Software Social

Colleen Schnettler  0:00 
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Michele Hansen  0:36 
So Colleen, the last time we talked about your SaaS, Simple File Upload, you had 89 users on Heroku 40 of which had uploaded files. And in order for your service to be released into the broader Heroku ecosystem, you have been working for months to get to 100 users. So it's been two weeks. Tell me, did you get to 100.

Colleen Schnettler  1:07 
I did 117 users. Last week I was approved for what they call general availability is when you can sell it in the marketplace. So my vendor documents are pending with Salesforce. Awesome, by the time this podcast airs, it will be available for sale.

Michele Hansen  1:27 
That's so exciting.

Colleen Schnettler  1:29 
Yeah, I'm super excited. It's really interesting though, Michelle, because this is a huge milestone, and you'd think I would get have gotten like a ton of energy and excitement about this project. But I've really been struggling the last two weeks, I have really kind of been down on myself thinking that this is a terrible idea. I need to start something new, and I need to find a new idea.

Michele Hansen  1:54 
Where do you think that feeling is coming from?

Colleen Schnettler  1:57 
I have no idea. I mean, it's, it's this really exciting time I've reached the milestone I've been trying to achieve. And so you know, I stumbled across this article by Amy Hoy called, why what's it called? Why Women Entrepreneurs Fail. Oh, and yeah, like speaks to me. And it's not just applicable to to women. But she does say in the article that she sees it a lot more in women. And let me let me pull out a few gems from this, quote, I'm tired of sitting by while you ship your thing and refuse to market it. Or you make a few sales your first time out, but it's not enough sales. So you sink into a funk and quit. Or you make it to the 90% mark, you tow up to the line of doing something, then refuse to cross it. I mean, that's like, right where I am, I'm finally getting some success. And I like want to run away and hide. And it's almost like I'm scared of my own success. It's super weird.

Michele Hansen  2:54 
So you say it's weird. But also, you know, Amy was able to write an article describing this. It makes it sound normal.

Colleen Schnettler  3:05 
She must see it all the time. And she wrote a whole article about it. I mean, I don't know her. She didn't write it for me.

Michele Hansen  3:10 
So does it make you feel better to know that this is a common feeling?

Colleen Schnettler  3:16 
Yeah, I mean, it totally, it was so weird, because I'm not kidding. Like two weeks ago, I was like, this is a terrible idea. I should shut this down. And I had just reached 100 users. And so I mean, the psychology sometimes we kind of talk a little bit about a psychology of trying to start your own thing. But, you know, I thought I was above that. sounds terrible. Like I didn't think it was going to impact me because I got my shit together. Everyone is above average. Right. And I'm above

Michele Hansen  3:45 
you. It's so interesting. Like, it's so interesting. And and as you said, I really think that does apply, you know, to both men and women. But maybe it's more acute, because the standards were held to are so much higher, you know, especially in an in a male dominated field. Right. But I think anybody could feel that way.

Colleen Schnettler  4:07 
Yeah, I think so. I don't know. So I it's been really interesting. And like I said, I really just wanted to throw the whole thing away last week. And then I found this article, and I talked to a lot of other people in the space. And those people were like, you're doing really well. Why would you walk away now? And I think it's a fear. So I think it's just a combination of a fear of failure. Like, once you start to have some success, like is that actually going to translate into something? It's a fear of learning a new skill set, there was this other great article I stumbled upon? Yeah.

So Alex Hillman has a great article called The Fear of Beginning Again. And this article is about how all of the developers that take his class, like freak out, because now they have work. We're kind of experts in our field, right? And we spent years building up, you know, this career as a developer. And so now we have to learn how to do like sales and marketing. And it's like starting from scratch, because we don't know we're doing and it's hard and it's scary. And that's where I am right now.

Michele Hansen  5:07 
That totally makes sense, especially if you're switching from going from a consultant who has a defined scope. And you know, there's a little bit of sales, a little bit of accounting involved in that. But the vast majority of your time is spent on engineering work. And now running a SaaS, engineering work is a huge percentage of that. But it's no more than 50% of the work of the business. There's marketing, there's sales, there's, there's customer support, there's all of those other things that weren't really skillsets that you would have done in a developer job or really as much in a consulting setting. So it makes sense that it's scary to to feel like you're starting from nothing in totally new fields, and that this project, unlike past projects, does not just hinge on your engineering abilities.

Colleen Schnettler  6:10 
Right. I think that's the biggest thing. I've always been able to kind of prove myself, quote, unquote, from an engineering perspective. And so this is a whole This is a whole different skill set. It's like a whole different ballgame.

Michele Hansen  6:25 
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Colleen Schnettler  6:29 
Okay, well, you're my pseudo business psychologist. So it's good. We have this podcast, so you can you can remind me not to quit when I'm like, this is a terrible idea. Probably not a terrible idea. No, I thought it like it's a great idea. Like, it's a proven market. It's like, I don't know, 100.

