previous technical skills have become automated, competitive advantages tilt toward nuanced and soft skills, like communication, empathy, and perhaps most of all, flexibility."Colleen Schnettler 2:08 Hmm, interesting.Michele Hansen 2:10 And this reminded me a lot of what we talk about, because it's kind of like we've been talking about as it relates to your business. The one of the like, the biggest challenges for you is not the engineering side, it's like, knowing when you should, you know, change directions, or be flexible with with like, what your image of what the business and what the product is. And also like communicating with people about what it does and what it is and pulling that information out of them. And then and then how do we use empathy to figure all of those things out, which is, which is a really big focus for me, and I read this and, like, grabbed the nearest writing utensil near me, which normally I only write in pencils in books, like I will underline things, but I only had a pen, and I was like, This is so amazing, I'm gonna underline it and pen because I'm not gonna regret that, like. That just really stuck with me. Colleen Schnettler 3:09 Interesting. Why was that in your psychology of money book? Michele Hansen 3:13 Oh, I mean, so I don't know if you've ever read Morgan's writing. Colleen Schnettler 3:16 No.Michele Hansen 3:16 He writes a lot about the sort of psychology of business. He's a very different business writer. And I used to work with him so I've sort of been been around a lot of his thinking for a while. And I'm really sort of grateful for that, because he has a very unique perspective on things. And you know, it's not very often that you read in a best selling business book that the key is empathy. Right? Colleen Schnettler 3:42 Yeah. Michele Hansen 3:42 Running a good business. Right. And it reminds me a lot of something that I have been working on lately, too. So you know, we've talked about like getting people to reply, when you are trying to talk to them about the reasons why they use your product, which can be difficult. Colleen Schnettler 4:02 Yeah. Michele Hansen 4:03 And I think I mentioned a couple weeks ago, how we like so on our NPS survey like that, that pops up, I think, you know, relatively soon after someone uses the product, but not the first time and it's, you know, just rank us one to 10. And normally, we just look at this just to make sure we're getting mostly nines and 10s. But then it also has a question that asks as a follow up, and that survey and the question have a really high response rate. And we were previously asking, 'what can we do to improve?' And I changed this question. First of all, we were you know, we're getting a lot of like, boosts out of it. Like people were saying, like, no, you're awesome, and like, that makes us feel great. And like as -- you know, it feels nice. But also, we were kind of like asking people to do our work for us by telling us what we should improve. And so I changed it instead to 'What did you use before you used Geocodio?' And this is just reminding me about how we, you know, you know, competitors, at first blush, they seem like other companies, but in so many scenarios, and I think this applies to your business a lot too, competitors are people figuring something out for themselves or like some, like manual process where they're patching things together. And it is so fascinating to see the variety of responses I get from people. And how many of them say 'nothing' like that they used no tool and that they were like, hunting and pecking, or they had something internal, or they were like stringing together different solutions. I mean, our approach to competitors is so much more like relaxed than this, I think for, like, the traditional kind of business approach is like, you know, you should know everything that your competitors are doing and like, you know, know exactly when they have new features and like, be copying their features and everything. And I'm like, Nah, dude, like, I'm going to talk to my customers, because my competitors are all the time that they spend doing it themselves.Colleen Schnettler 5:59 It's this, it kind of the same thing with my business where a lot of people in the beginning, they were just weren't really doing it, or they weren't, you know, they were just, they were just putting, like piecemealing kind of half a half usable open source solutions with with, with other things. So So to your point, like your competitors, really not the other people offering the same service, but what the user was doing before.Michele Hansen 6:26 Yeah, I mean, there's so much space in software to have products that do things that are similar to somebody else's product, because so many people are just doing things themselves.Colleen Schnettler 6:40 So one of the things from that quote, you read from the book that I thought was interesting was flexibility. And what do you think that means in a business context? Does that mean pivot? Does that mean, let go of your idea that you're super passionate about because it's not working?Michele Hansen 6:55 I think it means both of those things. I mean, if you remember, a couple of weeks ago, when we were talking about the Adam Grant book, I was reading Think Again. And there was a quote, I read from that in that episode, which is talking about the values of taking an experimental approach and how entrepreneurs who were open to experimenting with their idea and like they, they had higher revenue in the period of that study that was done. And I don't think it necessarily means like forcing yourself to walk away from something when you're really passionate about it. But being passionate about the problem that you're solving, or the people you're solving that problem for, and less. So your like, specific implementation idea of that problem, because I think like we, I feel like ideas for products have these kind of two parts to them. There's like the problem you're going to solve. And then there's the way you're going to solve that problem. And I think, so often those things are sandwiched together. But if you pull them apart, and then you just really focus on like, what is like, why am I trying to solve this? What is that I'm trying to solve? And then there's probably 10 different ways to solve that. And so you know, you go out and talk to people and figure out what that is, and then not being so anchored to that one specific idea that, you know, came floating down on the cloud from the gods. I think that's kind of what I pull from that about flexibility.Colleen Schnettler 8:27 Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I think something too, is I've, I've tried to change kind of the content I consume from less blog posts, not that blog posts aren't helpful. But we've talked about how there's also quite a lot that, that, you know, paint unrealistic expectations to more actual books. And something I've noticed about reading these actual books, is the timeline is longer usually, then I would have originally guessed, like when I first started learning about like bootstrapping, and indie hacking, when people talk about pivoting, for some reason, I thought that was like, like, you do it after two weeks. And then I'm reading the lean startup and some other books, and they just talk about like, you can't, you should probably shouldn't make big decisions based on 10 customers, and you know, being in business for two weeks, like they talk about these longer term, kind of like looking at data over a longer term, as opposed to a shorter timeframe.Michele Hansen 9:25 So I think context really matters there. And I'm reminded of another point that Morgan Housel makes in his book is that you need to define the game that you are playing, and then only take advice from people who are playing the same game. And I think what that means in this context is that the thing about a lot of business advice is that it's not necessarily written for bootstrappers in mind, right? Colleen Schnettler 9:55 That's a good pointMichele Hansen 9:55 Like this is basically kind of what's leading me to like write my own newsletter about customer research right now because I have all these resources that I send people, but I'm like, but you know, caveat, like this book assumes that you have a multimillion dollar research budget, and you can write consultants for it. Colleen Schnettler 10:09 Right.Michele Hansen 10:09 And so I feel like, like, like lean startup is such a, I think there's a lot of things I like about that book and like concepts. And if you're, you know, a 25 ,50, 500 person company that is thinking about pivoting a product, that is what all of your employees are relying on for their salaries, then yeah, you're not going to make any decisions about pivoting that product with like, major decisions without six months, or, you know, a significant pile of data, right, like,Colleen Schnettler 10:45 rightMichele Hansen 10:46 that, you know, that would be unwise to just change it on a dime, and not having evidence for the change. By contrast, if you've only launched something two weeks ago, or if it's a relatively small or like, insignificant feature, or if it's just you, and you're just trying to figure it out, I think there's there's more wiggle room for changing based on feedback, especially if you have really strong signs that there's something wrong and like what you should do instead. But I think, you know, I think some of those, like those business books are good, like, conceptually, but like, Colleen Schnettler 11:20 yeah, Michele Hansen 11:20 But on the ground, as it relates to the to not only the specific situation of being a bootstrapper, but also the incentives at play. Like that's like something that's so different between being a company of people versus a one person. I mean, that's the thing we loved about it in the beginning was like, we could just Colleen Schnettler 11:38 do stuffMichele Hansen 11:39 Try stuff, like, throw pasta at the wall and see what stuck, like, and there was no, you know, there were no real consequences of that.Colleen Schnettler 11:46 Yeah, I think I think my context is, so I've had this has been live for about a month that I had, I had like 13 paying customers, and about three or four of those churned out. And one of the people who actually emailed me back, thank you, thank you, person just said it was too expensive for what he was doing. And so then like, this is like feedback from one person, I only have 13 paying customers. Then I started, I was like, hey, maybe it has too expensive could I could I do a new tier that's cheaper? Should I do that? And I kind of tried to stop myself, because I was like, okay, practically speaking, I don't have the time to set that all up right now, as we've talked about right now is a busy time. And I've literally only been in business for a month. So maybe I should just pause and you know, get more than 12 playing customers and see, you know, what the churn rates are then.Michele Hansen 12:40 Yeah, and I think something critical that he said was, it's too expensive for what he is doing.Colleen Schnettler 12:47 Yes. And he did say that it was a small budget ecommerce thing or something.Michele Hansen 12:51 Yeah. Did he tell you more about what he is doing?Colleen Schnettler 12:54 He did not. Unfortunately, I should have asked.Michele Hansen 12:57 Did he tell you about what he is going to do instead?Colleen Schnettler 13:00 No, that's a fascinating piece of information. That would be really nice to find out, I should ask him. Michele Hansen 13:07 Because the thing I find with, like interviews like that, like, I mean, you've learned something valuable from that, which is that unless so that he as a person and more that he as someone with this type of use case is not your customer, Colleen Schnettler 13:23 RightMichele Hansen 13:23 That it's to get like compared to alternatives. You are too expensive for whatever those alternatives are. So what are those alternatives? And then how I usually take from that is okay, like, more so than less so how do we change our product to make it so he would have stayed and more so how do we change our marketing, to make sure that we're not speaking to his use case? And we instead are, like, if we can get our happy customers to talk to us? What are their use cases? And how can we speak to their use cases more so that we attract more of the would be happy people and attract fewer of the would be churning people? Just based on their use cases.Colleen Schnettler 14:03 Yeah. And I think you would ask me last week, if I was getting a lot of Gmail addresses, or a lot of company addresses, and it's been pretty much a mix, but you know, obviously, my ideal customer is a small business, not a person because my price is expensive for a side project, you know.Michele Hansen 14:22 Yeah, I mean, something without any budget is -- paying for anything is always. Colleen Schnettler 14:28 right. Numbers UpdateMichele Hansen 14:28 And if we can just check in here since everybody always loves numbers, what are the numbers right now?Colleen Schnettler 14:36 So they're exactly the same as they were last week. I had two people churn out and two people sign up. So it's like MRR is like $340.Michele Hansen 14:48 But you also didn't you get your first like, check from Heroku this week?Colleen Schnettler 14:52 Oh, yeah, that was so fun. Okay. It was so fun because I put this like you get a notification from Heroku when your app is available for sale, and then you set up plans, and you know you, you decide how much they're going to cost. And then people were signing up and I was super excited. But you have no indication outside of the fact that people are signing up that like, you're actually going to get paid. So, I mean, I knew I was supposed to get paid, but I kept being like, did I did I forget, I set up the plan wrong, and it's really $0. And I'm not gonna find out till the end of the month. Like, it was very exciting to get my first check from Heroku. Because I knew that people were actually paying for it. And plus, with Heroku, as I've said, unlike stripe that pays you up front, like I get paid at the end of the month. So someone signs up March 1, I don't get paid till the end of March for that particular person. So yeah, that was really exciting.Michele Hansen 15:49 So how much was the check again?Colleen Schnettler 15:51 It was like $250. Well, okay. It was like 250 bucks, but they take 30%. So it was like 140 bucks. And then it costs me like 100 bucks just to host it, and then maybe 20 bucks in storage. So I'm net $20. And then I bought a $20 bagel. That's my whole month. That's what I did.Michele Hansen 16:16 I think that's awesome. Um, I'm really curious by how you said that there's no like way to, like track the revenue within Heroku or like to see that things are actually working.Colleen Schnettler 16:28 it's just not like real time. Like, okay, I could see that things were working. But they have. So basically, if you go into your add on, they have a revenue graph, they'll show you, but it's zero for that whole first month. So I would check my revenue graph, and it would be zero. And then I would check my signups and I was like, someone signed up, it shouldn't be zero. And it's just the way they do their accounting. It's not like stripe that gives you that like real time feedback, Heroku gives you feedback once a month. And at the end of the month, so it's not like all exciting where you get to see Oh, real time signups. It's like, wow, I hope. I hope they're tracking this properly.Michele Hansen 17:07 So I wanted to dive in a little bit on those numbers, because you, you said that you had about $100 a month to host it. And so you, you basically netted $20? Is that right?Colleen Schnettler 17:23 Yeah, something like that was like 20 or 30 bucks. Michele Hansen 17:26 Okay, Colleen Schnettler 17:26 yeah.Michele Hansen 17:27 So that tells me that you're that? Well, I guess my first question before I decide what that means. Is that cost going that hosting cost, is it going to increase as you get more customers? Or is it going to decrease as you get more customers.Colleen Schnettler 17:42 it shouldn't change. I mean, when I set it up, I set it up. Michele Hansen 17:45 Ok. Colleen Schnettler 17:45 So it's pretty robust. So I've already paid for like the workers and stuff to do all the image posting to AWS. And so that should be pretty flat. I mean, I'd have to get like a million customers for that to be a problem.Michele Hansen 17:58 So your margins should get better from here, then.Colleen Schnettler 18:00 correct, my costs should not my storage costs will go up a little bit, but generally speaking, my costs will not go up significantly.Michele Hansen 18:08 So from a sort of, a, I don't know how to describe this, a sort of structural perspective of the business, that is a very good sign, when costs do not increase with the amount of customers you serve, like, that is really good. And that's a very unique situation is one of the reasons why software is so awesome. Colleen Schnettler 18:36 Right? Michele Hansen 18:37 But like, you know, think like, um, you know, think about like, at like a store, right? Like, they can only sell as much inventory as they have already purchased. And if they have 100 customers come in, like they need to have stuff to serve 100 customers, like they have to buy that right, like they have rolled out an inventory, or if it's a one to one relationship, like those will all proportionally increase. Now, you can have great businesses that that just by virtue of you know, the prices they charge and the volume they have, like, the cost do increase like so I'm not saying those aren't necessarily good businesses. But it's really amazing when you have a business that can serve a lot of customers and keep the the cost of the goods sold. Like that flat like that is very interesting.Colleen Schnettler 19:30 Yeah, yeah. I mean, I do have storage costs. So it's not a you know, a zero sum game. But yes, unlike having physical goods. It's definitely a better margin then than that. Signups have it feels like signups have slowed down a little bit. Well, it's interesting. So paid signups have slowed down. A lot of people have started entering their email address to do the free trial and then they're bouncing when they see that they need to enter a credit card. So that's just an interesting data point. Like I said, I'm not going to change anything this month. But I have noticed that more people are hitting the site and more people are putting in their email addresses. But not converting. Well, converting isn't the right word, but not putting in their credit card. Michele Hansen 20:13 Hmm. Colleen Schnettler 20:14 But I think you're right. Like, I really need to figure out who my ideal customer is. And I need to figure out how to reach them. Right. It's like the number one problem everyone has in SaaS.Michele Hansen 20:26 I think that, you know, people talk about having the ideal customer. And I think that almost like starting out, that kind of puts pressure on ourselves to find the ideal customer. And when you're starting out, if you can just find a customer that will reliably pay you every month..Colleen Schnettler 20:44 That's pretty good. Michele Hansen 20:45 They're like, we don't have to find like the, you know, the perfect customer, you know, they going back to what you're talking about, like the business books and stuff about customer research, right? Like, there's so many great books that go through all of these ways to diagram, you know, who like, who is the customer? And who are the other stakeholders involved? Like, what is the whole, you know, process they go through to like, accomplish a job and like, all of like, it's so great. It's so robust, but like, when you're a one person company, you're like, Yeah, that's great. But like, that's not like, like, Yeah, I don't I don't have no, no, I don't have six months to just do a research project about this. Like, I need stuff now. And I need people paying me now. And so I think using whatever insights you can get from people, and and I -- like the guy you said who churned did he was that over email? Or did you get a chance to actually talk to him?Colleen Schnettler 21:37 That was over email? Michele Hansen 21:39 Okay. Do you think maybe you could see if you could get him to talk to you?Colleen Schnettler 21:45 I will, I think, you know, as we've discussed before, and I believe you addressed in your newsletter, finding people is hard, like getting people when you I mean, again, I have what 12 paying customers. So getting people to talk to me is hard. Now, when I had the free plan, I had 120 customers, and I had a much better success rate. But the thing about the people I spoke with that were on the free plan, is they were people who would never pay for the service anyway. So you know, I don't want to reintroduce the free plan just to get more people. But yeah, I am I am struggling getting people like willing to take that time.Michele Hansen 22:27 So with people who have churned, I find that offering an incentive is critical, in the same way with with people who aren't a user yet, like I remember when you did, you had yourColleen Schnettler 22:41 Yes, the Amazon gift cards.Michele Hansen 22:42 Your child care idea, you gave people gift cards. And I think like that is absolutely critical. When you're trying to talk to someone who's churned it's like, because like, you know, they signed up for your product, hoping it would do something and then it didn't do that, or it wasn't fit for them. And so like there's an amount of disappointment there that is difficult to overcome. And this I mean, this is kind of what I tend to say that churned or like former customer interviews or like expert level of interviews, because there's so much more negative emotion there than there would be with someone who's just signed up or someone who has never even used your product. But I think if you offer them like $25 Amazon gift card, and you're like, hey, like I know, it didn't work out, like I understand. And I would just love to hear more about like, just like what it is you're doing in general. And just just so I can just understand that better. And then kind of like framing it from a perspective of so that we can make sure that nobody else has the experience that you had. Colleen Schnettler 23:42 Yeah. Michele Hansen 23:44 It's still like it's delicate. And a lot of people will say no, but I find if you frame it from that perspective of like, here's a way for you to help somebody else not go through this. And here's $25 to Amazon, like yeah, you know, you combine altruism with with straight up self interest, like, yeah, that is the highest likelihood to get through. But like, they can just be really delicate. But I think that would be valuable to figure out like, okay, like this, this kind of use case is not my customer.Colleen Schnettler 24:17 Yes, that's a great idea. Yeah, I'll do that. Because I do I do need to know why, you know why those people signed up added files and then bounced, like, that would definitely be helpful.Michele Hansen 24:29 Yeah. And it may not be something anything about your product or the functionality of it. Colleen Schnettler 24:34 Right.Michele Hansen 24:35 It may be that you know, your marketing somehow grabbed them, and maybe you need to tweak it so that you don't grab more people like them.Colleen Schnettler 24:42 Right, right. I can target the marketing. 100 Days of MarketingMichele Hansen 24:45 Speaking of marketing, how's your 100 days of marketing going? Colleen Schnettler 24:48 Terrible.Michele Hansen 24:50 Really? Is it still going?Colleen Schnettler 24:52 Well, no, I'm not I'm gonna still do it if it takes me a whole year but I mean, I had I had thought that I could organize my day in such a way where I could do an hour of marketing a day. And I have found that to be really challenging when I'm working on deeply technical projects, because it's like a context switch, like I've been trying to start my day with the marketing hour. But then like, you're almost done. But then you stopped to go work on your other project, I'd almost rather I'm thinking I might try and reorganize my time. So I'm doing one full day on simple file, upload marketing stuff, and then can just do my other work the other days. And I think we talked about last week, but just like some of the stuff that shouldn't be so hard, like the terms and conditions in the privacy policy and the GDPR policy, you're just like, jeez, this is a lot of stuff.Michele Hansen 25:45 I mean, it kind of makes sense that you would like it takes it you know, the context switching like that is hard. And then you sort of like, I feel like I can hear that you sort of like you have to like work yourself up to, to work on this. Like it's not something you're looking forward to. And then you finally get into it. And then you're almost done with something and then it's time to switch. That's exactly what really frustratingColleen Schnettler 26:07 is that's exactly what it's like, because you're right. I don't I mean, who loves reading privacy policies? No one. So maybe you do love reading, practicing?Michele Hansen 26:17 No. Privacy lawyers might write like, users definitely do. Colleen Schnettler 26:23 So I think that you're absolutely right. That's what it's like, like, I love the idea of committing a little bit of time each day to it. And that keeps it Top of Mind, which is great and lets it not fall on the backburner. But you're absolutely right. Because it's like, I try to do my hour. And then I'm like, 80% done. And then I got to switch to do like, my consulting work. And then the next and so it just feels like I can never quite get it, whatever I'm working on over the finish line. So yeah, I think maybe baby, hopefully this week, at least I can organize my week in such a way that I get a whole day to work on it. And then I can just knock out all this stuff I've been wanting to do because I've wanted wanting to do you know that terms and conditions and all that get that up. And I want to do an FAQ because I love FA Q's. And there's some questions I keep getting asked that clearly, I'm not communicating effectively enough. So, you know, I want to get stuff like that done.Michele Hansen 27:17 Do you as a user, you like FAQ's?Colleen Schnettler 27:20 Yes. I love FA Q's. That's like my first thing. As a developer, that's like the first thing I do. I usually go there before I read your docs. Love them. Michele Hansen 27:28 Oh, that's fascinating. Colleen Schnettler 27:30 Is that weird?Yeah. Because that's fascinating. That's because I want to see where the problems are gonna arise before I even jump into your thing.Michele Hansen 27:40 Oh, that makes sense. Colleen Schnettler 27:44 Yeah, it's like my favorite thing. So I want to put it on my website.Michele Hansen 27:49 So I wonder like, are you sounds like you. Like, this is a new skill for you. And it's just more mentally tiring to do new skills. Colleen Schnettler 27:58 Yeah. Michele Hansen 27:58 Than it is things we're familiar with. And I wonder if having a whole day, like, knowing that you have a whole day of it, like, could could also, like feed into that dread of it a little bit? If you know, you have to spend a whole day on it. And I like I almost wonder if you're saying like, an hour is not enough, if you do like, are Pomodoros are like, are they 45 minutes or 90 minutes? I forget.Colleen Schnettler 28:24 I mean, you can do them however you want.Michele Hansen 28:25 Yeah, but like me, I mean, maybe just trying with like, ninety minutes and see like, because if you if you like, you know, say, okay, Fridays are marketing day, and then you spend the whole week being like, Oh, my God, I have to spend like Friday doing marketing. Ah, I could see that like not like, you know,Colleen Schnettler 28:42 I see what you're saying, Yeah, I got to experiment with it, I have found that an hour is too short. That's what I have discovered. So I need to find kind of that optimal period of time where I can feel like, you know, like many people, I like to finish something. So the optimal period of time where I can finish these tasks. But yeah, you don't want it. I mean, I don't dread it. But it is a new skill set. And it's it's kind of nebulous, and you don't really know what's going to work. And so I have a list of all these ideas of things. I would do give an infinite time, but obviously, I can't do them all. So yeah, I like I like the 90 minute maybe try 90 minutes and see if that's more effective.Michele Hansen 29:22 Because I think it It helps to time block it.Colleen Schnettler 29:26 It does, because then you know. Michele Hansen 29:27 You're only signing yourself for an hour or 90 minutes of this struggle.Michele's Customer Research Guides NewsletterColleen Schnettler 29:32 Yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah, I like that idea. So tell me about your newsletter. I love getting your newsletter I think I've gotten two now.Michele Hansen 29:44 Um, so I, I launched it last week.Colleen Schnettler 29:48 Yeah, it's brand new,Michele Hansen 29:50 um, and I'm actually just writing it for myself. Which seems kind of funny, but so I find you know, I talked to people who are starting, or running businesses pretty often. And I find myself giving the same advice over and over again. And also saying the same things about the resources I send people like, as we mentioned earlier, being like, this book is really great, but like bear in mind, like x, y, and z, and like, this isn't going to apply and like, but the concepts here are good and like, and then there's this blog post. And then I really liked this podcast, like, no, here's the thing over here, and it's like, it feels very disjointed. But I also hear myself saying the same things over and over again. And so I'm basically writing it to sort of have this like virtual library for myself, and just kind of get everything out of my head and onto you know, quote, unquote, paper. Just just so that I have this one like consolidated place to send people. Colleen Schnettler 30:51 Very cool. I like it. Michele Hansen 30:54 It's been really fun. Colleen Schnettler 30:55 Good. Michele Hansen 30:57 It's definitely like productive procrastination for me.Colleen Schnettler 31:01 Productive procrastination, I love that.Michele Hansen 31:05 Like, when I should be doing my SEO work, I'm like, let me just just read this article really fast. Like, no, but it's, it's been so fun. And and, you know, I so I was, like, I was having a call with an entrepreneur a couple of weeks ago, and I was, you know, thinking about, like, there's all this stuff that I say every time and I don't have, like, I don't have one book, I can, like send people that is relevant to the bootstrap experience, Colleen Schnettler 31:34 rightMichele Hansen 31:36 Of trying to understand your customers. And I was like, I was like, should I write a book, like, and I was like, Oh, my God, like, I think everybody I know, who has ever written a book is, like, Don't, um, or, you know, has says, you know, you had to had some warnings there. And, and so I was, like, you know, I think signing up for kind of, you know, worrying about like, signing up for a whole day of marketing feels a little bit daunting, like, Colleen Schnettler 32:03 YeahMichele Hansen 32:04 The idea of signing myself to write a whole book, and like doing so kind of on my own for, you know, six months, or whatever that is, that feels like, very daunting, and not fun to me. But this is just, this is just been fun. And, yeah, I think there's like five issues out now. And kind of the idea is like pulling together, a lot of the scripts we talked about, so like talking to someone who's a happy customer versus somebody who has just started using your product and trying to figure out why they are using it, versus people who have turned versus kind of like keywords and phrases and stuff and sort of also kind of writing that for the like, I find that a lot of UX books, like don't go into super nitty gritty detail on what you actually say in an interview. And so, you know, kind of writing it from the perspective of someone who might find this difficult or daunting. To give them everything they need to get started. Maybe that's a good point to end on this week. Um, you can get actually just go to my Twitter, and then there's a link to it there. But yeah, the newsletter is free. And it comes out whenever I want to publish it, which I think it's been like three times this week. I have two things scheduled already for next week. Yeah, we'll talk to you next week. This has been Software Social, and you can find us at @softwaresocpod and we absolutely love it when you tweet at us with what you thought of an episode. So thanks so much for doing that.
MicroConf On Air + Software Social Crossover
Transcript below. Watch the video: https://youtu.be/cfeXNzWwAEcThe hosts of the SaaS Podcast Award nominated Software Social Podcast join Rob to chat about all things SaaS, early stage marketing strategies, and more. https://microconfonair.comMicroConf Connect ➡️ http://microconfconnect.comTwitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/MicroConfE-mail ➡️ support@microconf.comMicroConf 2021 Headline PartnersStripehttps://stripe.comTwitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/StripeHeyhttps://hey.comhttps://twitter.com/@heyheyTRANSCRIPTRob Walling 0:00 Welcome to this week's episode of MicroConf On Air. I'm your host, Rob Walling. And as always, every other Wednesday at 1pm Eastern 10am Pacific we live stream for about 30 minutes, we cover topics related to building and growing ambitious SaaS startups that bring us freedom, purpose, and allow us to maintain and value healthy relationships. We know that Silicon Valley way to raise buckets and buckets of money and go big or go home. But we believe in bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped founders who are making a change in their lives, maybe not changing the world, but at least changing their little corner of it. Thanks for joining me. Welcome back. I am excited today to talk about the talk about Software Social, it's a podcast if you're not listening to it, you should be it got nominated for the Best podcast in the best podcast category in the MicroConf SaaS podcast awards. And I have the pleasure of having the co-hosts of that podcast on the show today. And we'll be talking about have some questions for them about getting started and the benefits they receive from podcasting and that kind of stuff. But if you are watching this, please chime in with your own questions. We'd love to have the listener engagement. And that's why level level and your engagement. And that's why we do live events like this, instead of just doing them asynchronously through a podcast feed. Before we dive in, I want to mention MicroConf remote, which happens at the end of the month, March 23rd 24th 25th. It's gonna be pretty amazing event producer Xander is really outdoing himself on this one, MicroConfremote.com if you want to get on the list for that, and we'll be putting tickets up for sale here in the next few days. It's an early stage event. And it's aimed at folks trying to get their really their first 100 customers and it's going to dive deep into four specific early stage marketing tactics. We're going to have folks on who have done a specific tactic to get early stage traction and example App Sumo or posting on Producthunt. And we're gonna have a founder or subject matter expert on who has done that very thing and we'll share as many numbers with us as they can. So it's going to be a real barnburner especially if you're early stage. I look forward to seeing you there here towards the end of the month. With that, let's dive into Software Social. My two guests today are Michele Hansen. She's a co founder of Geocodio. And you might remember her from Startups for the Rest of Us Episode 524 called Bootstrapping a Commodity SaaS when she and her husband Mathias came on and spoke to me about their journey of growing Geocodio to a pretty amazing bootstrap business. They started that company in 2014 as a side project, she went full time in 2017. And as I've said, she's cohost of the software social podcast, which was nominated in several categories for 2020 SaaS podcast awards. She also recently launched a free newsletter about customer research for bootstrappers. So check her out at mjwhansen on Twitter, if you want to link to that. And her co host is calling Colleen Schnettler who is @Leenyburger on Twitter. She's a Ruby on Rails consultant. She's spoken at both Rails Comp and RubyConf and loves being part of the dev community. She recently launched her first product, Simple File Upload, excuse me, which is in the Heroku app marketplace. If you haven't been following their story, it's super cool to hear this going from zero to $360 MRR in the span of about a month with this file uploader app. So again, software social podcast if you want to check that out. Colleen is a mother and a military spouse and loves chatting about all things software and business. Ladies, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me today.Colleen Schnettler 3:45 Hi, thank you for having us. Yeah, it's great to have --Rob Walling 3:49 issues are great had issues. Anders, it's great to have you here, as I read the outline where Xander says the internet is causing causing issues. So let me start with this before I try to figure out if I have to troubleshoot my internet or whatever it is. But I want to start with this question of when did you start your podcast? And what made you decide to do it?Colleen Schnettler 4:12 So I have actually been on Michele for a while, like I had been asked gel for a while if she was interested in starting a podcast. Because Michele and I used to always casually meet about once a week to talk business and I was in that really hard idea generation phase where it just feels like you're just slamming up against brick walls like you have a great idea and then you just can't get any traction or you can't ship it or you can't find someone to purchase it. And so we were already meeting and that was great. But then COVID hit and she moved across the ocean.Rob Walling 4:53 You want to take it from there, Michelle? Michele Hansen 4:55 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think it came out of it because we wanted to stay connected to each other. And we had some friends in the bootstrap community who had prodded us about it and had said, Hey, you guys should have you should have a podcast. And so we're like, you know, we'll just take the conversations we were already having. And worst case, it just like forces us to keep meeting every week. And I think during COVID, that's been really helpful to have to schedule in interaction with other people. And so it really just started as something that we were doing for ourselves. And I think we've joked that we expected that we would just have a couple of pity listeners, like our husbands and some friends of ours, and it would just sort of just be this thing we did for each other. So it's been really fun. Colleen Schnettler 5:47 Yeah, I think for me, what happened was, I was trying to stay motivated. And I was searching the internet for bootstrapped founder podcast, and there's 1000s of bootstrapped founder podcasts. But I was listening to one show, and I distinctly remember, the guy was talking about, like, how he got in his car and drove to California. And he was just such a different place in his life. Like, I was like, where the parents like the mothers and the people who are trying to build sustainable businesses, while raising a young family? And while working a job like I was looking for an approach that was would fit more like in our life, and I didn't feel like a lot of people were podcasting about that.Yeah, love it. And that's really why a lot of us I think started is we started podcast or even why we started MicroConf was that we looked around for other people trying to do what we wanted to do in the way we wanted to do it. And I like calling you just said, I want to start a startup or I want to start a product that fits around my life. and not the other way around, I'm not going to be able to I have three kids and a mortgage, I'm not gonna be able to hop in a car and drive to California, and sleep on this on the side of the road in Santa Clara, like some people do, it makes a great story. But that's not a lot of our reality. And that's frankly, the name of my podcast is Startups for the Rest of Us. And we named it that because we we this is 2010. And we wanted to talk about building ambitious, but like ambitious startups, but that also worked with our goals and our life. And it was for the rest of us for all of us who can't, you know, uproot and sign up for Y Combinator and maybe move to San Francisco for three months, because that's just has never been a reality. For me, I love the I love that you guys started at because a we need more bootstrapping, podcasts and B, I just love to see more diverse voices coming into this space. It has been something I talk about every state of independent SaaS is something we focus on with MicroConf get in terms of of getting more attendees and more speakers who are just under represented. And so I love you started and I've been listening to it since I first heard about it. I'm curious, have you been doing this podcast now? For how long?Since early August, July? Rob Walling 8:01 Okay, that sounds right. Seven, Michele Hansen 8:03 I think early August was when we first launched. Yeah.Colleen Schnettler 8:07 I'm curious, maybe start with Michele. What benefits if any, have you received from the podcast? Or has it really just been we wanted accountability and to have some fun? Or do you feel like, yeah, I guess what benefits have come your way because of it.Michele Hansen 8:24 Something that's really important to me as a person is that when I go through something difficult that I make it easier for the people who come after me, but just just something that's always guided my life. And so I doing the podcast, I feel like I'm thing we'd have this goal of demystifying it. Rob Walling 8:45 Right. Michele Hansen 8:46 So a lot of people want to start a company, you want to bootstrap a company, they don't really know where to start. They're in that exact situation that Colleen was in, not in anymore, but wasn't of spinning their wheels and trying to stop consulting. And just it's a really frustrating place, but a lot of people are in it. And so I think there's opportunity to to just, I don't know, show people that it's normal to struggle. And just normalize that, I think, and it's been fun.Rob Walling 9:24 So fun, plus the benefit, or the value you get out of it is feeling. It's like purpose almost. I would if I were just looking for you. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. How about you Colleen.Colleen Schnettler 9:37 I've gotten tremendous benefit out of it. Part of the reason I wanted to start it was so I didn't quit and I actually launched something. Why is it so hard to launch something? Anyway, part of the reason I wanted to start it was just to get over the finish line and keep chatting with Michele since we couldn't see each other in person anymore, but I feel like it's been tremendously beneficial in terms of weekly accountability.In terms of just more interaction with people on the internet, there's been like this whole community of people I didn't know existed something I noticed when I was listening to all these other bootstrap podcasts, they'd always talk about their, they had some word form. They're like their mentor groups, they have a better word. What do they call those group mastermind? Rob Walling 10:19 Yes, that's it. Colleen Schnettler 10:20 I was like, Why is everyone in a mastermind? Where's my mastermind? And so I found Michele and she's like, she and the random people on Twitter have become like, my mastermind group. And it's spectacular. It's been so much fun.Yeah, yeah, I'd like to call that out. There. I have this phrase, I say doing things in public creates opportunity. And whether that's publishing blog posts, or starting a podcast, or just shipping, some code shipping, an add on to whatever, it has never ceased to amaze me the number of people that I have met, because they start shipping things. And a lot of it is podcasting. I look at a lot of the early, just the early friends that I made, were through MicroConf, and then people starting their podcast, a lot of the early like angel investments. When I first started angel investing where people was like Jordan Gaul with cart hook, because he had bootstrapped web, there was just a mcgillicutty fuse, because he had zero to scale. I believe their podcast was, I don't know, there's just something about it that it feels when you're listening. I think it always feels it always felt to me, Will I ever be able to, to do this, or it's like this coveted spot. And then once you start doing it, you're like, wow, I'm going to include already it was way less work. And way easier. I think that I thought because there just aren't that many people who are doing what the two of you do, which is to get on the mic every week. And to do it even eight months. Most people don't last that long. And I think you should Pat yourselves on the back for making it this far. I am curious, Colleen, you're sharing revenue right now. And you're sharing progress. And the transparencies is awesome, because it allows you to really follow your story. What I've seen, I've seen a pattern where folks are transparent to a point and then when they hit they usually hit 10 or 20 K and then it's I don't think I'm going to do this anymore. I'm going to shut it down. Have you given any thought to that about whether you'll continue to share perpetually, whether you'll decide when as you get there, or whether there is a mark where it's time to start hiring employees and people. If you wind up doing that, or once I'm making my full time living off of this, it's perhaps too dangerous may invite competition whatever reason, have you given any thought to longer longer term with that transparency might look like? So I have not. But as you bring up the question, it seems to me there's probably not a lot of benefit to sharing past a certain point, Michele has deliberately chosen not to share so she could tell us why they made that choice. But it seems like it's so great to share in these early days because you get so much bad press on the internet saying you're going to get 10,000 MRR your first month. And that's just not the reality. So I love being in sharing their like small MRR growth. But I definitely think there's going to be a point where there's it's not value added to the community anymore.Yeah, we have a listener or a viewer question from Pablo. And maybe I'll throw this to Michele first and calling you can add any additional thoughts? How much time and or money do you dedicate to the podcast outside of the time spent on air?Michele Hansen 13:16 That's such a good question. I guess we'll start at the beginning. So every week we record and we try to keep it to 30 minutes intentionally so that somebody can listen while they're driving to and from the grocery store or walking the dog or whatever that is. We block off an hour for that. And that includes us like chit chatting, like what people don't hear is that like Colleen and I having social hour after we get off recording, we actually don't prep for the podcast we did initially. And we would like both come into it with something we wanted to say and plan to each talk for 15 minutes. And we found that we were both talking in paragraphs and sounded very stilted. And something that has been important to us is that it sounds conversational and social. And so we found that that sort of imposing that structure was inhibiting that. And then so there's editing time, and I'll let Colleen go into that because she has been handling that. So I'm going to start handling that in a few weeks. And then there's also the posting time. So we have transcripts made from otter.ai, which is super fast, but like you need to clean it up a little bit. But I do a prelisten, before we publish anyway. And it's it's not nothing I can't do in that time. I'm listening. So I don't know, that probably takes me about an hour, 45 minutes or an hour total. And then in terms of costs, we have a subscription to Transistor. And I think that's what $20 a month or something like that.Colleen Schnettler 14:48 Yeah, it takes me about an hour to edit. I was slower in the beginning because I didn't know what I was doing. But I would say probably an hour for each of us outside of the hour we spend to record so it's really low.Yeah, that's been my experience too. And in fact, we, when we started sort through the rest of us, we edited first I think 15 or 20 episodes. And then we found an editor on Upwork, which was called, what to call back then. Remember freelance? Elance? No. Elance and oDesk. Camp. Michele Hansen 15:21 oDesk. Rob Walling 15:22 Thank you. That's called oDesk. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, anyways, Upwork 15 bucks an hour. This was before podcast motor, right? This was before the productized editing services, or we would have just gone with them. So I think similar to you guys are too similar to the two of you. I spend time on the mic. And then and for me, it's only about it made an additional half hour of prep, because I pay for all the other stuff and pot to give you an example, because Pablo said, I have a friend. I have a similar regular conversation with similar software social and I've been thinking of turning it into a podcast, too. It was Oh, he's trying to think through Yeah, so it's not if you have a bit of budget, you can throw it out at 75 bucks in episode for like podcast mode or to do your editing and posting. Or you can do it on your own like Colleen and Michele are doing but it I don't feel like it's an insurmountable amount of work, especially if you do keep the episode shorter start going to 45 or a minute or an hour episodes, it can get a little more cumbersome. Michele Hansen 16:20 But honestly, the thing that takes the most time is talking to people on Twitter the day when an episode goes live. And that's also the most fun part about it, too, is just chatting with people about what they thought and what it made them think of and questions they have. That's one of the best parts as Colleen mentioned earlier. Rob Walling 16:41 When you so the day it goes live, you tweet the episode out, and then two folks respond and say, Hey, this helped me do you have a cool example in the past month or something? Have someone like bringing something up specific that you felt like our work here is done? Achievement unlocked? Michele Hansen 16:56 Yeah, I mean, all the time. Pretty much every episode, we're getting positive comments from people on Twitter. Just yesterday, we had someone send us an email thanking us for doing it. It's, I have been so moved by how willing people are to show us that they enjoy it. It's so nice.Rob Walling 17:20 You have similar interactions. Michele, I don't think you've had any guests on yet. Have you ever planned to have guests come on.Michele Hansen 17:28 So we had Alex Hillman on in September. And then we had Michelle Penczak from Squared Away, which is gonna be the does military spouse virtual assistants. And then we also had Danielle Simpson, co-founder of Feedback Panda on a couple of months ago, or about a month ago. And then we have another guest coming up in a few weeks, Colleeen us moving. And this time, I'm really excited. It's a listener who's joining us, and we're going to workshop, their business. So I'm really excited. Yeah, we're very deliberate about how we do guests, I get pitches for guests all the time. And we are only bringing people on when we feel like it's something that really aligns with our mission for the podcast, which is really fun. Like we bring people on because we think they need more visibility or because they're saying something that people need to hear. It's, it's been really fun when we've had guests on, I can be so deliberate about it. Rob Walling 18:29 That's the thing. It's nice bit the way your you've set up your format is he the two of you can just talk every week. And so you have the luxury of just only handpicking guests that you want on that really have something to say at the moment you want them to say it and I that's something that I've enjoyed with my podcasts as well is that we didn't have guests on for a few 100 episodes. And then we had a bunch of guests on and I didn't really like either of those extremes. And being able to maybe have a guest on every once a month or twice a month, I think is a nice balance. But we Okay, we're having having some questions and comments coming in from the audience. And I think calling Hey,Colleen Schnettler 19:06 Holly, thanks for joining us again. Yeah. So maybe we'll start with Colleen on this one since I just asked Michele a question. He says I believe producer Xander is that his quote as well. He says I heart Software Social exclamation mark, a little bit of love for there. And then and then he says how do or how did you foster a growth mindset? How did you develop the mindset to ship things without the need for immediate payoff? philosophical like it. That's tough.I mean, when he says that, I'm like, Wait, do I have that? Man, I have struggled to ship something. And so I think social accountability helps a lot like when I learned I'm a career changer. So I'm a self taught coder. When I learned to code, I did 100 days of code, and I got involved in as many coding communities as I could because that social accountability really makes a difference. And I feel like shipping a product, it's been the same thing. I hadn't really found good community, although I had been trying. So Michelle and I, I don't want to say we started one. But it feels that way. Because now I have Michelle, who I talk to every week has been very successful and can keep me motivated. Then I have this also this random group of people on the internet who tweet about their success and their MRR. And they're all building and public, and I'm building in public. So just like seeing that has really helped me ship and not just ship because this is the developer problem is we ship something and we think we're done. So it's like shipping now. Rob Walling 20:46 Nice. How about you, Michelle?Michele Hansen 20:50 I think something was you can see with Colleen story and with ours is that we started with things we needed ourselves. And I find that motivation is so much easier to come by when you're not building something for other people that really, you're just building it, because it's a pain point that you have in your own life. And worst comes to worst. nobody uses it, but you use it and you have solved a pain in your life, whether that's something that took you five minutes or five days, you have removed that frustration from your life. And so maybe this product is something that becomes something that other people use and you grow it. Or maybe you've just removed frustration from your life. And that frees you up to think about something else you could improve. And maybe that will become something that other people will use.Colleen Schnettler 21:38 Yeah, and the only thing I want to add there was don't there's so much information and advice on the internet that is 100% in conflict, like people told me do not solve your own problem. I kept hearing that over and over, they were like, go do the whole pre sells in the marketing. And I don't, that's great. I just didn't know how to do that. And maybe my next product, I'll do that. And then Michele was like, yeah, that's cool. You should just make the thing you want. And then if no one buys it, you have the thing you want. And that for me, the pre sale thing just didn't work for me. I couldn't wrap my brain around how to do that. And so if I had just continued to follow that advice, I probably wouldn't have gotten anywhere. So I think different advice is appropriate for different people and different skill sets to.Rob Walling 22:21 Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree that's something I've been harping on for years is don't listen to everyone who's talking about how to do what you want to do, how to start a successful SaaS app or, you know, software product. Find the one or two, maybe three tops who really resonate with you and who you feel like their approach matches with you or like they're where you want to be. I have some I'll call them virtual mentors or people who I look up to people like Jason koa and Hayden Sean says, but when I look, I don't Jason Cohen runs WP engine or he's co founder. I don't have the desire to build, essentially, what is going to soon be a billion literally a billion dollar business with 500 employees already and they've taken no response capital. That's what he wants to do. And he's doing an amazing job at it. And but I don't particularly have that desire myself. Now I can take and choose some of this stuff when he talks about bootstrapping, when use that in my own portfolio or in my own kind of mental models. But in addition, I think finding someone who has done it, hopefully done it a couple times, because oftentimes it's you have to determine whether, you know, did they? Did they have a lot of luck? Or do they really have the chops? And have they are they really executed on this for a long time, and finding someone that resonates with you and someone that I think you respect? I think the other like, I've heard folks idolize whoever you want to whoever you want to say, who's a business person who maybe some people might not like an Elan Musk, or Jeff Bezos, and it's if you're not willing to do what they were willing to do to get where they are, then maybe that's not the path you want to travel either. Maybe they're not the folks to idolize, if you want to build a 500,000 or a million dollar bootstrapped startup. Should I really be listening to either of them even though Yeah, arguably, they're great. They're great business people, and they've built amazing empires. It just doesn't feel like it necessarily fits. So I like what you're saying about there are at any given time, there are 1000 people telling you how to start your app and who how are you going to narrow it down? How are you going to figure out who resonates with you and what advice to take? You guys have other Michelle, do you have other thoughts on that topic of like, how you maybe filter advice that that you take or how to narrow down to who the folks are that you really listened to and trust on the internet?Michele Hansen 24:35 It's funny, I don't actually read a lot of the kind of advice that Colleen does, I'm trying to think about. So who am I like business heroes and I think of Daniel Kahneman, the author of Thinking Fast and Slow. Like I tend to gravitate towards books that give me frameworks and mental models for thinking and finding out how to make better decisions and I do read a lot of books on customer research, because I'm always trying to improve my chops there. But yeah, Colleen and I are so opposite on that. But I think I think we're now both in agreement that hustle porn is pretty toxic. And that there's a lot of people out there who are, as you're saying selling advice that doesn't necessarily relate to the bootstrap founder.Rob Walling 25:25 You have any other thoughts? Coleen?Colleen Schnettler 25:28 No, I think I think one of the things Michele mentioned is, she consumes a lot of books. And originally when I started, I would just read a lot of blogs. And they're both useful ways to get information. But thanks to her recommendation, I've been reading some of these books she's recommended. And I think that those have really resonated with me a little bit more. I think when you start to feel like you're never going to make it, you start to get on the internet and read things on the internet. And that can lead you down. Maybe not the most productive path.Rob Walling 26:01 Here here, I agree.Colleen and Michele, thank you so much for joining me today. And thanks for starting Software Social being nominated for the Best podcast and Microsoft's podcast awards after what, six, seven months on the air is pretty cool. So folks, again, want to find you on Twitter at mjwansen with an E. And @leenyburger.Thanks for joining me.Michele Hansen 26:28 Thanks for having us.Rob Walling 26:32 And with that, we'll wrap up for the day. Oh, yeah, I saw live guys. I'm having internet problems. Sorry about that. Again, MicroConfRemote.com cheat codes for early stage marketing strategies. We have an interactive video game environment. That is pretty dang cool. So I would encourage you to go check it out. MicroConfconnect.com you'll see the dates on the screen. It's March 23 through 25th 11am to 1230. Eastern time. There is also there's an interactive pass and then there's a video only pass if you just want to do the live stream but I've really you should check out this thing. We've I think again, producer Sanders outdone himself on this one. MicroConf mastermind applications are open again periodically, every several months we open them So MicroConfmasterminds.com if you want to be paired up in a mastermind, and thanks again to Hey and Stripe as always for being our headline partners for the year. Thank you so much. I'll see you in two weeks.