Michele Hansen  6:46 
People, you started out with like, zero people. And I remember when you first launched it, you're like, well, maybe I can get a couple of friends who don't actually need it. But use Heroku to use it. And like that's your first milestone was 10 people, right? or something? Yeah. And it's like, okay, like, none of them are really using it. And like they're just kind of pity users. And,

Colleen Schnettler  7:11 
and but like, nature, though,

Michele Hansen  7:12 
like so last time, we talked, you had 40 people who had actually uploaded a file. How many people have uploaded files now?

Colleen Sc...

Michele Hansen  0:00 
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Colleen Schnettler  0:55 
We are super excited to have a guest on today's podcast. We are joined today by Danielle Simpson, the co-founder of Feedback Panda.

Danielle Simpson
Hi, Colleen. Hi, Michelle.

Michele Hansen  1:07 
Hey, Danielle, I am so excited to have you on today.

Danielle Simpson  1:11 
Thank you for having me.

Michele Hansen  1:13 
So, so excited. So I want to give a quick background on you. And then we're gonna dive right in.

So Danielle is the co-founder of Feedback Panda. And how this came about is Danielle is a classically trained opera singer, who moved to Berlin. And while she was singing, she started teaching English online. And part of that process for teaching the students is to provide them with feedback. And her she and her partner Arvid Kahl who many of you probably know from Twitter, figured out that the process for this feedback could be much more efficient. And there was actually a software solution in here to make that easier for teachers. And so they launched feedback panda together. And then they sold feedback panda in 2019. And so I am so excited to have you here, Danielle, because I feel like there's so much for us to learn from from you. And just so many different points, whether that's, you know, starting a company based on your own needs, scaling that company, figuring out what other people need, even you know, selling that company, and then what do you do after selling that company? There's so much in your story that I think really resonates with people. And so I'm so excited to hear your perspective on everything.

Danielle Simpson  2:38 
Thanks. Yeah, it's my privilege to be here and to share it with you.

Michele Hansen  2:44 
So my first question, you started Feedback Panda based on your own needs. And this is a recurring theme of our show, it's where Geocodio came from. It's where Colleen's Simple File Upload came from. It's where a lot of great bootstraped companies come from. And in those early days, it can be really hard to prioritize your different needs. And when you're solving something for yourself, you know, there's a million things that could be done. And so I'm really curious to hear more like, like, when you first started it, how did you even figure out what you should work on and what you should work on next?

Danielle Simpson  3:22 
So thank you so much for asking this question. Because it's definitely, you know, if you didn't bring it up, this was something I really wanted to share, about how we prioritized work. In the beginning, it was really easy to divide the different work because Arvid was the programmer and, you know, I would have the ideas, I have the knowledge about what the teachers need, what I needed. So I could tell him what to build. And then he would build it. And then so we work super closely. In this kind of like feedback loop where he would build something, I would test it out, I would give him feedback. He iterate on that. And so before we had customers -- super easy, super easy to just kind of build a prototype of a product.

And then about a year, no, sorry, about four months in when we actually had customers. And before this, like adrenaline of something needs to be done and you just are like on autopilot, you just figure out a way to do it. We actually made this pretty expansive chart of 52 roles that we thought our company had. We're a company of two, but we got really specific about different departments, different positions in each department. And then what job what responsibilities each of those, call them people or positions had. So whenever we were kind of stuck for, okay, there's a million things that need to be done today, but what role hasn't seen some attention from us? Or what role kind of gets forgotten about because there's customer service is always something that's like super prominent, because it's actually somebody on the other line that's wanting your attention. But so in that kind of part of the company for, you know, customer experience and customer success, of course, the person on the desk is getting a lot of attention. But what about, you know, who's building the knowledge base? Is that getting a priority, and then, you know, that's going to help the person on the customer desk. And so we got super specific on these different roles. And also, who was going to be responsible for them, which was important that Arvid knew what he was responsible for, I knew what my responsibilities were.

And, and so I think part of the the issue with priority is that we don't always know what the work is, we don't always have this clear understanding of what is this role? And I know, I need to work on marketing, but like, what does that mean? I don't know. So, getting really specific about what the marketing role is, or, you know, the content writer, or all of these different, who's posting to Instagram, all of these different little jobs, even, we're little roles that our company had. So we were very, we had a very clear picture, visually, to consult to when things were getting a bit overwhelming, then we could just look at this and see what needed to be done.

Michele Hansen  6:47 
That's so fascinating. I've never heard of anyone doing that for a two person company. I mean, it's it's ingenious, and, and it sounds like as much as it is defining what the roles and tasks are. Because I think that's a challenge I definitely face into a lot of other people. face too is, you know, figuring out what even needs to be done. And you're also defining what that role isn't, right, like you defined 52 roles, but not 100 roles, like -- there you are, you're scoping the company itself. It's, it sounds like, not just tasks.

Danielle Simpson  7:27 
Absolutely. And then this also became kind of the the structure of who do we want our first hires to be? You know, this role is taking up so much of our time, is it time to bring somebody in, of course, long story short, we never ended up hiring anyone. But you know, we had that layout that structure so that we knew where we could possibly, you know, substitute ourselves out and put someone else in.

Michele Hansen  7:57 
That makes a ton of sense.

Colleen Schnettler  8:00 
So when you guys were this far along, were you both full time by this point?

Danielle Simpson  8:05 
Not quite. So we did this for months after launching this big, you know, 52 person...

Colleen Schnettler  0:00 
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Michele Hansen  0:43  
So as you may have just noticed, we have a sponsor now. So exciting. I mean, we, even we so we got we got reached out to you by balsalmic in October, to our official podcast email address, which I actually never checked, because I didn't expect anyone to email us and I found this email sitting there in December. And I was like, Oh my God.

Colleen Schnettler  1:10  
That's funny. I had no idea that they they did that. Yeah, I've never checked our email address either.

Michele Hansen  1:15  
We check it now.

Colleen Schnettler  1:17  
Yeah, it's really it. You know what I'm really happy it was balsamic because I do use them. And I just think it's really cool to have a sponsor. Although now my podcast about my product is making more money than my product.

Michele Hansen  1:29  
You'll get there. It's okay. I don't

Colleen Schnettler  1:32  
get there. I did have one more person sign up. stripe paid me $10 I know $10 I went That's awesome. Wait.

Michele Hansen  1:42  
We straight paid you $10? Is that the first money you've gotten for it? Yes, ma'am.

Colleen Schnettler  1:47  
It sure is.

Unknown Speaker  1:48  
That's a huge moment. Oh my gosh,

Colleen Schnettler  1:50  
it is a huge moment. It's It's exciting.

Michele Hansen  1:54  
I wish you could tape $1 bill to your terminal like

Colleen Schnettler  2:00  
I should ask like, can you like send me like $1 bill from this? tape it up on my wall.

Michele Hansen  2:07  
So this is really exciting. We're really excited to have a sponsor. But you know, this reminds me of something else, which is, it's really hard times right now in the world. Like there's, there's just no getting past that. And if you're listening to this show, you're probably interested in running a bootstrap company, or you're trying to start a side project yourself. And, and I, and I just want to say for a second how, like, yes, this is amazing. And we just got a sponsor. But I also don't want to add to this perception that sort of that I pick up sometimes it's sort of everybody else is doing well, except for oneself. Right? Like, I feel like, you know, on Twitter and everywhere else where the, the community kind of congregates. Like, we tend to share positive things more than we do. things we're struggling with. Right? Yeah. And and I've noticed in a couple of smaller communities I'm in and sort of private places. This this past couple weeks that I've seen more people saying like, Wow, it feels like everybody's killing it except for me.

Colleen Schnettler  3:16  
Yeah, I agree. I think there, there's so much when we share publicly, you know, we're protecting ourselves, and we're protecting our ego. And so we share the good things, and we don't share the challenging things. And it isn't really challenging time. And, and I agree with you, it's important to remember that things are hard. And everyone's coping with the situation differently. Like, just three days ago, I was lamenting how much I missed my full time job because it was so low stress, like it was so much easier than this. And, and you know, some of my friends were able to give me a pep talk. But I was just like, this is a terrible idea. I'm wasting my time. So So I think those emotional highs and lows are, are normal. And I think they're exacerbated right now because of external stresses.

Michele Hansen  4:01  
Absolutely. And, and so I just kind of want to say that, like, if you're finding yourself, not able to focus and are feeling like you're spinning your wheels and things aren't working, like that's okay. And you're okay. And you will be okay. And also at the same time that if you find yourself working compulsively and unable to stop working to the point of, you know, working instead of being your friends and family or things like like like that is also a trauma response in the same way that not being able to do anything is as well. And we all respond to trauma and stressors differently. And no matter how you're reacting, you're okay. And other people aren't sharing the full story of what's going on in their life. So it's not just you that struggling. Other people are too but this is not a current events podcast. It's not a mental health podcast. We're not gonna go into that too much more. But I did just want to make a note of that since I mean, like the last few weeks have been just really hard. But you do have good news, right? amidst all of this, there are somehow good things happening to which is also just mentally confusing.