To Take Funding, or Not to Take Funding
Colleen Schnettler 0:00 The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners.This episode is sponsored by Intro CRM. There's a new simple sales tool built just for freelancers and early stage founders called Intro CRM. Add details in one click and know what you're earning next month. Quickly log next steps for every deal and integrate with Basecamp, Trello or Asana for managing tasks. Check out their website at introcrm.com. Thanks again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners in this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit balsamiq.com/go/software-socialMichele Hansen 0:46 So Colleen, you launched your SaaS, Simple File Upload, in December. And for the past couple of months now, we have been tracking how it's doing, how many people are signing up, your revenue, all those things. So last time we talked, you were on track for $325 in MRR and I think the previous time we had talked about before that which is maybe like two weeks before that. You're at $120 MRR. And so I'm curious, like, where are we now?Colleen Schnettler 1:29 So since we last spoke, I had one additional signups. Michele HansenNice. Colleen Schnettler So that puts me at $360 MRR. And I really I mean, I feel like I've won the lottery, Michele, like it feels amazing.Michele Hansen 1:39 Isn't SaaS great?Colleen Schnettler 1:41 So I mean, it was so hard to get to this point. But right now it just feels good. I think it's important to note that I couldn't charge for it until February 4, which was three weeks ago. So in three weeks, I've gone from zero MRR to $360. That's why I feel like I've won the lottery, like it's just.Michele Hansen 1:59 That's amazing. Have you annualize that yet? like have you let yourself like multiply that by 12. And just like think about that for a second?Colleen Schnettler 2:05 Too much. It's too much dreaming. I'm not quite ready to dream that big yet. But it feels really great. I mean, I am kind of floored -- Michele Hansen $4,000 a year, by the way --Colleen SchnettlerI could fly to Europe someday with that money when it's safe to fly. Yeah, so it feels really amazing to see this growth. And I have mentioned that I've been really busy the past couple weeks with with real paid work. And so I haven't put a lot of time or energy into this and people are still signing up.Michele Hansen 2:43 So this is real paid work the differences. Colleen Schnettler 2:47 Yeah, I shouldn't call --Michele Hansen 2:50 You don't have to be sort of like a like button chair, in order to make that revenue and make those sales, right like cuz whenever you get a consulting client, this is where these are so different. You have to work for every single customer in order to make that happen. Like you have to be out meeting people and making contacts and landing each client. But when you have customers, and they can just sign up whenever they need it. And they don't have to talk to you or do anything with you at all, before paying you, it's a huge shift.Colleen Schnettler 3:30 Yes, I mean, it's it's ultimately, you know, right now I trade my time for money. And as a consultant, I'm very, very aware of my time almost to my own detriment. And with this, yeah, I mean, of course, I put a ton of time in upfront, but people just sign up in the middle of the night and sweet. Like, that's awesome, I didn't have to do anything!Michele Hansen 3:52 So I'm curious. When you were when you had a you know, sort of we call them corporate jobs like were you? I wonder if were you a consultant like were you time tracking? Colleen SchnettlerNo. Michele HansenOh, okay.Colleen Schnettler 4:05 So I've done them. All right. I've done the salaried not time track to time tracking as what I do now. And now the product. So it's exciting. Michele Hansen 4:14 Yeah, it is exciting. I just remember when I went from working at an agency and having to, you know, time track three minutes spent replying to an email to then working in a product company and not having to time track and it was like, Oh, my God, this is -- this is amazing.Colleen Schnettler 4:34 Yeah, it feels totally different. So I'm, you know, I'm trying to enjoy it. And I'm also trying to think about, like, how I can continue to try and find -- I don't really feel like I found any kind of real product market fit. Like I've definitely found a pain point because people are signing up. But, I mean, I think that that there's a lot of opportunity to find deeper pain points in more specific niches. Because not everyone is this is the weirdest thing I know I keep bringing this up, but like people are signing up, but only about 50% of the people who sign up and they have to pay me when they sign up, are using it. And I'm emailing them. And I'm trying to see if I can help them. But if they don't use it, they're going to churn. So I feel like I'm a little I don't want to say concerned, but I'm cognizant of the fact that I think I'm going to have a high churn rate this first month, because people are going to be like, why am I paying for this thing I don't use?Michele Hansen 5:27 Yeah, I think that's something worth diving into. And you mentioned that you're emailing people. And we've talked a little bit about different approaches, you've taken to those emails, in terms of copy and subject lines, and all those sorts of things. And so I'm curious, if you've been, like trying anything differently, or if you've had any more people get back to you. And you've kind of gotten any more insight into why that might be happening?Colleen Schnettler 5:53 Nope. I mean, I can't get anyone... Michele Hansen That sounds frustrating.Colleen SchnettlerIt is it's frustrating. So in the beginning, I had a free tier, which I no longer have, there's no free free option. And the people in the free tier would would engage with me a lot more and and they seemed it was seemed like because they were very grateful. I mean, most of them expressed gratitude that I had solved this problem for them for free. No one emailed me back who was paying me money. Now to be fair, it's only what 1012 people that are paying me money, they don't want to talk to me. So I'm right. Have you beenMichele Hansen 6:30 Like, can you like look at their email addresses and see like, are they Gmails that are signing up? Or like people at companies?Colleen Schnettler 6:38 There are Gmails? It's both. It's a combination of Gmail and custom domains. And it you know, I haven't even been looking to see if they're, you know, what, it just occurred to me, I haven't even been checking to see if those emails are opened. So there could be something else going on, or they just don't want to talk to me, which is is what it is, I think, though, like why I just I don't want to stress about it. But like, why would you sign up for something you have to pay for and not use it? Like did i know.Michele Hansen 7:07 I think that's a very valid concern. And something that's worth diving into like that's, you see that when people aren't using a product, they are more likely sure to cancel it like that is that is very fair. Now there are some products that people buy, and they buy them aspirationally. And whether or not they use the product is sort of almost tangential to whether they're getting value out of it like so, for example, like gym memberships are a great example of this. Like, there's a there's a great Planet Money podcast on i think i think it's Planet Fitness, this business model.Colleen Schnettler 7:47 And, like, theyMichele Hansen 7:48 know that most people who sign up are not going to use it. And they sign up for that because they want it to be because like it's aspirational. And they have this whole thing, or I like this, why they have like monthly bagel days and pizza days or whatever. So people like come back and they feel like they're getting value out of it. And they're like, Oh yeah, I'm gonna like, I'm going to start coming to the gym, like, I'm going to do it. But in actuality, if everybody who had a membership showed up to their gym, they would not have nearly enough equipment or spaces for them. And so it's baked into their business model, that people will not use it. However, I don't think anyone is buying cloud storage aspirationally...Colleen Schnettler 8:27 and don't either. Feel like you get it because you want it. Michele Hansen 8:31 Why aren't you buying my files? Like I really liked this, my New Year's Resolution is start storing my files. Um, like, I mean, maybe there's, you know, cases of that with like, people who were, you know, saving important documents or whatnot or photos, like personal photos, but I think in a business context, you know, I I don't think that whole building in intentional non-users/inactive accounts, it is like really relevant. But yeah, I mean, but yes, especially with a subscription business, if someone is not using the product. In general, especially in a business context, especially for something that's designed for regular use, like if this was the kind of product that people only need once a year, or they have a subscription, and then it's, they only use it when they have like a specific acute problem. But your product is designed to be used, you know, daily or weekly, or, you know, at a fairly frequent context. And so, so yeah, I think you're justified and trying to figure out what the heck is going on there and see, yeah, I'llColleen Schnettler 9:45 tell you what, why they aren't using it. So I'm trying to follow up with those people to figure out what that's about. And you know, it's just consistently on this, this journey to try and find where it fits the best. So one of the kind of fun things I did, I think I've mentioned before that you can either install it with a JavaScript snippet or a React component. And I have been trying to speed learn React, so I could maintain the React component, because I don't actually know react. And so one of my friends has a really cool site protege.dev, and they correlate junior developer positions. So it's kind of neat, because it's something I'm really like excited about, because I, you know, you know that I'm really passionate about helping people get into tech. And so they have need for a file uploader. So he is using Simple File Upload the React component. So it's and they do live streaming it live, live, twitching, live streaming, what's it called? You know what I mean? I went live twitch live streaming. Yeah. Anyway, it's becoming this really cool thing in this community, I'm in where a bunch of people are participating, and working on the site together, and they live, switch, Twitch, stream it, and they're using my uploader. And it's great, because he's talking to me, right? So. So he's using the React component. So I'm getting really good feedback on the React component. And he's incorporating it into his like, beautiful, really professional site. So I'm really getting an opportunity to test that component really deeply. And, for example, he pointed out, he brought to my attention that it wasn't keyboard accessible, which I hadn't even realized until he brought that to my attention. So I was able to fix that quickly. You know, because it's just me, so I can just fix it. So that was cool. Michele HansenThat's so cool. Colleen SchnettlerYeah, I'm excited about it. Like because I am, I'm dogfooding this on several applications, so I'm using the heck out of it. But I always use the JavaScript snippet. So it's nice to have someone like testing the React component as well.Michele Hansen 11:51 So do you have your own clients as paying customers?Colleen Schnettler 11:55 I do. Michele HansenHey-ohColleen SchnettlerI disclosed that to them. Just so you know, this is my upload. Like, you won't get better customer service. And thenMichele Hansen 12:11 I wonder how like, do your clients react to that? Or are they, you know, kind of like, Oh, sweet, like, we just saved you, you know, six hours of consulting for this monthly fee? like whatever, orColleen Schnettler 12:21 Yeah, they didn't seem to really care. They just wanted it to work. Like many people are like, okay,Michele Hansen 12:27 They just want the job done. Colleen Schnettler 12:29 they just want the job done. Oh, my goodness, that makes me think of you had some tweet about Jobs To Be Done this week. And I thought about, but it was like, it was so funny, because here we are every week and you tell me about Jobs To Be Done. And I hear you, and I hear you. And it's like, I can't internalize it. And I was thinking about no one responding to my emails. And in your tweet, you said something about don't ask the customer how to solve the problem. Michele Hansen Yeah. Colleen Schnettler And I realized, despite my weekly coaching with you, I think I'm still doing that. Because I'm like, What feature do you want? Like, would it be better if we had multiple file uploads? Where's the focus? I need to refocus on what are you trying to do? Michele HansenYes!Colleen Schnettler So yeah, it's so funny, because you tell me that all the time. It's like, just like, it didn't sink in until I saw that. I was like, wait, I'm asking them what they want in terms of like a feature set. But that's not, that's not the problem they're trying to solve. Right? Whatever I offers a feature set is, what are they trying to do? Like, you know, how do I help them solve their own problems?Michele Hansen 13:38 Yeah, and how you figure that out as listening to their problems, but it is your job to figure out what features they need. And you figure out what features they need, by listening to what their problems are, and listening to what they are trying to solve. But and I'm so glad you brought this up, because I think this is where a lot of people trip up on customer research, or they've kind of had a bad experience. Because, you know, they're like, well, we asked the customers what they wanted, and it wasn't useful, or they didn't tell us anything good. Or they all wanted different things. And it's like, well, that's because you asked them the wrong question. You can't, you know, ask them to basically do your work for you. And, you know, I, one of the objections I get from people sometimes is, oh, well, if you know, if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse, not a car at you know, as sort of a way of dismissing talking to customers that, you know, customers are not going to come up with innovations. And it's like, well, yeah, like your job as the entrepreneur is the person to come up with those things and to listen and pull from that not that customers are asking for a faster horse but that even if they say they want a faster horse, what they're saying I want to be able to go places faster. I don't want the expensive taking care of a horse or it's expensive to take care of, of a horse like, like, those are the things that you listen to and then hearing out from many different people, you you piece together. Okay, what are the problems? And then how does that drive me towards a solution? And maybe that's something that's hugely breakthrough, like a car, or maybe it's a marginal improvement, that it's still okay. Like, I think it's like one of my pet peeves is like, you can have a company and not change the world. And that's okay.Colleen Schnettler 15:34 Yeah, for sure. I have I think, like many small-time founders, like I have this, this is a little bit of a tangent, but whatever. I have this dream of getting funding, like, like small. Michele HansenDo you!Colleen SchnettlerWell, okay, so let me just tell you... Michele HansenYou never told me that!Colleen SchnettlerWell, because it sounds like it sounds like the the easy way.Michele Hansen 15:54 I mean, I know it's a really, does it sound like it, like make you like legit, like at all, it's like aColleen Schnettler 15:58 Well first of all legitimacy. Absolutely. Legitimacy. And then also like, it, it, I mean, it would be awesome. But we talk a lot about time pressures on this podcast like, man, if I didn't have to do other work, like, I feel like I would have so much time to do this work. Like, it would be amazing.Michele Hansen 16:18 Colleen, you know, I'm an investor in Earnest Capital, and their whole thing is giving money to bootstrappers. So they can go full time on their SaaS products that already have revenue.Colleen Schnettler 16:28 I do not I told you that.Michele Hansen 16:32 Like, and they don't require referrals. Like it's not like a traditional VC where, you know, like, you had to have, you know, gone to Stanford with some guy, whoever who can connect you like, you know, they're not like that. But I'm just gonna throw that out there. Cuz I guess we've never talked about this before, even though I talked to you every week for like, what, two or three years? Colleen Schnettler For a long time. Yes, we've never talked about that. But it's kind of an interesting thing. When you look at something I had been, of course, this is like, okay, so maybe not, of course, because you didn't know. But this is like a secret dream of mine.Michele Hansen 17:03 Is it? Oh, let's dive into this.Colleen Schnettler 17:05 Well, but it's interesting. So if you think about it, so someone who has received funding, and kind of made a video about like how the numbers play out if you get funded. And it was really interesting, because he was talking about, like, if you just want to grow your business to $10K MRR and sit there, you should definitely not take funding, because the way you would have to pay back that initial investment, like, you know, it doesn't make sense. It's if you want to grow your business to like $100k MRR? Like how big do you want to be that that? Where's where is the balance? In terms of like, what kind of business you want? So I've been thinking a little bit about like, what kind of business do I want this to be? Do I want to go all in full time? And like, take a run at the big guys who are making $60 million a year? So there's space in that market? Or do I just want like a little like $5 a month software business?Michele Hansen 18:01 I think that's a fair question. I also think you could have a bootstrapped $100K a month company, I'm sorry, sorry, my dog in the background. That's Nigel, some of you may have seen pictures of him. He also just because like if you don't take funding now and you grow it to $100, $150, $200k a month company, like you could take funding at that point, like wasn't it last summer that one password took like a ton of funding, after being bootstrapped the whole time. And also, like, I think Atlassian, like Atlassian was completely bootstrapped until they went public.Colleen Schnettler 18:38 This is a fun dream world to live in.Michele Hansen 18:41 I'm just saying like, you don't necessarily have to take the funding right now. Or at $10K, or 50, or $100K or like, whatever that is. And like, you also don't have to decide what kind of company you want now, like, like, you mean, you can dream about it? And you're the you know, you're more than allowed to do that. But you don't have to feel like you're, you're committing to something that's not changeable in the future.Colleen Schnettler 19:12 Yeah, I see what you mean. And I'd like to clarify for my listeners, and no one is offering me funding like, this is not something this is just my dream world, right. No one's offering it.Michele Hansen 19:22 Why do you feel like you need it?Colleen Schnettler 19:25 so I could stop consulting, and I could work on this. I just feel like and it's because this month is really busy. Okay, to be fair.Michele Hansen 19:33 So it's like personal stress that's kind of driving that.Colleen Schnettler 19:36 Yeah. So my background to the side project, which I don't know that I ever shared is I have always wanted to do this. And so I consulted pretty hardcore for a while and then I saved up a bunch of money so I could have taken almost up to a year off been able to pay my bills and worked on my project, but then COVID hit and we had a lot of unexpected financial stressors, so I had to start working again. And I enjoy work. I enjoy consulting, like, I don't mean to make it sound like a terrible thing like actually really like it. But what I had really wanted to do was do side projects. So right now, especially this month, because we're about to move and work, consulting work is really busy. I just feel the pressure, like, for example, I launched this thing it's doing so well. I mean, I think it's doing well. And I don't have any time to work on it. Like, like, I just feel like if I just had more time, there's so much I could do with it. So for me, it's a time pressure time financial stress. That's, that's why you know, you like for me, like that's why i would i would do something like that.Michele Hansen 20:40 You mentioned that you have this, you know, the sort of like financial stress going on right now. And I'm not going to make you go into that. But what I am curious about is, is that a temporary thing? Like, is that going to, you know, mitigate in a couple of weeks or a couple of months? Or does that look like a permanent thing that will keep you consulting?Colleen Schnettler 21:07 I don't know, it's hard to say. I mean, it's not going to go away completely, because of some life changes we're making. And so there will be there's a but but you know, it's not tremendous, like yeah, I don't know, Michele Hansen 21:27 Does what you're doing right now not feel sustainable? Colleen Schnettler What do you mean, what I'm doing right now? Michele Hansen Like, like working and like, like consulting and working on Simple File Upload. Colleen Schnettler So it's like trying to do those things? Is it a matter of like, you feel like you cannot do both of them, or you aren't giving Simple File Upload as much attention as you want to.Colleen Schnettler 21:51 It's a combination of both. It's so funny, because I got on this other podcast last week, Virtual Coffee, great group, great podcast. And I taught I gave this like long soliloquy about work life balance, and how I take the weekends off. And I cannot take the weekends off, and consult and work on Simple File Upload, like just not possible. Now, what I can do is I can work hard consulting for a couple months, scale that back and have more time for Simple File Upload, which is probably the right answer, and then I can just do more 50/50 it's just been a little crazy this month, I think I think I'm just feeling the stress of everything going on in my life right now. And so it seems like the get out of jail free card if someone just handed me $200,000. Sweet.Michele Hansen 22:36 I had a conversation with someone a couple of weeks ago, who has a SaaS who, you know, said they're feeling some, like financial stresses and feeling you know, like they weren't growing as much as they wanted to, and like things would be easier if they were growing more and everything. And actually almost came close to taking funding. And like basically like, you know, had the offer for the check, like, in hand.Colleen Schnettler interesting. Michele HansenAnd, and they turned it down. Colleen Schnettler Interesting.Michele HansenBecause it turned out that that kind of stress was going to be temporary.Colleen Schnettler 23:13 Yeah. I mean, honestly, for me, it's probably temporary. And it's probably just like a knee jerk reaction to everything that's going on. Yeah, because because it does seem to change. Like you said, you can always change your mind. I just wish I had more time. I feel like I'm in this really cool place where I finally have launched my product, I have definitely not found what they call it, you know, product market fit. I don't think I've found that because I think I'll know when I find that because I'm still pushing, but it's only been a month. So I feel Michele HansenYeah, it's so early. Colleen Schnettler It's so early. So I feel like I'm at this critical juncture right now where it's either push and make this a thing or just let it kind of marinate in the you know, 300 to 500 whatever it's going to be dollar range and let it sit there and I really want to push and make this a thing and so I think I'm just feeling that pressure of like I really want to push this and I just don't have the time.Michele Hansen 24:06 So I I also don't know if there's really enough data there for it to like to get a valuation of the company and to know what would be a fair price for some percentage of the company. But it sounds like thinking about funding is helpful for you because I think you said this or maybe it just popped into my head but like did you say it's sort of like a get out of jail free card, but it feels like okay, for the stress that you're dealing with right now. And so what you can do is say, I'm going to reevaluate this in three months. Colleen Schnettler Yeah, that's a good idea.Michele Hansen Like write down how you feel write down the you know the reasons why right now like if if you know I said here calling here's a check for what, what amount of money what would make it worth it for you like $50,000, $100,000.Colleen Schnettler 25:00 Yeah, something like that. Okay,Michele Hansen 25:01 let's, let's, let's say that Okay, all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna be the, the Oh my god, what are the Danish? The let know that the the TV show The Shark Tank, right?Colleen Schnettler 25:13 Oh yes.Michele Hansen 25:14 They call it Lion Den in Danish. And I'm like, kind of a lion. I'm like, like, you know, here's the check, like, what would that do for you right now? And what would you do with that? And also, how do you think it would change your approach to the business? I just write all those things down and then go and look at that. Okay, like, two or three months from now, like, capture all of that feeling? Because I think thatColleen Schnettler 25:41 that's a great idea. Yeah,Michele Hansen 25:42 Like that stress you're feeling is valid. Like, that's real. And that's, like, totally normal. Like, it's very stressful to have a job and a side project and like that, that's normal. So, you know, honor that feeling. But, don't necessarily make a decision from that position of stress right now, especially when you're so early. And you have all these other factors that aren't normally going on.Colleen Schnettler 26:07 Yeah. And again, no one is offering me money, like no one would offer me money with... What I know, you asked you. I never know. I'm not gonna ask because you're right,Michele Hansen 26:16 that you're gonna get angel investors sliding into your DMS after this. Colleen Schnettler 26:18 Angel investors. Where are you? Did you hear? So? Um, no, I think you're right. I think that, first of all, again, no one's offering me money, but also making that kind that's a big decision and making that kind of decision from a position of stress. I think I've mentioned casually that we are we're making a big move. I mean, not across the ocean like you did. But still, it feels like a big move -- Michele HansenAcross the country. Colleen SchnettlerYeah, we're moving in about four weeks across the country. So I think I'm feeling the stress of that. And work is actually going great. I'm loving what I'm doing consulting, so that's not a problem. Michele HansenAnd you're still getting people signing up, even though you're like doing, like, quote unquote, nothing. Colleen SchnettlerSo this is the beauty of SaaS, right? It's like magical, like, yes, someone signed up, and I did nothing. That's awesome. At first, I was really trying to, like temper my excitement about it. But honestly, Michelle, the other day, I went back and I listened to one of our first podcasts. And like, it is just so cool. To see for me going to just being like, I can't think of anything. This is so hard to like, like, I can't even have met six months ago. I can't imagine myself here. You know what I mean?Michele Hansen 27:24 Yeah, like, it's so amazing. It's like, I've gotten like a front row seat to this and it's just it brings me so much vicarious joy, like to see this.Colleen Schnettler 27:37 Yeah, I can't even like listening to one of my early podcasts with all I wanted was to just launch something. I mean, I just it's so cool. And so I hopefully like I can't even see what six months ahead of me. Right? Like, like, that's kind of how I'm thinking about this position. I'm in like, yeah, I could totally this could become a non-thing like this could not work. But I you know, I --Michele HansenEarly signs are good. Colleen SchnettlerEarly signs are good. Yeah. And I think I've gotten better since we started this to it filtering through the the, the bad internet, SaaS information and the good internet SAS information. Michele HansenWhat do you mean by that? Colleen SchnettlerI mean, like so before, I was following people on Twitter who are like, Oh, I started a SAS and I made $10,000 the first month, like, that's not helpful, because that almost never happened. Michele HansenHustle porn. Colleen SchnettlerThat's what it's called hustle porn. Yeah, I was probably way too much hustle porn. And so now I'm following people who are like trying to build long term sustainable businesses. And what I've noticed is one compared to them, I'm doing really well. Sorry, guys, I love Your love your tweets. And too, like, this takes a long time. Right? Like, this takes a long time. That's just how it goes. Like you. You just can't give up and you just have to keep learning and learning when to pivot and trying to find like, where you fit.Michele Hansen 28:57 Yes.Colleen Schnettler 29:02 I'm coming around to it. But um, but yeah, so I think for me, the biggest thing, like I said, I've just been so busy. I haven't had time to work on this. But I have so much to do marketing wise, like I haven't done like they're such, even this little business stuff. No one tells you about like, trying to get a terms and conditions. Like, why has that been so hard?Michele Hansen 29:23 Oh, why has it been hard?Colleen Schnettler 29:24 Well, it's been hard because I do file management. So I paid a company online to create a terms and conditions for me. It was like 50 bucks. And it was like just, like not specific enough. I had thought they would give me more opportunity to customize it. So it just wasn't really quite good enough. And they were really nice. I asked for a refund and you know, and when they asked me why I cancelled I gave them a very detailed answer I thought of you and I thought it would be nice of you. Now as I said, I said a very nice lady, or--Michele Hansen 29:56 Paying it forward, or, refunding it forward. Colleen Schnettler 29:59 I said Yeah, he or she, but or, I don't know, but if they a day, right like I don't I don't mean to presume gender, but um, I responded with a detailed email while I was looking for this particular clause and you didn't have this, and I was looking for this particular thing, and you didn't have this. So but there's like, I mean, just little stuff like that. And then someone recommended a service like, I don't want her I'm not i'm not big enough to have Terms and Conditions for service service as a service. Yeah, so they hosted for you, but it's a monthly thing. Oh, hmm. Who knew? Like, just sort of, it's like, when I started consulting, just sorting through all this stuff is annoying. I needMichele Hansen 30:39 I will say one thing that, you know, someone told me, once that I have found is relevant is like looking at your competitors Terms of Service. And then, you know, sort of using those as a starting point, quite frankly, usually making them friendlier to the customer. Yeah. But using that at least as a as a starting point for the different kinds of issues that they are, you know, bringing forward and putting in there. And I mean, quite frankly, competition on Terms of Service is actually a huge part of our business and why we get customers coming to us from the major players. So, yeah, it's it's not something to overlook, and it can actually be a competitive advantage for you.Colleen Schnettler 31:25 So it's just something I didn't realize I'd have to spend time on. You thought I thought I'd be at like five minutes, like, go grab one, put it on my site, and it just hasn't hasn't turned out that way.Michele Hansen 31:34 I think I need the we talked a little bit about how things that are not engineering tasks require more mental overhead. And yes, yeah, because that's not your your, you know, sort of home domain. And it I mean, it makes sense that like, you know, these these, sometimes they feel like you're sort of like running around swatting flies. And it's like, I have to do this, and I really just want to be doing something else, but I'm just swatting all of these things. But yeah, I mean, I would not I, it takes some mental energy, but I would not overlook that and use those terms of service to see if there's a way to make your service friendlier to the customer. I mean, one of our major competitors' Terms of Service was like, literally, you know, like, it's on trial in Congress this week. So you know, there's there was a hearing about it, so don't overlook that. It's a it's a that that that can as much be bizdev as having a call with someone.Colleen Schnettler 32:42 Yeah. Yeah, I just wish someone did all this for me. Michele HansenYou could hire a lawyer to do it, too. Colleen SchnettlerBut I mean, I'm not there yet. Right. Like, yeah, like I think eventually.Michele Hansen 32:49 So it's a couple thousand dollars. 1,000 and yeah.Colleen Schnettler 32:53 Yeah once I'm once I'm big time, ask me again. I will hire a lawyer and get one that's specific to my company. But now being little time like I need something. ButMichele Hansen 33:03 And a privacy policy.Colleen Schnettler 33:05 Yes. And a privacy policy. Yep.Michele Hansen 33:06 All that stuff. So and it probably you need a GDPR policy.Colleen Schnettler 33:11 Yep, too. IMichele Hansen 33:12 mean, maybe you can work in like GDPR and ccpa. The California one? Yeah. People, I guess you wouldn't need a DPA a data processing agreement, right, because you're not necessarily. I have no idea. Presently, as a GDPR thing, maybe, maybe, sorry, I'm just making you were like, I'm overwhelmed by this. And I'm like, let me throw out a bunch of acronyms and make it more overwhelming.Colleen Schnettler 33:35 Thank you, Michele. Now I'm overwhelmed.Colleen Schnettler 33:47 All right. Well, after that stellar advice, thank you. I think. I think that's gonna wrap up this week's episode of the software social podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review. And you can reach us on Twitter at @softwaresocpod.