Colleen Schnettler  5:21  
Yes, so I, you know, I just did mention that emotional swing I had this week, I was like, this was a terrible idea. But, um, things my signups have been pretty steady. And I did get one more customer who has signed up, put a credit card down outside of Heroku. So that makes four or five now. And I have 89 Heroku users. So anticipate being ready to start charging in the Heroku marketplace in a couple weeks. Since I'm averaging. so far. It's been about Yeah, it's pretty exciting. Like I think we're super excited. So of those 89 people or teams, I 40 have actually uploaded files. So for me, what makes it sticky is using it right. So considering how easy it is to sign up, I'm not upset. I feel like that's actually a pretty good number. I'm trying to take each week and focus on one technical thing and one marketing thing.

Unknown Speaker  6:18  
So

Colleen Schnettler  6:20  
because I'm just really struggling with like, I feel like we talked about this every week now that I've launched something is how to prioritize my time, I have to actually figure out what to charge because I'm going to be charging people. Hopefully in two weeks,

Michele Hansen  6:31  
you said you had to the stripe signups for those people who added their credit cards, but they don't have they haven't incurred a charge yet.

Colleen Schnettler  6:38  
No, they had I mean, it's $10. But some one of my friends recommended I changed, I changed the price significantly. His argument was that I'm not really a commodity, I'm acting like a commodity when I talk to you when I think of it in my head. But I'm not really a commodity, because I'm not just providing storage, I'm providing all of this architecture, around storage to help you deal with your files. Like I'm not just reselling AWS buckets, there is someone who does this, by the way. It's you know, and his point was my closest competitor is charging $89. So I should have he his su...

Michele Hansen  0:00 
So Colleen, you launched your new SaaS -- actually your first SaaS -- about a month ago, Simple File Upload. And you launched it first on the Heroku marketplace. But you also launched it off of the Heroku marketplace so that people who are not on Heroku can use it as well. And I was thinking about this. And I'm really curious if anyone has signed up off of Heroku, and how that's gone?

Colleen Schnettler  0:30  
Yes. So I got the most wonderful surprise yesterday, when I actually checked my subscriptions and saw that there were three people who have actually put their credit card. 

Michele Hansen 
Oh, my gosh!
 
Colleen Schnettler 
I know, super exciting. The funny thing is, as I think I've mentioned before, Heroku requires you to get 100 users before you can charge. So I have been so focused on getting that 100 user number. I hadn't even been checking my Stripe subscriptions. So I logged on the other day. And I have it in my admin dashboard. But I literally never check it. And I saw like three subscriptions. And I was like, That can't be right. 

Michele Hansen  1:09  
So are these people paying you or they just added their credit cards to Stripe?

Colleen Schnettler  1:14  
They've added their credit cards to Stripe, I am currently offering a free 30 day trial. And so they may cancel one of the people has already reached out to me, and we've had a pretty in depth email conversation about her needs. So I anticipate she'll stick around. But I have not actually heard from the other two people yet. So we'll see. I don't know.

Michele Hansen  1:34  
Tell me more about this email exchange you had.

Colleen Schnettler  1:37  
Yeah. So based on our conversation last week, I significantly changed the email, I changed, I got rid of all the graphics, I tried to be more concise and what I was asking and give a little more context. And you were right people like when you have more context, I think. And so I've been hearing back from people. So I've actually been spending a good part of this week, like handling email stuff and talking to people and listening to their feature requests. But there's one person who actually put her credit card in, you know, she actually shared with me her application, and there was an error. It was like a really subtle bug in the React component. And it actually worked with the bug, like it still worked most of the time. But she was running into an issue where it was not working consistently. So I was able to troubleshoot that and get that fixed. And so you know, we've kind of had had a dialogue going, it's been very exciting. 

Michele Hansen  2:34  
It sounds like you've been able to build a rapport and a little bit of a relationship with her.

Colleen Schnettler  2:40  
I'd like to think so. I'd like to think so every time someone gets beat, every time someone emails me, I get super excited. So I'm still at that phase where I'm like, tell me about your thing. Like what's going on? What are you working on?

Michele Hansen  2:54  
I'm still in that phase. Like, honestly, I mean, anytime someone replies back to one of my feedback emails, so I have them going out with after a couple of days, the first time we charge someone, and I have different emails that go out based on, you know, different plans, they're on and whatnot. But every time somebody replies to one of those, I'm always like, Oh my god, somebody replied, like, this is so exciting. And then they're giving me this feedback. And I always learn things about industries that I had just, I never even realized existed like, and they're doing things I didn't even realize was happening. And then, like, somehow we're part of that process. And it feels so magical and exciting. And I feel so you know, like privileged that they've let me into their little world and told me all about how they're, for example, need to get timezone stamped reports back from tractors and how we make that easier for them. And I'm just like, yes, this is so cool. Like I'm, I think I'm just a huge business nerd. But and and i love i think that's

Colleen Schnettler  3:59  
awesome learning about business.

Michele Hansen  4:01  
So you know that that phase has, you know, been going for? Oh, wow, seven years now. For me.

Colleen Schnettler  4:10  
Wow. Yeah.

Michele Hansen  4:11  
Oh, wow. Geocodio turns seven this month. So, so tell me tell me more about about what you talk to.

Colleen Schnettler  4:17  
Ya. So it's been great. Like I said, I changed an email copy. And some people like reached out to me on Twitter. I love I love hearing from people. Thank you. I love ideas and shared with me the email copy they use. And like I said, so people started engaging. And I got a lot of good feedback. I got one person who was like really excited, who was like, Oh my gosh, Heroku has a file system, you know, was really troublesome. And so this is just what I needed. I got a lot of feature requests, which is something we'll talk about in a minute. I got one guy who was like, Oh my gosh, thank you so much for emailing me. Okay. So it was really fun. It's still just a handful of people, right? But I love it. Like I love hearing from people. And some of them, like I said, are comfortable sharing what they're working on, which has been cool, too. And there have been a lot of suggestions for utilizing the uploader in a way I did not anticipate. Ooh, so yeah, so this is like, the next thing. And I know I remember months ago, you said something about every new feature request should sit out in the rain on the porch for three days.

Michele Hansen  5:27  
Yes, I think that is taken from one of the early Basecamp books getting real, badly adjusted adjacent free, yeah, that new features should have to stand on the porch in the rain for three days before you let them in.

Colleen Schnettler  5:44  
And so I appreciate that. But at the same time, I feel like that's more appropriate for mature products. This is just a little baby product. And I'm trying to turn it into something amazing. And I think so. So I mean, when you're only talking to eight to 10 people, I think that every feature request, you know, I should really consider now I understand, like I was preparing for this podcast, I tried to look back at what I did this week, because I had, I didn't really do many things on the list of things I wanted to do. And it's because I spent so much time like doing these emails and talking to people and looking into their feature requests. And so I don't want to just throw them out there as quickly as possible. But I do think the product really has space to grow. And I love hearing what people are asking, and some of them are not too hard, like I can do, but I don't know, it's just it's just a struggle of like balancing all that, like do I impure, I have active people. And again, it's like a people who are talking to me. And so when they request something, if it's within my ability, and I think it's going to make the product better, because then other people might want that same feature. I want to do it. But of course, I'm balancing that with trying to do marketing and trying to do documentation, which I really need to do more documentation. So it's just like the challenge of balancing Oh, and you know, my paid work, balancing all of that.

Michele Hansen  7:13  
So it sounds like you're balancing a lot right now. And I'm curious with all of those feature requests coming in? are you saving them like, like, how are you sort o...

Colleen Schnettler  0:00 
Hey listeners, Colleen here. This week I lead off discussing the positive uptick in my signup numbers, tempered by the fact that none of those new signups responded to my welcome email, Michele and I discussed what I'm doing wrong. And we also talked about how I should be prioritizing my time, every bootstrapper's most challenging problem, at least in the beginning. Michele talks about a detailed customer feedback email that brought her great joy. And we discussed the new book she is reading called Jobs To Be Done in the context of small business. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Colleen
So I have been keeping track of my numbers every week for how many people are signing up for my service. And this week, I had quite a few signups. I had 39. Yeah. This week, I had 38 new signups.

Michele Hansen  0:48 
Whoa.

Colleen Schnettler 
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
I how many were the previous week? The previous week?

Colleen Schnettler  0:53 
I had 18.

Michele Hansen  0:56 
Okay, so then the week before that,

Colleen Schnettler  0:59 
I just started recording the past few weeks.

Michele Hansen  1:05 
hey, that's almost 100% growth week over week for two weeks. That's That's pretty good. I mean, not long ago, you had, like 18 ish users total.

Colleen Schnettler  1:16 
Yeah, I'm really happy with the number of signups I'm getting, I think part of it might be because of the holiday break. I've noticed because my service is free. And it's in the Heroku marketplace. I get a lot of hobbyists. So I'm wondering if people are like trying it out because they have downtime. But I've also done a lot to improve the documentation. And so the other thing that has happened this week is a lot more people have actually converted. I think I mentioned a week or two ago that I was getting so many signups and then only like 10% of those people were actually using the single sign on to access their custom dashboard and install the JavaScript. And this week from those 3817 made it to single sign on, which is huge compared to the numbers I was seeing before. Yeah. So I'd like to believe it's because I've added more documentation so people know what it is. And, you know, we worked out did we do it on the podcast where we worked out some of the copy on my marketing page. Yeah, yeah. So some of the things we put where we like put numbers and we're like, here's the three step process. I'd like to believe that's, that's been part of the reason this is working and more people are converting.

Michele Hansen  2:30 
So you have what you would like to believe about why it's working. Have you asked anybody about that?