Giving Up On An Idea
Michele Hansen 0:00 The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners.This episode is sponsored by Domain Mapper. Domain Mapper gives you a single place to see all of your domains from multiple registrars and their DNS settings. Automated tracking for domains includes a MX and txt records. Plus, you can get domain renewal reminders, so you never lose one of your domains. Check it out at domainmapper.app. Thanks again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners in this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit balsamiq.com/go/software-socialColleen Schnettler 0:42 So Michele, I saw a tweet you had the other day where you just casually dropped that you were quoted in Adam Grant's new book, what is that about?Michele Hansen 0:54 Yeah, it's kind of a funny story. So Adam Grant, who wrote Originals, has a new book out called Think Again. And a vignette from my application to my old job, actually is in the book. It's kind of crazy.Colleen Schnettler 1:15 So how did that happen?Michele Hansen 1:17 So he gave a talk at the place I used to work. And the talk was on sort of unexpected findings and learnings. And there was just one particular story he told that prompted me to go ask him a question and talk to him afterwards. And I love that story, if I can just tell it for a second. So he was saying how there was this startup that was pitching some venture capitalists for funding. And in addition to all of the slides, you would expect about, you know, the problem they're solving and how they're doing it, and why they are the team to do it, and how they're taking over the world and all those kinds of things. They also had a slide in there, that straight up said all of the reasons why their company may not work.Colleen Schnettler 2:08 Hmm. Okay.Michele Hansen 2:10 Yeah. And it's not something that people normally put in a slide deck. And what really stuck out to me was he said that instead of the VCs going, Yeah, you're right, like, this idea sucks, your company's never going anywhere, your team isn't qualified, like, all right. Instead, the VC started problem solving with them, and talking about how they could help the company overcome these problems and avoid these pitfalls. And it went from this kind of, I don't want to describe it, like pitching as an adversarial relationship, but it's definitely like a weird, icy dance. To one that was really collaborative, and they were diving in together and and those sort of veneers were dropped. And, and he was talking about how, you know, they they said that it wasn't going to work out. And then that made people more interested in and talking to them and helping them. And so I went up to talk to him afterwards, because that that kind of reminded me of the application that I had written to the company. Because I had written in the application, basically, that I was probably not the candidate that they were envisioning, and that I didn't meet the qualifications they were asking for, but that I had other things that I was bringing to the table. And so he, you know, tells that story. In the book, I was also on his Work/Life podcast a couple of years ago telling that story.Colleen Schnettler 3:50 It's so cool. Yeah, it's,Michele Hansen 3:51 it's kind ofColleen Schnettler 3:52 weird. You're like secretly famous, and you never told us? Like you should have.Michele Hansen 3:57 I don't I don't know if I'm, I'm sorry, Colleen. Yeah, it's, it's it's pretty wild seeing my own name in print. But anyway, so since I'm in this book, and also I just enjoy his books in general. I figured he should read it. Yes, choice choice. He did send me a free copy of it. So and I absolutely loved it. Actually, there was some the part in it that kind of reminded me of something that you've been going through, and is something that's really common that I see in entrepreneurs, people who are starting out and also people who've been doing it for a long time.Colleen Schnettler 4:39 Which is...Michele Hansen 4:40 So I'm going to if you'll bear with me for a moment, I am just I'm going to read from the book. I have it in front of me here and it's a couple of paragraphs, so just bear with me here. So he's talking about if you can train people to think more like scientists and do they end up making smarter choices. And so, he says: A quartet of European researchers ran a bold experiment with more than 100 founders of Italian startups in technology, retail furniture, food, healthcare, leisure and machinery. Most of the founders businesses had yet to bring in any revenue, making it an ideal setting to investigate how teaching scientific thinking would influence the bottom line. The entrepreneurs arrived in Milan for a training program and entrepreneurship. Over the course of four months, they learned to create a business strategy interview customers build a minimum viable product and refine a prototype. What they didn't know was that they had been randomly assigned to either a scientific thinking group or a control group. The training for both groups was identical except for that one was encouraged to view startups through scientists goggles. From their perspective, their strategies a theory, customer interviews help develop hypotheses, and their minimum viable product and prototype are experiments to test these hypotheses. Their task is to rigorously measure the results and make decisions on whether their hypotheses are supported or refuted. Over the following year, the startups in the control group average under $300 in revenue, the startups in the scientific thinking group averaged over $12,000 in revenue. They brought in revenue more than twice as fast and attracted customers sooner too. Why? The entrepreneurs in the control group tended to stay wedded to their original strategies and products. It was too easy to preach the virtues of their past decisions, prosecute the vices of alternative options and politic by catering to advisors who favored the existing direction. The entrepreneurs who had been taught to think like scientists, in contrast, pivoted more than twice as often, when their hypotheses weren't supported. They knew it was time to rethink their business models. What's surprising about these results is we typically celebrate great entrepreneurs and leaders for being strong minded and clear sighted. They're supposed to be Paragons of conviction, decisive and certain. Yet, evidence reveals that when business executives compete in tournaments to price products, the best strategies actually slow...Okay, I'm going to stop there. But what he's really talking about is the flexibility to change your mind and being open to new perspectives on things. And this reminded me of how when you were originally building your, your file upload tool, it was originally only for files, and then you keep talking about images and like, do people need images and you're talking to people, and but the really like, the core idea of this is, you know, we wrap up so much of our own feelings in the idea that we have, right? Colleen SchnettlerYes. Michele HansenLike, we attach the validity of the idea to the validity of ourselves, right? Colleen SchnettlerYep. Definitely. Michele HansenAnd the person who, if the idea is valid than the person who created the idea is valid, right? Like, there's this sort of unspoken connection between those things. But if we can detach our, you know, our feelings from it, and our sense of identity from that, and like our original idea, and we can say, okay, like, what does this actually, you know, how does it actually work in the real world, and how many other people think about it, and being open to how other people think about it, and pivot, then will be much more successful. And it just really reminded me a lot of the kind of different struggles you've had around, what should I build and your initial idea versus people are telling you what they're using for it? And? And then what do you do with that information?Colleen Schnettler 8:39 Yeah, and it's interesting, because the very first iteration of my product was completely different. It was actually designed to be like shared files in the cloud for teams for you to use on your website. Michele HansenOh yeahColleen SchnettlerYeah, that's how, cuz that's how I used it. So I like to have all of my files in the cloud. I don't like to package anything in on my servers. And so I was always dropping like, if you go to my website, simple file upload.com. I serve that video from my simplefileupload.comMichele Hansen 9:11 dogfooding. Nice. Colleen Schnettler 9:13 Yeah, I serve that video from my cloud storage, right. So I like to serve everything from Cloud Storage. So I had first set it up to be static files for websites, and no one cared. I mean, that was, so that first, that was hard. I know. And then just the other day, someone was like, wow, wouldn't it be great if we had a service? And I was like, they were like, if we had a service for static files, and I was like, Yeah, I built that. And no one wanted it. Change. I totally agree. But I do think it's important, something that I have really struggled with, is giving up too early. Michele HansenMhm. Colleen Schnettler So I feel like in my previous ideas, because I did a deep dive on several things. I think, you know, I did the babysitting thing I wanted to do. Then there was the content marketing stuff. That was gonna do like a deep dive on your content marketing, then there was, I don't know, there was something else. But each one of those looking back, I feel like I could have succeeded with any of those ideas. But I gave up a little too early. So I think the difference between like, this is a terrible idea. And pivoting is important to keep in mind too.Michele Hansen 10:22 I think there's also a lot more black and white there. And I think the ideas you had were good ideas. It just may be a question of, like, Are you the right person to do them? Is it the right time to do them? You know, I remember what you mentioned, as your babysitting idea was actually like a pretty good idea for, like military moms to watch other people's children as a way to make money because it's really hard for military moms to work. And like it was a regulatory problem in Virginia that you ran into.Colleen Schnettler 10:56 Like, so someone did something like this, but no funding. Yeah, he got funding. But he so I internet stopped him, not in a creepy way just to find out more. And he got VC funded. Like he's deep in this. He did. Yeah. Because but but I see why for that. Michele HansenBut I think it needed it. Colleen SchnettlerLike you needed funding, because it's a marketplace. And it's, it's just big, like you said there was regulatory hurdles with getting people like licensed and it's the whole thing. So I guess my point is, I don't think any of my ideas previously were bad. But like, the other one, that content marketing, there's someone doing that that's doing really well. But like, that just wasn't, it wasn't a great space for me.Michele Hansen 11:37 Yeah, because I think it wasn't your it wasn't your like niche, and you were building a lot of knowledge on that. And you were pounding the pavement, interviewing people for it. Colleen SchnettlerOh man, I was. Michele Hansen But everything requires background knowledge. And if you don't have the background knowledge of that field, it's just really hard to break into it. And so it doesn't mean they weren't good ideas. It just means it wasn't like the right fit. Like we've had stuff that didn't work out. And it it, I think that's like, the really important thing that I pull from that quote is that it doesn't mean anything about you as a person or your ability to generate ideas or your ability to execute on them, you just have to be willing to understand, okay, maybe I should work on something else. Or like, people, I initially needed this for sharing files, but then other people really want it just for this other purpose. And being willing to change to that is, is really, really valuable.Colleen Schnettler 12:40 I have to say, though, while you were reading that, and I know the purpose was to point out the pivot, the success of the pivot, but all I could think was if someone gave me four months and a team, I could like take over the world. Like right now I'm trying to raise kids, like, move, have a full time job and do this side project thing. Like, Oh, my gosh, how luxurious would it be? to just have all that time?Michele Hansen 13:03 Do you ever read the Myth of the Man Month, or whatever, I think I'm butchering the title of that book, but I mean, it's, among other things, it gets into this idea that it's like, it's not just a function of people in time about executing and succeeding on a problem. It's, you know, all of these other things we talked about, like building the right thing, and having the right skills. You know, of course, like, you know, it doesn't mean that you have to be an expert in what you're building for, right? Like, I am not a GIS person. And, you know, I say this now, and people are like, you have a geocoding service. You're a GIS person, I'm like, okay, yes, fine. But like, you know, I took one geography class, in college, like, I never took a GIS class, like, I don't have any, you know, advanced degrees in GIS, like, I don't come from that field. But I do come from it as a user of that information. And that's been really helpful because a lot of the GIS tools out there, geographic information systems, tools are built for GIS people. But there are a lot of people who are not GIS people who need geographic information, like marketers, and data analysts and developers, like all sorts of other people. And so building it from the perspective of a consumer of that information, like has been really helpful in that regard, even though I was not a subject matter expert when we set out on this.Colleen Schnettler 14:30 And maybe even better, right, because it you know, because you didn't have a deep knowledge of it, like you were able to design a product that appealed to someone like you who needs it, but doesn't have a deep knowledge of it.Michele Hansen 14:44 Yeah. And so I think that also counts as being a, you know, quote, unquote, expert in a field, you know, to your SEO idea. Were you doing much in SEO either as a developer or as a as a content- like you're not? How did that even come about? Colleen Schnettler 15:06 The content marketing, I think it was a great it came about because it felt like so it felt like a solution that could be solved with software. Because if you look at these midsize companies, they have content marketing managers. And to have a successful content marketing strategy, you should do like kind of a analysis of all your content. And there's so much you can do with your content. And I learned a ton about SEO while I was doing this. And people almost never do these, like annual reviews of their content. And so you have stale content that can hurt you, you have like, you have all kinds of stuff. And people were doing that manually, like they were building these content strategies manually. I mean, takes a ton of time. Like if you could extrapolate some of that manual content building into software, like I think you'd have a really great product. And I found some companies that were actually doing it. But it felt like it was good because people with small SAS is don't know a lot about content. Like I still think it's a good idea. Yeah. Right. Like you have a small SAS, you don't know a lot about content. So what if there was a software that could instead of you having to get a subscription to a h refs and spent hours every week analyzing it? What if something just spit out for you like what your keywords should be? And what you should write about? I mean, it would be so great. Yeah, it wouldMichele Hansen 16:23 be.Colleen Schnettler 16:25 I just didn't know, it seems like it would be so great. But I interviewed content marketing managers at mid sized companies. And they didn't like it because their companies were big enough that they wanted, like tight control over what their content strategy looked like. And people at the smaller sizes were totally into it. But like, ultimately, it came down to it was a cool idea. But I couldn't build it without someone else. Because I just don't know enough about content. And then you start getting AI involved. And it was like it was cool. But that would definitely be something where I would need a lot more time. It wasn't something I could just build in a couple months. But think about it if you spent the same. What if you could spend the same amount that you spend on a href? And I know it's pretty expensive. Michele Hansen 17:14 And it would just like we barely, honestly, like I feel so guilty about it. Like I wish I used it more. I feel like it really makes sense for people who run ads, and we don't run ads. So we should use something else. Yes, thank you, I should say close my books for the year. And I'm reminded of all of our expenses, that one that one does come to mind as one that's like, I should do something about that.Colleen Schnettler 17:39 Yeah, so I think I still think the content thing was a good idea, I still think there's opportunity in that space. But ultimately, I didn't care enough because I didn't really understand the problem. Michele Hansen 17:49 Well, now you have the humility to admit that. It's such an underrated quality of entrepreneurs to like, you especially we have this, you know, there's this whole cultural image of, you know, the, the Steve Jobs like entrepreneur and how, you know, they, they stand on top of the mountain and these amazing business ideas are beamed to them from the heavens, like a lightning bolt like, and it's just like, come on, I think that holds people back because they're like, Well, I'm not a Steve Jobs person, you know, I don't have the personality for this or whatever. And it's like that. You just have to have the curiosity to go out and notice a problem. Talk to people about it. Admit that maybe you don't know everything about it, learn about it, right, like this, this kind of humility that you have exhibited. And then sometimes you say, Okay, I'm not the person to build this. And sometimes you are.Colleen Schnettler 18:49 Yeah.Michele Hansen 18:51 But being willing to listen to other people and listen to your own instincts on that is, is really key. And, you know, good businesses do not come down like a gift from the gods, you know, floating on a cloud, right? Like they are built by solving genuine problems that people have and how you find those problems is being curious about them, and listening to people about their problems.Colleen Schnettler 19:20 Yeah, yeah. I mean, the best thing, I probably spent six months on this content idea. And the best thing I did is I didn't write any code. I just talked to people, like I thought about it, like, how could I build this? I saw what else was out there. But I'm so glad I didn't spend two years writing something that would have been a bad fit. So that was that was useful.Michele Hansen 19:43 You just reminded me of a great tweet I saw the other day from Val Geisler. She said, "A lot of people will tell you to talk to your customers, but they don't tell you what they really mean is listen to your customers. The hardest and most important part of customer interviews is shutting up." And you just reminded that when you were talking about, you know, you spent six months talking to people, you spent six months listening to people. And, you know, thinking about where you were from when you first had the idea about military moms making money through babysitting. And now something you have gotten really good at, in the last year and a half, or two and a half years, is listening to people.Colleen Schnettler 20:30 Yes, I definitely think I have gotten better. And the content marketing thing, I probably spoke to 10 people, at least, like I spoke to a lot of people, I was really emotionally tied to the idea because I thought it was so brilliant. But person after person was kind of like, I'm not interested. And then but you know what? I thought Michelle, I then thought about Steve Jobs. So it's funny, you just mentioned him, because I thought, you know what they always say about Steve Jobs. He doesn't listen to people. He just tells them what they want. Well, that's great for Steve Jobs, but like, Steve Jobs. So yeah, so I finally after talking to 10 people realize, literally not one of those people was excited to you know, seem to have this problem. It's kind of like, oh, okay, so this is not for me to build.Michele Hansen 21:19 That takes humility to admit that.Colleen Schnettler 21:21 This is why I love the dogfooding build something for yourself idea. You'll see a lot of people say don't do that, because they're like, you don't really know what the market needs. But it's worked really well for me. And I never use your own product. Yeah, like, I'm using it, I have this product I'm using it across. And it's really nice. Because you know exactly how it works. I don't know, I think it's worked out really well for me, and you don't lose motivation when you're building it. Because you're so motivated when you're your ideal customer.Michele Hansen 21:53 Yeah, most of these days when I'm using our product, it's to, you know, like, validate an issue a customer saw, like, there have been some times for various volunteer efforts. I've been part of that I've actually used it. And those have been so exciting. And I end up being like, okay, one actually, we really have to fix this. This is super annoying. And this took way too long. This is awesome. But I what I need is be able to do this. And like, but like we have these really excited like jam sessions after that where we're rapidly improving the product, because you're seeing it firsthand. And yes, you are not the customer and you need more customers than yourself. That is no question but but sort of like we are reading an Adam grants book. Part of that is going out and talking to people and understanding what they need, and pivoting or just, you know, making slight changes and expanding your understanding of the problem based on what they need.Colleen Schnettler 22:52 Yeah, I do have to say, too, in the early days, when you're either idea generating or you have a nascent product like I do, it's hard to find people to talk to and I think that's, that can be hard when I got started, like all the advice was always to talk to people. But even that can be hard. You know, when you're when you're startingMichele Hansen 23:12 This this actually like on that topic. You know, I remember that you for the babysitting idea, you interviewed people that you found on military base Facebook groups, right? Colleen SchnettlerThat's right. Michele HansenLike that's when you found that people and then you were talking to kind of like a community of people we know who are bootstrappers. And this makes me excited to read Arvid Kahl's upcoming book, which is apparently all about this kind of embedding yourself in communities and engaging with people and, and learning about problems that way.Colleen Schnettler 23:50 Yeah, yeah. So for the first thing, I found, like you said the babysitting thing, I found people on Facebook for the content marketing, I hit up SaaS owners, but I think I still think the content marketing thing is a good idea. But I hit up small SaaS owners like small one to two person companies. And I think you know, that was the wrong size company for a product like that. You'd need a midsize SaaS and I just don't have access to those people. And even now for my file uploader. I'm having a hard time talking to people, like I'm talking to anyone who will talk to me, but but I, if you ask me who my ideal customer is right now, I don't exactly know because it'sMichele Hansen 24:29 okay not to know.Colleen Schnettler 24:31 Like, people are signing up, which is amazing, and people are using it. But very few people are talking to me and they're still people are still like kind of across the board in terms of how they're using it. So even now, I'm still kind of like, Huh, who is my ideal customer? I don't know. I findMichele Hansen 24:49 it you know, asking the right questions that get the information that's useful for you is a hard thing and it never stops being something you have to improve. And actually so this one We changed something. So we have a little like NPS survey that pops up for people. And so we'll see them come through. And I'll say, you know, someone gave us a 10. And then we have a little question that says, What can we do to improve. And sometimes, like people will put in something like that went wrong, or like they have a suggestion. But most of the time it comes, you know, it, it posts to slack. And then if they put comments, and it comes into intercom, and it'll say something to the effect of 10. And you know, what we can do to improve like, nothing like Keep up the great work, which like, is really nice and makes us feel good, but isn't necessarily giving us something that we can use to improve. And it is, you know, it's, it's not fair of us to ask our customers what we can do to improve like, that is our job. To know that right? Like, that's basically asking them to do our work for us. And so I changed that question this week to what did you use before you use geocode? Do not, and it has been so interesting. And I have gotten to jump straight into those conversations about people's processes and what their frustrations with the other tools are, and what they're trying to create overall, like, What does their end project or product look like? And and why weren't they happy with the other things? And what are they coming to us for? And, and I can get that out of a one, even if they give me a one word answer that says, you know, the Census geocoder, I can be like, you know, can you tell me more about that, like, why we're using that versus you're using us now. And it's a really good springboard into a conversation. But it's, it can be hard to ask the right questions to elicit the information that's both not too taxing on the person you're asking the question to, right. like asking them how we can improve is kind of a taxing question. Like you're asking them to sit down and think about it unless they had something like just right now annoyed them, that might be a difficult question to answer. So they just put nothing. And also gives us information that we can work with. And so I'm excited about this new question. I'm asking because it's giving us really good information that we can use as a springboard. But it's also a very easy question for them to ask.Colleen Schnettler 27:14 Yes. So I thought about that. So as I said, it's hard. I mean, I'm hand emailing everyone, right? Literally every person who signs up, and the response rate is really low. And then one guy emailed me back, and he's like, Sure, I can answer your questions. And I emailed him, like, for detailed questions, and he never responded. And I'm looking back at that email. And it was like, way too much of a cognitive load for this poor guy to answer. I mean, I should have emailed him one question, like, I feel like, because the questions we've talked about, like, what are you using it for? And like, what did you use before this? Have you paid for Cloud Storage before? And like the guy just bounced, which I get, because it was probably way too overwhelming, it would have taken 30 minutes to respond to all my questions.Michele Hansen 27:58 Yeah. So I feel like a call would be better for that. When you haveColleen Schnettler 28:02 one on one I always, yeah, I always go call first. I always asked for call first. But a lot of I don't want to say a lot. Very few people have taken me up on the call maybe four, which is still better than zero. People are so scared by sales calls, like especially I feel like technical people like worse.Michele Hansen 28:22 We're so you know, sort of shell shocked by it. Like we're so used to sign up a service and you get the call from the sales guy.Colleen Schnettler 28:29 And you're like, you hate it. And no, I hate that. Michele Hansen 28:32 No, I don't want to have to give you my phone number to sign up for your service. Like, I just want to use your $10 a month plan, please leave me alone. Like, and I think people are just are so has been so burned out by companies with, you know, bigger sales departments than product departments that that somebody asked me to have a phone call right after you sign up for something? Is it like red flags go up? Like I used to say explicitly in the feedback email, like no, this is not a sales call. And then I realized that my response rates were going down further because I think because I use the word sales for sale, like had that like anxiety feeling. And they're like, and like ran away. actually putting in like, I put in mind, yes, this is an automated email, but I will respond to you personally. Like and basically just like, try it out. Come on, like test me. And people seem to like that. I've gotten some good comments on that.Colleen Schnettler 29:32 So I have set up, I have like five templates that I'm just randomly assigning to different people to see if I can get a better response rate on like one template versus the other. But I think as we've talked about, it's just kind of a playing around with different language and you know, figuring out what people will respond toMichele Hansen 29:51 and I have 5% back that's really really good, by the way, like the most I have ever gotten is 8%. So You know, keep keep that in mind. Like if you get one person out of 20 people, you're you're doing pretty good.Colleen Schnettler 30:05 Yeah, I think too. I hate email. So I get that, like, I totally get it. I am email overload, like, I will not respond. If I got that email, and I wasn't having any problems, I would not respond to it. So I mean, I totally get it, although maybe I have more empathy now that I'm actually trying to build my own business. Maybe next time I get that email. I will, I will respond. But yeah, I feelMichele Hansen 30:31 like we could talk about customer interviews and strategies to get people to talk to us forever. But I am curious. So how is the business side of everything going this week?Colleen Schnettler 30:43 It's so good. Michelle. Michele Hansen 30:46 Okay, what are we like burying this lead, like 30 minutes in here?Colleen Schnettler 30:50 they are not still here. You don't get to hear.Michele Hansen 30:54 Congratulations on making it this far.Colleen Schnettler 30:56 Only the committed listeners. Things are going really well. People are signing up. Okay. So it's funny because I think I put something on Twitter the other day saying I was going to shorten my free trial. Yeah. 30 days to seven. And the way it's set up with stripe right now, as we've talked about, I don't have any time to do any dev work. So I had two people that were either gonna convert or churn, they both converted, by the way, nice. Oh, no. And then I was gonna change it to seven days, but four people signed up. Right before you changed it right before so I can't change it till those people convert or churn or I have the time to figure out how to do it properly. So that was really funny. Like, I don't know if that was just a total random fluke, coincidence. Or if someone like saw my tweet was like, I should sign up now. So I get 30 days. ButMichele Hansen 31:48 yeah, I think I retweeted it from the podcast count, maybe I shouldn't have. So time was like, You were like, $120 a month in MRR? Can I ask you where we're at now? Or you're at what is that a week? This is a you?Colleen Schnettler 32:04 Yes, you can. $325 Heck, yeah. Right. What is happening? That's amazing. It's amazing. Now, as we have discussed, this is all fake money until the end of the month, because I don't get paid till the end of the month. So I have only seen 10 of these dollars. Okay, so youMichele Hansen 32:24 have, like, $10,Colleen Schnettler 32:27 I have received this $9.50 whatever to Stripe. So I have received real money from a real person that is not me. That amazing. That is amazing. But based on the signup rate, like things are going really well. But again, like I don't really count that because I think the Heroku people are gonna have a high propensity to churn. Because if they don't use it, they're gonna see it on their bill at the end of the month. And you know, the culture, you getMichele Hansen 32:55 paid, even if they don't use it, right, like you get paid once they start, like once they enable it, then that starts the charge, even though that's rolled up at the end of the month, like like if someone signs up right now, and then decides they're going to cancel on March 1, you would still get paid for that period of time.Colleen Schnettler 33:16 That's right, prorated amount, so I don't get paid for the whole month. Michele Hansen 33:20 But yes, every minute, I want to keep an eye on that. But that's like, yeah, you get that money.Colleen Schnettler 33:25 Every minute, they have the thing provisioned, like I get paid. So I'm gonna get paid something. So it's very exciting.Michele Hansen 33:31 dolla dolla bills, y'all,Colleen Schnettler 33:32 right. So I think my goal, so my goal before had been to get one new signup a week, like that is a growth rate that I think would be really great. And I'm far exceeding that. So I think my kind of modified goal is to get one signup plus actually uploading files a week, because once they upload files, they're much more likely to stick around.Michele Hansen 33:55 So, you mentioned you have all these emails going out to people? Do you have an email that's like, Hey, I noticed you signed up, but you haven't uploaded any files. Let me know if I can help you.Colleen Schnettler 34:05 Yeah, I do. That's one of my so every couple days, like I don't do it right away, because I'm still doing that manually. But every like two or three days, I check it and I send out all those emails to people who have not uploaded files, that sort of thing to do. It's actually good. I'm so busy with work because I'm not obsessing over it like and so I'm spending the time on it that I can, which is not a lot right now. But it's really giving it some space to breathe, I think. And I think with that space, I'm going to learn I've gotten some really good feedback. Like one piece of feedback that didn't even occur to me is someone mentioned that he really liked how you can see all your files and your admin dashboard. And one of the really frustrating things about s3 is you can't see your me you log into your AWS account, you can see your bucket and then you can see like your folders. So you have to go in every folder and then you don't even know what image it is unless you click on it and it's a whole thing. So he I never even he was like Oh, I didn't know I was gonna have this feature. This is super cool because I don't talk about it. Yeah, reading of delights. So yeah, so things are things are going really well and just gonna keep on keep on.Michele Hansen 35:08 All right. I think that's gonna wrap us up for this week. Thank you so much everyone, for listening and we'll talk to you next week.
Raising a Business
Colleen Schnettler 0:00 The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners. This episode is sponsored by Diversify Tech. Diversify Tech helps companies reach candidates from underrepresented communities in tech. Their job board reaches 7,300 members. They have a free talent directory, and they have a newsletter for companies to learn about diversity, equality and inclusion. Please check them out at DiversifyTech.co Thank you again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners in this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit balsamiq.com/go/software-socialMichele Hansen 0:44 Colleen, can I ask you a question that you're not supposed to ask people?Colleen Schnettler 0:50 Are you going to ask me how old I am? Michele Hansen 0:52 No, I'm not going to ask you how old you are. I am going to ask you how much money you have made on your side project. Colleen Schnettler Ohhh!Michele HansenBecause we had talked about this a couple weeks ago, right? Like you had said that somebody had paid you $10 yet and that you had a bunch of people who would sign up on your free trial, and that their first charge was coming through in the middle of February. And now we are in the middle of February. And so I was curious if you would share with us what it is looking like, from a revenue perspective right now.Colleen Schnettler 1:29 Okay, sure. So to customers were up middle of February, one churned and one paid the $10. Michele HansenNice. Colleen SchnettlerSo that's always exciting. Yeah. But the real exciting boost for me is, as of I think about a week ago, maybe 10 days ago, it's been live on the Heroku App Store. And I've had a couple people sign up and there's no free trial. So they're signing up at $35 a month. Michele HansenSweet. Colleen SchnettlerYeah, it's actually really exciting. I'm trying to not get too excited. But um, I think the important thing to remember about Heroku though, it's not like Stripe, I don't get paid up front, you're pro-rate build. So if they sign up to try it out, and then they deprovision it or, you know, cancel it, essentially, I only get $1 or whatever, you know, the 35 amortized over the number of days in the month.Michele Hansen 2:21 Oh so it's month after? so if I say... Colleen Schnettleryes Michele HansenFebruary 1, for example, I would be billed March 1 for it. And if I cancel February 15, I'm billed on February 15, for two weeks worth of usage. Is that right?Colleen Schnettler 2:34 I think that's correct. Michele HansenOkayColleen Schnettler So I haven't actually seen any of that money yet. And so but it is really exciting. Like, I wasn't sure once I made it, you know, paid if anyone would sign up for it. And I've had a handful of people sign up. So it's really exciting. Yeah, it is, um, it is very exciting. And I kind of don't know what I should be tracking. I'm kind of struggling with that. Because I'm not actually tracking churn right now. I don't know if that's important to track, like I see if someone cancels, but I don't not like tracking that metric over time.Michele Hansen 3:14 I think more important than then the numbers and percentages right now is why did they churn, right? Colleen Schnettler I know. I emailed them. Michele HansenOkay, good, good. That's what you should have done, right? So right now you say, okay, 50% of the people cancelled, which looks really bad on the surface. But that number, knowing that one out of two people canceled, those numbers will never tell you why that happened. And so, yes, it's a good idea to be attuned to those numbers. But at this stage, the most important thing is to try to figure out why.Colleen Schnettler 3:50 That's what I figured is like, the goal here is to talk to people, so I am Michele HansenOh, my God. Finally, Colleen SchnettlerOh, my goodness. Lately, I've come around to it.Michele Hansen 4:00 It's fluttering hearing you say that! Colleen Schnettler 4:02 I mean, you know, I was thinking about something this morning. So if none of these people churn and they probably went, like I said, people are trying it out. But like, I'm at 120 MRR. I mean, that's amazing, right? Like, a lot of people never even launch a product. I've launched a product and that's amazing. 10 days, I met 120 MRR. So I'm trying like,Michele Hansen 4:25 Dude, you have been working towards this for like, so like, I feel like there's so many milestones that you've gone through. And, you know, people like listening right now. Right? Like, like you're hearing Oh, my God, like Colleen, like got this thing launched. And she got it in the marketplace. And then she went through all these hoops and now she has people paying her like -- it has taken you years to get to this point. Like, like a year ago, when we were still having our in person, weekly business chats before the pandemic and we were both in the same place and all of that, like you were trying, whatever you could even find a product find a problem you could solve, like the idea of like, if I had told you one year from now, you will have you know, 100 and something people using your product paying you 100 and something dollars for. Like, I think I don't know what you would have said you either wouldn't have believed me, or it'd be like, Can we just like fast forward to that?Colleen Schnettler 5:28 Right, can we fast forward?Michele Hansen 5:30 This is like this has this is the culmination of years worth of work for you like, yes, it looks like it's only been in the last three months. But you have been working towards this for such a long time.Colleen Schnettler 5:42 Yeah, and I think that's super important to remember. Because I was thinking about, like, I was trying to in my head, I was fast forwarding to a year from now. And probably when I tell my hopefully success story, it'll be Oh, I launched it, you know, February 4 2021. But to your point, like, that's totally a lie, I have been working on ideas and talking to people for years. I mean, the whole reason I learned to code was so I could have a product business. So this is, this is really a lot, you know, a long adventure in the making. Michele Hansen 6:14 I'm so happy for you.Colleen Schnettler 6:15 I'm so excited. So I'm trying not to I mean, this is really where the work begins. This is where a lot of people stop working, I think. And I think that's why I know so many software developers that can't quite get their products off the ground. For me, this is where the work begins. Like I think I made a joke the other day to my husband, I was like, I thought having children taught me patience. What's really teaching me patience is having a business. You know, I have to like, avoid. So what I'm trying to do, what I'm focusing on, or what I'm just trying to do mentally is not attach my personal happiness to whether people sign up or not. Oh, god,Michele Hansen 6:53 oh, that's such a, that's such a hard one. And like not attaching your I don't know, self-worth Colleen SchnettlerSelf worth Michele Hansento like somebody cancelled and you're like, just stab me through the heart. Like, you know, like, it's that that is a normal feeling to feel like take it personally, when people aren't signing up, or they're canceling like, it is. I think it's okay to like, make space for yourself to like, take that personally. But like, put that feeling in a box, keep it somewhere safe, put it off to the side, and then say, Okay, what am I doing that like I could have more people signing up? or Why are these people canceling? Let me attack this objectively, but making space for those feelings of like rejection and hurt that come with that. That's, that's totally fair.Colleen Schnettler 7:44 Yeah, I mean, I found myself the other day, I was just kind of in a blah mood. So I was like, Oh, well check my signups and someone had signed up. So I got this dopamine boost. I was like sweet, it was great. But just as easily someone could have churned or I could have had no signups. And what I have internalized that and like exactly the opposite way, so I'm trying not to obsessively check my signups. I'm trying not to do the funny thing though, right? Like, Oh, my gosh, Michelle, take from it. To your point. Like, I can't, I mean, there's so much work to do. But Holy crap, look where I am, people are paying me money for this thing. Like, I have a real product, that people are paying me real money. It's very exciting.Michele Hansen 8:27 It's amazing. I mean, like, so you should you allow yourself to enjoy those dopamine hits, too, right? Like you have earned that, you have worked for it. But I think the you know, yeah, the hard thing is, is the reverse of the dopamine hit whatever that is called. And, and not letting that get you to down and, and taking everything, both when good things happen. And when bad things happen. Both of those are learning opportunities. And to your point that, you know, raising a business has challenges on the level of parenting.Colleen Schnettler 9:07 You said raising a business, did you realize that? It's amazing.Michele Hansen 9:13 If I ever write a book about business,Colleen Schnettler 9:14 that's going to be called raising a business.Michele Hansen 9:16 Yeah. You that, like that's one of the hard things is to say, Okay, how do I learn from this? And you know, so one of the things to say about parenting is like the things that are hard now, like you will figure them out, but then you will have new hard things to figure out. Colleen SchnettlerYeah. Michele HansenAnd someone said that much better than me, and I just completely butchered it. But I think you know what I mean? Like, you know, getting your child to sleep is a problem that you eventually solve and then is replaced by another problem, right? Colleen SchnettlerYeah. Michele HansenAnd, and I think that's very true. But if you are able to respond to those challenges as opportunities for growth that will serve you well. So you have this revenue. And this is also recurring revenue too, right? Like, this is the amazing thing about SaaS. Right? Colleen SchnettlerYeah. Michele HansenAnd once but it will theoretically recur in the future.Colleen Schnettler 10:15 Yes. As long as you know, again, we'll have to see if people stick around. It's only been a week, so they could be trying it out. But yeah, this is recurring revenue. So I feel like I've achieved a really exciting for me level of success in these, like, 10 days since it's been live. And something interesting happened. I'm a casual internet acquaintance, which is pretty much all my friends these days. I mean, like, if we have one Talk, I'm like, true friends.Michele Hansen 10:46 It's COVID. It's true. Like we have a conversation on Twitter andColleen Schnettler 10:49 Twitter,Michele Hansen 10:50 like mutual follow up to that. And I'm like, Oh, my God, we're best friends. Colleen Schnettler 10:52 So a casual Twitter acquaintance, sent me a DM with some interesting information. And he said, he said something that that I am actually a little not uncomfortable to share. But whatever. He said, Colleen, you know, congratulations, like you've had so much. It seems like you're having so much success. In the last episode of the podcast, Michele said, quote, obviously, you found a hole in the market, and quote, and he told me a story about how years ago, he had a podcast, and about his business, and someone copied his business, like, word for word. And he was just kindly trying to like, give me a heads up that, you know, you're not that far ahead. You don't really have an established business yet. If someone wanted to fill this hole, especially someone with a team, they could catch up to you in like two months. And it reached me out.Michele Hansen 11:52 That sounds like that really scared you.Colleen Schnettler 11:55 Well, I mean, it's going so well, I almost don't want to tell people, it's going well, because any of these not that any of these big companies know anything about me. But you know, anybody could just build one of these things and be a direct competitor. And they know what I mean, because of the podcast, like there's this huge benefit of building and public. But because of the podcast, they literally know exactly what my service does and what it doesn't do. And so yeah.Michele Hansen 12:24 So I think you're justified in being freaked out by that. And I think the person who brought this to you It sounds like they're being very well intentioned, and trying to be helpful to you, but this has understandably freaked you out.Colleen Schnettler 12:37 Yes.Michele Hansen 12:38 And I would like to remind you that you have something that those big companies do not have. The thing about big companies is that they are extremely difficult to turn, you are a the equivalent of a little Sunfish, you know, those little tiny sailboats that have like one person on them, at these large companies you're competing with, they're a cruise ship, they may be able to throw a team of 20 people at something, they could put 20 developers on something and launch something into two months if they wanted to. They have bureaucracy to go through, they have departments to go through, they have department heads who all want to weigh in on things. Big companies do not move quickly, even if they have the bodies. And they also only pivot that giant cruise ship for big opportunities, like we compete with Google and Microsoft, and now Amazon, like all of these huge companies. And yes, that's a little bit scary. But also, I know that we have so much less bureaucracy than they do. We also have way lower overhead. So like, you know, I think I think one of those companies, someone told me once, they will only pursue a new opportunity, if it will create at least a billion dollars in business. And wow, your product is awesome, and it's making money. I don't think you're gonna make a billion dollars anytime soon. I'm sorry to break it to you. I don't know if you want it to be the female Elon Musk.You are nimble. And the other thing that you have, which is often missing in big companies, is that you intimately understand what the user is trying to do, and why they would use you and why they are not satisfied with current options. And not only do you have that personal experience with it, but you're also going out and talking to other people and building your understanding and building understanding of other use cases related to this. And, I mean, that's where our advantage comes from is that we care about use cases that other companies don't care about. Like there are things we purposely don't go after that are compelling that our competitors go after. Yeah, it's it's scary thinking about competitors. And it's scary thinking somebody could copy you in, you know, two months. Like, that's, that's scary. And I mean, we've had people completely copy all of our website, but also they don't have other things going into it. You know, that they can't see that we have, but Yeah, dude, like, I totally understand why you would be scared by that.Colleen Schnettler 15:25 Yeah, it's definitely like, building in public has been such a benefit to me I mean us in this podcast and being online, that has been nothing but good. But now, you know, it was just an interesting kind of other side of the coin of how well maybe it could be kind of bad. Down the road, I don't know, I guess we'll find out.Michele Hansen 15:49 I mean, like what we'll find out, I mean, you know, somebody could already be working on something and they happen to find the podcast and but the thing is, like listening to the podcast is not going to give them the technical skills to build this, it's not going to give them the level of empathy and concern that you have for the user that drives how you make pricing decisions and strategic decisions and marketing decisions. Like, you know, I often see things floating around on Twitter of, you know, people offering ideas for projects, or whatever. And, you know, I do this occasionally, myself, because I was very frustrated about faxing the other day. But the thing that you that doesn't come from just having like a list of ideas, what doesn't turn those into good businesses, is all of those