Colleen Schnettler  2:37 
Why can't I just say, Oh, they converted? Can I just go with what I'd like to believe?

Michele Hansen  2:42 
Hunches are great. But that's not a substitute for going out and finding the answer.

Colleen Schnettler  2:49 
I've had this great number of signups. But something else interesting has happened. And this is not good. So I think I mentioned answer my question. No, I don't know. No---

Michele Hansen  3:04 
I have tried not to talk over you. But you did not answer my question of whether you have tried to figure out know why people are converting that answer is -- and so as much as we need to figure out why people are canceling and why they're not converting. And we ask them a million questions about why you canceling why you're not doing this, why you're not doing that. We also need to ask them about why they are doing things so we can help more people do those things and find more people like them who will do those things.

Colleen Schnettler  3:31 
So this is interesting, because I've had all these signups and I mentioned last week that I was going to start doing transactional email like a welcome email. Since I have started the welcome email zero people have responded to it. Zero before when I was hand emailing people, like maybe 10 to 20% of people responded. So my professional looking welcome email with like a footer and branding seems to be turning people off.

Michele Hansen  4:01 
You can just do a plain text email. I think that's gonna be that there. That's more likely to get caught in a spam filter if it has graphics in it.

Colleen Schnettler  4:09 
Yeah, that's what I'm going to do. Because I was really surprised. I was like, Oh, I'm getting all these signups and these people are converting, not a single person has responded to an email.

Michele Hansen  4:18 
Plaintext tends to have better open rates than graphical email like this is why that most, if you've ever had them made the mistake of signing up for a political campaign's email list, you will notice that even the most well funded campaigns will have plain text emails. This is something the Obama campaign discovered and then just proliferated throughout the industry that the fewer images and formatting and everything in an email, the better open and response rates you're going to get from it because there's just fewer barriers to people getting the email and then you know, formatting and everything else in it. I send most of our especially feedback emails, I always send those out plain text.

Colleen Schnettler  5:06 
Yeah, I'm going to, that's my next step. Because I was really surprised to see such a poor response. Now, it's kind of a little bit funny, maybe not funny. So when I went to get my transactional email set up, for some reason, I got kicked out of Sendgrid. And that was just I don't really know what happened. So I'm actually sending it from my Gmail. So I don't have open rates right now. So I can't see how many people are actually opening it. But I am going to get that sorted out. And I like the idea of going plain text because no one is responding right now. So I have no idea why more people are converting I guess I should ask them.

Michele Hansen  5:42 
I think it's a, you know, it's a, an easy thing to fall into. On a recent episode, we talked about loss aversion and how human beings are so much more motivated to try to avoid losing money, rather than making money. And I think feedback really plays into that, because most companies asked for feedback when somebody cancels, or if they give you a negative NPS score, or something like that, but not as many companies ask for feedback from people who are happy, which, you know, trying to find more people who are are happy, like your your current happy customers with similar processes and needs is much easier than trying to fix all of the people who don't like it. Like that's a tough hill to climb.

Colleen Schnettler  6:33 
Yeah, so I definitely will reach out to those people. I guess one by you know, I'll just, there's only 17 people, I can just email them and ask them.

Michele Hansen 6:43 
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler  6:44 
it seems like I get better responses. If I don't ask open ended questions in email.

Michele Hansen  6:50 
What are the questions you're asking?

Colleen Schnettler  6:52 
So my first email which I was hand typing, which got maybe 10 to 20%? response was, Hey, my name is Colleen. From simple file upload. Do you need any help installing the service? Question mark? Please let me know. Thanks. And that got some responses. So then I ...

Michele Hansen  0:02  
So you remember a couple weeks ago how we were talking about competitors nipping at our heels?

Colleen Schnettler  0:07  
Yes.

Michele Hansen  0:09  
So, recently, we had a new competitor, enter the space. 

Colleen Schnettler
Ooh, interesting. 

Michele Hansen
Amazon.

Colleen Schnettler  0:18  
Oh, no. That's fair. 

Michele Hansen  0:22  
I mean, it's inevitable. Um, and we already compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft, and you know, all of these huge companies. So it's not, it's definitely not unexpected. Like, it's definitely been one of those. It's only a matter of time, things. But yeah, I, that that that happened, they launched their own location services. And, interestingly, they're just reselling to other providers, they're reselling s, ri, and here. And it's very focused on fleet management and asset tracking, which kind of makes sense based on what they're doing. Like, they're tracking packages and trucks and like, that's crucial to their operations. So it's almost kind of funny, because, you know, looking at that, and whenever people are asking about, you know, how do I bootstrap my own business? Like, where do I start? How do I get an idea? One of the most common pieces of advice and advice that I give is just start with something that you need yourself and go from there, which is what you have done. And it's also what Amazon has done here, too. So, so it's, like, I look at it, I'm like, Oh, this is clearly something they built for themselves, and now they're gonna have people paying for it definitely does, does a, you know, not a totally welcome surprise for us, right, because, um, fleet management and asset tracking is an important vertical for us, because it's expressly forbidden by some of the other major geocoder. So we do have an important amount of customers in those spaces, and overall, Amazon's pricing is much higher than us. But for asset tracking, it's, it's very favorable for that use case, because instead of paying per basically per ping from a GPS, imagine, like a truck might say, send back a GPS paying every 100 feet, for example, instead of paying every time for the new coordinates of that you only pay per asset. So you know, so I imagine we will lose some customers from this. But at the same time, what I think one of the great things about being in b2b SaaS, but especially the kind of space we're in, is that we're so diversified across industries, that we have tons of other verticals, in addition to fleet management and asset tracking. And it makes me really glad that I do that semi annual customer portfolio analysis, because I know exactly how much of our revenue is from that sector. And looking at this now and knowing Okay, there's this huge, well funded, competitor coming into the space. I can see pretty clearly like, how much revenue that directly puts at risk. But yes, certainly an interesting week.

Colleen Schnettler  3:33  
Yeah. So when you do your semi-annual customer portfolio, do you break up your customers by industry? Is that the purpose of that?

Michele Hansen  3:43  
Yeah. So basically, I look at our customers, as a portfolio, as an investor might look at, say, a mutual fund portfolio, for example. And I split it on a couple of different metrics. So I basically take the top 90% of revenue, and I look at the customers from it within that space. And I look at them by industry. So so there's like fleet management, but also say real estate or insurance, health care, things like that. By industry, I try to get a rough sense for company size. So that I can just kind of, you know, have a little bit more understanding there. And then just really trying to understand, okay, based on these different industries, like how much of our revenue is dependent on any one given industry, and should we think about diversifying whether we want a you know, a higher percentage of revenue in a particular category, we want new customers there, or do we want to purposefully pull back from a certain industry or simply just not emphasize it as much if we feel like there's too high of a concentration there, and also making sure that we don't have any high customer concentration and any one Given customer, so something an important metric for me is, you know, what are our largest customer, what percentage of overall revenue are there, they and basically making sure that that number is below 1%. And again, this also comes out of sort of investor style thinking where, you know, for example, if they're analyzing a company, and they see that a company has, say, 40% of its revenue coming from one particular customer, that's a huge red flag. Right? versus if it's highly diversified, then then let that's less of a risk. And yeah, that's, that's something I do about twice a year. And, and that's kind of one of those things are sort of had to create for ourselves, you know, I'm obviously not creating the concepts, but I think applying them in this way, is because, you know, as we've talked about a lot of the content out there on running a SAS is very much focused on growth and, you know, more well funded approaches to business that don't necessarily emphasize stability or profitability, or things like that. And so, rather than managing for growth, we manage for stability. And I find that this customer portfolio analysis is a really helpful tool for me. And, and matea stew in sort of like us communicating, okay, what are our priorities? And how do we create a more stable business and just kind of giving us a high level of that?

Colleen Schnettler  6:37  
So you do that as a manual process?

Michele Hansen  6:40  
Yes.

Colleen Schnettler  6:41  
So do you literally hand Google? 

Michele Hansen  6:44  
It's because I'm a I'm a glutton for punishment, apparently,

Colleen Schnettler  6:46  
I know. 

Michele Hansen  6:50  
You probably like the like the week, you know, the the week I spend on this every six months, I actually like genuinely is like

Colleen Schnettler  6:56  
your favorite. Yes.

Michele Hansen  6:58  
Making all my little pivot tables and everything and like, Oh, my gosh, I am. Yeah, it's actually really fun. Yeah, I basically just google them. And then, but a lot of them I've also had conversations with. So that's where I can fill out the rest of the picture to sort of so it's this combination of quantitative and qualitative information that we use for prioritizing. And, and this is really like kind of the first big moment I can think of where something happened. And my first thought was numbers from that analysis. And then it like made me feel better when when this happened.

Colleen Schnettler  7:39  
So when we talked about competitive analysis last week, the reason and this wasn't we were talking about Amazon, we were talking about some of your other competitors who had launched new features. And we talked about you guys competing on some very specific in some very specific areas. So with this Amazon launch, are you saying that now at least for the fleet management sector, you do not compete on price.

Michele Hansen  8:09  
So it's, it'll be it'll depend on the on the customer. So their price for pay as you go geocoding is much higher, they are $4 per 1000, versus we are 50 cents per 1000. If you want to store the data there, 50 cents per 1000, if you don't want to store the data, to anything, I read it more of a as a shot across the bow at Google than you know us. I mean, we're so small like that, you know, Amazon doesn't care about us, like, just kind of one of the nice things about being a bootstrap business. So of cour...