things that you have, like that level of concern about a problem, right, because like, if you're not deeply concerned about solving a problem, you're not going to get up and work on it every day. Like, I think that's what led you to work on this for six months was that you were building something for yourself that frustrated you so much, that you're willing to work on it in the dark and launch it even if you were the only person who had ever used it because it bothered you so much. And yes, somebody listening could be like, Oh, well, I could go hire a team of 20 developers and build this in two months, but they are not going to have that level of feeling about the problem. And that level of empathy for the user. And I think that's such a powerful thing that you shouldn't undercount.Colleen Schnettler 17:29 Yeah, okay, you're right. And they're not going to go after my, you know, $100 a month, or whatever it is. It's low, low hanging fruit for people who have a team. SoMichele Hansen 17:42 you don't have to sit here and tell me I'm right. And act like you're not freaked out by it. Like, it'sColleen Schnettler 17:46 I am though, like, cuz I've come to so. And it's not really big companies. It's I'm worried, gosh, this sounds so bad. It's not that I'm worried. But it's, it's not big companies, because you're right, like, they're not going to go after my tiny little slice of the market. It's like other other people like me, like other indie hackers who are searching for an idea who are like, oh, I'll just take Kelly's idea. Anyway,Michele Hansen 18:10 I'm probably those people who have maybe thought about that, I would encourage them to be introspective about their problems as you have about the different processes they go through every day as part of their work. And notice when they are frustrated, and direct their energy towards that, because I think it will be a much more productive endeavor. If you go around just trying to copy people all of the time. That's very, that's very frustrating. And you'll be spinning your wheels, and maybe you find something once in a while that sticks, but start with solving your own problems.Colleen Schnettler 18:46 I like it. I like it. All right, I'm gonna I'm gonna put that somewhere else in my brain, I'm not going to worry about that, that becomes a problem. I'll handle it when it becomes a problem. So something else I want to talk about was distribution. So you had you had a tweet this morning, maybe about? What did I tweet? It was something you were just explaining how you got customers. And I think you said SEO was was the number one thing. So I'm kind of wondering. I'm getting a lot of customers through Heroku. Like just through their, their marketplace. But I am always I have a lot of people asking me about that. Like, I have a lot of friends in the rails community who have built products. And now they want to know how to sell their products. And they're trying to figure out if they should buy ads, if they should write content. And I'd love to talk a little bit about if you remember like, I mean, I was thinking of you because you guys just launched into the like regular internet. I mean, if I had launched into the regular internet, I would have like zero signups. So do you remember like how that got started? And how people find you now?Michele Hansen 19:57 Yes. And I will caveat this because the way our launch went, I don't think was very typical. So we launched and we basically just threw it on Hacker News. So when we launched like Product Hunt didn't exist, like, I don't know, if IndieHackers was around, maybe it was I didn't know about it. So we just put it on Hacker News, and then asked a couple of our friends who are located in different places to upload it. And then, to our huge surprise, it, like took off and was on the front page, sometimes in the number one position for a whole day. That was really unusual. Now, there's a combination of luck there. There's also that we clearly launched something that people really needed. And so you know, how much of that was luck? And how much was that? You know, launching a product with genuine demand. But that traffic fell off, like right away. Like, actually, people want to see the graphs on this. Mathias and I gave a talk at Laracon like three or four years ago, we talked about launching it as a side project. And you can see the Google Analytics chart like this massive spike on the first day, and then it just like drops off. And whenever I look at our Google Analytics, I have to filter out our launch because it distorts everything so much, we had so much traffic, and then it was all gone, like a week later. Okay, so. So I'll sort of start with that. But really how we get customers. And this is basically been this way from beginning like, like our first month, for example, you said that you have hit what you define as success. So I remember when we launched, I defined different levels of success. And a, like a baseline success was we launched it, we can use it, we can keep our projects going that we needed this for a like, I don't know, I don't remember what I called it, but like a sort of a next level of success was that we launch it and some people pay us for it. And it covers the server costs so that we don't have to pay to maintain the servers, which were to DigitalOcean servers. So that definition of the second level of success was $20 a month. And a wild success was that it more than pays for its servers, not like to go full time The next day, or like anything like that it was it pays for it servers. And so we made like $31 our first month with $20 in expenses. And so we were over the moon because we never expected to be that successful. But our revenue was I mean, pretty, pretty low, like like under $1,000 for a long time.Colleen Schnettler 22:51 I remember how long, I'm just trying to get like realistic benchmarks. I mean, one month, three months, so I think it was like,Michele Hansen 23:00 four or five months later, quite a while, okay, broke 1000. But then it took a really long time to like, you know, break 5000 right, like, and it would like have months where it was kind of felt like it was stagnating. So, but how we have grown basically since then is you know, the, the just the rod distribution and acquisition angle has been has been SEO like, we also did a lot of things like you know, we'd post on StackOverflow, or Quora, or other places where people were asking about geocoding, we don't really do that as much anymore. But it basically just comes down to, you know, having landing pages that speak to the problem and then tweaking the words we're using on those landing pages and improving them to match what people are typing in, paired with a freemium model. And I think that's a really important piece for us, because people can try it for free. So there's less legwork that we have to do to convince them to sign up.Colleen Schnettler 24:01 So I have been working in my marketing power hours this week, every every day, I've been working on my landing page, I tried to improve the copy. And you just said, tweaking our landing pages based on what customers put in or something. So how do you two questions? What do you mean? And how do you know that your landing page is actually resonating?Michele Hansen 24:26 So one of the tools I use for that I use Ahrefs a lot these days, but for a long time, what I use was Google Search Console, which is totally free and you can set up on your site, and it tells you the keywords that are leading people to you. And so if I would find that the words people were using were not the words we were using. So for example, like we use the term reverse geocoding a lot which is turning coordinates to addresses and like what I found from Using Google Search Console, for example, was that people were typing in GPS coordinates to address. Like, I would never describe it as GPS coordinates, or address to GPS coordinates, like I would not use that term on my own. And so that's, that's an example of something that we would have how we would change it.Colleen Schnettler 25:22 Got another question there?Michele Hansen 25:23 Did I answer that other question?Colleen Schnettler 25:25 How do you know it's working? I mean, do you do so I'm Oh, I don't so.Michele Hansen 25:28 So this is this is the thing, like, I mean, I check in on these things like, maybe once a month or so like there are people who are much more attuned to their metrics than I am. Like, I fundamentally know whether it's working like are there more people reaching out to me about these specific things. So for example, last year, we had someone, someone in one of my feedback, emails mentioned that they were using as not forgetting coordinates, but to find the county for an address. And I was like, Oh, that's really interesting, because this is a feature that we support. But we've never really talked about it very much like we were turned that with all of our results, but we don't, we don't really talk about it too much. And so then I made a landing page, that was a step by step guide to how to add the county to addresses. And then I noticed the next month when I had people reaching out to me for feedback of new customers, like a whole bunch of them, were saying, Oh, I needed to add the county to addresses and I was like, okay, that page worked.Colleen Schnettler 26:30 Got it?Michele Hansen 26:31 Yeah, I tend to not look at the numbers too closely. Like, I know that we're doing the right things, if our revenue is stable, or increasing, if we're, you know, still getting new customers, but like, I'll look at stuff on on h refs, but I, I am not the person who sort of, you know, spends a lot of time looking at those numbers and trying to get them to move.Colleen Schnettler 27:02 Okay, because I so I'm trying to rewrite the my landing page, kind of in a different tone, more value proposition focused. And I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole by accident where like, these ABX testing websites, they're like, Oh, you could do this landing page and this landing page. I was like, Whoa, should I be doing that? Is that should i and i think not where I am. I'm so early. And I'm just getting going. I think I don't I don't want to I was just wondering if if you were doing anything like that.Michele Hansen 27:30 I think for testing a value proposition, I don't think I would be doing a B testing like that, because AV testing is really great for when you're only testing one thing, so that you can determine which is right like so it's really great for for submit buttons if you have an order form and you want to change that button to submit versus purchase versus I'm in versus You know what, like, whatever you want to test a different version there and see if it has a higher conversion rate, or you want to specifically test the headline, or you specifically want to test only the subhead copy, or you specifically only want to test like several like paragraphs of copy. Like I think that's really good in those scenarios. But if you're trying to test an entirely different approach, and like a different layout, and like there's like there's so many variables going on that you can't, like, if it worked? How would you know which variable was itColleen Schnettler 28:28 was? Yeah, if you change the whole diet, it doesn't do you any good? I get it.Michele Hansen 28:32 I think for for testing a value proposition I would more so just put that in front of someone and have two options like have two options completely mocked up and say, okay, narrate, look at this page, tell me what you think you can do here, narrate your thoughts out loud, as you're going through it? What questions do you have? What does this have? You know, does this sound like something that would work for you? And then do the exact same with the same person? Do the other landing page with them? And then ask them? So which one of these Do you like more? Why? Like,Colleen Schnettler 29:03 what?Michele Hansen 29:05 With you? What other information? might you be looking to find that you can't find here? If you had a magic wand, and you could change anything about this page? What would you change? Like? Questions like that? Okay. Yeah. Because what you're really trying to figure out is, why does someone want this? And how can I take why they would want it into language that would communicate to them why they want it, if that made any sense? Yeah, and I don't think AV testing will tell you that but I think talking to people well.Colleen Schnettler 29:35 Yeah, cuz, so this last week on my regular page, so not my Heroku page, so my regular page is a lot harder to find because it doesn't pop up in the Google search results. I had 95 visitors and three people signed up. But all of those people bounced when they saw they had to enter a credit card. So I had zero signups this week, from that page, so I'm just wondering If 95 people visit it, only three are interested enough to try it. I feel like maybe I'm not communicating well enough.Michele Hansen 30:09 Yeah, I mean, that could be possible, it could be possible that for people specifically working with Heroku, like they experienced this problem more acutely than these are that's true, they definitely come across the landing page. And so there is a danger to focusing on Heroku. And this is something we've talked about. And yeah. You know, one of my, something I find myself saying is, don't build your house on someone else's lawn? I don't know if I've ever said that to you before.Colleen Schnettler 30:39 No, but I like it,Michele Hansen 30:40 it causes a lot of problems for people when you're overly reliant on one marketplace, or one channel or one vendor. And like, this is really common with people who build their product off of somebody else's platform. And then Yep, they make an API change, and boom, like, bam, you're out of business, or your business is significantly curtailed. So that's a long term problem, though. Yeah, you don't need to think about long term problems right now. Like, okay, I think when you're at, you know, 1015 $20,000 a month in revenue from Heroku. And you still have zero from other sources. That's when we might be like, okay, like, let's really think about diversifying into other markets or other marketplaces or, yeah, but I think as long as you have a website that is professional, that speaks to the same problems as the Heroku page, like even sends people to their Heroku page, like, don't necessarily need to focus too much on that right now. Because you do have a choice. Okay, it's working. And it's okay, it's okay to you know, build your tent on someone else's lawn, not the house.Colleen Schnettler 31:57 Got it? I like it. Okay, I like this. This is this is great advice. For where I am now. Like, I'll focus on on the Heroku traction channel, because that's the one I'm using. And yeah, when I get to $20,000 a month. Okay,Michele Hansen 32:11 I gotta be there. We're talking about where you're gonna be a year from now. Like, you may not be there a year from now, but you you might be like, getColleen Schnettler 32:17 there. It does seem it seemsMichele Hansen 32:23 like if you had told me that I would be working on this business full time, in a matter of three and a half years from when we launched it. I would have thought that was utterly absurd. Like, wrong. Amazing. Like,Colleen Schnettler 32:36 I love it. Yeah.Michele Hansen 32:39 I think you can do it, though. But yes. What's the I think that is a future calling problem? And let'sColleen Schnettler 32:45 Yeah, okay. Got it. That's what I need to problems right now. Okay. And, okay. So I think for this week, for my marketing stuff, I think emailing people personally has really been good. Because I've gotten I got another guy on the phone. another segment. I did. It was a another 10 minute conversation. But it was good, though. Like it was, I feel like I know, on the free, the free tier at least, like I kind of know how people are finding me, and I know how they're using me. And this was exciting, because he's using node. So the two people I have talked to are not neither of them are using a language that I have specific documentation for. But both of them sorted it out. Yeah. And he was like, it was super easy. And I was like, sweet. So that's really good. So yeah, so I'm gonna keep keep pounding the pavement on trying to get people to talk to me. I think that's, that's where I am.Michele Hansen 33:34 Yeah. And, and one more, I feel like I keep like trickling out these pieces of advice to you about interviews. And I promise at some point, I will tell you everything, and I'm not doing it intentionally. When you talk to someone on the phone, especially in these early days, it is so powerful if you can send them a handwritten thank you note. Now, you may not have time for this, you may not have good handwriting, like you, you know,Colleen Schnettler 34:02 I do a reading.Michele Hansen 34:04 people listening may not you know, I don't want to make them feel bad. We receive such little mail lately that is meaningful, right? Like it's bills or it's junk mail or catalogs, like getting something in the mail that somebody else like personally, hand wrote to you, thanking you for doing something is so powerful, and I think it'll be really powerful for you at this stage. We started doing that when we like finally had stickers made and I would include stickers in it and like people would excitedly like, send us pictures of, you know, our sticker on their laptop, which is just the coolest thing. That's so cool. But I think it's really, really powerful. If you can just send someone I think you know,Colleen Schnettler 34:49 okay,Michele Hansen 34:50 cool. At the very least, and email is good.Colleen Schnettler 34:54 Yeah, that's a that's a great idea. And it's such an obvious thing. It didn't I'm kind of surprised. It didn't occur to me until You just told me so I'm going to do that immediately. That's a great idea.Michele Hansen 35:03 Yeah. And then if you later like make any changes based on what they said, whether that was, hey, like, thanks for talking to me six months ago, I just wanted to know that I added documentation for installing this and node and I really appreciate you taking the time to share that suggestion with me. Like, people really appreciate that.Colleen Schnettler 35:24 So that's gonna wrap us up for this week's episode of the software social podcast. We love to hear from you. You can reach us on Twitter at software slash pod. And if you enjoyed this something that would help us a lot would be leaving us a review on iTunes.
First on Google
Link to the marketing to developers article Colleen mentionedMichele Hansen 0:01 The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners. This episode is sponsored by SnapShooter. SnapShooter helps you keep your server safe with backups for all major VPS hosting providers like Digital Ocean, AWS, Hetzner, and more. It makes it easy to take backups for MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB. And you can also do super easy backups for applications like WordPress, Laravel, and Ghost. Check it out at snapshooter.io.Thank you again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners in this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit https://balsamiq.com/go/software-social/.Colleen Schnettler 0:49 So Michele, are you at your computer right now?Michele Hansen 0:51 I've always at my computer.Colleen Schnettler 0:55 Okay, I would like you to go to Google. And I would like you to Google file uploading on Heroku.Michele Hansen 1:01 Okay, I'm typing right now. Colleen Schnettler Okay. What came up first thing?Colleen Schnettler 1:10 First Google result.Michele Hansen 1:14 Wait, is this because I've gone to it before though? Like,Colleen Schnettler 1:17 that's what I thought I was like, is Google biasing my response by incognito. Ok, do it again.Michele Hansen 1:25 Does it file upload on her whileColleen Schnettler 1:27 uploading on Heroku?Unknown Speaker 1:28 Still number one.Unknown Speaker 1:32 Amazing. That'sMichele Hansen 1:33 amazing. Like,Colleen Schnettler 1:36 I just want to capitalize on being the number one Google response. I don't really know. Yeah. But I was super excited to see that. Yeah, that is like my exciting news for the week.Michele Hansen 1:47 That is really exciting.Colleen Schnettler 1:50 Yeah. I and you know what the best part about this is, I didn't even know. And I was having a customer interview. And I asked him how he found out about we'll talk aboutMichele Hansen 2:02 this, you're burying the lede here? Well, I don't know. It's all exciting. There's like multiple news stories here.Colleen Schnettler 2:12 Yes, it's all exciting. So this is exciting. I am the number one. Number one hit on Google for file uploading on Heroku. Your number one brilliant,Michele Hansen 2:21 your number. IColleen Schnettler 2:22 know, that's awesome. Like, I just I don't want to breathe on it in caseMichele Hansen 2:27 Google changes their mind. Okay, this means you do shouldn't work on your documentation and just don't touch it.Unknown Speaker 2:33 Don't touch anything.Colleen Schnettler 2:36 Don't breathe on the website. So I think that was really exciting to see. And I definitely want to make that landing page that you dropped to better to kind of pull in the people who are reaching me now from Google. So that's something something I'm working on. But what I alluded to is I found that out because I had a customer interview. So last week, I emailed I think I told you, I would do it ages ago. And I finally did it. Thanks to you know, the positive encouragement I received from you and friends on the internet. Thank you friends on the internet. I emailed 14 people. And as I told you with Heroku, I can get their application name. So in the subject of the email, I said, simplify, upload a end, and I put their application name. personalize it. That's smart. Yeah, I figured I'd get a better response rate, like people would actually open it instead of just saying like, simple file upload. Yeah. So of those 14 emails, I got three responses. That's great one. Yeah, I thought free for 14 isn't bad. One guy said he didn't have time to talk. But it was the best file uploader on Heroku. And I should do more marketing. Nice.Michele Hansen 3:48 I always love it when customers tell tell us to do more marketing. Like it's such a an unexpected kind of feedback. Because it's like, wait, you want me to be louder?Colleen Schnettler 4:05 So I responded to him and asked him if I could use that as a testimonial. And he said I could. So I haven't put those I haven't put the testimonial on the website yet. But that is something I want to get to do.Michele Hansen 4:15 That's awesome. testimonials are so good for growth, like when you like if you've got people clicking on it from Google. And then they come to and it's like not only it seems like it's what they need, but there's some other person saying this is exactly what I needed. That's so helpful for getting new signups. They've been really good for us.Colleen Schnettler 4:36 Yeah, I think it'll be good. So So I will add that I just haven't added that yet. So I'm going to add that to my site. And two people said they would get on the phone with me. So you'll know that this is the first time I've actually done this right.Michele Hansen 4:51 Yeah, that's that's so good.Colleen Schnettler 4:54 Yes, so it is good, but so the first person I see spoke with he was actually in Japan. So I had to do it like in the evening here, and it was morning in Japan and he was so nice, but the call lasted 10 minutes, that's okay. I feel like I totally like, I don't want to say I bungled it like it was really great. But at the same time, like I thought about you talking about how I should schedule an hour, and it was like 10 minutes, and I just ran out of things to say. So,Michele Hansen 5:28 like, I've had interviews that were, you know, 10 minutes, like you said, and then ones that were like, an hour and a half, I usually came for about half an hour. Okay, but like, 10 minutes is fine. Like, if you got a really good nugget of information, or you found something out about, like, how they found you why they were looking for something different, what they were using before, which may not have been another service, but like, it could have been, you know, a combination of manual things or patching things together, whatever. Like, if you got that information, and you feel like you got something out of that conversation. That can happen in 10 minutes. Like, that's okay. Okay.Colleen Schnettler 6:12 Because I got off the phone and my whole family. So it was dinnertime, here. So I told the kids like I have this call, I'm gonna be there for an hour. And I'm back like 10 minutes later, and they're like, Why are you back? Well, I guess I'm done. But it was like a great, it was a great interview, the person I spoke with was really kind. And I got a lot of information. As I said, that's how I found out like, he found me, because he googled file uploading on Heroku. And that's the first thing that came up. So that was exciting. Yeah. And it was also great, because he's using flask with Python. And I don't have any documentation surrounding like Pike, Python, specifically, like I have generic documentation. But it was nice to see that like, he didn't have any trouble. Theoretically, it should have worked. But I don't actually know anyone who's tried it. So I was it was good to see he didn't have any trouble integrating the add on in his application, because he's actively using it. And so that was like, really useful information.Michele Hansen 7:11 Yeah. So I have to ask, Did I ever tell you about my favorite most critical interview question? No, it would have been a really good thing for me to tell you last week. Okay, so. So you have your questions that you've prepared in advance, right? Like, I always suggest having a script, you don't necessarily have to stay to the script, but it's it just helps like, organize your thoughts. And I also, I used to print them out with, you know, maybe 10. Returns worth of space so that I could scribble down notes as I was going through it. But so in addition to those things, that sounds like you got like, how did you find out about it? Why were you looking for something? You know, what were you using before? And how do you find it? The question I always end with is something to the effect of, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I've learned so much from you. Is there anything else you want me to know? And then you wait. And you just let them fill that silence. And I tend to find that will be where some of the best information will come out of the interview because you've gotten them primed to thinking about this and their their their brain is on the topic, and then you basically just let them kind of freeform with it.Colleen Schnettler 8:37 Okay, okay, that's a great idea. I have another one coming up this week. So I will get to continue to practice nice.Michele Hansen 8:44 And by the way, so getting two people on the phone out of 14 like that, that's pretty good. Like, I think that's about what you should expect, I think my own feedback requests, which are actually our new customer ones go out once a month, and mine just went out the other day. So it's been really fun. This week. hearing back from people, I think my the best I've been able to get my response rate is like 8%. And then the percentage of people who actually have a phone call with is like, much lower.Colleen Schnettler 9:19 Okay, wait, what emails are you taught you send out monthly? Will you talk with me emails?Michele Hansen 9:24 Yes. So for so the way our pay as you go plan works is that we roll up all of their usage and charge it on the first of the following month, which saves us money and credit card processing fees. And we also give them a volume discount. So it's kind of a win win for everyone. Because like if you know somebody is using the API and for example, they're building up 10 cents worth of usage every day. Like it doesn't make sense to charge them every day. And so I have emails that trigger to people who have are being charged for the first time to understand why They started using us or why they've recently started paying us.Colleen Schnettler 10:05 Interesting. So do you also email them at the beginning of that cycle? Like as soon as they sign up, you email them, I assume.Michele Hansen 10:11 So they get a like, generic, like, here's how you, you know, hello, here's how you use the service, like, let us know if you have any questions when they sign up be like, because we have a free tier, it's really hard to distinguish between who is going to become a paying customer and who's just trying it out, or who is Oh, I see. And I just, I would love to talk to every single person. And we used to talk to every single person. But that's just not feasible at this point. So now I only talk to people who have paid us something. But it's for the first time I have other specific projects. I'll do if I have like a specific question I'm curious about. But that's my sort of ongoing work, work work that I do on that. And I had like, I have a phone call next week. But I didn't have any this week.Colleen Schnettler 11:03 So what is that? Usually? Like? How many people does that usually end up being that you're talking to a month?Michele Hansen 11:10 I don't know. What did I end up talking to you? So I don't actually know how many I end up sending to, I want to say, this week, it was like, there was like 15 or 20 people who I ended up replying to and I will say because of like lockdown and time zones, I have steered the email in the direction of getting people to email me back. Yes, I've also gotten better at asking the question so that I can get more from the email.Colleen Schnettler 11:43 Right. Okay. Yeah,Michele Hansen 11:44 that's I mean, that's taken a couple years worth of a b testing on that. Yeah. I mean, at the beginning, it was like, Hey, we noticed you signed up, like, tell us why you're using it. So and then I have a call with someone next week, because what they mentioned, relates to a broader question I have been trying to figure out, and so we're gonna have a call at some point next week. But yeah, I mean, I'll get, you know, emails back that are like five, six paragraphs, or sometimes it's like two sentences. One I responded to this morning, as if I was a real person, which was so awesome. If you're listening, you know who you are. And that made me laugh. But yeah, I mean, I always love that, that people are like, Wait, is the founder really emailing me? Or is this just like some automated email that's going out? Yes, I remember when I first bought a mattress from one of those mattress startups, I get in the early days of mattress startups. We bought from one of the smaller ones. And I got an email that's like, Hey, I'm the founder of the company. I'd love to hear like, why you why you bought it. And you know how you found us and whatever. And I was like, Oh, my God, this is so exciting. I was like, I love being on the other side of these, because I feel like I take so much from the world and getting other people's thoughts that I that I love to participate on the other side. And so like, I spent all this really long email, and I got a reply, but it's from a customer service person. And they were very, very nice. But I was kind of like, Oh, it's not really very nice. But it was like that was kind of a trick. And so I definitely get emails back to like, are you really the founder of the company? And like to be like, yes, yes, I am a real person who is actually not tricking you. And people really appreciate that. But we were talking about you and your customer.Colleen Schnettler 13:34 So right, so I have another one next week. So I mean, the thing that I think we've talked about before that I really struggle with is the the overexcited ik responding. And, you know, there's the guy on the phone with me, like was very complimentary about what I had built. And, you know, said it really helped him. Because Heroku has this problem where you can't store your images, like with your app, because they have an ephemeral file system. So everyone on Heroku, who wants user uploaded files needs to store them somewhere else. And so it was great. Like, it was a really good chat and, but I do think like, it's hard for me not to be, that's really my struggle, cuz I'm gonna be like, yes, that's why I built it, or, you know, I get really excited. So, so that's something I'm going to work on. I have another one on Wednesday. And that's something I'm gonna work on for my next talk. My next customer interview on Wednesday, but I really think at this stage I I'm in trying to get as many of these as I can, is a good move.Michele Hansen 14:36 Yeah, absolutely. And like it also makes sense that when someone says, This is so useful, and really helped me and thank you for making it that you would feel oh my gosh, like like that feels so good for you because you worked on this for so long without any feedback. And you worked on other things for so long without them really going anywhere like this, and so it makes sense why, like that would catch you. And you want to sort of revel in that feeling rather than being able to like file away the compliment to store it for later. And then I'm not trying to make storage ponds here that just happened accidentally. But like filing that away for later and then saying, oh, like, Can you tell me why it was helpful? Like, like, we're specifically like, it makes sense that you wouldn't be able to take it to that sort of, like completely unemotional level. And instead you're like, Yes, I help someone. This is a minute. Like, that makes sense.Colleen Schnettler 15:41 Yeah. Yeah. So I think we talked last week, I talked about dedicating one day a week to marketing. But that's still really hard for me. So I'm doing one hour a day I'm committing. Because we talked a little bit last week too, about just like kind of sitting in that uncomfortableness of like, what am I doing, starting something new and trying to learn a new skill? So I am going to do one hour a day. And I'm going to tweet about it to help me stay accountable. Nice. A Yeah, that's like how I learned to code. I did 100 days of code a couple years ago, when I was trying to learn web development. And it was great, because you know, no one cares what I tweet about. I'm not Twitter famous. And and it was a good thing for me to be able to go back and see like what I had done and keep myself accountable. So I'm trying really hard to do that. So and as I also said, work, like actual paid work is going to get really busy. So I just don't have time to obsess over this. So I'm trying not to obsess over it.Michele Hansen 16:38 So what did you work on in your marketing Power Hour, this week.Colleen Schnettler 16:43 So the marketing Power Hour this week, I did the thing where I emailed everyone that took like an hour to get 14 individual emails, I also worked on the landing page. I'm really, as we talked about, I think before landing pages are hard for me, because it's just not a skill set I have. And so I'm really like I pulled out a whole bunch of text, I really tried to simplify. And kind of market a little bit more towards developers, I found this great article, my friend shared with me about marketing to developers and what they want to know. And so like, there's things I haven't added, but like I kind of came up with a plan. Like I want to add like, as a developer, when you're looking for a piece of software, you want to know how I was talking about I but like, you want to know how it works. You want to know if it's gonna work with your stack. You want to know that other people have used it. So to me that looks like I now have a heading on my Heroku elements page. It says what does it do? Like? That's what it says involved? What does it do? Because that's the kind of thing like how does it work? Right? Like, what do I have to do? I tried to make it simpler to explain, like, What do I have to do as a developer to integrate it? Like what do I have to do? So once I had this like really flowery language, it was like simple file, upload uploads all your files to the cloud and returns the CDN URL and has, you know, multiple cloud storage providers for redundancy. And it was like three sentences long. And I got rid of that. And now it just says how to apply how to how to use it in five easy steps.Michele Hansen 18:10 Nice. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna pull up your website right now. So I just want to say that, you know, the more you do these interviews, that'll help with your copy a lot, because you'll be phrasing it in the terms that people are using that people are typing in when they're looking for something. I mean, it sounds like file upload on Heroku is, I mean, you've nailed that. And yeah, okay, so I see this how it works button here. Does that meet? Take me to the documentation? Oh, interesting. It takes me to a video.Colleen Schnettler 18:41 Yeah, so I was thinking of take taking that video maybe and putting it See I just have a splash image like a, you know, one of those free images on the right here. So I was thinking, making, maybe making where it says see how it works. And it opens a video and a modal. Like I was thinking of maybe putting the video on the right. So you could just play it in the frame there.Michele Hansen 18:59 Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Okay. I think that makes sense. And then like, I might even add the like you said, the first thing you want to know is, how does it work? And will it work with what I'm doing? So I might even put a documentation button right there as a call to action?Colleen Schnettler 19:19 Well, I have one in a navbar.Michele Hansen 19:21 Yeah, but now is different than a immediate call to action. Like it's there. But like, if you're saying that your thought process when you find out about something is what is it? Like, you know, does it do what I wanted to do, which is you're gonna have that video sitting right there. And then yeah, does it work with what I'm working with? Like, how does it work? I think it might make sense to have the documentation.Colleen Schnettler 19:44 Yeah, I don't think the documentation really answers that question in a succinct way, which might be a different problem. Because if you were to go if I did have a documentation link there, it would jump you to documentation. Well, maybe I should. I was thinking more of like adding a You know, like another section under the header that just like said, like answered those questions that you just said like, will it work with my stack? How does it work? Yeah, I was thinking putting that here on the homepage, or the landing page, whateverMichele Hansen 20:12 you call them. So I, you said earlier that one of the people who got back to you said that you should do more marketing? And I'm curious, like, Did you follow up with them? And say, like, Can you be more specific? Like, what what kinds of things would you like to see us doing? Oh,Colleen Schnettler 20:28 I did not. That's a good that mightMichele Hansen 20:30 be helpful, because like, I've had people say that and it turned out like they were they were looking for some documentation, or they were looking for like, how to guides about things or, like they wanted to send it to a, like a co worker, for example, who was less familiar with this? And they needed something that would have explained a specific thing to them. Like, it might be just worth digging in there a little bit.Colleen Schnettler 20:54 Okay, because I have a lot of ideas, right of what I should do. Like, I want to make a react. Well, I told you, I hired someone to make me a react thing, but it needs a little polish. So I'd like to get that out there. But I will reach out to the person who said that to see to see if there was something specific he was looking for that he couldn't find. But yeah, I think on this main page, I just want to add like I was thinking of adding a block, right before it says seamless file uploading that just says like, like, will it work with my stack or something like that? And then having icons of all the different languages that works with Oh, yeah. Right. Because visually appealing, someone suggested that to me, but it seems like a good idea. So I was thinking of adding that. And then the testimonials. Yeah, that's that's kind of what I'm thinking.Michele Hansen 21:43 So it also I noticed that in from Google, when you click on it, it doesn't go to that like splash page that you had on Heroku, it goes to something that looks a little bit more like documentation.Colleen Schnettler 21:56 Yes, so the Google results take you, I think, to the Heroku documentation page, which is different from my apps documentation page. Because the Heroku documentation are specific to Heroku. And that's like, part of the requirements when you submit an app to Heroku is to have that page. So that's why that's why it takes you there on that that page. I mean, I have three pages I'm talking about here. Okay, I have the Heroku documentation page, which is where Google drops you. I have the Heroku elements page, which is like my landing page for Heroku. And then I have my regular landing page. So there's like three places that I need to be mindful of how I'm communicating my message. Yeah.Michele Hansen 22:39 And you as I'm on the on the main Heroku, add on page, I guess. I am reminded of how last week you said you raise the prices. And I'm curious if that had any impact on your signups this week.Colleen Schnettler 22:53 So it didn't, it became approved yesterday, because there was some like, yeah, work. Yeah. So now this is like an interesting thing to talk about. Because I did raise the prices based on some feedback from you and other people. And so it was only yesterday. So I have had one person sign up at the higher price point. Nice. So that's cool. Yeah, yes. So that's exciting. And I still like I hate that I can't do a free trial. But Heroku isn't set up to do a free trial. So you can do one, but you have to manage all of the like signup logic on your application to do that. And I just don't have the time right now, like I said, with work, and all this other stuff. Like I don't have the time right now to set that up. I think if you're getting people signing up without a free trial, even at a higher price point,Michele Hansen 23:47 run with that, like, see how far that can take you maybe you don't need a free trial, because it sounds like there is a pretty big gap in the market for file. top result, there are literally a gap here.Colleen Schnettler 24:03 Already the top result, and I've had this for like six months, maybe four months. Yeah, so that's what I'm going to do. Because I just, I have a lot of demands on my time, like work, and I have a big project, and then we're moving. So there's a lot going on here. So I don't think I'm going to do a free trial. And if you know we check in in a month, and I only have two people signed up, then I can reevaluate. But I just I think you're right. Like I think the overhead of that right now with what else I have going on in my life is not is not something like I really want to handle. But it's something I can always revisit in the future. Right?Michele Hansen 24:38 Yeah. And I think it'll be interesting over the next few weeks as you have a bunch of those for free trial. Users converting into paid and I guess like, when we talk last week, you had 117 people who were actively using the Add on so like, do they get to use it for free forever or do they get converted into a plan like how does that work, so theyColleen Schnettler 25:03 won't convert to a plan unless I force them to convert to a plan. And I'm, I'm torn, like, like I said, like a lot of the people who are using it are not using it heavily. So what I did is I put an upper limit on the amount of storage they can have. And if they hit it, they'll have to upgrade but I'm not, at least not today, right now, again, maybe in a couple months. When I see where I am, I'll change my mind. But I'm not going to force those early adopters to upgrade. Now I might be able to use this as to my advantage to email them and be like, hey, there's no longer a free plan. But if you have a conversation with me, I'll let you keep your free plan. I don't know. I feel like there's opportunity to like kind of be like, hey, if you talk to me, I'll keep I won't kick you off. Even though I don't offer a free plan anymore. I'll let you keep your free plan, I think I don't know,Michele Hansen 25:56 I think it's reasonable to let them stay on the free plan as a legacy thing. As long as you have a limit there. That's, you know, that that's, like, sustainable for you. I don't know if you necessarily need to incentivize them to upgrade because, you know, I was talking to somebody about this on Twitter the other day, right? Like, I feel like those are the kind of tactics that really work in consumer when you're trying to convince someone to do something, but a business process exists. And you can try to incentivize it, but like, it's just, it's going to exist, how it's going to exist. And that that's a hard thing to push. And so yeah, I think you can just kind of let those people float there for theColleen Schnettler 26:43 for the time, but yeah, they're not there. Like I said, none of them are using a ton of storage yet. So I'm just mindful of like, the amount of storage they're using, but I think I think I'm gonna let them let them float. Yeah. So this week, this upcoming week, my goal is I really liked spending Monday, individually emailing people, because it did result in to customer interviews. So I'm really excited to finally have these customer interviews going after dragging my feet so long. And I'm really excited to talk to more people.Michele Hansen 27:12 I'm excited for you. And you know, so talking about things that we have promised each other we would do and then dragged our feet on. So I finally did something that I think you and my husband and other people have been telling me to do for a long time, which I have resisted. Which is delegating.Unknown Speaker 27:38 Oh,Colleen Schnettler 27:38 did you hire someone? Michele?Michele Hansen 27:40 No, no, no, but okay. So since our episode with other Michelle from Squared Away a couple of months ago, like I remember getting off of that and being like, Oh my god, it would be so amazing to have a virtual assistant. Like, it sounds so awesome. And my husband was like, Yeah, like, you should totally get one. I was like, No, no, like, I like I don't need one, like, you know, and it just like, it felt like, you know, like a luxury to me, you know, like the business equivalent of like, I don't know, buying myself, like a designer watch or something. I was like, No, that's like, that's not for me. Like, I'm not gonna, you know. So, um, but then, you know, I've spent the last couple of weeks like in total, you know, closing our books, like, spreadsheet mania, and like, that was like, you know, what, I don't have to be doing all of our bookkeeping anymore. I have some other like, random projects I have to do with like, updating addresses on contracts and stuff like that. And, like, you know what, maybe I should like, get a VA to do this. But then I was like, but that sounds like so much work just to get them set up. Like, I'll just do it myself. That's where I was like two weeks ago. And then as I was waiting through the spreadsheet again, this week, I was like, You know what, actually, I should get a VA. So I finally like emailed squared away to inquire about getting some help.Colleen Schnettler 29:12 Nice. I'm so proud of you.Michele Hansen 29:14 You know what you do with delegating?Colleen Schnettler 29:16 I know you do. Like I feel like that's another theme of our podcast is huge. As I tell you to hire someone and you tell me No.Michele Hansen 29:25 I don't know if I'm just like, scarred from like too many high school group projects or something. But like, I have, like a lot of trouble with with delegating, and like, you know, I think when you're overwhelmed with something like to me the idea of like spending all of the time to get somebody else started on a task. I'm like, I could just do it and like half the time, it's like not even, you know, but then I end up with a million tasks and I don't need to be doing all of them. And I you know, I like I think we are at a point where I can hire someone for like 15 hours a week.Colleen Schnettler 30:00 So is it working? Is it working out?Michele Hansen 30:03 Well, so I haven't actually hired them yet. Like I have only I, I submitted. Oh,Colleen Schnettler 30:09 you don't get the gold seal? Yeah, no, IMichele Hansen 30:11 did it. I did expect the contact form submission to like burst out and confetti and say like, Congratulations, you've taken the first step towards delegating. Yeah, like you get confetti when you buy a stock on Robin Hood. Like why not? When you you know, try to get a va? We should give Michelle that some feedback. I would like some very serious need, like some good petty petty, and cowbell. No. So, so we'll see. So that'll be like something for me to, to work on over the next couple of weeks.Colleen Schnettler 30:43 I think that's great. I think this is gonna be so good for you.Unknown Speaker 30:48 I think so too.Colleen Schnettler 30:49 I look really hesitant. But I'm proud of you for taking this first step.Michele Hansen 30:53 I took the first step. So and I have been like promising you or probably not promising you just brushing it off for a long time.Colleen Schnettler 31:04 Oh, yeah. From like, since we've started this podcast, I've been like, why don't you get some help? And you're always like, no one could doUnknown Speaker 31:10 it as good as me. That's not what I said, when we madeUnknown Speaker 31:14 this kind of when she saidMichele Hansen 31:17 they could probably do better quality, but I know that I can do it quickly.Colleen Schnettler 31:23 Well, I hope I don't think that's just you know, I hope this gets going for you. And the time to help your VA get setup is worth it. And hopefully, you know, once you guys are rolling, which I guess will be in a month or so you'll have found that it is lifted some of the burden. I mean, you have a lot going on in your personal life right now. So I feel like lifting this a little bit of your burden is going to be great.Michele Hansen 31:45 Yeah, and I think I can like I can spring for this, you know, it kind of feels like you know, the equivalent of like, getting a personal trainer or something except for my business life. Like it feels like a luxury but also it's like, also I need to do this for my my sanity. So yeah,Colleen Schnettler 32:03 yeah. Awesome. Well, that's great news. I'm excited to hear how it goes.Michele Hansen 32:07 I guess on that high note, we will end this week's episode. I just wanted to thank everybody for all of your nice things you said on Twitter this week, like I mean, it was seriously amazing. I feel like every time I opened Twitter, there was somebody else saying how much they enjoyed last week's episode. And that just makes this podcast really fun to do. So thank you. We'll talk to you next week.
Getting to 100
Colleen Schnettler 0:00 The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners. This episode is sponsored by Teleprompt.me. Teleprompt.me is a voice activated teleprompter service. You can write and save scripts and read them in multiple languages. Check it out at teleprompt.me. Thank you again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners in this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit https://balsamiq.com/go/software-social/.Michele Hansen 0:36 So Colleen, the last time we talked about your SaaS, Simple File Upload, you had 89 users on Heroku 40 of which had uploaded files. And in order for your service to be released into the broader Heroku ecosystem, you have been working for months to get to 100 users. So it's been two weeks. Tell me, did you get to 100.Colleen Schnettler 1:07 I did 117 users. Last week I was approved for what they call general availability is when you can sell it in the marketplace. So my vendor documents are pending with Salesforce. Awesome, by the time this podcast airs, it will be available for sale.Michele Hansen 1:27 That's so exciting.Colleen Schnettler 1:29 Yeah, I'm super excited. It's really interesting though, Michelle, because this is a huge milestone, and you'd think I would get have gotten like a ton of energy and excitement about this project. But I've really been struggling the last two weeks, I have really kind of been down on myself thinking that this is a terrible idea. I need to start something new, and I need to find a new idea.Michele Hansen 1:54 Where do you think that feeling is coming from?Colleen Schnettler 1:57 I have no idea. I mean, it's, it's this really exciting time I've reached the milestone I've been trying to achieve. And so you know, I stumbled across this article by Amy Hoy called, why what's it called? Why Women Entrepreneurs Fail. Oh, and yeah, like speaks to me. And it's not just applicable to to women. But she does say in the article that she sees it a lot more in women. And let me let me pull out a few gems from this, quote, I'm tired of sitting by while you ship your thing and refuse to market it. Or you make a few sales your first time out, but it's not enough sales. So you sink into a funk and quit. Or you make it to the 90% mark, you tow up to the line of doing something, then refuse to cross it. I mean, that's like, right where I am, I'm finally getting some success. And I like want to run away and hide. And it's almost like I'm scared of my own success. It's super weird.Michele Hansen 2:54 So you say it's weird. But also, you know, Amy was able to write an article describing this. It makes it sound normal.Colleen Schnettler 3:05 She must see it all the time. And she wrote a whole article about it. I mean, I don't know her. She didn't write it for me.Michele Hansen 3:10 So does it make you feel better to know that this is a common feeling?Colleen Schnettler 3:16 Yeah, I mean, it totally, it was so weird, because I'm not kidding. Like two weeks ago, I was like, this is a terrible idea. I should shut this down. And I had just reached 100 users. And so I mean, the psychology sometimes we kind of talk a little bit about a psychology of trying to start your own thing. But, you know, I thought I was above that. sounds terrible. Like I didn't think it was going to impact me because I got my shit together. Everyone is above average. Right. And I'm aboveMichele Hansen 3:45 you. It's so interesting. Like, it's so interesting. And and as you said, I really think that does apply, you know, to both men and women. But maybe it's more acute, because the standards were held to are so much higher, you know, especially in an in a male dominated field. Right. But I think anybody could feel that way.Colleen Schnettler 4:07 Yeah, I think so. I don't know. So I it's been really interesting. And like I said, I really just wanted to throw the whole thing away last week. And then I found this article, and I talked to a lot of other people in the space. And those people were like, you're doing really well. Why would you walk away now? And I think it's a fear. So I think it's just a combination of a fear of failure. Like, once you start to have some success, like is that actually going to translate into something? It's a fear of learning a new skill set, there was this other great article I stumbled upon? Yeah. So Alex Hillman has a great article called The Fear of Beginning Again. And this article is about how all of the developers that take his class, like freak out, because now they have work. We're kind of experts in our field, right? And we spent years building up, you know, this career as a developer. And so now we have to learn how to do like sales and marketing. And it's like starting from scratch, because we don't know we're doing and it's hard and it's scary. And that's where I am right now.Michele Hansen 5:07 That totally makes sense, especially if you're switching from going from a consultant who has a defined scope. And you know, there's a little bit of sales, a little bit of accounting involved in that. But the vast majority of your time is spent on engineering work. And now running a SaaS, engineering work is a huge percentage of that. But it's no more than 50% of the work of the business. There's marketing, there's sales, there's, there's customer support, there's all of those other things that weren't really skillsets that you would have done in a developer job or really as much in a consulting setting. So it makes sense that it's scary to to feel like you're starting from nothing in totally new fields, and that this project, unlike past projects, does not just hinge on your engineering abilities.Colleen Schnettler 6:10 Right. I think that's the biggest thing. I've always been able to kind of prove myself, quote, unquote, from an engineering perspective. And so this is a whole This is a whole different skill set. It's like a whole different ballgame.Michele Hansen 6:25 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.Colleen Schnettler 6:29 Okay, well, you're my pseudo business psychologist. So it's good. We have this podcast, so you can you can remind me not to quit when I'm like, this is a terrible idea. Probably not a terrible idea. No, I thought it like it's a great idea. Like, it's a proven market. It's like, I don't know, 100.Michele Hansen 6:46 People, you started out with like, zero people. And I remember when you first launched it, you're like, well, maybe I can get a couple of friends who don't actually need it. But use Heroku to use it. And like that's your first milestone was 10 people, right? or something? Yeah. And it's like, okay, like, none of them are really using it. And like they're just kind of pity users. And,Colleen Schnettler 7:11 and but like, nature, though,Michele Hansen 7:12 like so last time, we talked, you had 40 people who had actually uploaded a file. How many people have uploaded files now?Colleen Schnettler 7:20 56. So people are usingMichele Hansen 7:24 Last time we talked to someone paid you $10 outside of Heroku. Have you gotten paid anything else since then?Colleen Schnettler 7:34 Nope. I've had a couple other people I want to say to additional people sign up for the free trial. So we'll see if they convert. It's funny, though, because all those people aren't emailing me back.Michele Hansen 7:47 Interesting. Colleen Schnettler 7:47 So yeah, but they're using it. So I guess they're happy. Maybe.Michele Hansen 7:53 So how many credit cards on file Do you have right now then outside of Heroku? Six, six. And that's a one month free trial, right? Yes. Okay. And so when does that when are we coming up on the first charge for most of those people,Colleen Schnettler 8:11 like February 6 through 10th ish, people will have to turn out by then if they don't want to pay.Michele Hansen 8:17 Okay, so by the middle of February, then we will have a little bit of a sense of whether people want to pay for it or not.Colleen Schnettler 8:29 So I did some interesting things, which, which is basically the story of this whole thing of this whole product, I just do things. So I am about to become really busy with some consulting work. And I'm really looking forward to it, because it'll be kind of a nice break to just dive into doing something I know how to do. But because of that I was working on this like, three, three days a week, I'm gonna have one day a week to work on this. And so I did a few things. I raised the prices quite a bit, because I don't,Michele Hansen 9:00 Yeah, taking some patio11 advice there!Colleen Schnettler 9:04 Why not? I mean, I might as well come out of the gate high. And if no one signs up, then that that's, you know, that's a lesson learned. But I'd rather have five users at $40, then, you know, 50 users at $8. Exactly right, because I am one human like, and now I have a job that's going to pay me money that's going to take up most of my time. So I'm not gonna have a ton of time to spend on the uploader. So yeah, I'd rather have fewer customers at a higher price point. So I raised my price from I think was 10 to 35 for the intro tier. So that's pretty significant. So it'll be interesting to see if anyone signs up at that price point. And what else did I do? So I tried to do a little marketing work since I last spoke to you. So I actually hired someone from people per hour to make me a react application using my uploader.Michele Hansen 9:57 Oh, interesting.Colleen Schnettler 9:59 And that was Whole thing like people for hours, like a race to the bottom, have you guys ever used that? I know, it was, it was a weird experience. Maybe because like, I just didn't spend enough money. But it was like, I felt like, I don't know, like people were just sending me messages, I must have gotten like 50 messages from these people and like the people started working on it before I had agreed to pay them. And it was just, it was a really interesting experience, to try to hire someone to do to getMichele Hansen 10:28 something usable out of it.Colleen Schnettler 10:31 ish. It's mostly usable. I think it's not kind of what I would like it to be. But it's I think it's good enough that with my teensy, tiny minimum react skills, I can make it good enough. It wasn't good enough to put out there on my documentation page yet. But I feel like I can get it there. If I spent a little time on it, but that was a weird experience.Michele Hansen 10:56 That -- yeah, I mean, I think there's when you use services like that, you know, you get what you pay for. Colleen Schnettler 11:09 And yeah, that's what I think, too. Michele Hansen 11:13 yeah, it's just it's just, it's just tricky. And I think if we ever needed something that we didn't have in house, we would just, you know, see who our friends are in our network could do it. And probably pay more, but you know, have a have a good result that you can use from the get go.Colleen Schnettler 11:32 Yeah, I definitely think so. And I absolutely think it's because I'm not making any making $10. So I'm not making any money. So I'm really hesitant to put money into that. And I absolutely think that's that was part of the issue. It was like, I think I paid 200 bucks. So what do you expect to get for 200? bucks Colleen? Like, really? It was interesting. So that marketing, that's such an interestingMichele Hansen 11:57 point, though, I just want to ask you. So you said you spent $200 on that, aside from your time, which actually has a cost that you can pretty clearly calculate because you do consulting work. I'm curious, what is your Do you know what your total investment in? The product is? so far?Colleen Schnettler 12:19 So I don't really want to know, because I think it'll freak me out. In terms of the opposite leg. If I include opportunity cost. It's ginormous. So if I, I mean, without opportunity cost is low, maybe 500 bucks. But if I include the opportunity cost of my time as a developer, it's kind of a scary number. I don't know a lot.Michele Hansen 12:41 Yeah, this is it's just interesting, because I think we were talking about this a while ago, right about how much it cost us to get off the ground. Because it's a big thing about bootstrapping, right is like you're you're funding yourself. And I want to say it was in about that, like, four to $500 range, not taking into account, you know, free AWS credits and stuff that we got, and of course, the opportunity cost of your time, which is not free. So I think this will be really interesting when you are forced to only spend one day a week on this, you know, you've talked a lot about how you have a tendency to read as a substitute for doing or to avoid doing, right reading about entrepreneurship and marketing. As a way to procrastinate on actually doing that task, though you may we'll be learning things. And I think it might be interesting, because if you only have one day a week, you only have one day a week to get stuff done. I know, it might be good for you.Colleen Schnettler 13:48 I think it will. So I have a plan. Do you wanna hear my plan I do want to hear. So here's the thing is, like all developers everywhere, all I want to do is add more features. We talked about this every week,Michele Hansen 14:01 you want to do engineer, I only ifColleen Schnettler 14:03 I want to do engineering, I only have one day a week to work on this. So here's the deal, it works great. It doesn't have all the features I'd like it to have. But it works. So my plan is to spend that one day a week, only on marketing. And it's going to be really challenging for me. But I spent these past two weeks there were just like a couple little bug fixes I had to get through security stuff, and things like that. So I spent these and like email stuff. I spent these past two weeks, like just knocking that the tech stuff out. So now it works well for what it does. So my plan is that those Fridays are just going to be marketing days. And that's a little bit scary for me. But there's no point in me spending another you know, 100 hours or however long to implement new features if no one's buying it in the first place.Michele Hansen 14:53 Right. If a feature is launched in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, was it really launched?Colleen Schnettler 15:00 Yeah, that's amazing. By the way, I love that. So, like, that's so good. So I'm really, really kind of struggling, but also excited about this decision. It's like, I'm going to stop half assing marketing because like, everyone, I've been half assing marketing, I'm like, Oh, this landing page is fine. When it's not really like people are giving me suggestions, and I'm just ignoring them, because I don't really want to do it. So Fridays are gonna be marketing days for me marketing, sales, whatever you want to call it.Michele Hansen 15:32 They're different. They're two different things. They'reColleen Schnettler 15:35 different. Oh,Michele Hansen 15:36 should we talk about how they're different? shirt, or different? Okay, so for So, so marketing is this the kind of stuff you've been doing, like SEO, writing landing pages, you know, working on the design, writing your documentation, you know, running ads, but you're not doing but those those are kind of like marketing things. Sales, people would usually conceptualize as sort of a direct one to one interaction with a customer to try to convert them. So that might be like, you know, some people do cold emailing, for example, like that would be sales, or having a phone call with a potential customer about, you know, trying to pitch them on an on a contract, or whatever it is, negotiating on a contract, those would be sales functions. And, you know, kind of like going back to what Danielle Simpson was saying last week about the system they built at feedback panda with what was it like 50, something 52 rolls in there to company, like marketing and sales, you know, they might sort of, you know, feed up to the same VP, but they're different functions.Colleen Schnettler 16:53 Okay, so at this point, where I am now I'm getting a good number of signups through the Heroku traction channel, which has been great, but I am going to start charging. So I expect that number to go down. What are your thoughts? I have a lot of ideas about how to spend my next Friday my sales slash marketing day, like what are your thoughts on how to maybe approach this or what's a good way to get started?Michele Hansen 17:17 You mentioned that people have given you feedback on your landing page and other places, lots of feedback,Colleen Schnettler 17:25 and lots of feedback.Michele Hansen 17:27 any criticism like is it actionable? Or is it like your landing page sucks? Like, is it?Colleen Schnettler 17:33 No, no. Okay, super. It's super actionable. I am scared of Okay, here's the thing. I am scared of landing pages. This is this is truth telling. here's, here's how I do a landing page, I go find a template, I copy the template and I put my words and images in the template. So when if you ever tell me like, Oh, you should do this. So let me let me give you some step one. Okay.Michele Hansen 18:00 Copies Stripe's homepage, step 1.Colleen Schnettler 18:06 Me and everyone else. So here's some feedback I got, which is really good. And I'm really want to implement it. But it's funny how I don't even know how. So yesterday I was introduced to this concept of pain, Dream fix. And it's this concept of like, what is the customer's pain? What is their dream about how their life would be better if they and what is your Fix? It's a lot you know, about what we've talked about? Michele Hansen 18:35 It sounds consistent with Storybrand.Colleen Schnettler 18:37 Yeah, it's very consistent with everything we've talked about. But it's a lot like here's the real so everyone's giving me this great feedback on Oh, you could do this pain dream fix. And that's really good. But like, I literally don't know how to put that on a on a webpage without it looking terrible. Because it's so many words. I mean, it's like basic, like design stuff. And I'm just like, wait, there are three blocks. Wait, what I don't know what to do.Michele Hansen 19:01 That's not a design problem. That is a copywriting problem. And okay. And I think you also might be running into something that I think is pretty common. When you hear things like that. They're like, Oh, yeah, of course, that's so obvious. Like, yeah, I'll do that. When you're, I think especially working in this space, we're in of b2b SaaS, which is, honestly, like, pretty boring. You know, we've talked about how we're not building, you know, businesses that are going to take over the world and everyone's going to use them and like, you know, talking about the dream when it comes to making business processes faster. It requires a little bit of creativity. And I think, you know, releasing ourselves from the idea that people are, you know, accomplishing all of their dreams with us, right. But I also think it's, I think it's probably possible and you also but you don't have to, like hit them all within like, the top of your homepage. Like I think it's pretty common to you know, just like speak to the pain first. And then as someone keeps you know, you, you kind of show them what it is and then you introduce the the dream and and the pain further down contextually like it doesn't have to be everything crammed above the fold.Colleen Schnettler 20:29 Yeah, so I think something I have never done before is like really pay attention to landing pages, like I just don't pay attention. So there's a couple like Twitter threads people sent me of everyone's favorite landing pages. So I think part of my work as starting something new here, which is, you know, learning about marketing, is to actually look at landing page examples and try and get some ideas. And it feels so much like starting from scratch. And I'd put more time and put two hours into my landing page, like it's okay. But I just threw up a template and threw some words and got some stock images and called it a day. So I really think that's a good place to start. And I think next week for my first marketing Friday, I'm going to work on that.Michele Hansen 21:18 Yeah, so I think something else that you could do is, if you, you mentioned that it's hard to get people to reply to you, but you have had some people reply to you and give you feedback. And I wonder if those people who have given you feedback on the landing page, if you could reach out to them and basically do a usability test with them, where you're on a screen share with them, and they are narrating their internal thoughts as they look at your landing page. And you say, okay, like, that's what the copy is, can you like, tell me why you use this product, like what, like what excited you about it, and like have a conversation like that, you might even want to record it. So you can listen to it later and use those words for your copy later. But I think that can help you like if you have people who are willing to give you feedback, and willing to help you improve that, right because like, if you make this into a real business and keep supporting it. And they prefer to use it over the other options out there, they're going to benefit from it too. And so maybe if you can see if you could get one or two people just be willing to do a screen share with you for half an hour each. And just go down to just narrate what they see and just ask them questions about it. Ask them Why did you choose this over other things? Like, you know, this is what it says but like, let's have a conversation with him about it.Colleen Schnettler 22:44 Okay. Okay, I did one person I asked over email. And I guess it wasn't landing page relevant. But he said, he picked my product, because it seems fast and easy. Which is kind of what I'm, that's great. Going for good. Yeah. So that's kind of what I'm going for. Okay, that's a great idea. You think I should do that with people that are using it?Michele Hansen 23:04 Yeah, I think you know, like this guy who said, he picked it because it's fast and easy. Like, see if he'll do a call with you. And just say, you know, as can be, or even just say 1520 minutes, you may not even need a full half hour, I find it's pretty easy to get people on the phone for the most part. Especially in that kind of a scenario. Like I have been amazed with how generous people have been with their time when you are building a product that truly does make things faster and easier for them. People appreciate that.Colleen Schnettler 23:36 Okay, it's interesting. Another thing while I was having this little two weeks of self reflection, something I realized is you keep telling me to talk to people, and I keep emailing people. But I haven't actually asked any of these people to get on a call with me yet. Oh, and I keep saying I'll do that, but I'm lying. So and you just lied to you, my dear friend, Michelle. It's so funny because I thought this would be something like I'd be good at but, and I think I will be but it's just interesting to like discover your own hesitations. I'm sure it's like a fear of rejection or something that has that has prevented me from actually asking people to get on the phone. But I'm going to do that too. For real.Michele Hansen 24:18 He was what we were talking about earlier about having a lot of this sort of pent up stress around like learning marketing and, and all of these other functions that go into making something a full fledged business that can support you full time. It makes sense to me that you would have hesitations about that. And it's like it's so common that people are afraid to talk on the phone with other people and ask them these kinds of questions that you know, I think we've talked about, you know, it's you're, you're asking for somebody's pain points, right? And first of all, you can't say what are your pain points, but second of all, Just we don't have vocabulary around talking about pain and struggle, really, like we don't say, Hey, how are you struggling today as a normal conversation topic, like it just doesn't happen. And so it's totally understandable that you would have hesitations about that. And, and something I want you to remember, is that what you say? And the specific questions you ask, I think people get really worried about that about having the right script, those are less important than how you treat the other person. Because if you treat them in a way, that shows them that they can trust you, and that you're going to respect what you're saying, you know, respect what they are saying, you know, if you simply just listen to them, like, remember that with all of these, as I said earlier, boring business processes that we are solving. These are things that people are doing every day or every week, and they have probably never talked to anyone about, like, they have probably never sat down and had a conversation with their spouse, or their roommate, or whomever it is about, like, tell me about, like how you're struggling with file upload. Like, they have probably never been asked that question. But if somebody had asked you that question a year ago, you would have said, Oh, my God, let me tell you, because I have so much to say about this. And like you would have never realized you had something to say about that. But you never had someone sit there and say, tell me about this, and then just listen to you.Colleen Schnettler 26:43 Yeah, you know, you're soMichele Hansen 26:44 powerful, right? And so you don't need to have a million questions. And you don't need to, you know, I mean, maybe you feel like you need to somehow impress them or show them that you're a real business or something about this. Leave all of that at the door. The most important thing is just to listen to them about something that nobody has probably ever listened to them about. And that is really powerful. Okay, okay. I'm on my soapbox. I'm sorry.Colleen Schnettler 27:16 It's funny, because like, you keep going to your soapbox and I keep pretending that I'm going to do it and then not doing it. So. So I'm gonna what's uh, what are you? I don't know. I don't know, Michelle, this whole experience is you know, a weird psychological introspection.Michele Hansen 27:35 Leaving your comfort zone.Colleen Schnettler 27:36 It's I know, in my comfort zone was so warm and cozy. It's a nice in here. Nice in his comfort zone. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's just such a different skill set. I mean, you're literally cold emailing someone asking them to get on a phone call with you. I mean, it's 2021. People don't talk on the phone. So it's just a lot of things. I don't know why I just put it off. Like, every time this week, I thought about reaching out to someone. I was like, oh, but I got to finish. I got to fix this part. First, I got to fix this part first. I think it's like a fear of perfectionism. I'm sure right? Because there's gonna be negative feedback, presumably at some point. And so it's just just learning how to not internalize that in a personal way.Michele Hansen 28:19 There's always going to be negative feedback. There's always going to be mean people like, but I mean, of the probably 1000s of interviews I've done like, I can really only think of like, two or three that made me uncomfortable, and only one where someone straight up insulted me.Colleen Schnettler 28:47 Oh, wow.Michele Hansen 28:48 Yeah. And actually, that one where the woman insulted me. She ended up giving me the most amazing information in that interview, because she thought I was stupid. And so she explained things to me about how she thought about things on the most basic levels. And it was so good. Like, and I actually when she, she, she, she basically called me stupid, and I was doing it with a co worker. And and I heard that and I was like, oh, now she's gonna she's gonna say everything. Like, she's going to over explain everything. And I you know, I threw out basically like a touchdown sign to my coworker. I was sitting there when I was like, here comes the good stuff. And I was so excited. Um, you know, I mean, don't take it personally. Right? Like, it's just business like, they're, yeah, they're not insulting you. Like if they're saying there's stuff you need to work on, then. You know, you say, okay, thank thank you so much, can you can you tell me why that would work better for you? Like, everything is an opportunity for you to learn more about what their process is so that you can make the assumptions that you have made in your product better fit, whatever their process is?Colleen Schnettler 29:56 Yeah, I definitely. And it's not even that. I'm worried. People be mean, per se, like, I assume people that get on the phone, you know, we'll be fine that get on the phone with me, we'll be fine. It's just, I don't really know. But I think I just need to rip the band aid off and start getting people on the phone. And so this is part of like you said, I'm, this is way out of my comfort zone. And so here's a growth opportunity for me, and I'm never going to be successful if I don't do it. So now I'm telling you today, like when we talk next week, I will have made a real attempt to get at least one person on the phone who's using my product to talk to them about their pain points around file upload. That's like my small but but still important weekly go.Michele Hansen 30:41 So when does you're only working on Fridays, or one day a week? I guess I just assumed Friday, one day a week start.Colleen Schnettler 30:50 Next week,Michele Hansen 30:51 what day of the week, is it going to be?Colleen Schnettler 30:54 Well, it was going to be Friday, I think I'm I think Friday. Okay,Michele Hansen 31:00 it's a good day. Okay. And I think I think this could be really good for you, because it'll also force you to time box things. Like you could say, okay, like, this is the marketing hour. And this is the hour when I'm going to slot in my customer interviews. And this is the hour when I get to have, you know, fun playing around in the magical forest of new feature development. And yes, you know, like, our building in time for those things so that you know, it's going to happen and that you know, that you don't have to sit in that discomfort for very long, right. Like, ifColleen Schnettler 31:36 you love that onlyMichele Hansen 31:38 an hour, like it's only an hour of torturing yourself with new things that you don't know how to do, that are mentally exhausting, because they are new like that, that is totally normal. That is a well documented psychological phenomena that doing new things, and learning new things is more mentally taxing than something that's familiar. And, and I will also, I think it could be good for you too. Because this tendency of reading instead of doing the work, like you have the whole week to plan out that work. And so if you're like, I want to work on the landing page, and so maybe at night, or whatever that is like during the week, it's like, Okay, I'm going to scroll through Harry's marketing examples on Twitter, and look at landing pages or whatever, like just like small things to build yourself up to it.Colleen Schnettler 32:33 Okay, that's a great idea. It's funny, because you just, you just totally called me out for not doing the work. And I'm doing the same thing with you. Like, I'm asking you every week about customer interviews, and I'm, I'm internalizing all this great knowledge You're giving me but I have yet to actually do the work and it's so weird, but it's okay. Like,Michele Hansen 32:51 it's a thing. It's not something you have any background or training or anything. And like, that's okay to be scared by it and procrastinate, because you don't even know what the work is to do like that. That'sColleen Schnettler 33:08 okay. The problem is, when you're, you're entering kind of these new these new fields or these new areas, it's like you don't even know what the work is.Michele Hansen 33:15 And you're a solo founder to like you don't have somebody else who is bringing in that kind of experience, like, you know, Mateus and I had that advantage because we both come at it from from largely different disciplines Now, like I was a product person so I also had to learn marketing and and sales though. And accounting but but it like it was there, you know, I had time to explore those things because because because that was just falling in my domain.Colleen Schnettler 33:53 Yeah. Okay, I love the time boxing idea. Before we record again, I will pick a day and I will time box out some hours to actually do this. Let's start doing it.Michele Hansen 34:04 Let's do it. Yeah. All right. I guess I guess that'll wrap us up for this week. Thanks so much for listening to software social, we, by the way we seriously love when people tweet out about you're listening to an episode and you liked it or it just it just makes my day when those things come through. So if you liked the show or our show, definitely tweet at us and let us know or post a review on iTunes. Thanks so much.
Prioritizing Features and Yourself: An Conversation with Danielle Simpson, Co-Founder of Feedback Panda
Michele Hansen 0:00 This episode of Software Social is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners. This episode is sponsored by GetTheAudience. Every entrepreneur has the same problem. Find out who their audience of their product or service is, what they talk about a need, and when to engage with them in a fruitful conversation. Get the Audience helps entrepreneurs to understand and develop their audience much easier than before. It's a web based tool with a monthly or yearly subscription, created by a bootstrapped founder, Matthias Bohlen. You can get GetTheAudience at gettheaudience.com. Thanks again to Balsamiq for generously sponsoring our listeners this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsalmiq, visit balsalmiq.com/go/software-social.Colleen Schnettler 0:55 We are super excited to have a guest on today's podcast. We are joined today by Danielle Simpson, the co-founder of Feedback Panda. Danielle SimpsonHi, Colleen. Hi, Michelle.Michele Hansen 1:07 Hey, Danielle, I am so excited to have you on today.Danielle Simpson 1:11 Thank you for having me. Michele Hansen 1:13 So, so excited. So I want to give a quick background on you. And then we're gonna dive right in. So Danielle is the co-founder of Feedback Panda. And how this came about is Danielle is a classically trained opera singer, who moved to Berlin. And while she was singing, she started teaching English online. And part of that process for teaching the students is to provide them with feedback. And her she and her partner Arvid Kahl who many of you probably know from Twitter, figured out that the process for this feedback could be much more efficient. And there was actually a software solution in here to make that easier for teachers. And so they launched feedback panda together. And then they sold feedback panda in 2019. And so I am so excited to have you here, Danielle, because I feel like there's so much for us to learn from from you. And just so many different points, whether that's, you know, starting a company based on your own needs, scaling that company, figuring out what other people need, even you know, selling that company, and then what do you do after selling that company? There's so much in your story that I think really resonates with people. And so I'm so excited to hear your perspective on everything.Danielle Simpson 2:38 Thanks. Yeah, it's my privilege to be here and to share it with you.Michele Hansen 2:44 So my first question, you started Feedback Panda based on your own needs. And this is a recurring theme of our show, it's where Geocodio came from. It's where Colleen's Simple File Upload came from. It's where a lot of great bootstraped companies come from. And in those early days, it can be really hard to prioritize your different needs. And when you're solving something for yourself, you know, there's a million things that could be done. And so I'm really curious to hear more like, like, when you first started it, how did you even figure out what you should work on and what you should work on next?Danielle Simpson 3:22 So thank you so much for asking this question. Because it's definitely, you know, if you didn't bring it up, this was something I really wanted to share, about how we prioritized work. In the beginning, it was really easy to divide the different work because Arvid was the programmer and, you know, I would have the ideas, I have the knowledge about what the teachers need, what I needed. So I could tell him what to build. And then he would build it. And then so we work super closely. In this kind of like feedback loop where he would build something, I would test it out, I would give him feedback. He iterate on that. And so before we had customers -- super easy, super easy to just kind of build a prototype of a product. And then about a year, no, sorry, about four months in when we actually had customers. And before this, like adrenaline of something needs to be done and you just are like on autopilot, you just figure out a way to do it. We actually made this pretty expansive chart of 52 roles that we thought our company had. We're a company of two, but we got really specific about different departments, different positions in each department. And then what job what responsibilities each of those, call them people or positions had. So whenever we were kind of stuck for, okay, there's a million things that need to be done today, but what role hasn't seen some attention from us? Or what role kind of gets forgotten about because there's customer service is always something that's like super prominent, because it's actually somebody on the other line that's wanting your attention. But so in that kind of part of the company for, you know, customer experience and customer success, of course, the person on the desk is getting a lot of attention. But what about, you know, who's building the knowledge base? Is that getting a priority, and then, you know, that's going to help the person on the customer desk. And so we got super specific on these different roles. And also, who was going to be responsible for them, which was important that Arvid knew what he was responsible for, I knew what my responsibilities were. And, and so I think part of the the issue with priority is that we don't always know what the work is, we don't always have this clear understanding of what is this role? And I know, I need to work on marketing, but like, what does that mean? I don't know. So, getting really specific about what the marketing role is, or, you know, the content writer, or all of these different, who's posting to Instagram, all of these different little jobs, even, we're little roles that our company had. So we were very, we had a very clear picture, visually, to consult to when things were getting a bit overwhelming, then we could just look at this and see what needed to be done.Michele Hansen 6:47 That's so fascinating. I've never heard of anyone doing that for a two person company. I mean, it's it's ingenious, and, and it sounds like as much as it is defining what the roles and tasks are. Because I think that's a challenge I definitely face into a lot of other people. face too is, you know, figuring out what even needs to be done. And you're also defining what that role isn't, right, like you defined 52 roles, but not 100 roles, like -- there you are, you're scoping the company itself. It's, it sounds like, not just tasks.Danielle Simpson 7:27 Absolutely. And then this also became kind of the the structure of who do we want our first hires to be? You know, this role is taking up so much of our time, is it time to bring somebody in, of course, long story short, we never ended up hiring anyone. But you know, we had that layout that structure so that we knew where we could possibly, you know, substitute ourselves out and put someone else in.Michele Hansen 7:57 That makes a ton of sense.Colleen Schnettler 8:00 So when you guys were this far along, were you both full time by this point?Danielle Simpson 8:05 Not quite. So we did this for months after launching this big, you know, 52 person company, chart, but we went full time. I guess it was about 10 months, 10 months in. Let me just check my math. Yeah, it was about 10 months in when Arvid quit his job. And I, I had been scaling back on my own teaching, I was still teaching. But then in February of 2018, was when I taught my last class.Colleen Schnettler 8:41 So you guys, were still working other jobs and running your company. While you were trying to prioritize these kind of 52 roles within your company? That sounds like a lot.Danielle Simpson 8:55 Yeah, I mean, 52 roles sounds like a lot, of course. But, but I really think that once you actually have clarity on something, and like that's sometimes half the work is just understanding what the work is. So once we could really be agreed. So once we could really be intentional about the time that we had to spend on feedback Panda, then I felt that it was pretty clear. You knew Wednesday, we're spending time on Feedback Panda, then what job you were supposed to be doing.Colleen Schnettler 9:35 Yeah, I love that because you don't spend a ton of time spinning your wheels in this. You know, I'm like way in the beginning of this process. And I have a list of what feels like hundreds of things to do. And the problem is like without a focus on what is this, to your point, what is marketing mean? Like, what path, what bandwidth? Do I have to go down that path and how do I do it? It's kind of like all over the place. So I kind of I've really actually love this idea of defining the work and defining the roles really specifically. Danielle Simpson 10:06 And I should clarify, there were a few roles that we both said, I don't want anything to do with this. Like, I didn't want to have to do anything tax reporting. I love bookkeeping. I didn't, I didn't want to, you know, be responsible for anything to do with the government or the FinanzAmt is what it's called in here in Germany, I, you know, really wanted to avoid that. Arvid is also very happy to let somebody else do that. So that was a position in our company, we said, but really, it was just our tax advisor had working for us. And then, and then also, bloggers, were one of the first people that we contracted to do things for us, because I wanted to have some content on on the website wanted to have a blog. But I find the whole process of writing quite laborious. So that was something I was happy to have other people to do.Michele Hansen 11:10 You mentioned a couple of times how you would talk to the teacher community. And you would talk to them on these different formats, whether that was Instagram or other places, and people talk a lot about choosing an audience. Actually, I think Arvid talks about this quite a bit on Twitter and might be writing a second book on this, if I'm not mistaken.Danielle Simpson 11:31 That's right -- Audience First, coming to you, we'll see.Michele Hansen 11:38 And I think what's so interesting to this, to me is that, you know, you didn't really choose an audience, you you were the audience and, and so I love this idea. Because, you know, we talk a lot about about using customer empathy, and you had a how do we use empathy for our customers and translate that into priorities and tasks and a successful business. And most of us naturally have at least some amount of empathy for ourselves. And so it's, you know, it's sort of straightforward to translate that into other people who are in a similar situation as ourselves. And it sounds like you were in that situation, being so close to the English teacher community online.Danielle Simpson 12:25 Yeah, absolutely. And I think, also has to be said that Arvid was seeing this as well, through my work. Even as a child, though, I remember looking at teaching as a profession, and thinking, wow, these are people who put their heart and soul into their work, and they will do anything at any hour to help their students succeed. So immediately, I felt when, you know, I had the idea that this could be something that could be shared to help other teachers, it felt like something we were compelled to do, like, a way I really wanted to help an audience, you know, quote, unquote, that was quite underserved, and sometimes undervalued.Michele Hansen 13:22 I love how you mentioned that Arvid saw this too. And I think this is such a critical point. Because developers need to be near the user, they need to be able to interact with the user and understand them. Not just as a user, but as a person. And you know, Colleen, you've talked about how, in your college engineering classes, there was not a lot of focus put on understanding the user and building empathy for the user. And even still, there's so many companies that really, they either hesitate to put developers in front of users, or they just think it's a waste of a developer's time. But it's not. It's so incredibly powerful when you can get the person who is using a product in the same room with the developer. And can you just talk a little bit more about that? Like, what like, what was the experience like for you seeing him learn about your community?Danielle Simpson 14:24 Yeah, so I think, of course, it started with me, being the first to us are the first customer of our product. But Arvid was also heavily involved with the customer service and having conversations with people we had. At the very beginning, we used a small chat tool on the website, and then eventually changed it over to Intercom. But we always had this direct line where we could talk to users who were on the app. And so at the beginning, it was mostly me leading through that leading them through just, this is my idea for what we have to offer you. You know, how does it match up with, you know, what you think we're offering this kind of conversations, but also, those were kind of sales conversations as well, you know, like, having, explaining what we were offering. And so I think he learned a lot of how to communicate with our customers through those original conversations that I was having. But then he just jumped right in and, you know, had lots of conversations with teachers as well. And yeah, I mean, part of it is just who he is, I think that it came very natural to him. So it's hard for me to kind of like, pinpoint what he was doing. But I think definitely having that direct line of communication on the website, where if there was something that teachers needed, a lot of feature requests would come in there. And, you know, we would both have those conversations, one on one, you know, with whoever was talking to us, but then we would come together and talk about them together. So he was very much a part of the community and the teachers just adored him. Because they were not far from a magician who could just make you know, their wishes come true. And help them with their teaching.Colleen Schnettler 16:40 I love this, because I feel like, just from this conversation we're having now, you were driven to create this product, like as altruism, because you really felt like it would it would help these people and improve their lives. And I feel like in the in engineering, and in development, sometimes we're taught, not explicitly taught, but kind of internalize it. Like, that's not how you make money, right? Like there's this focus of you make money this way. These are two different things. And I just love when someone can build a product that enriches people's lives and makes money makes me really happy.Michele Hansen 17:16 Yes. Yeah. Like it just, it's that whole, like, yeah, it's the whole Conscious Capitalism thing. Like I think I, like you mentioned on episodes ago, the Lapsed Anarchist's Guide to Building a Great Business, which is one of my favorite business books, but it, it also hammers down that point of like, you can approach business, from an altruistic perspective from a perspective of helping people rather than, you know, exploiting them and taking as much money from them as possible, like, you can run a business that that helps people and provides a living for you. And those two things can work together.Danielle Simpson 17:53 Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, it was also such a wonderful thing to have this direct conversation with customers with people who have to think about all of the subscription fees that Arvid refunded, or, you know, just gave grace periods for because people were having trouble making ends meet or, you know, were waiting on a support paycheck, or whatever it was he he really was about a human approach. It wasn't just numbers. And yet the bottom lines. It was always about serving another human being.Michele Hansen 18:41 A human approach to business.Colleen Schnettler 18:45 So I have a question about the early days, you were your first customer. And so it sounds like the two of you were really able to create a product you knew would be would well serve these teachers. Did you have any trouble finding customers? Or did you find that the teachers were so excited about it, they just kind of showed up out of the woodwork.Danielle Simpson 19:04 That's a nice image. It really was that way. You know, I had been there was multiple communities on Facebook, or, you know, in private spaces that the company hosted, where people were having problems, just keeping up with the number of students, the number of reports that we had to do, and developing systems to deal with this extra work that we had. So I was observing these different communities and how people communicated and you know, just the dynamic in them. So when it came time that we were ready to actually share the product. I just went to the communities and shared that we had a product that could help them with some of these issues that you know, they were looking for solutions for their already looking for solutions. So it was quite welcome when I presented one.Michele Hansen 20:06 I want to go back to something you said a couple of minutes ago, you said when you were talking to customers, especially new customers who might be coming to you from from one of these groups, that you would say something to the effect of, you know, "Here's what we think we do, does that match what you think we do?" And this struck me because it sounds like something that Colleen is going through right now. And I'm curious to hear you say a little bit more about that. And, and, and, and how those, you know, would that match up? Or would people think you were doing things differently? And how would that change your thinking about what your product did for people.Danielle Simpson 20:45 Um, so I have to say that I was quite confident in my solution, I was quite like, I was confident that what I'd built worked for me, so there would be others like me. I wasn't so in this really beginning phase where I was trying to build something that maybe like the mass wanted, of course, this is always a really good idea. I don't want to dig myself into any holes here, because this is really important. But it was also just about, like, getting this idea bank for, okay, what kind of features we might want to add on in the future, or, you know, are people thinking about our product this way, because this is the only thing that exists for them yet. And now I can just like, blow their minds with the new wave of doing something. So that's a little bit. I won't judge myself there. But I think that's pretty confident in what we built. Yeah, so what was really interesting from those conversations was the features that we hadn't built. And yet, most of the teachers really liked what we were offering. And I was also pretty, like non-offended. If it wasn't what they thought it should be. I understand like, there's so many different human beings, we're all so different, if this isn't how you visualize feedback, your workflow, whatever, it is totally fine with me. But there was some really golden ideas that came from early conversations, and also staying involved in Facebook groups, where people were talking about our product, saying, I learned a lot just from kind of being a fly on the wall. I think that can also be super useful. And one of the features that teachers kind of expected to be a part of our product was template sharing, feedback template sharing among teachers. Because this was something that existed in like a Google Sheet, and where people would just put in different templates that they had for different courses. So they kind of were hoping that would be a part of Feedback Panda's offering. And this was like, a no brainer, just with this stickiness of template database, if you can, up the whatever you're offering. Yeah, there was like a variable reward part of the business there, where people could change other templates. And so this was a really, really great feature that neither Arvid nor I had thought of that came from observing community, talking to teachers, getting their feedback about, like, how they might want it implemented, and building it quite quickly. I mean, like I said, the teacher thought Arvid was a wizard, and that's because he built up this feature, you know, in a month. This is like template database is what we call it.Michele Hansen 24:05 I love how that, you know, came from the conversations with the customers. And it wasn't something that you guys, you know, had ever really occurred to you. But then as you said, it was something that not only helped the teachers, but made your product stickier, and to what we were just saying, you know, that is something that had both an altruistic end result, and also one that helped your business and made your product stickier for them because it was more valuable to them.Danielle Simpson 24:32 Exactly.Michele Hansen 24:34 I want to fast forward a little bit. So you guys sold the company in 2019. And I guess can you can you take us back there? Had you guys you intended to sell the company?Danielle Simpson 24:54 I think it was always kind of an option in the back of our minds. But You know, we were two years in, we weren't really thinking about selling at that point. But we did build systems in the company that made sense to keep running it and, you know, made it efficient for us to stay a small team and keep running it. And this also happens to be what makes it very attractive to potential acquirers. So. So yeah, I think it was always an option for us, like the door was open pretty well, but but we didn't, we weren't looking for for acquires or anything like that, at this point.Michele Hansen 25:43 And, you know, given your close connection to the community, and how you had come out of the community, you know, I think people think about selling their company, and they probably think more, you know, about the paycheck that comes, but not so the other things that that come out of that. And I'm curious how if you can say more about how that impacted how you perceived your role in this community and to your users.Danielle Simpson 26:16 So I was -- both Arvid, and myself, had kind of become almost like rockstars in this ESL community, because this is a community of entrepreneurial teachers. So our success is also very inspirational to them and showing them what they could possibly do. A lot of teachers had Teachers Pay Teachers shops, a lot of people were referring a lot of other teachers to these platforms. So these are really cool group of teachers, very entrepreneurial. So when we sold after we sold it, I kind of, or I shouldn't say kind of -- I very much felt disconnected with this community suddenly, because I didn't feel like I could engage with them in the same way. I always was engaging with them as the representative from Feedback Panda. And I was careful. Going back to your previous question about whether we had thought about selling, I was always careful not to build too much of a brand around myself, as the founder of Feedback Panda, because I thought that would make it just more difficult to transition the company if I wasn't the CEO of the company anymore. So I was still hesitant of that. But it still happened, because it's just such a wonderful inspiring story to build to have a teacher, a fellow teacher built this company. So after we sold, I did feel like I lost that. That authentic way to engage with them, because I didn't really feel like, like I could, I didn't feel like one of them anymore.Michele Hansen 28:18 That makes a lot of sense. And it sounds like that was really hard for you.Danielle Simpson 28:23 Yeah, it was hard. Not the rock star part. But I think the hard part was so much of what we woke up and did every day, brought so much value to other people's lives. It was so gratifying. And it was very clear how we were helping people. You know, still people would, you know, two years and people would have just discovered Feedback Panda, go to a Facebook group or write to us directly on Intercom and just thank us. So, you know, teachers, we had wonderful, wonderful customers and very grateful customers. So I wasn't really prepared for how much I would mourn that, that just clear purpose. Just you know, how you're helping people in the world today. And it feels good. So after selling the company, even though I had read, you know, many the few blog posts, actually that there are for bootstrapped companies that have sold and, and reading about people's experiences through through the sale and afterward, you know, you kind of see, okay, yeah, there's gonna be maybe this dip. So I, I'll be prepared, because I know that's coming. This little dip where you're not really sure what to do. And of course, it helps if you know what you're going to do next. But even though I kind of knew it was coming, it's still hit pretty hard, I did fall into this melancholy, I would call it, it's just where you're not quite sure what you're going to do next. And that kind of purpose for what was so clear, you know, every day when you were waking up to do to do good in the world, it kind of went away. So. So that was that was strong. Last year, I would say.Colleen Schnettler 30:32 It's interesting, because I think what you have achieved is the goal of a lot of founders. But the more founders I talked to who have actually successfully exited, share similar feelings as yours is, it's they, they had so much purpose. And they exited in a way they wanted to, but it's not like life is suddenly perfect. It's it's your starting over. And what do you do now? And it's just really interesting to hear that, because there's so much, you know, rainbows and sunshine surrounding most people, most of these people's stories, like most people just want to tell you the good parts. And you don't hear a lot about, like everything else that comes with that.Danielle Simpson 31:14 And yeah, absolutely, I think there was also a lot of celebrations and feeling proud of ourselves. And, of course, there was, yeah, just a feeling of accomplishment. And, like, we had left something good in the world, even though we weren't, you know, steering the ship anymore. It, it was also it was kind of like this, where you kind of oscillate in between different states where you're just you can't believe this happened. And then you're very proud. And then you're like, Oh, my gosh, what am I going to do next? What, what am I going to do? Well, I'm not doing anything kind of feelings. But I still do, even though this really intense melancholy came, I still feel that it was the right decision. And I know we sold for the right decision for the right reasons as well. Because I, I even though I loved helping the teachers, it felt like that phase was done for me. Like I was ready to move on to something else. But I also just think I'd look back at other experiences I've had, whether it was coming off of a show run, you know, doing recitals or doing shows, and you have all of this excitement, and all of these positive emotions that are associated with this performance. And then after the performance is over, then you go through this like a lull, it's like you really go on the other side of the wave. And so it makes total sense now, looking, you know, hindsight. And I think the bigger and more gratifying our experiences are, maybe the more intense that wave on the bottom end is going to be, but it also comes back up again. And and that's what I keep feeling like now, I'm, I'm in the building stage, I'm in the Okay, I'm clearing out any blocks, anything that's gonna hold me back next time, all the things that I've learned from running Feedback Panda. And I'm, like, riding the wave up again. So sometimes I feel when we're in that low, we're scared that it might last forever. Or we're scared that it's just got us and it's gonna hold us down. But, yeah, I think there's work that we can do. And you know, we see the other side coming out.Michele Hansen 34:15 I just love the way you put that and how you put that in perspective of other experiences. Like it's really beautiful how you phrase that. And, you know, you're reminding me of something one of our previous guests, Alex Hillman said a couple of months ago, he tweeted out: "Almost every person I've ever met who sold their company needs therapy. That's not snark. I genuinely believe it should be part of the package. Money doesn't overwrite the grief that comes out of founder exits."Danielle Simpson 34:46 Absolutely. Where is this? I need to put that somewhere where I can remind myself. Michele Hansen 34:53 I'll l put a link to it in the show notes.Danielle Simpson 34:55 That's so wonderful. And I think I really appreciate hearing somebody else sharing that experience, because a lot of what keeps us down in that low point is also just shaming ourselves for having these negative feelings out of something so positive. So yeah, there's liberation and knowing that other people have been there before.Michele Hansen 35:22 Absolutely. And you talked about how you feel like you're on the other side of that curve now. And so I am curious, what's next? Danielle Simpson 35:33 I don't really know. That's something I'm getting more comfortable saying, Yeah, I I'm doing the work is what I say I'm doing the work, which means making a practice of things that are important to me. And clearing away this kind of negative voice that tells you that you're not enough or that what you want to work on isn't really worthy of your time. So unlike, in other years, I'm actually approaching this kind of work. Getting to know myself, getting creative. I'm approaching this like I would like, as a college course, or as starting a company, you know, diligently with routine with a schedule making that big priority for me, because I think in this past year, where I did feel lost, I kind of wanted to skip this phase, where you skip to the "I already have a product, I already know what I want to work on. Okay, let's get talking to people and start building something." But actually, the work that comes before that is really important. And that's kind of where the magic happens, where you can actually come up with whatever it's going to be, and I'm not sure really what that looks like, if it looks like another SaaS or it looks like putting out an album or you know, like, painting, I'm a terrible painter would never be painting. Whatever that could look like. I'm really saying that that has value, that doing that kind of work, getting to know myself. And what I want to do next is is a value and I'm not sure how long this phase will last. But I think it's an important one.Michele Hansen 37:48 I admire you for sitting in your discomfort and rather than running away from it, you're exploring it and seeing what it has to teach you and and in that discomfort. You're seeing so much confidence in you and how you talk about that and how this this period for you, even though you don't know what is what's going to come, what strikes me is those outcomes you talked about as possibilities. All of those are run by you. You have a founders perspective now. You you know that you can do it, you know that you can run a company or launch an album, which I'm sure is just as complicated and time consuming as launching a company is.Danielle Simpson 38:33 Oh, absolutely.Michele Hansen 38:35 You believe you can do it now. And you're you know, we talked about how Colleen for a long time was looking for a product to build. And I think we described that on more than one occasion as sort of wandering through the woods and Colleen finally emerging from the woods and having a product and but you're not wandering, you're just sort of sitting there meditating in the woods and just allowing yourself to be consumed by that. But knowing that when you leave, you will not just be walking out, you will be leading your own way out and building your own future and not being reliant on other people for that. And that's just incredible and so admirable.Danielle Simpson 39:19 Thank you. Thanks. I think that kind of stillness, I guess I could call it too. I like this idea of just meditating in the woods. It takes a lot of trust, to trust that there will be something if I put in the work, if I put in the hours, then something will emerge. And so yeah, I think it's about trust.Colleen Schnettler 39:53 Can I ask what does that actually look like? Like I don't know how to sit in discomfort very well. So like, what would you say? Like put in the act like what are you actually doing?Danielle Simpson 40:04 Um, so I have lots of quirky habits, that, that I think are quite meaningful and actually help. A lot of the work is like clearing away the BS, the BS, like voice in our head that tells us that we can't do what we want to do. And some people it's like, really strong and other people, you know, it's like very small, and so they don't really have to do that much work. But for me, it's like setting healthy routines. waking up every morning and I, I do this practice called Morning Pages. It's actually just like stream of consciousness writing. And that, okay, helps clear away. Negative voices that can cut sometimes inhibit you. And so I do that every morning, I have a yoga practice that is very important. I noticed when I don't do it, it's always when you haven't done the different practices that you start to notice. But then it's also about not waiting until you feel inspired to actually create something like, Oh, I have a great product idea. Let's start. I don't know, what's the first thing we do buy a domain or like, check Instagram to see if the handle is available. But actually, just like, I don't know, if you're a writer, just sit down in front of a computer and write something every day, if you want to make an album sit at your piano or whatever, in front of the computer, and like, just dedicate time to actually doing those things. And then I think, if you create that practice of already creating then, then you create the space to become inspired. Right? It's not waiting for the inspiration, and then I'll do the work. It's I'm going to, I'm going to do the work. And then maybe I'll be inspired in the middle of it. So I'm thinking about like a lot of creative work, like designing things like this, like don't wait for a job, just start building your portfolio, and then maybe a job will come from that or, you know, yeah, I think I think there's many different ways. It's just like the artistic ones that are coming to mind.Michele Hansen 42:39 Colleen, that reminds me of when you like decided that you were going to be serious about trying to build your own company and get out of consulting. You designated one day a week for your side projects. And you didn't necessarily know what those projects were going to be. But you're like Friday is my day. And that's the day that stuff is going to happen.Colleen Schnettler 43:01 Yeah, absolutely. And it made a huge difference. And, you know, this, this first product came out of something that I wanted myself, and I still don't know if it's gonna work out if anyone else wants it. But I think to your point, Danielle, like, I did something and that was better. I'm someone who's gets stuck reading and reading about how to do things like I just read about how to do them. But sometimes it's hard for me to pull out from like just reading to actually doing so once I dedicated more time to just doing and tried to set aside some of my perfectionism tendencies. I made a lot more progress. Danielle SimpsonAbsolutely. Colleen SchnettlerWhat you said about like self and self worth really touched a chord in me I have a post it I keep on my desk that says everything you want is on the other side of fear. And like, I just really struggle with like letting go of the BS, like you were just saying, and it's just weird. Like, sometimes I think for me my inability to get out of my own way. So I love this this concept of like making space and kind of sitting in that discomfort to sort it out.Danielle Simpson 44:09 I love that. That's a great Post It, and it's nice if you have these little things that you can be helpful reminders to keep them close, keep them in a space where they remind you or inspire you. Michele Hansen 44:27 You know what you said about the post it note? Was it everything you want is on the other side of fear is that right? Colleen Schnettler 44:33 That's right. That's what I wrote. Michele Hansen 44:34 I love that I think there's there's people have so much fear I have so much fear and and you know to what Danielle is doing in such an amazing way of sitting with the discomfort and allowing it to be there. I think if we allow the fear to be there, that what we've built isn't good enough or that a competitor is just going to come in and crush us and all of this will be for nothing or whatever that is, we have to face it rather than because if we run from it we we haven't built anything. Colleen SchnettlerI love that, it's such a hard but important lesson to learn.Michele HansenDanielle, it was so amazing having you with us today. If people want to hear more about the story of Feedback Panda, your partner, Arvid Kahl wrote a book called Zero to Sold. He's also writing a new book called Audience First. But you are on Twitter as well. And we will put a link in the show notes to your Twitter account.Danielle Simpson 45:34 Awesome. Yeah, I'm at SimpsonDaniK, da and IK on Twitter, and Instagram. Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a privilege and a pleasure to speak with you both.Colleen Schnettler 45:47 That's gonna wrap up this week's episode of the Software Social podcast. If you enjoyed our podcast, we would love it if you would leave us a review. You can also find us on Twitter at @softwaresocpod.
What to Work On Next
Colleen Schnettler 0:00 This episode of Software Social is sponsored by Balsamiq, makers of Balsamiq Wireframes, everyone's favorite low-fidelity wireframing tool. Balsamiq is designed for founders who have great ideas for their apps, but can't afford to hire a full-time UX designer. Balsamiq is as easy as using Keynote. Drag and drop elements on the page and you'll have the screens for your app designed in no time. You can then review your designs with a developer or prospective clients, before writing any code.Because they're already well known in our community, Balsamiq have decided to donate their airtime to YOU, listeners of this show, starting with the next episode.If you want a promo code for Balsamiq, visit balsamiq.com/go/software-social/Michele Hansen 0:43 So as you may have just noticed, we have a sponsor now. So exciting. I mean, we, even we so we got we got reached out to you by balsalmic in October, to our official podcast email address, which I actually never checked, because I didn't expect anyone to email us and I found this email sitting there in December. And I was like, Oh my God.Colleen Schnettler 1:10 That's funny. I had no idea that they they did that. Yeah, I've never checked our email address either.Michele Hansen 1:15 We check it now.Colleen Schnettler 1:17 Yeah, it's really it. You know what I'm really happy it was balsamic because I do use them. And I just think it's really cool to have a sponsor. Although now my podcast about my product is making more money than my product.Michele Hansen 1:29 You'll get there. It's okay. I don'tColleen Schnettler 1:32 get there. I did have one more person sign up. stripe paid me $10 I know $10 I went That's awesome. Wait.Michele Hansen 1:42 We straight paid you $10? Is that the first money you've gotten for it? Yes, ma'am.Colleen Schnettler 1:47 It sure is.Unknown Speaker 1:48 That's a huge moment. Oh my gosh,Colleen Schnettler 1:50 it is a huge moment. It's It's exciting.Michele Hansen 1:54 I wish you could tape $1 bill to your terminal likeColleen Schnettler 2:00 I should ask like, can you like send me like $1 bill from this? tape it up on my wall.Michele Hansen 2:07 So this is really exciting. We're really excited to have a sponsor. But you know, this reminds me of something else, which is, it's really hard times right now in the world. Like there's, there's just no getting past that. And if you're listening to this show, you're probably interested in running a bootstrap company, or you're trying to start a side project yourself. And, and I, and I just want to say for a second how, like, yes, this is amazing. And we just got a sponsor. But I also don't want to add to this perception that sort of that I pick up sometimes it's sort of everybody else is doing well, except for oneself. Right? Like, I feel like, you know, on Twitter and everywhere else where the, the community kind of congregates. Like, we tend to share positive things more than we do. things we're struggling with. Right? Yeah. And and I've noticed in a couple of smaller communities I'm in and sort of private places. This this past couple weeks that I've seen more people saying like, Wow, it feels like everybody's killing it except for me.Colleen Schnettler 3:16 Yeah, I agree. I think there, there's so much when we share publicly, you know, we're protecting ourselves, and we're protecting our ego. And so we share the good things, and we don't share the challenging things. And it isn't really challenging time. And, and I agree with you, it's important to remember that things are hard. And everyone's coping with the situation differently. Like, just three days ago, I was lamenting how much I missed my full time job because it was so low stress, like it was so much easier than this. And, and you know, some of my friends were able to give me a pep talk. But I was just like, this is a terrible idea. I'm wasting my time. So So I think those emotional highs and lows are, are normal. And I think they're exacerbated right now because of external stresses.Michele Hansen 4:01 Absolutely. And, and so I just kind of want to say that, like, if you're finding yourself, not able to focus and are feeling like you're spinning your wheels and things aren't working, like that's okay. And you're okay. And you will be okay. And also at the same time that if you find yourself working compulsively and unable to stop working to the point of, you know, working instead of being your friends and family or things like like like that is also a trauma response in the same way that not being able to do anything is as well. And we all respond to trauma and stressors differently. And no matter how you're reacting, you're okay. And other people aren't sharing the full story of what's going on in their life. So it's not just you that struggling. Other people are too but this is not a current events podcast. It's not a mental health podcast. We're not gonna go into that too much more. But I did just want to make a note of that since I mean, like the last few weeks have been just really hard. But you do have good news, right? amidst all of this, there are somehow good things happening to which is also just mentally confusing.Colleen Schnettler 5:21 Yes, so I, you know, I just did mention that emotional swing I had this week, I was like, this was a terrible idea. But, um, things my signups have been pretty steady. And I did get one more customer who has signed up, put a credit card down outside of Heroku. So that makes four or five now. And I have 89 Heroku users. So anticipate being ready to start charging in the Heroku marketplace in a couple weeks. Since I'm averaging. so far. It's been about Yeah, it's pretty exciting. Like I think we're super excited. So of those 89 people or teams, I 40 have actually uploaded files. So for me, what makes it sticky is using it right. So considering how easy it is to sign up, I'm not upset. I feel like that's actually a pretty good number. I'm trying to take each week and focus on one technical thing and one marketing thing.Unknown Speaker 6:18 SoColleen Schnettler 6:20 because I'm just really struggling with like, I feel like we talked about this every week now that I've launched something is how to prioritize my time, I have to actually figure out what to charge because I'm going to be charging people. Hopefully in two weeks,Michele Hansen 6:31 you said you had to the stripe signups for those people who added their credit cards, but they don't have they haven't incurred a charge yet.Colleen Schnettler 6:38 No, they had I mean, it's $10. But some one of my friends recommended I changed, I changed the price significantly. His argument was that I'm not really a commodity, I'm acting like a commodity when I talk to you when I think of it in my head. But I'm not really a commodity, because I'm not just providing storage, I'm providing all of this architecture, around storage to help you deal with your files. Like I'm not just reselling AWS buckets, there is someone who does this, by the way. It's you know, and his point was my closest competitor is charging $89. So I should have he his suggestion was just charge 75% of that. Interesting. Yeah, it was an interesting thing. I think that I mean, and you know, I don't know a lot about pricing, but what i what i have heard, and what I've read is that, you know, it's probably easy, if I start out way too high, I can always come down. But if I start out way too low, and I realize I'm I'm incurring a lot more charges than I realize it's going to be harder, not impossible, but it's going to be harder to scale up. So I just need a starting point. And you know, I think I can adjust it. So I kind of been thinking about how I want to do that. Yeah, and I got to sort that out.Michele Hansen 7:51 So I was think about this the other day, you said you only have one close competitor, and they they don't even really do like fully do the same things that you do.Colleen Schnettler 8:04 Well, since this is this is becoming a, this is this thing I am building is becoming different than what I had intended. And I thought of you because I keep explaining myself by saying, Well, I didn't intend for people to use it with images, I intended them. You know, I intended for them to use it with, you know, all the other files on the internet. But what I have learned from the 40 people that are actually using it is people are predominantly using it with images. So I am slowly rebuilding this, this other service that a lot of rails developers use is called cloudinary. And they're a great company, but they provide this like huge architecture ecosystem, that's just kind of a lot to figure out. If you just want you know, minimal, you know, if you just if you just need a couple files here and there, like using their services, kind of exhausting. But I'm slowly it feels like I'm slowly rebuilding their service, because what I'm finding is people are using it for images. So I just I think and that makes me a little nervous because I'm not trying to compete with you know, this company that is $60 billion a year or something, maybe it's million, a lot of a lot of dollars a year in business. So I don't know. Okay, now I'm kind of off topic, but but I've been trying to think about, like, what who is my market? Who am I trying to serve here? Because I am more and more approaching a similar, you know, a similar service to what they offer. So like, how do I distinguish myself from them? And who can I serve that they are not serving? Like I said, they're predominantly as I understand, like, they hit a lot of rails developers. So you know, maybe once I move to other marketplaces, I'll have more opportunity. And maybe this is all a terrible idea. It's not a terrible idea. This is how I got to like, Oh, this was a terrible idea.Michele Hansen 9:52 Why did I do this? That's a perfectly normal thought to have many, many times. Like, I mean, that's a thought I have pretty much Every time I, when I go hiking, and then it you know, afterwards I'm like always, like, that was so great, but like, you know, it's getting dark and you still have three miles to go and you're like, why did I think this was a good idea? That's what building a product is like. So these people who are signing up with you, you said that cloudinary is also focusing on rails developers, these rails developers are signing up with you instead, have you been able to, like grok from them? Why they are signing up with you and not cloudinary?Colleen Schnettler 10:36 I have not. And I need to figure that out. That is actually not you know, now that you say that, that is such an obvious thing to try and figure out my, okay, I know I talk a lot on the show, but my hypothesis, and you're always like, Go ask the customer stuff.Michele Hansen 10:50 Yeah, it's okay to have hypotheses, I have them all the time, but you have to go test them. That's it's the first step in the process.Colleen Schnettler 10:56 So when I think back to why I wanted to build this, as opposed to using cloudinary, it was because there are two things and this may have even changed. But cloudberries focus is not on their upload widget. As far as I can tell, their focus is more on on, you know, the whole ecosystem surrounding handling your images, but not really how you get your images into the store. So they have a widget, but the UI, I think the UI of it is really icky. icky, that's a terrible word. I think the UI that is it's not what I wanted, and the setup, just like I mean, they must have 1000 pages of documentation, because they provide this amazing set of features, but just trying to I set it up on this client's website. And you know, just the setup took hours. So my hypothesis, which I have to test is that people sign up with me, because of the five minutes setup, they set it up, they don't have to do anything else, it is super fast. So if I think of how I can compete with them, I got to pick a different market. It's easy, and it's simple, I don't want to offer 5000 features like they have right like I want to keep my feature set tight. And I want to you know, I also they don't they at least they didn't allow you to have multiple widgets on a page and the product I was working on needed, like multiple widgets on a page. So so there's like little things like that, but I think distinguish, but I think the biggest factor is the ease of setup.Michele Hansen 12:23 And so you mentioned they're focusing on like a tight set of features. And on, you know, eight, it sounds like you really want to focus on on a type of customer that is not very well served by them. And, and that's such a critical thing to figure out. Because, you know, if you were to go and just like look at their site, and literally just build a copy of their service, that would probably be a failure, because you're not building the insights of why people don't just use them why they aren't willing to go through that process and put up with that price for it. And so and so I'm curious, like, like, do you feel like you have gotten more commonalities in what people are telling you about why they're using the service. Last time we talked, you had kind of all these different things, and you had people from different functions with with different purposes, and some people within companies and and some people with consultants and front end developers and back end like and like this whole like mix of people. And I'm curious if you've started to hear similarities in your conversations with customers,Colleen Schnettler 13:37 in terms of their industries, or in terms of what they're doingMichele Hansen 13:40 in terms of the activity that they're trying to do. So like putting this in those the jobs to be done terms, which very much looks at rather than looking at customers by function or industry and you know, looking at things like market size, and all that kind of thing. You instead look at customers by process similarities and people who are trying to accomplish similar things or who are going through similar sets of steps in order to reach their end points. And so I'm curious if you've seen any similarities in those steps? Well, IColleen Schnettler 14:13 think instalment, this is not exactly what you mean, what I'm seeing, which again, I didn't really anticipate, I probably should have though was most people are using it for images, and they're using some people the image collection is a primary goal of the service and the other like it's a secondary goal.Michele Hansen 14:33 I think you need to be a little more gentle with yourself and forgiving that you did not first see this coming. I think that's totally normal. And that means that you're that means you're learning and that's valuable. And you know, I think this sometimes there's this perception and sometimes this is how products are built that people just gather in a conference room and decide everything it needs to do and that's everything the customer is going to want and You know, then you spend a year and a half building it. And that's it. But I think that you're learning, right like that, that's, that's valuable. You took what you were struggling with. And now you're learning what other people need to do this with. And so that's, that's exciting. It's a weird feeling. But that's totally okay, that you're learning that people are using it for something else than you had originally pictured.Colleen Schnettler 15:26 And what I'm seeing too, and I think there's, like, have a mental block here, too, is, this product is not going to be particularly unique, right? It's not like, like, going to be some cool new hotness that no one has thought of, it's gonna be another like way to handle files. That's okay.Michele Hansen 15:40 That's a common thing. Oh, it's just developers needs to do all the time. And if you can save them from wading through 1000s of pages of documentation, and let them do it in five minutes. People appreciate that. But IUnknown Speaker 15:54 want to be special. Michelle?Michele Hansen 15:56 Look, I'm not doing a cloud AI internet of things take over the world service here either. Okay. Like, not all of us can take over the world. And quite frankly, many of us don't want to, it's perfectly okay to have a boring business that a business will reliably pay for every month and have it be something that gets you blank stares at cocktail parties, or cocktails, or whatever it is we have now. Right? It's okay to be boring.Colleen Schnettler 16:32 Yeah, and I think so I think for me, you know, I think for me, it's really with this product, if I'm going to make this work, because there as I get more and more into the image space, there are more and more competitors. And so I think if I'm going to make this work, I have to there's some things I can do. But I have to find the right audience. And I don't know who that's gonna be yet, but I think that's gonna be some trial and error.Michele Hansen 16:59 Keep talking to people, you have people coming to you, which is amazing.Colleen Schnettler 17:05 Yeah, it's good. And I have a couple, like just a handful of people who are really into it. And we're like, constantly chatting with me about feature requests. And, and so those people are fun. I really enjoy that back and forth of how they're using it and how it's helpful for them. And things like that.Michele Hansen 17:21 So you said earlier that you have about 80 users right now is that 80 total signups or 80, people who are actively using it. So I know for Heroku, there's like this rule that you have to have, you have 100 100 people who are actively using it, in order to be allowed out of the, you know, the little protective garden and be able to sell it.Colleen Schnettler 17:47 So it's 89. And so I only have to get 11 more people. But thoseMichele Hansen 17:51 are all those people are actively using it, or they're installed or what wouldColleen Schnettler 17:56 they have installed it, they have gone through the processMichele Hansen 17:58 of installing metric that Heroku cares about. Right, okay.Colleen Schnettler 18:06 And so this other thing, so I spent a lot of time this week. So I think we talked about a while ago, when someone installs it, they have to make it to the second step, single sign on in order to get like all the good stuff. And I spent a lot of time this week wrapping up the Heroku platform partner platforms API, because using that API, I can actually get their email address before they hit single sign on. But it's like, it takes like four API calls. It's ridiculous. But the cool thing I discovered when I was playing around with this API, I can also get their website. Oh, so tell. Yeah, so tell me if this is cool or creepy. So I was thinking of like, one of the things I should do is I could do my goal will be like maybe five to 10 people a week, I'll like hit the API, I'll get their website. And I'll actually like, check out their website, see how they're using it, and then send them a personalized email about like, Hey, I saw you're using it this way. And, you know, I was, you know, as, like details. Is that awesome? I think that's brilliant. Is that really?Michele Hansen 19:08 Yeah, I think so. Like, you know, if somebody is using a corporate email address, and it's the, that's the website, where they're using it,Colleen Schnettler 19:16 it's nothing like secret like this is aMichele Hansen 19:18 web I think that's cool. Like, you know, I mean, being like, hey, like, I checked out your site, like I would love to hear more about how this fits into your process and what you're trying to accomplish.Colleen Schnettler 19:28 So when I target those people, should I target the P i? You tell me what you think that I'll be back? Should I target the people who are already actively using it? Or should I target the people who are not actively using it? I mean, what do you think? Or just go through them all?Michele Hansen 19:43 I think you could do both like and you know, there's the the already signed up and using it email could be something along the lines of, Hey, I noticed you've, you know, you started using this service. I would love to hear about what you're working on and how simple file upload fits into Your process and what your overall project look looks like. And then the people who are getting started, and I noticed you just signed up, I love to hear more about what you're planning to use it for, and why you've chosen to use this over alternatives or what other alternatives you're considering to try to do whatever it is you're trying to do. Because I think that question of why are people choosing you over alternatives will tell you so much about your audience and what your product should focus on?Colleen Schnettler 20:30 I'm a little afraid if I asked them, they're gonna ditch me and go pick someone else.Michele Hansen 20:35 That's okay. I mean, that's it, that's it,Colleen Schnettler 20:37 they're gonna be like, Oh, I didn't even know about this other service. I'm out of here.Michele Hansen 20:41 You know, I mean, that's, you know, that's the the fear of you, you go to the prom, and your date sees everyone else there. And it's like, why the hell am I with you. And I think as most of us can attest, that doesn't actually happen. You know, people might be doing a, you know, ai process to evaluate vendors. And if they're doing that, and they'll tell you that, and they'll tell you, which other vendors they're looking at, and how they're comparing them. That is a goldmine of information. Like, that's really valuable, like the reasons why they choose somebody else, like, the thing is, is somebody says, Well, we want with this other service, because they do X, Y, and Z, and you don't do that, that could, like with that information, you have a choice with what you do with that, you can either decide to go copy those features, or you can decide, you know what, this doesn't sound like a customer. That's right for me, like, it sounds like they're doing trying to do something that for whatever reason, is not something that's within your your wheelhouse, or, you know, the, you know, if they tell you that they went with another provider, because they're SOC two compliant, then that's not like, that's like, okay, that I wasn't going to get that customer anyway. But if they tell you, it's because of some simple difference in the feature, then that's something that's very actionable. You know, unfortunately, for you right now, there are, you know, product based reasons why people, especially like teams, and, you know, operational people within a company will choose a product. And then there are also, you know, procurement and operational reasons why they will choose something else that have little to do with the actual features of the product. And I think it's really critical to try to distinguish between those, because some of them are actionable for you, at the moment, and some of them may not be and are just kind of things to just file away for later. But getting some detail on that can be really helpful.Colleen Schnettler 22:40 Yeah, I mean, more information, I think, at this stage is, is good, yes, as muchMichele Hansen 22:45 information you can get from your customers like, and that's why it's so key to get them on the phone and get them comfortable talking to you. Because people will be more open. Talking on the phone. And I specifically say talking on the phone, even though it may be over zoom, because if you can, when you're doing the calls with customers, schedule them as a call, not as a video chat. First of all, most people are so tired of video chat at this point. But I find that people are more willing to be open with you when you're like disembodied voice and they can't see your face, then they then they are in video. Now there are some cases where you know, you need to walk through something with someone or you need to see their screen or, which is also really helpful. When I when I'm scheduling things, I purposefully mentioned that it's going to be audio only. And I find you know if you can get your customer rambling about what they're trying to do, like that's a dream scenario, like, you know, yeah, get as much information as you can and and take notes and find some way to make that information usable in the future, even if it's just throwing it into a Google Doc. So you can control a search it later on for keywords.Colleen Schnettler 24:01 Okay, yeah, that's, that's a great idea. So, yeah, so I'm really just trying to prioritize what to do next. I'm trying to do one marketing and one technical task a week. But I'm finding like, especially in this early stage, there's a lot of technical work like I was having the server timeout issues because of the way I'm processing thumbnails. So I had to deal with that this week.Michele Hansen 24:21 There's always technical work. I don'tColleen Schnettler 24:23 want to get too sucked into that to the point where I forget that I need people to sign up. Right. So that's always the balancing act. I think as developers too, you're so tempted to work on all the technical things and just push the marketing things aside. And when I looked at my day, when I when I looked at my week to review for this podcast, it was mostly technical and like one tiny marketing thing. So next week, I want to hopefully flip that a little bit and do more marketing. I am trying to decide like kind of what I should do next. I'm thinking more documentation. I was thinking Maybe I shouldn't make them put a credit card in maybe for the for to sign up. I was thinking, what else was I thinking? I was thinking I should go on another marketplace, like I'm all over the place with what to do next. Any suggestions?Michele Hansen 25:15 Have you had people bring problems or issues to you that could be solved by more documentation?Colleen Schnettler 25:22 No, but you can't really access the good documentation until you have signed up. So I Hi, I am someone myself, before I sign up for something, I want to read all your documentation, because I want to know if it's gonna work for me, before I go through the signup process. So on my main website, I don't have any documentation, you have to actually sign up and go on to your customized dashboard to get like the good the good information.Michele Hansen 25:48 Yeah, I'm looking at this right now. And I'm seeing that and our documentation page is consistently one of our top entry pages.Colleen Schnettler 25:57 Okay, I think that should probably I think, again, I know, we talked about this when I did documentation last time, but you know, you tend to kind of draw you I tend to kind of drag my feet on it because it feels monotonous. But I added this feature for someone and I'm not even documenting it anywhere. So no one else can use. It sounds like that's no good. So I think for this week, like my goal will be to shore up some documentation.Michele Hansen 26:21 Yeah, I think that's great. And you the other things you talked about around not reclaiming your credit card or changing the pricing level. Those are really important things big, big things that that. I mean, people will test all the time. It sounds like this documentation thing is something very concrete, that you can get out there easily. And where you're saying that it's more difficult to gear yourself up for doing marketing work. I think that makes a lot of sense to start there. Because it feels like something you can easily like check off the list and it feels done.Colleen Schnettler 27:01 Yes. And it's not that I don't like the marketing work. I think what I really want to learn through this process is how to do market like part of this, you know, a lot of people who in you know, while while I was getting my pep talks, a lot of people mentioned that maybe this isn't a great idea. But most people who are successful eventually, it's because their emotion. So for me personally, being in motion is better than sitting around reading about other people being absolutely, yeah, yeah. So the marketing stuff I do want to learn, but I've gotta be honest, like, it's all new to me. And I'm just kind of tired.Unknown Speaker 27:39 Yeah.Michele Hansen 27:40 Tired learning, like so as we talked about, like earlier, when the world is going to hell in a handbasket. It's hard to, to focus on like growing and learning and finding the mental space for that when things are not stable is very difficult. And, you know, I find it tough, sometimes you just need to focus on things that are tasks and like that you can just bang out tasks, like that's what I find a lot of myself doing, right, because like, like I had to plan some very deep work projects for the next couple of months. And because of locked down in school closures, I've I've had to shelve all of those. And so I'm just doing those small task type things. But that's still productive work. It's you know, the the technical work you're doing is still helpful. As long as you're not kind of going down. Wild Goose chases of things that are very tangental to what you're trying to do.Colleen Schnettler 28:49 Yeah, yeah. And that's why I think the documentation this week is a great goal for me, because it is very, very needed and very kind of easy, you know, it'll take a chunk of time, but I know how to do it, I can just do it and check it off. And see if that moves the needle on signups.Michele Hansen 29:07 It'll take some time to show but that's really it's a really interesting insight that you like noticing your own behavior when you are looking at a service yourself and making mental notes of Okay, what am I doing here? What are the different things that I'm considering? What are the different behaviors I'm doing like the firt? You know, the first thing I'm going to look at the documentation. And then using that to improve your own product, like being able to sort of sit on your own shoulder and observe yourself and then use that information for your own product is a really valuable mind shift.Colleen Schnettler 29:44 Yeah, totally.Michele Hansen 29:46 That's gonna wrap up this week of software social will talk to you next week.
Wading Through Feature Requests
Michele Hansen 0:00 So Colleen, you launched your new SaaS -- actually your first SaaS -- about a month ago, Simple File Upload. And you launched it first on the Heroku marketplace. But you also launched it off of the Heroku marketplace so that people who are not on Heroku can use it as well. And I was thinking about this. And I'm really curious if anyone has signed up off of Heroku, and how that's gone?Colleen Schnettler 0:30 Yes. So I got the most wonderful surprise yesterday, when I actually checked my subscriptions and saw that there were three people who have actually put their credit card. Michele Hansen Oh, my gosh! Colleen Schnettler I know, super exciting. The funny thing is, as I think I've mentioned before, Heroku requires you to get 100 users before you can charge. So I have been so focused on getting that 100 user number. I hadn't even been checking my Stripe subscriptions. So I logged on the other day. And I have it in my admin dashboard. But I literally never check it. And I saw like three subscriptions. And I was like, That can't be right. Michele Hansen 1:09 So are these people paying you or they just added their credit cards to Stripe?Colleen Schnettler 1:14 They've added their credit cards to Stripe, I am currently offering a free 30 day trial. And so they may cancel one of the people has already reached out to me, and we've had a pretty in depth email conversation about her needs. So I anticipate she'll stick around. But I have not actually heard from the other two people yet. So we'll see. I don't know.Michele Hansen 1:34 Tell me more about this email exchange you had.Colleen Schnettler 1:37 Yeah. So based on our conversation last week, I significantly changed the email, I changed, I got rid of all the graphics, I tried to be more concise and what I was asking and give a little more context. And you were right people like when you have more context, I think. And so I've been hearing back from people. So I've actually been spending a good part of this week, like handling email stuff and talking to people and listening to their feature requests. But there's one person who actually put her credit card in, you know, she actually shared with me her application, and there was an error. It was like a really subtle bug in the React component. And it actually worked with the bug, like it still worked most of the time. But she was running into an issue where it was not working consistently. So I was able to troubleshoot that and get that fixed. And so you know, we've kind of had had a dialogue going, it's been very exciting. Michele Hansen 2:34 It sounds like you've been able to build a rapport and a little bit of a relationship with her.Colleen Schnettler 2:40 I'd like to think so. I'd like to think so every time someone gets beat, every time someone emails me, I get super excited. So I'm still at that phase where I'm like, tell me about your thing. Like what's going on? What are you working on?Michele Hansen 2:54 I'm still in that phase. Like, honestly, I mean, anytime someone replies back to one of my feedback emails, so I have them going out with after a couple of days, the first time we charge someone, and I have different emails that go out based on, you know, different plans, they're on and whatnot. But every time somebody replies to one of those, I'm always like, Oh my god, somebody replied, like, this is so exciting. And then they're giving me this feedback. And I always learn things about industries that I had just, I never even realized existed like, and they're doing things I didn't even realize was happening. And then, like, somehow we're part of that process. And it feels so magical and exciting. And I feel so you know, like privileged that they've let me into their little world and told me all about how they're, for example, need to get timezone stamped reports back from tractors and how we make that easier for them. And I'm just like, yes, this is so cool. Like I'm, I think I'm just a huge business nerd. But and and i love i think that'sColleen Schnettler 3:59 awesome learning about business.Michele Hansen 4:01 So you know that that phase has, you know, been going for? Oh, wow, seven years now. For me.Colleen Schnettler 4:10 Wow. Yeah.Michele Hansen 4:11 Oh, wow. Geocodio turns seven this month. So, so tell me tell me more about about what you talk to.Colleen Schnettler 4:17 Ya. So it's been great. Like I said, I changed an email copy. And some people like reached out to me on Twitter. I love I love hearing from people. Thank you. I love ideas and shared with me the email copy they use. And like I said, so people started engaging. And I got a lot of good feedback. I got one person who was like really excited, who was like, Oh my gosh, Heroku has a file system, you know, was really troublesome. And so this is just what I needed. I got a lot of feature requests, which is something we'll talk about in a minute. I got one guy who was like, Oh my gosh, thank you so much for emailing me. Okay. So it was really fun. It's still just a handful of people, right? But I love it. Like I love hearing from people. And some of them, like I said, are comfortable sharing what they're working on, which has been cool, too. And there have been a lot of suggestions for utilizing the uploader in a way I did not anticipate. Ooh, so yeah, so this is like, the next thing. And I know I remember months ago, you said something about every new feature request should sit out in the rain on the porch for three days.Michele Hansen 5:27 Yes, I think that is taken from one of the early Basecamp books getting real, badly adjusted adjacent free, yeah, that new features should have to stand on the porch in the rain for three days before you let them in.Colleen Schnettler 5:44 And so I appreciate that. But at the same time, I feel like that's more appropriate for mature products. This is just a little baby product. And I'm trying to turn it into something amazing. And I think so. So I mean, when you're only talking to eight to 10 people, I think that every feature request, you know, I should really consider now I understand, like I was preparing for this podcast, I tried to look back at what I did this week, because I had, I didn't really do many things on the list of things I wanted to do. And it's because I spent so much time like doing these emails and talking to people and looking into their feature requests. And so I don't want to just throw them out there as quickly as possible. But I do think the product really has space to grow. And I love hearing what people are asking, and some of them are not too hard, like I can do, but I don't know, it's just it's just a struggle of like balancing all that, like do I impure, I have active people. And again, it's like a people who are talking to me. And so when they request something, if it's within my ability, and I think it's going to make the product better, because then other people might want that same feature. I want to do it. But of course, I'm balancing that with trying to do marketing and trying to do documentation, which I really need to do more documentation. So it's just like the challenge of balancing Oh, and you know, my paid work, balancing all of that.Michele Hansen 7:13 So it sounds like you're balancing a lot right now. And I'm curious with all of those feature requests coming in? are you saving them like, like, how are you sort of digesting those feature requests? And, you know, potentially saving that information for later or categorizing order? Or are you not doingColleen Schnettler 7:36 sure I am I you know, this is something else that's that's challenging is just how to keep track of all this. So like, you launch your product. And then there's all of this tooling you need around the product, which is like a whole nother thing. It's just, there's so much stuff, like, I just want to focus on my product. Yeah, I just have a spreadsheet, and I'm just putting the person's name, email feature request. And like, if I think it's a good idea what my timeline for considering it is, I mean, they're all really good requests, like all things I would like to do eventually. Some of them are like bigger chunks than others. But for example, one thing I don't support that I want to support in the future is multiple file uploading. So one of the people, one of the customers is doing that with the sim with the single uploader. And just kind of basically what happens is you drop a file into the uploader, and then he's got, like a grid view of all the files you've dropped. So he has found a creative way to take my single file uploader and make it a multi file uploader. But I default show you the preview of the file after you upload it. So he would like me to not default show you the preview, he just wants it to go away. So that seems like a really good idea. Because then you can kind of use it as a multi file uploader, even though it's a single file uploader, because every time you drop a new file, I still upload the file, I just don't have like the UI for multiple file upload errors. So that's one. Another one is smaller sized images, which I bring up every week, because my thing, right, but that's a lot more work because I'm gonna have to write an external API that they can, they can hit, and I'm gonna have to figure out how to authenticate them. And I'm gonna have to figure out how to charge them for that. So that one's kind of like, definitely something I want to do eventually, but I think that's a big one. So an another person didn't even want an upload, or he just wants to storage, which I thought was the first request to address that. Yes. They're all over the place. So right like I'm like, these are all great ideas. I would like to be able to help all these people achieve their goals, but they're all different.Michele Hansen 9:44 So when they bring these feature requests to you, are you able to get to the level of asking about what their processes and like what the broader context they're in that you know, helps you understand where this feature request comes from and, and how that fits in with what they're trying to do. So then you can make parallels to what other people are trying to do, like see if they're in similar process patterns?Colleen Schnettler 10:14 Yes. So I have a little bit I haven't gotten anyone on a call yet, but I have like, kind of ask those leading questions. And, yeah, so I don't know, they're not all. So I did ask like anyone who is comfortable to actually share the application with me, a lot of them are in the beginning stages, which makes sense because it makes more sense to me. And in the in the beginning, as opposed to when you already have something set up. So a lot of them are in the beginning stages. And of this group of people, there were two that are working that are like doing this at work. And one person who's doing it as a hobbyist. And like, the smaller file sizes is because the one person is having is allowing the users to download files, which I hadn't even really thought I don't you know, if I don't do it like that I hadn't really thought about like allowing your users to download files, which is not something I hadn't really thought about. So that's like, a good point. And then the multiple file uploader. Like I knew that was an issue, because I have a event site that I want to I want to allow multiple file uploading. So I don't know, am I answering your question? I feel like I'm rambling a little bit.Michele Hansen 11:28 It sounds like you're figuring things out. You know, last week, we were talking about how you had some hunches about different things that might be going on, about, you know, hobbyists, or whatever. You just told me, okay, you know, this person was a hobbyist and these people were doing it at work. And I, what I think is really interesting is you said people are bringing you on at the very beginning of a project. And that sounds like a critical insight to me.Colleen Schnettler 11:57 Yeah, and that's really good. And you know why that's such a great insight, Michele, that is such a great insight. Because when I first launched this, one of the things I was really concerned about was moving people from their existing storage solution to my storage solution. And I was like, Oh, I'm gonna have to write, like, all these scripts to help people move and, and, as I see right now, at least for the people who are talking to me, that's not really something I need to spend time on right now. I need to focus, I think I need to focus on these people in the beginning stages of their product. One person, you know, wasn't a developer. Well, he was kind of a developer, but like, he wasn't, you know, he was, and, and I thought that was relevant. Cuz he was like, this is great, because I have been asked to implement this thing at work. This system, it's like a database system where they store stuff. And I'm not really a developer. So this was, you know, really easy, because I didn't have to figure out all the AWS stuff, those are the people I'm targeting, like, in my head, that's always what who This product has been designed for. You love the no code crowd. I do I love and I really, okay, so I really want to build something with no code, excuse me, I really want to build something with no code. I just feel like, oh, man, like, I love everybody. Like, don't get me wrong, but I just feel like the opportunities going forward are in no code. I feel like it's such, like, everyone is going to be starting a website and starting a business, I think in the next 10 years, like, I expect my personal trainer to be selling stuff online in like, a couple years. And so I feel like getting a now is is the time to get in. And so I still on my list of things to do is still like build something with no code to get involved in the community to learn more about it. I just think their options are so limited, as far as I can tell, like, the they're the main players in that space charge, like 100 bucks a month. And so, yeah, I feel like there's a lot of opportunity in the no code space.Michele Hansen 13:57 I think it's worth, you know, you noticing how much enthusiasm and sort of natural empathy you have for this group. You know, I mean, even in your own looking at your own work, you've done a lot on you know, helping people learn to code and and some previous businesses we had talked about that didn't really work out were around, you know, like teaching stay at home mothers how to code or, or like other sorts of things that help people build things. And I see that thread running through your interest here. And your product will probably have many different audiences. But I think it's okay to, you know, love one a little bit more than others, especially if it really motivates you, right, because there's going to be times when you're, you feel mired and bugs and knowing that you can reach out to one of those customers or somebody in that group and and Just get that motivation and get that reminder of Oh, I'm helping them do something that they literally could not do before, period. That's really rewarding. And and, you know, the, you know, I think the secret of staying motivated is to talk to people and hear how you're helping them. And it sounds like you get a lot of that from the no code crowd.Colleen Schnettler 15:26 Yeah, I haven't thought about it like that before. But I think maybe that is one of the reasons I'm so interested in this particular space is because, yeah, like a personal passion of mine is helping people get into flexible remote work. And if they can start a business, you know, if they can start a business with web flow, and they can use my thing, then that's extra motivating for me. So tell me what has been going on with you this week.Michele Hansen 15:59 So despite, you know, Denmark going into lockdown, again, in schools closing and the coup, I somehow managed to read in the jobs to be done book. Colleen Schnettler 16:10 Oh, nice. Michele Hansen 16:13 I'm feeling proud of myself considering everything else going on. So so there's this one story from it that that I thought something's up so well. So for anyone who's reading along, I'm in chapter two this week in the jobs to be done playbook. And the story goes this, a traveler came upon three stone workers arranging bricks and asked them what they were doing. The first replied, I'm laying bricks. The second answered, I'm building a room. When the traveler got to the third man, he heard a different response. I'm building a cathedral, the stone worker replied, of course, all three answered correctly, it's just a matter of perspective. I love that story. And as I was, so I was reading this while helping my daughter with her homeschool, work. And I read that to her. And what I love about that is, you all of them are correct, right? Like, you could be laying bricks, or building a room or building a cathedral. All of those are true at the same time. And it's just a matter of perspective. And, and I think what that says to us from a business perspective, is that there are different levels of doing things. And when we talk about customer needs, and processes and situations, and all the kinds of things that you've been talking to your customers about, you might get a different level of perspective. And you might ask someone how they're using your product. And they might give you an answer, that's the equivalent of I'm laying bricks, or they might give you the equivalent of, I'm building a cathedral. And then it's about sort of building out that whole picture and figuring out, okay, there's a cathedral being built, that's the broader job that's being done. And then there are specific people who are doing that. Within this. There are specific tasks down to mixing mortar to planning out a specific room, like those are all at different levels. And but they're all happening, too, and where does my product fit in? And but what are they trying to do more broadly? Yeah, I just loved that story.Colleen Schnettler 18:36 So you're basically saying when we think about our product in like, a development lifecycle of a business, someone else's business, right, because both of our products are inserted into someone else's business, we should kind of see how they fit in to the bigger goal.Michele Hansen 18:54 Right? So for example, nobody's job is to geocode a spreadsheet, like that's not a broader goal that they have, the job is something that is, you know, much larger than any one particular step or one particular process. But it'll have many different sub steps to it. And so the book defines this, as you know, there's an aspiration, an ideal change of state, something the individual desires to become. So in this example, with the bricks and the cathedral, it might be to, you know, bring religion or community to a specific area. That's a very broad goal. Right, right. And then the big job is to build the cathedral. The little job is to build the rooms in the cathedral, and then the micro job is to lay the actual bricks. So I think my product is sometimes it's it's a micro job, but sometimes it's also playing into a larger one. For example, if someone's goal is to To create a map to show a congressperson, all of the supporters, their nonprofit has in their district, for example, that may be, you know, much closer to their goal of getting a an elected representative to take them seriously. But on the other hand, if they're doing a huge data analysis process, like we are just one step in that process, and pretty far removed from whatever their end goal of creating AI based simulations that help real estate executives make better commercial real estate decisions, like we're really far removed from that end step. Does that make sense?Colleen Schnettler 20:43 Yeah, but I'm trying to figure out how that like, I'm trying to take what you said, which felt kind of general and figure out how to directly apply that to business to actually my business specifically, like, does that help you with pricing? Does that help you? I mean, so let's say it because I also am probably a micro step. Does that mean I should charge less? Does that mean? How do you kind of take that information and work it into your workflow?Michele Hansen 21:10 So that's only one step have jobs to be done. There's a whole bunch of other pieces to this. And, and what I find helpful, so with this, this chapter is like a very broad view of things. It dissects the different pieces of this. I mean, so you're a developer. So you've probably worked with user stories before, right? Like, yes, as an administrator, I would like to be able to update billing information like like things, it sounds like that are pretty common, especially in the Agile world. And what this chapter is doing is, is laying the framework, not only for that, that hierarchy of tasks and activities, which is very important, but also for the different types of jobs that are going on at the same time. So you have that big goal of, for example, making more sales, right? Or for you, if you're you might be working with a developer who's building a website for a client like that is their end goal here. And there are many different things. So they're going through a process, right to build that website, they have different needs as they go through that process. For example, one might be making the steps of that process, or accomplishing the steps in that process as quickly as possibly, right. There might be different circumstances they're under, they might have six months to build this website, or they might have a week. There may also be emotional and social jobs going on too, like they want to feel competent as a developer, or they want to show their client that they can get quality work done. So there are all these different things going on. And where this helps specifically, it does talk about you know, in marketing, for example, if you speak to the overall job too broadly, it's just too vague. And I think that's when we get to websites, or a product and you're like, what do they even do? Like, it's not even clear, like, Yes, I want to retire comfortably. But it's very unclear to me how your app remotely gets me close to that. And so thinking about needs differently than the broader goal that someone is trying to do. And But mostly, where I find that this applies to my own work, is really understanding the process. And and this is something that the author talks about, in the beginning of the of the chapter, he talks about Copernicus, and how that revolutionize things going from the earth being the center of the universe, to the sun being the center. And his framing is that jobs be done forces companies to go from my product is the center of the universe. And that the customer's job is the customer's goal is to interact with my product and interact with my company, to instead that, you know, our company's job is to help people get things done better. And he actually framed it in a way that I had never heard anyone say before, which is that companies can buy customers, which makes so much sense and he doesn't just mean that literally in the terms of you know, you can go on Facebook and buy ads and buy customers that way. But he, you are you are the one who is going out and, you know, solving their needs and and buying them as a customer, which I thought was very interesting. Now I feel like I'm the one who's rambling. I don't know. Have you gotten anything useful out of this?Colleen Schnettler 24:39 I Not really. I know I'm excited about this book. Let me just say I mean, I know you're excited about this book, and I know this is your, your strength lies in this customer empathy stuff. And I feel but I feel like the words that You're saying are very hard to translate into actionable actions that can help me grow my business. Like I just there's a to me what you're saying makes sense like I understand you, I feel like it's kind of the same thing they say in story brand, which is your your cost, you are not the center of the universe, your customer is the center of the universe and but outside of being like nice and answering people's questions. I, you know, having a background in engineering, so no background in this stuff, and really struggling to turn that kind of like pros into actionable stuff.Michele Hansen 25:42 So I think you can actually see that you're turning it into actionable things. In fact, you have too many actions based on it. Yeah, we were, we were working on your email copy. And you weren't really getting enough useful information, actually, people weren't replying to you at all. And now you're not only getting feature requests, you're also getting understanding about the context that they're in, and the process they're going through to do that. And I think in this case, you know, your, your product may be the equivalent of laying the bricks. And while it's great to know that people want to lay bricks, they don't want to just lay bricks forever, right? The the famous phrase about this is that people don't want to drill, they want a quarter inch hole. And I would like to add to it, well, they don't actually want a quarter inch hole, they want to hang up a picture of their family on the wall so that they have something nice to look at when they walk by and they feel a warm feeling inside. Right? Like, it's not just about your product. And so what you're getting out of this is understanding of that broader process that they're in. And that information, helps you make decisions about what you should build next, it helps you understand, yeah, who might be a customer for me, who might have a higher propensity to pay me versus based on how often they need something like this, or how urgent their need for it is. All of those things can be dropped from using this kind of thinking. But I can definitely see how this sort of thinking. It takes a leap. And I admit, you know, when I when I was first exposed to it, I was like, we don't have time for this like with like, with like, I have deadlines. Like, right, like you want to add another, you know, like, I mean, I was, I remember when someone came to me about first even doing, you know, usability testing on you know, and we were, we were on pretty tight launch schedules that we didn't have control over. And, and I was like, you want to add another week until we can launch this? Like, did you go negotiate with the people who give us our deadlines that we're gonna do that? And they're like, No, and I was like, so what do you want me to do with this information, like, this sounds great. But like, I don't see how I can do anything with it. And, and I admitted, it took me a while, like maybe, you know, probably like six months or a year until I really started to get it. And after I had some launches that were you know, I wouldn't call them failures. But you know, we spent a lot of time doing things and it didn't have the effect we wanted and getting getting frustrated with that and feeling like we're spending all this time building stuff, and not having the kinds of effects that we had expected to have based on, you know, reading the tea leaves and spreadsheets, about what we should do. And, you know, it took me a very long time to come around from there to having interviews and and this kind of jobs to be done driven customer empathy, be the be the core of what I do. But it's it's it's just been so revelatory for me. But yeah, I absolutely empathize with the situation that you're like, what the hell is this? And why do I care? And I have stuff to do, like, just tell me something. Tell me how to raise my prices and get more customers? Like I don't I don't you know, that makes sense to me.Colleen Schnettler 29:07 Yeah, I am. I think we talked about this a lot. Like, I feel like this comes up a lot. Because I think what we're learning from you is that's really the secret to a successful business. I mean, you guys have like a geocoding API, no offense, but it's not really sexy. It's not like,Michele Hansen 29:24 yeah, it's really boring. Like, actually, I say, what I'm talking about this job's done stuff. I I'm like, you know what, like, coordinates are not stamps. Nobody collects them for the fun of it. They're trying to do something else with it. Like it's so boring that it's abundantly clear that it's not the end goal. I think that's almost a gift in and of itself.Colleen Schnettler 29:49 But I guess my point is, we talk about this a lot because somehow, despite I don't want to say despite it it's a great product, but it's a boring product, but you have great customer loyalty. And that is because of you. And it's because of this way of communicating and empathizing with your customers. But those of us who are kind of not kind of who are totally new to sales, and our engineers, you know, I'm not really known for my patience or my empathetic nature, right? I'm like, let's just write it down and get it done. And so it's, it's a fundamental mind shift, I think, to be like, okay, slow down. Like, let's try to dive into these, you know, these castles, these people are building and really understand these people. And I feel like it's slowly sinking in. But I feel like it's gonna take a while like, and I'm learning as I'm doing right. So I told you last week, I sent that email that I thought was brilliant that everyone hated, because no one responded. So you know, we changed the language and thought about it a little more. But I do think it's a process. Like, I feel like I'm learning it, but it does feel like it's a process.Michele Hansen 30:51 I feel like if we can build a business, in a commodity industry, where we are competing with billion dollar companies, then anybody can do this. And the secret to how we do that is using jobs to be done. Understanding what people are trying to do, understanding their whole process, and then making it faster and cheaper for them to get through that process and eating off other steps of the process to help them get done. What ever it is they want done.Colleen Schnettler 31:29 Yeah, it's just a completely different mindset. I mean, there's so many developers trying to start SaaSes. And I think this is like the piece we are missing. Because I think it is a fundamental mindset shift. And I think you have to practice it. And we're not used to practicing that.Michele Hansen 31:47 And I think that starting with your own need is a really helpful springboard into this. Because you naturally have some amount of empathy for yourself, maybe we don't all have 100% empathy for ourselves all the time. But you have some empathy for your own problems, you're able to understand how long it took you to do this and how annoying it was to have to build a file uploader every single time. You had that empathy built in, and you could see that need and what process that fit into and what the end goal was. And you were able to use that as a springboard to launch something. And now you're you're learning about what other people are trying to do. And I'm just so excited for you that people are bringing suggestions and problems and situations to you that you had never even thought of before. Like that's the most exciting thing for me when I sit down to interview someone. And I think we're going to talk about one thing and then we end up talking about something else that I never even realized would come up and it's so fun because it shows me how many more opportunities there are even in a super boring, commodity highly competitive industry.Colleen Schnettler 33:03 Well, that's going to wrap up this week's episode of the software social podcast. please reach out to us on Twitter at @softwaresocpod for your questions or comments. We'd love to hear from you. Hope you enjoyed the show.
Getting People to Reply to Those Critical Early Feedback Emails
Colleen Schnettler 0:00 Hey listeners, Colleen here. This week I lead off discussing the positive uptick in my signup numbers, tempered by the fact that none of those new signups responded to my welcome email, Michele and I discussed what I'm doing wrong. And we also talked about how I should be prioritizing my time, every bootstrapper's most challenging problem, at least in the beginning. Michele talks about a detailed customer feedback email that brought her great joy. And we discussed the new book she is reading called Jobs To Be Done in the context of small business. Hope you enjoy the episode. ColleenSo I have been keeping track of my numbers every week for how many people are signing up for my service. And this week, I had quite a few signups. I had 39. Yeah. This week, I had 38 new signups.Michele Hansen 0:48 Whoa.Colleen Schnettler Yeah.Michele Hansen I how many were the previous week? The previous week?Colleen Schnettler 0:53 I had 18.Michele Hansen 0:56 Okay, so then the week before that,Colleen Schnettler 0:59 I just started recording the past few weeks. Michele Hansen 1:05 hey, that's almost 100% growth week over week for two weeks. That's That's pretty good. I mean, not long ago, you had, like 18 ish users total.Colleen Schnettler 1:16 Yeah, I'm really happy with the number of signups I'm getting, I think part of it might be because of the holiday break. I've noticed because my service is free. And it's in the Heroku marketplace. I get a lot of hobbyists. So I'm wondering if people are like trying it out because they have downtime. But I've also done a lot to improve the documentation. And so the other thing that has happened this week is a lot more people have actually converted. I think I mentioned a week or two ago that I was getting so many signups and then only like 10% of those people were actually using the single sign on to access their custom dashboard and install the JavaScript. And this week from those 3817 made it to single sign on, which is huge compared to the numbers I was seeing before. Yeah. So I'd like to believe it's because I've added more documentation so people know what it is. And, you know, we worked out did we do it on the podcast where we worked out some of the copy on my marketing page. Yeah, yeah. So some of the things we put where we like put numbers and we're like, here's the three step process. I'd like to believe that's, that's been part of the reason this is working and more people are converting.Michele Hansen 2:30 So you have what you would like to believe about why it's working. Have you asked anybody about that?Colleen Schnettler 2:37 Why can't I just say, Oh, they converted? Can I just go with what I'd like to believe?Michele Hansen 2:42 Hunches are great. But that's not a substitute for going out and finding the answer. Colleen Schnettler 2:49 I've had this great number of signups. But something else interesting has happened. And this is not good. So I think I mentioned answer my question. No, I don't know. No---Michele Hansen 3:04 I have tried not to talk over you. But you did not answer my question of whether you have tried to figure out know why people are converting that answer is -- and so as much as we need to figure out why people are canceling and why they're not converting. And we ask them a million questions about why you canceling why you're not doing this, why you're not doing that. We also need to ask them about why they are doing things so we can help more people do those things and find more people like them who will do those things.Colleen Schnettler 3:31 So this is interesting, because I've had all these signups and I mentioned last week that I was going to start doing transactional email like a welcome email. Since I have started the welcome email zero people have responded to it. Zero before when I was hand emailing people, like maybe 10 to 20% of people responded. So my professional looking welcome email with like a footer and branding seems to be turning people off.Michele Hansen 4:01 You can just do a plain text email. I think that's gonna be that there. That's more likely to get caught in a spam filter if it has graphics in it.Colleen Schnettler 4:09 Yeah, that's what I'm going to do. Because I was really surprised. I was like, Oh, I'm getting all these signups and these people are converting, not a single person has responded to an email.Michele Hansen 4:18 Plaintext tends to have better open rates than graphical email like this is why that most, if you've ever had them made the mistake of signing up for a political campaign's email list, you will notice that even the most well funded campaigns will have plain text emails. This is something the Obama campaign discovered and then just proliferated throughout the industry that the fewer images and formatting and everything in an email, the better open and response rates you're going to get from it because there's just fewer barriers to people getting the email and then you know, formatting and everything else in it. I send most of our especially feedback emails, I always send those out plain text.Colleen Schnettler 5:06 Yeah, I'm going to, that's my next step. Because I was really surprised to see such a poor response. Now, it's kind of a little bit funny, maybe not funny. So when I went to get my transactional email set up, for some reason, I got kicked out of Sendgrid. And that was just I don't really know what happened. So I'm actually sending it from my Gmail. So I don't have open rates right now. So I can't see how many people are actually opening it. But I am going to get that sorted out. And I like the idea of going plain text because no one is responding right now. So I have no idea why more people are converting I guess I should ask them.Michele Hansen 5:42 I think it's a, you know, it's a, an easy thing to fall into. On a recent episode, we talked about loss aversion and how human beings are so much more motivated to try to avoid losing money, rather than making money. And I think feedback really plays into that, because most companies asked for feedback when somebody cancels, or if they give you a negative NPS score, or something like that, but not as many companies ask for feedback from people who are happy, which, you know, trying to find more people who are are happy, like your your current happy customers with similar processes and needs is much easier than trying to fix all of the people who don't like it. Like that's a tough hill to climb.Colleen Schnettler 6:33 Yeah, so I definitely will reach out to those people. I guess one by you know, I'll just, there's only 17 people, I can just email them and ask them.Michele Hansen 6:43 Yeah.Colleen Schnettler 6:44 it seems like I get better responses. If I don't ask open ended questions in email.Michele Hansen 6:50 What are the questions you're asking?Colleen Schnettler 6:52 So my first email which I was hand typing, which got maybe 10 to 20%? response was, Hey, my name is Colleen. From simple file upload. Do you need any help installing the service? Question mark? Please let me know. Thanks. And that got some responses. So then I was trying to be clever. And I thought, all right, people are more likely to respond. If it's just as simple at least I am. Like, if it's a simple question. So then this automated email I'm now sending out is completely different. It just says, hey, it's Colleen. I'm the creator of simple file upload. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. Can you answer one question for me? Are you using the JavaScript snippet or the React component? Thanks, Colleen. No one has responded to that.Michele Hansen 7:37 That's interesting.Colleen Schnettler 7:39 And I thought that was I don't know, I thought it was easy, right? Like, because they could just be like, oh, like, that's an easy thing to respond to. But 35 people have gotten it and zero responses.Michele Hansen 7:49 But maybe it's not a meaningful question to them. Yeah, maybe they don't. Yeah. And is that a meaningful question to you to like? Is the is the answer about their projects? And how they're finding it? Like maybe, maybe if that's even if it's a more difficult question, if it's a more meaningful question to them, and to you, maybe that's the question to ask, rather than an easy one that doesn't have as much impact.Colleen Schnettler 8:15 Okay, so I wanted to know, because I'm trying to decide how to spend my time. So I'm trying to decide. The reason I asked the question is, because I genuinely want to know, so throughout the customer interviews I was doing before the holidays, the people most excited about this seem to be front end developers, because that way they can, they never have to touch back end, they can literally get the CDN image without any configuration. And front end developers these days, a lot of them are using react. And so my react component really could use a little bit of work. And so I'm trying to decide if it's worth it for me to, to invest my time into working on the React component, and really beefing that up or if I should continue to focus on, you know, just marketing and installing with the JavaScript snippet. So that's why I asked that question, because I just genuinely want to know.Michele Hansen 9:09 So you're trying to figure out how to prioritize your time.Colleen Schnettler 9:14 Yes, basically, yes.Michele Hansen 9:14 You sometimes -- I find that actually saying that to people in the email saying, hey, like, you know, are using this one, you know, I asked, because I'm trying to figure out how to prioritize my development work between those two things, and hearing about how you're using it will help me understand how to make it better.Colleen Schnettler 9:35 That's a great idea. I'm gonna write that down,Michele Hansen 9:37 And also makes people feel important, and like their opinion is going to be what shapes this company. And that makes people want to reply.Colleen Schnettler 9:44 That's a great idea. You're right. I think that's a great idea. So I'm gonna go plaintext. And then I figure I'll try maybe a new one every week since I'm getting you know, 10 to 20 signups on an average week. I'll try a new email this week. So I'll do plain text. And I'll tell them, that's a great idea. Like, Hey, I'm wondering if you are using react or JavaScript, because I'm trying to figure out what is the most important thing to work on next? What do you think? And then maybe they'll tell me what they think the most important thing to work on next is, so maybe I will get like, maybe it'll start a conversation.Michele Hansen 10:19 Yeah, and I would try to find a way to phrase that, that makes it clear that you want to work on the thing, that's the most important for them. So not just that, I want to find the most impactful thing to work on next, I want to find the most impactful thing to for you, for me to work on next. Yeah, like, which is, you know, that framing is almost like more like client language like, and they're like, in the right, the way you would ask a client, hey, I have a choice between these three projects, like, which is the most impactful for you to meet to work on. But you can say it in this context, too. And even if you're asking 50 other people the same question, and you know, you're going to synthesize all that information and figure out, okay, you know, is it front end developers? Is it some other opportunity? Like, like, Where should I be focusing? But asking people, hey, what is the most impactful thing I could do for you? I find that makes people more willing to, to give feedback and, and give really constructive, nice feedback to like, they're appreciative of that.Colleen Schnettler 11:25 Yeah, that's a great idea. I'm definitely going to work on that. And I'll try that out to see if I can get more engagement on that. I, it's been really nice. So I've taken the entire week, I took the entire week, between Christmas and New Year's off. And it was really nice to get that space. And just kind of step back from all like the buisiness. I, this has been in the marketplace for about a month now. And I am feeling the developer challenge of just wanting to build more things. Like it irks me so much that I don't I don't optimize the images for you, like like that is hurting my soul that I'm not optimizing images. But I'm doing that for a very specific reason. Some people don't want me to optimize images. I think we talked about that. A couple weeks ago, some people aren't even using it for images. So for me to put the time in to do these particular things that might not even be a use a good use case. I'm trying to fight the urge. So so I'm really trying to fight the developer urge to like build more things. So I've been I've been really thinking about, like I mentioned, like how to prioritize my time in the most efficient way. And I've really had so much success with this marketplace, this traction channel, because I have had now it probably 50% of these people have, you know, removed the add on because they were just playing with it. But 90 signups in a month through Heroku and four signups in a month from the internet, like going through my site. Yeah, that's a huge difference. Yeah, so I've been trying to think I've been trying to one resist the urge to build more features until people tell me they want or need more features. And I've been trying to look at other marketplaces that I could get into because I feel like this is essentially a widget. I mean, this is like this would be great in like, the WordPress marketplace or something like that. So yes, I've just kind of been looking at other avenues to, to launch the product and try it, like I said, just trying to figure out how to prioritize in terms of that.Michele Hansen 13:35 What is the threshold from Heroku that allows you to start charging people for it one to 100 to 100,000.Colleen Schnettler 13:41 It's 100. But they have --Michele Hansen 13:44 Wait, so you're 10 people away from being able to charge people.Colleen Schnettler 13:46 No, because they have to be active users. So I'm 55 right now. So I'm averaging about 10 a week that stick around. So I'm hopefully in five more weeks. But five weeks is a long time. And there's a lot I could be doing in those in that time. There's other marketplaces that don't make you hit that threshold. And so I have all kinds of ideas. And I'm trying to, like, narrow the funnel of all my brilliant ideas.Michele Hansen 14:13 What is the growth rate look like in the Heroku marketplace? So we've mentioned how you're adding people like is it? Are you steadily getting 10 people to activate a week? Or is that rate increasing?Colleen Schnettler 14:25 So this week, it was a significant increase. But again, I don't know if that's because it's a holiday week, so more people are like playing around with it. Before this week, I've only been tracking it for three weeks. So it's hard to say. I can't tell if it's linear or not like based on this week. It's not linear. And I'm hoping us I know I said hoping a few times and hope is not I think I told you hope is not a strategy last week. But I've been kind of hoping I'm getting more signups because my documentation is better. But I am going to reach out to those people. So I don't know if it's listed. I don't know if it's exponential, I have no idea what it's gonna look like, since I only three weeks of data.Michele Hansen 15:05 So let's sit back for a second. You just told me that you took the entire week off? Colleen Schnettler Yeah. Michele Hansen And you still had all of these signups? Colleen Schnettler Yes, ma'am. And as someone who has been making their income from client work, where you have to, you know, sort of be button chair in order to make money. How does that feel?Colleen Schnettler 15:28 Feels amazing. Can you imagine if Now, none of these people are paying me yet? But it feels amazing to get there. Michele Hansen Yeah. Colleen Schnettler And to have I mean, this is it's like I'm tasting the, you know, it's like I'm tasting it, like I'm tasting the the freedom of a product based business, because I build hourly when I, you know, when I work as a developer. And so like, this just feels like, it's gonna be freedom. And so much work, you know, has gone into it in the beginning to get it working. But it works. It works pretty well, not having any complaints. And so all I had to do was I checked my email, maybe except for Christmas, like, I would check my email every day. But generally speaking, like to have that many signups I was shocked, I was really excited. Like, wow, 38 people signed up in a week.Michele Hansen 16:13 That's amazing. And so what that tells me about your prioritization of thinking about which channels to go on, is that you could do basically nothing on Heroku, for the next three weeks, explore maybe another marketplace, I would caution you against spreading yourself too thin. But spend a couple of weeks on another marketplace, and then come back, and maybe you'll be out those 100 people, you know, a watched pot never boils, right.Colleen Schnettler 16:50 Yeah, I'm kind of thinking the same thing. I think like tweaking the email, like, there's a few things I can do now, in the Heroku marketplace that I haven't done so I can tweak the email, like we just discussed, there is a way to get people's emails, before they hit single sign on, you have to use there, they have a platform API, and it's a little convoluted, but I almost have that logic done. So I can hit them earlier in the sign on process. But outside of that, I think I was just gonna let it rest. I'm just gonna let it rest, obviously be available and try to email people and get as many people talking to me as possible. And so I have this like, kind of crazy, ridiculous idea, but I'm excited about it. Can I tell you? Michele Hansen Yes. Colleen Schnettler Okay, so here's something I've been thinking about a lot with SaaS businesses, especially in my space, like building widget, we're just not you guys. You guys fall outside of this category. But a lot of people in this space are just developer selling to other developers. But really, that's not a huge market develop. We, we if we could take our development skills, and sell to people that aren't developers, we'd be able to access so many more people. So what I was thinking was, I want to get into another marketplace. I don't know any other marketplaces like I know what they are. But I don't I'm not familiar with WordPress Dev, and I don't want to get into WordPress, I hate WordPress, I don't want to be in their marketplace, or any of these other platforms. So I need to become familiar with one if I'm going to get into it. So I thought it would be super fun to start my own Shopify store. So I have already bought the domain. You're looking at me funny, but think about it. Okay, so I can start a Shopify store. Most of shopping a Shopify app. Yeah. Yeah. Like a store, like sell t shirts. Like, I want to sell t shirts, or whatever you want. Michele Hansen 18:44 I'm confused. Colleen Schnettler Wait, what? Michele Hansen Cuz I know there's like a Shopify. Like, there's whole Shopify apps as a whole, right ecosystem, like, okay, thing, but I did not think you were going to sell t shirts direction. So you're gonna have to walk me through how this relates to.Colleen Schnettler 18:58 Okay, no, this is what happens when I take a week off. I have all these ideas. I'm like, I should do these things. But seriously, I've been thinking about this one for a whole week. And I think it's a good idea. Listen, so here's what we do. What if I started an actual legit Shopify store, like selling t shirts, I can drop ship t-shirts. Like I don't have to actually hold inventory. But it's not about the store. Like the point is not to have a Shopify store. The point is to build one, and then I'll blog about it on another domain, then I can also concurrently learn, you look stressed, just stay with me, Michelle, stay with me. Don't No, no, no, just I can concurrently learn Shopify development. So I can put my file uploader in the Shopify App Store and then I use my own file uploader on my Shopify store as an example of how to use it.Michele Hansen 19:58 There's a lot going on there. And I, when you're talking about getting into a new marketplace, I thought it was going to be a no-code thing like bubble or Zapier or something like that. I love the enthusiasm for this. But I think this is one to maybe like, throw it in Notion, put down all the enthusiasm, all the ideas, but put down all the ideas and that same list for things you could work on next, and then take a red pen to it and be brutal about your prioritization and find the things that are the least amount of work, and the most bang for your buck at this moment, and the most focused on what you're trying to do.Colleen Schnettler 20:50 Yeah, I don't disagree. Michele Hansen 20:53 I'm not saying don't do this. But I'm saying, you know, I tend to find that, like, when I get really enthusiastic about an idea, like, it's almost a bad sign. It's dangerous to like, get so enamored with an idea. And then it's like, then you're kind of, you know, bouncing around, you're like, I need to do that. And I can do this, and then it's like, hold on a minute, there's something much smaller, that we can do first, that will actually honestly have a lot more impact towards what we're trying to do, even though that other idea is very exciting and shiny, right?Colleen Schnettler 21:28 Well, it's very shiny, you're right. But also I was don't lose it,Michele Hansen 21:30 Like respect to the enthusiasm, respect to the idea, respect, the fun you had with generating that, capture all of it, like, make a whole board for it and outline all of the different things you would have to do. But I imagine there are things that are less tangential to, to what you're trying to do that could maybe come first, right.Colleen Schnettler 21:55 And that's the challenge is I don't want to be jumping into a new idea to the detriment of what I am currently working on. And you know, I don't want to always be like, Oh, I'm going to build a new thing, I'm going to build a new thing. But I've really liked this idea, because I get in the Shopify marketplace. And I know a couple like just randomly. I know a couple people who are like Instagram influencers. And those are the kind of people who are hustling to make money. So if I could actually have like a blog, it would not be for developers, it would be for like, Instagram influencers or something, I don't know, I'm just making it up as I go. But the idea would be almost to reach a different audience to be like, hey, there's all these people trying to hustle to make money. Like, let me show you how to set up a Shopify store.Michele Hansen 22:39 So there's definitely a space for finding a new audience, like we definitely started out with developers and then branched out from there. There's a lot of value in sort of fully saturating that audience until you move on to a next one. Colleen Schnettler Yeah. Michele Hansen And like we started out very focused on developers only only an API, really serving what they need, and understanding their their use case and their frustrations with other options. Before we really bridge into other things. So like, you know, half of our revenue comes from our API, and half of it comes from spreadsheet uploads, which is mostly like marketing people. And you know, people who don't want to work with an API for whatever reasons, oftentimes, developers if they have a huge list, but we maintain that developer focus early on very purposefully, because we wanted to make sure that we were slowly solving the problem for one group of people, before we moved on to something else rather than half or quarter, solving it for them, and then quarter, solving it for another group and quarter solving it for another group, because the problem that happens with that is that you need to wow those customers in order for them to tell other people about it and for you to grow. And if you're not fully solving their problem, then you're never going to get them to that like wow point where they're enthusiastic about it, and they're helping with your growth. And so I think this is really interesting. And you've had a lot of interest in serving non-developers, whether that's no code people or Instagram influencers. There's definitely market to be had there. But pick one group first. And even what we're talking about earlier, and you were saying how new is there difference between people who are using the JavaScript versus React and like front end developers versus back end developers? Like it doesn't even sound like the developer audience has been fully fleshed out as a customer group and fully solved yet.Colleen Schnettler 24:47 Yeah, that's true. Michele Hansen 24:48 I think you still have a lot more runway there to, to explore and grow into before you spread your wings a bit.Colleen Schnettler 24:56 Yeah, that's a really good point. So I'll keep you updated on All of my brilliant ideas. So what's been going on with you guys this week?Michele Hansen 25:07 You know, so your comments earlier about getting feedback from people and how to get good feedback from people reminded me of something that happened earlier this week. So something in question we've talked about in the past is how do you deal with feature requests?Colleen Schnettler 25:23 Right?Michele Hansen 25:24 And this is a big one that comes up, especially for the reasons we've just been talking about of how do you focus? How do you know what's important to people? All of that, how do you prioritize them together? And so somebody reached out with a feature request. And, you know, I asked him a couple of questions back, and their response was so good, like it was such catnip for us. And it really made me think about how like asking the right questions like we're talking about in the beginning, is, is really important, and how it's how hard it is. And so I thought I would kind of share what those questions were, yeah, that I asked. And then, and then we can talk a little bit about the book I've started reading. Colleen SchnettlerOkay. Michele HansenSo somebody reached out to us with a feature request for a specific data append. So, you know, like, as you know, so we don't just do geocoding, we also work with all the other types of data that are basic-- that are basically only available if you have the coordinates. So the coordinates are sort of a doorway into other pieces of data by location, like, the time zone, for example. And so that's kind of a niche we focus on in the industry. And so someone reached out to us asking for another data append. And so I replied to them, and I'll just, I'll read you. My reply to them. I said, Thank you for bringing this to our attention. You're the first person to ask us for this. This is really exciting. We always like to understand more on a deeper level, when people ask us to add data points, would you be able to shed some light on the context and use case here? In particular, some things I'm interested in? One, what is your current process for working with this data? How long does it take, which vendors and tools do you use and so forth? And to what is your end goal of getting this data I imagine it's for the sort of use case, but I'd love to hear more detail from your perspective. And so I sent this back to them. And they sent me this response back that was so amazing that like walk through their full process, and like the struggles they have the current options and why they they don't like those options, and why they would like us to do it differently, and how this is impactful for their business. And it was so it was so awesome. And such a great example of using jobs to be done thinking for product development. And so I want to talk about the book I started reading. So I mentioned this a couple episodes ago how I've started reading the Jobs To Be Done Playbook by Jim Calbach. So this book was recommended to me by a friend who works at a Fortune 500, who I talked about UX stuff with a lot. And and, and so jobs to be done. Basically, I'm going to do a quick little overview. Is that okay? Colleen SchnettlerYeah, go for it. Michele HansenSo it's this concept of basically understanding customer needs. And it's relatively new in the past 30 years or so. And the term really comes from Peter Drucker, who is a famous management thinker. And so he wrote in 1985 book, "some innovations based on process need to exploit incongruities, others demographics, indeed, process needs, unlike other sources of innovation, do not need to start out with an event in the environment, whether internal or external, it starts out with a job to be done." And so basically, the the the idea of this is that you have a process that you're trying to accomplish. So I don't know if you've ever heard of the term milkshake marketing? ColleenNope. MicheleOkay, so this is a famous example from Clayton Christensen, who was a Harvard Business professor, who was one of the foremost was one of the foremost thinkers in in jobs to be done. He unfortunately died in early 2020. And, and there's this case study where he was working with McDonald's, and they were trying to figure out how to get more people to buy their milkshakes. ColleenOkay. MicheleAnd they did some research and they found out that people were buying them first thing in the morning. Hmm, that's weird. And so they said, Why are you? Why are you buying the first thing in the morning and it's like, oh, well, people wanted something that they could eat on the way to work while they're driving. But that wasn't messy, like a bagel was too messy and a donut was too unhealthy. So they would get a milkshake and so They have this that. So their job there is to be fed on their commute, right? Like they have this commute anyway, and this is a big thing about jobs to be done is that we all have all of these activities and jobs that we're doing all the time, that exist, regardless of the product. So for example, 200 years ago, people may have hired cards and games to keep them busy on a Saturday night when they're at home. And now, we might hire Netflix for that same job. But that job has existed throughout time. And that's what makes it really interesting as a framework, that it's completely product agnostic. And so you're not asking for feedback about a specific product, you're instead asking for feedback about a process and how somebody gets something done. And so that milkshake example is a really famous one, though, as this book points out, which I love that McDonald's didn't actually use the feedback. And like if they had really used it, they would have introduced a protein shake, which they never did. But basically, the book defines jobs to be done as the process of reaching objectives under given certain circumstances. So you may have a job every day of, well, I guess, before the pandemic, like commuting to work, or making dinner like that's like you, these are things that you're trying to accomplish, and that you have a process that you go through all the time for these. And then where the real business opportunity comes in is if you can find a way to help people get that job done, faster, better, easier, or cheaper, then you have a winning product, right? Like a really simple example of this is like microwave dinners, right? Like, maybe we can argue that it's not a better way of accomplishing the job of eating dinner. But it's certainly easier and cheaper than assembling a meal. Colleen Schnettler 31:51 For your questions that you asked in his email, which of the questions you asked is specifically trying to identify the job to be done?Michele Hansen 32:00 Yes, so the whole thing. So really, the the job to be done at the end is what is the end goal of what you're trying to do, right? Like, I always try to remind myself that, you know, geocoding, and are working with our product, that is not some somebody's goal is not to like get it set up with geocoding. Their goal is to make more sales or, you know, get a project on at work or what like whatever that is like we're just one stop on this train that they're on that's going to some end destination, right? And then so really understanding that whole journey that they're going through, like what is their process for working with this data? Where are the other places they're going to get it, where their difficulties with it? Where are they spending a lot of time because if we can do something that cuts off another one of those steps in the process, or makes it easier for them to get through the whole process, then we want a customer. And so, so this week, I just read the first the chapter and the intro. And I think you can tell how enthusiastic I am about it and how much I already love this book. So so so just like a quick highlights from this. So first one is people employ products and services to get their job done not interact with your organization. So the goal is not for them to use your code to the goal is not for them to use simple file upload, their goal is to do whatever it is they want to do that is independent of your product, right? Like if, if my goal is to eat dinner, like it doesn't necessarily my goal is not to have, right. Like it's, it's there's a need there that I'm trying to fulfill. Another one is that jobs are stable over time, even as technology changes. So I think you know that we just had Christmas, right? Like we can see how the, the job of being entertained as a child has been fulfilled in so many different ways over the year, years, whether that's hula hoops, or a Nintendo Switch, but like fundamentally, that same need to play is still there. And then people seek services that enable to get more of their job done quicker and easier. And then another really interesting thing that I love about this is that jobs to be done is not limited to just one discipline. So it's like not just a UX framework, not just a product strategy framework, not just for marketing. It can be used in all the different areas of a business and thinking about new features, thinking about how you deal with competitors. It definitely influences my thinking and all of that. And something I'm particularly excited about with this book is that they specifically said this book is for people who have limited resources and would like to use jobs to be done and lightweight manner, which I love. And I'm so excited to see how they unfold that in the book, because there are so many books about this that are basically trying to convince executives to hire really expensive consultants to figure this out for them. And as a bootstrapper, that's not really the situation I'm in. And so it's exciting to see a book that that recognizes that. That is not just a consultant trying to sell a book, or also a book written for companies with 100 person UX and research teams that can really spend the time on this. So I'm pretty psyched, though. I think I just dumped a ton of information on you. And you're looking at me.Colleen Schnettler 35:45 Yeah. Okay. That was a lot of information. It was good information, but it was a lot. So let's take what you just talked about, can you read us the email again, that you sent this this job that you got such a great response on? Can we circle back? Yeah, questions? Okay, go?Michele Hansen 36:01 Yes. So the person asked for a feature. So I replied, saying, one, what is your current process for working with this data? Okay, how long does it take, which vendors and tools are using and so forth? Okay. That's telling me about the process. If we're talking about the milkshake here, that's me asking, What time do you leave for work in the morning? What road are you taking? How long does it take you? What are you listening to? What are you thinking about? What what are you doing at that time? What aren't you doing at that time? What is the process you're going through? Okay? The second one is, what is the end goal of getting the data? Okay, so I'm so if we're talking about a commute here, the person's goal is not to sit in their car. It's not even to make it more enjoyable to sit in their car, it's to get to work,Colleen Schnettler 36:47 right.Michele Hansen 36:49 So I'm trying to figure out what is their equivalent of getting to work? And then what is that whole process for them? Because I know that they're stopping with my products some way along the way. But I know they're also going other places. And so how do I figure out what those other places are? And then if I can remove some of those steps and make it easier for them to get there faster, or with less hassle or less frustration, then that's a winning combination. Right?Colleen Schnettler 37:17 So you didn't actually ask them what they're doing with the data, when you describe jobs to be done. I interpreted that as like, what is the long term job? Like, what are you doing with my data?Michele Hansen 37:32 Well, they got into that. Okay, so in this case, it's, you know, related to sort of real estate and, and some sort of, like financial needs around it. Okay. Um, but yeah, that that is what they're using the data for. And because I think when you ask those process questions, and the goal questions, those sorts of answers tend to naturally come out, okay. It's like, Okay, well, here's why I'm really doing this. And anything is really interesting to note, like their initial email to us, was, please consider adding the ability to indicate like this, like x y&z it was one sentence, which I know from a developer perspective can often be like, What am I supposed to do with this information? Like, what does this mean? Like? Like, how does this prioritize compared to other things? How does this fit into, you know, like, my conception of who we are as a company, and like what we do and how we, how we help customers versus how competitors help customers, right. And so those questions made it very easy for us to hone in on. Okay, like, what, like, what unique opportunity is there for us here? Because making it easier for people to connect to different types of data is something that we really focus on. Again, it's because it's a very process driven perspective. On on product strategy.Colleen Schnettler 38:58 Yeah. So what I'm hearing from this, I'm loving this, like this, this makes great sense. And the way you described it, I think, is really good. So my takeaway for me for this week is going to be to try to get someone to respond to my emails. I'm gonna take I was actually writing down a few, a few tricks, a few tips when you were describing that. So I'm going to kind of take the information we were just talking about, and put it in an email to see if I can get get people to respond and kind of see, you know, if trying to, you know, focus on the job, per the book, right, the job to be done, will help engage people in in letting me know what they need.Michele Hansen 39:39 And I don't know if you would conceptualize it of this, but I very much see jobs to be done and what you are trying to do, and how the whole point of simple file upload is to make this process easier for people and how your frustration was driven by you're looking at your whole process of trying to build a client website. This one particular station on that journey was repetitive and time consuming, and just really annoying. And you decided to make that particular station easier. And so now the question is okay, how can we make sure that that station is, you know, it's sort of fully built out, and it does what it needs to do. But then also, are there other places along the way that are adjacent to that, that you can nip off so that you're only just eliminating one step? you're eliminating three steps, right? And making all of those so much faster and so much easier? Colleen SchnettlerYeah. MicheleAnd and I just find this makes prioritization so much easier when I can see Oh, okay, they're doing this other thing, right before and that vendor makes it super hard to get the data, the one after us, like, you know, it takes a really long time. Okay, that's a unique opportunity for us that nobody else is focusing on. And yeah, like, that's really frustrating for you. And I find that really motivating too, because it really, you know, a lot of people talk about using empathy in business, but there's not a whole lot of resources on how you actually apply that. And I find jobs to be done to be a very concrete way of using that set of tools to figure that out. And then how does this apply to a business? How does this give you a strategic advantage? ColleenThat's awesome. MicheleSo I'm super psyched for this book, I promise that I will talk slower next time. Because this is the stuff that just like, you know, hits me in the heart and, and and I love working with because it was it was just so transformative for me when I first learned about it a couple years ago, so it's exciting stuff. And it helps us ask the right questions, which is, I guess, something we both are trying to do. Colleen Schnettler 41:53 Absolutely. Well, that's gonna wrap up this week's episode of the Software Social Podcast. Thank you for joining us. You can reach us on Twitter at @softwaresocpod
Competing with Huge Companies as a Bootstrapper
Michele Hansen 0:02 So you remember a couple weeks ago how we were talking about competitors nipping at our heels?Colleen Schnettler 0:07 Yes.Michele Hansen 0:09 So, recently, we had a new competitor, enter the space. Colleen SchnettlerOoh, interesting. Michele HansenAmazon.Colleen Schnettler 0:18 Oh, no. That's fair. Michele Hansen 0:22 I mean, it's inevitable. Um, and we already compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft, and you know, all of these huge companies. So it's not, it's definitely not unexpected. Like, it's definitely been one of those. It's only a matter of time, things. But yeah, I, that that that happened, they launched their own location services. And, interestingly, they're just reselling to other providers, they're reselling s, ri, and here. And it's very focused on fleet management and asset tracking, which kind of makes sense based on what they're doing. Like, they're tracking packages and trucks and like, that's crucial to their operations. So it's almost kind of funny, because, you know, looking at that, and whenever people are asking about, you know, how do I bootstrap my own business? Like, where do I start? How do I get an idea? One of the most common pieces of advice and advice that I give is just start with something that you need yourself and go from there, which is what you have done. And it's also what Amazon has done here, too. So, so it's, like, I look at it, I'm like, Oh, this is clearly something they built for themselves, and now they're gonna have people paying for it definitely does, does a, you know, not a totally welcome surprise for us, right, because, um, fleet management and asset tracking is an important vertical for us, because it's expressly forbidden by some of the other major geocoder. So we do have an important amount of customers in those spaces, and overall, Amazon's pricing is much higher than us. But for asset tracking, it's, it's very favorable for that use case, because instead of paying per basically per ping from a GPS, imagine, like a truck might say, send back a GPS paying every 100 feet, for example, instead of paying every time for the new coordinates of that you only pay per asset. So you know, so I imagine we will lose some customers from this. But at the same time, what I think one of the great things about being in b2b SaaS, but especially the kind of space we're in, is that we're so diversified across industries, that we have tons of other verticals, in addition to fleet management and asset tracking. And it makes me really glad that I do that semi annual customer portfolio analysis, because I know exactly how much of our revenue is from that sector. And looking at this now and knowing Okay, there's this huge, well funded, competitor coming into the space. I can see pretty clearly like, how much revenue that directly puts at risk. But yes, certainly an interesting week.Colleen Schnettler 3:33 Yeah. So when you do your semi-annual customer portfolio, do you break up your customers by industry? Is that the purpose of that?Michele Hansen 3:43 Yeah. So basically, I look at our customers, as a portfolio, as an investor might look at, say, a mutual fund portfolio, for example. And I split it on a couple of different metrics. So I basically take the top 90% of revenue, and I look at the customers from it within that space. And I look at them by industry. So so there's like fleet management, but also say real estate or insurance, health care, things like that. By industry, I try to get a rough sense for company size. So that I can just kind of, you know, have a little bit more understanding there. And then just really trying to understand, okay, based on these different industries, like how much of our revenue is dependent on any one given industry, and should we think about diversifying whether we want a you know, a higher percentage of revenue in a particular category, we want new customers there, or do we want to purposefully pull back from a certain industry or simply just not emphasize it as much if we feel like there's too high of a concentration there, and also making sure that we don't have any high customer concentration and any one Given customer, so something an important metric for me is, you know, what are our largest customer, what percentage of overall revenue are there, they and basically making sure that that number is below 1%. And again, this also comes out of sort of investor style thinking where, you know, for example, if they're analyzing a company, and they see that a company has, say, 40% of its revenue coming from one particular customer, that's a huge red flag. Right? versus if it's highly diversified, then then let that's less of a risk. And yeah, that's, that's something I do about twice a year. And, and that's kind of one of those things are sort of had to create for ourselves, you know, I'm obviously not creating the concepts, but I think applying them in this way, is because, you know, as we've talked about a lot of the content out there on running a SAS is very much focused on growth and, you know, more well funded approaches to business that don't necessarily emphasize stability or profitability, or things like that. And so, rather than managing for growth, we manage for stability. And I find that this customer portfolio analysis is a really helpful tool for me. And, and matea stew in sort of like us communicating, okay, what are our priorities? And how do we create a more stable business and just kind of giving us a high level of that?Colleen Schnettler 6:37 So you do that as a manual process?Michele Hansen 6:40 Yes.Colleen Schnettler 6:41 So do you literally hand Google? Michele Hansen 6:44 It's because I'm a I'm a glutton for punishment, apparently,Colleen Schnettler 6:46 I know. Michele Hansen 6:50 You probably like the like the week, you know, the the week I spend on this every six months, I actually like genuinely is likeColleen Schnettler 6:56 your favorite. Yes.Michele Hansen 6:58 Making all my little pivot tables and everything and like, Oh, my gosh, I am. Yeah, it's actually really fun. Yeah, I basically just google them. And then, but a lot of them I've also had conversations with. So that's where I can fill out the rest of the picture to sort of so it's this combination of quantitative and qualitative information that we use for prioritizing. And, and this is really like kind of the first big moment I can think of where something happened. And my first thought was numbers from that analysis. And then it like made me feel better when when this happened.Colleen Schnettler 7:39 So when we talked about competitive analysis last week, the reason and this wasn't we were talking about Amazon, we were talking about some of your other competitors who had launched new features. And we talked about you guys competing on some very specific in some very specific areas. So with this Amazon launch, are you saying that now at least for the fleet management sector, you do not compete on price.Michele Hansen 8:09 So it's, it'll be it'll depend on the on the customer. So their price for pay as you go geocoding is much higher, they are $4 per 1000, versus we are 50 cents per 1000. If you want to store the data there, 50 cents per 1000, if you don't want to store the data, to anything, I read it more of a as a shot across the bow at Google than you know us. I mean, we're so small like that, you know, Amazon doesn't care about us, like, just kind of one of the nice things about being a bootstrap business. So of course, I mean, people from Amazon, like us, us like they're a customer of ours too. So it's like one of those really weird scenarios where we also have people from Google who, you know, pay us too, but it's just a different department. So it's kind of, it's kind of a funny thing, I mean, it totally makes sense that they would be going into this and there's a lot of stuff that their service is doing that we don't do and that we don't plan to do. So for example, it's very built around asset tracking. So it also includes drive time, and like all these like geo fencing, like all these other things like so, you know, knowing when a truck has entered the area of a delivery center, for example, you might use geo fencing for that. We don't really do that we don't do driving directions or drive time or or radiuses like things like that. So yes, it's a new competitor in this space. But you know, I also tend to think but this kind of data, like there's so much need for it, that there is plenty of space for lots of companies. And I think it really says something about the space that this announcement came out and, you know, you know, the first people I talked to about it, you know, obviously Mateus and then my like, core group of other bootstrapped founders that I talked to, and then the guy who runs another bootstrapped geocoding company being like, Wow, what an interesting day how like, and we're like kind of analyzing it and like, what does this mean for us? And it's, you know, because we all do something different. And like, there have been many times when I've sent people over to his company, because we weren't the right fit for them. I, maybe that's a sort of uncommon approach to competition, but I feel like there's plenty of space for everybody like we, we purposefully like, we don't want to be a monopoly. I don't think that's, it's just not what I want to be. And I don't think it's good for capitalism. Anyway. Um, so So I think there's space for more competition, but it is, I mean, yeah, it's, it's, it's scary when one of the big guys comes into the ring? Absolutely.Colleen Schnettler 10:39 Sure, I could totally see that.Michele Hansen 10:44 One thing I was talking about, when we were talking about the competitors was how, you know, we don't really change much when our competitors do things, and how we tend to just focus more on the customers we do have, and you know, towards that overall goal of stability? How can we make them happier and and keep them with us? And so it reminds me of a book, I'm actually going to start reading called the jobs to be done playbook. And so I think we've talked a little bit about jobs be done right?Colleen Schnettler 11:23 halfway.Michele Hansen 11:25 Okay, so jobs to be done is a framework for doing customer research, and understanding what it is that people really want to do overall. So and I actually have an example of this from from my life this week. So earlier this week, I was getting our holiday New Year cards out the door, which I guess for us are less of a holiday card and more of a like New Years where By the way, we're moving to a different continent card. Which side note, actually, I realized as I was doing those cards that I think I announced it on the podcast that we had moved, like before I had told some of our podcast listeners, yes, you are, you are in my inner circle. So um, so anyway, so we had to, you know, we have to send out cards to tell people we moved, so and then I found a service online that you can create your cards, and they will send them all out for you, which is really necessary because mailing them from Denmark to the US would be ungodly, expensive. And so I'm just going to pay a little bit extra to have a company mail them out for me. But I have to have a spreadsheet of addresses that I upload to the service for them to send them out. And they have a specific format for the addresses. And my spreadsheet where I keep all my addresses normally has them all in one column, like so the whole address is in a single cell. And they needed it split out into Street, city, state and zip. And I first thought I was like, Oh, no, it's gonna take me so long to like, manually do all that in the spreadsheet. And then I was like, wait a minute, I have a tool that parses addresses, and literally does this for people like I should use my own product, which, so it's like, I honestly find it really fun to get the dog like dog food, our product is just kind of, you know, the term people use for that. I don't know why it's called dog fooding eating your own dog food.Colleen Schnettler 13:31 And that's weird, by the way, butMichele Hansen 13:34 that's what yeah, that's, that's what we call it bootstrapping and dogfooding. And we've all these, this whole weird language of our own. So, um, my, my seven year old is actually sitting here with me while we record this, and she just started laughing into a pillow when I said dogfooding. So, um, so, so I uploaded it. And while it was processing and the 30 seconds it took to process. I was like, You know what, we should have a landing page about this, I don't even know what I need. So like, I just I quickly wrote up a very, very sparse landing page. And I was like, feeling all good about myself. And I'm like, Oh, this is I'm getting Christmas cards out. And also, like, I'm being so productive and adding landing page. And this is awesome. And then I downloaded it, and it was actually kind of a nightmare. And it wasn't a good use for what I was trying to do. Because it because we split out the street number and the unit's type from the address, and I needed those in the same column as them. So for example, if it was, you know, 17 Main Street, 17 Main Street, would all be in separate columns, and I or rather it would be 17 would be in a separate column from Main Street, and I needed those concatenated and also the units were all split out from the unit numbers and I only I could only have one column for address to information. And I did it manually, even though material This letter was like, why didn't you just read a concatenate function. And so it was kind of a funny thing. But like talking about jobs to be done, like the whole idea of jobs done is that it's not just the one thing that someone wants to get done, there's a broader job they're trying to accomplish. So in this case, my goal was not process a spreadsheet, my goal was not get the addresses in the right column format, my goal was get out these cards to a fulfill my social obligation of sending out holiday cards with my family photo on it, and be tell people that we have moved in, give them our address. And so there was kind of this, like physical job of actually getting this physical piece of paper out, there's a social job of informing people that we have moved and, you know, send it, you know, sending a card reciprocally, as they would as well. There's also sort of an emotional job of me having the relief that this is over with, on the long holiday to do list. And so. So that's what like jobs we don't really get that is that it's not just that one thing that people want to do, it's there's some broader goal that they have. You know, most times when people are using Juco, to for example, it's they want to make more sales, they want to track where their trucks are going so that their customers are happy with them so that they order from them again, like, it's not just about tracking the truck, or, you know, putting their customers on a map, like there's something else they're trying to do. And so how do you dive into that? How do you get that kind of information out of a customer? And then how do you use that information, to make decisions to write landing pages to have sales conversations, you know, like, how do you use that to really run a product run a business?Colleen Schnettler 16:56 Yeah, I love this. Because last week, we were talking about how I have started doing all these customer interviews, and how I was getting so excited talking to customers, when they gave me suggestions. And they showed me how they want to use my product. And you pointed this out last week, you said something which kind of struck me. And you pointed out that I missed an opportunity to understand the bigger picture of what they were trying to do, and why they wanted to do it. So I was just thinking about the small potatoes, which was you're trying to get a file on your site, you're trying to get a file in the cloud, and you pointed out these discussions are an opportunity to figure out why why do they need to do that? What is their their bigger process? What are they trying to achieve? So when you describe this book, it sounds exactly like what we were talking about last week in terms of customer interviews.Michele Hansen 17:47 Yeah, and something I think about that took me some time to learn with customer interviews is that they're not a conversation, and ways that you would act in a conversation where if somebody says something, and then you're just to agree with them or to disagree with them, or, or whatever that is, in an interview, you can't do that. Do it, you instead say? Can you tell me more about that? Why are you looking to do that? What were you doing before that? What would you do if that wasn't available? Like you asked these sorts of questions that you just don't, don't really ask and sort of normal conversational style. You know, there's actually I, I was I was preparing to give a talk at micro con last year, so 2019 on this, and I was talking to a friend beforehand at a cookout about what I was planning to talk about. And he goes, you know, that reminds me of this improv class I took where whenever somebody says or does an improv, no matter how crazy it is, you just have to build on it. Like you can't react to them, you instead build on what they have done. And so if they put on a cowboy hat, and like, tell you, they're an astronaut, like you have to just go with it. And you you can't like question them about that, right? Otherwise, the whole thing falls apart the whole dance. And so it's not a conversation, it's acting. And the way that you would talk to a friend is very different than the way I would talk in in a customer interview setting. Also, at the same time, though, like, you know, these are, this is a set of tools and in if you use these tools outside of that context, it can come off as the wrong way or not be as effective. Like, for example, I wouldn't do this in a sales setting because people have their guard up and are less vulnerable in a sales setting. justifiably Yeah. And so you don't want to dig too much into their emotions and their goals and everything else like it's it's very surface and has its own dance entirely. But yeah, I'm really excited to read this book. And if anyone else wants to read along with me, it's called the jobs to be done playbook by Jim kobach. And like so a friend recommended this to me who was a UX director at a at a big company. The reviews for it alone are from some of the big names in the jobs be done world Des Trainor, the co founder of intercom, Melissa Perry and author of Escaping the Built Trap, Bob Moesta, who is like a just a rockstar in the jobs to be done world. Tony Ulwick. Same He also wrote a jobs to be done playbook himself. So I, I'm so psyched to read this book, you know, seeing all of these people that I that I really respect recommending it, and of course, my friend recommending it as well. So this is something I'm going to start diving into over the holiday break. We you know, we are in a second lockdown now. So it seems like a good time to start a new book. But yeah, it's, it's even for somebody like me who's been doing this for years. I love diving in and learning more, there's always more to be refined. Nice.Colleen Schnettler 21:13 So with the holidays coming up, I wanted to ask you, what do you guys do to take a vacation? Or do you not like what is your honor, we talked a lot about like your customer support cycle. But I was thinking about this this morning. Because what I did just for context, like I am down to one client, which they're wonderful. But I told them, I'm going to take two full weeks off, but now I have this product. So I'm obviously not taking I'm going to check it every day, except maybe Christmas, right? And I was like, oh, Is that normal? Is that what Michelle's doing? So what are you gonna do?Michele Hansen 21:45 Yeah, our approach to vacations is just hope nobody reaches out to us. Which is not healthy.Colleen 21:56 Yeah, kidding.Michele Hansen 21:57 You know, we were having actually a conversation with some friends last week about this. And one of them pointed out that, you know, the things you do for growth are different than the things you can do when you're at a stage when your goal is stability. And that really got me thinking that, you know, there's things that we did to drive growth, especially when we were trying to transition to full time or, you know, maintain confidence in our transition to full time. And that we that we did to drive growth that maybe we don't need to do now that we feel like we're at a point where, you know, things are more stable, and we don't have to be so aggressive on that front. And, yeah, I'm totally not answering your question, which is that we don't know, again, you. Okay, that's what I'm really good at avoiding that question. Yeah, yeah. It's just that we just hope nothing comes up. But I think I mean, it's gonna be more challenging this break with with us in second lockdown. And, yeah. It's a, it's gonna be tricky. Yeah. But yeah, that's kind of what we do in general. And I don't think I would recommend that other people. So don't do what I do.Colleen Schnettler 23:18 Well, and I'm, of course, in this position, where I'm trying to get customers and retain customers. So I'm in a totally different position. But I definitely feel like I need to, you know, be on top of things even during a you know, vacation. Because I'm in such as I'm in such a critical stage. So what you're telling me is even where you guys are, where you're very stable, you still you still do check in every day, even when you're on vacation, to make sure everything is running smoothly.Michele Hansen 23:50 I would say it's less that we check in every day. And it's more that, you know, if an email comes in, like we still reply to it,Colleen Schnettler 23:57 I met you check your email every day. Michele Hansen 24:00 Like I yeah, like, Intercom still pops up. Like I think this is the kind of the difference between having clients and having customers is that you can tell your client, like, I'm not going to be checking my email, or I'm only going to check it, you know, every three days or whatever. And then like they can like grumble me like whatever fine. Or I'll be like, our offices are closed too. So it doesn't not a big deal. You know, we have you know, 10s of 1000s of people who could email us at any time and hopefully, they're taking a break to us usually holidays are pretty quiet for us. But especially especially with Christmas and New Year's because those are more common around the world than say Thanksgiving is which was pretty quiet for us. But we still had stuff coming in from other parts of the world. But yeah, we we don't have a good approach to taking breaks. And I think we are at the point where maybe that's something we can give ourselves. I mean, but It's just one of the trade offs of running your own company is, you know, working half an hour or an hour a day, during the holidays, but getting to take that time period. I don't really know. I don't really know where the line is there, quite frankly.Colleen Schnettler 25:22 Well, fingers crossed. You guys don't have a lot of support requests, and you have a wonderful new year. Well, that'll wrap up this week's episode of the software social podcast. I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday and we look forward to connecting with you again soon. And just as a reminder, Michelle is going to be starting the job city jobs to be done playbook. If you want to read along in that book. We'd love to hear from you at @softwaresocpod on Twitter.