Colleen Schnettler  0:00 
Welcome to Software Social. I'm Colleen. This week, Michele and I discuss my progress getting my first product, a file uploading widget to 100 users. Why 100 because I'm going to sell it in the Heroku add on store, and I need 100 users before I can start charging. We also do a deep dive into what makes a good customer interview. And Michelle gets really excited about something called Prospect Theory. Enjoy the show. So I'm excited to share my numbers with you this week. For the past couple weeks for those that are new. I have been sharing with Michelle the numbers of signup, the number of signups I have for my new widget simple file upload. And as of this morning, I have 47 active signups.

Michele Hansen  0:45 
Oh, it was like 31. Last time, right?

Colleen Schnettler  0:50 
Yeah. So I really think using this marketing channel of the Heroku add on store has been tremendous for me. That's awesome. Yeah, I'm super pumped. So it's interesting, though, because when I first looked on, when I first signed on to my admin dashboard, it said 75 teams, but then I have to cross reference that with the people who have deprovisioned or kind of like, ditched it. So I'm still seeing a lot of people click the button to sign up. And then deprovision the add on but still 47 isn't bad. I'm pretty pumped about that. That's almost halfway to my 100. I need to get to actually make it a viable product.

Michele Hansen
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah! So that's good news. I and I also spoke with someone who has a really successful add on in the marketplace. And he showed me this somewhat convoluted way where I can get the user's email address, even if they haven't gone through the single sign on process that I've mentioned in the past. So something I want to set up this week as I want to set up a wrapper so I can get the person's email address as soon as they provision the app and send them an email right away to see you know, if they're having any trouble setting it up, I think. I think that's where I'm losing people, but not that many people are communicating with me. So that's my best guess right now.

Michele Hansen  2:10 
So you said 47 current signups?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
Or current current user, so and then. So that's 16 new people since last time we talked. Do you have a sense for like, how many of those have have gotten to that, that crucial single sign on step and like, have actually added it to?

Colleen Schnettler  2:30 
Yes, so of those 47,34 have actually gone through the single sign on. So 34 might actually want to use it for real is how I look at that. Only 16 have actually started uploading images or not, I shouldn't say images files. So there's a pretty big gap between showing intent and actually using it. So I really want to work on closing that gap.

Michele Hansen  2:57 
Yeah, and it kind of makes sense to me that there would be a gap for that, when, in order to see how it works, people have to install it first versus services that you can see whether it works first, and then sign up for it, would have a lower drop off in that conversion.

Colleen Schnettler  3:19 
Exactly. One of the things I want to do -- I have a long list of things I want to do, but they're all small, but they are there is quite a long list. I want to put because the Heroku documentation has to be formatted in this really specific way to comply with the Heroku requirements. Once you single sign on, I have the documentation and what I consider to be a much more user friendly format. So one of the things I want to do is on my normal marketing site, I want to add the user friendly documentation. So someone can see the documentation before they install the add on to see if it's a good fit because I know I'm someone -- if I want to install like a piece of software. I want to see your docs first because I want to see how good they are. And I want to see how hard it really is and how it actually works.

Michele Hansen  4:06 
Yeah, that makes sense to me.

Colleen Schnettler  4:08 
I also -- in very like I haven't taken Amy Hoy's course but like in very I had, you know I subscribed to her email is in very Amy Hoy fashion. As we've discussed, I launched this with a lot without a lot of boilerplate things. And one of the boilerplate things I didn't have is I don't have transactional email setup. Which means what I've been doing is, every night I've been signing onto my admin dashboard, copying the email addresses of people who signed up to an Excel sheet, literally emailing each person, one by one from my support account in Gmail. So in the beginning, that was not too cumbersome. It enabled me to see exactly where they were in the process like have they added files have they not have added a lot of files and kind of customize the email but now that's getting way too cumbersome and time consuming. So one of the things I really need to get up this week is transactional email. Yeah, it doesn't even take that long. It's, I'm somewhat like I do it all the time. It's just, I find it very mundane, because it's a very boilerplate thing. But it's such a, it's not such a pain, but it's kind of a pain, right? And so I tend to procrastinate the boring things like, like maybe most people, I'm like, Oh, I want to work on this, this this other feature, that's going to be so great. Instead of set up transactional email, but I'm losing people, right? Because if I don't email if you sign up, and I don't email you for 24 hours, like your path, you're over it, you have already made that decision, like your motive when you think of like a human motivation, at least for me, if I want something I want right now. So if I sign up for your software, it's because I want to use it right now. So if I can't figure...

Michele Hansen  5:50 
So is this the welcome email?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, there's no welcome...

Michele Hansen
Here like this as like, here's the documentation. And here's what you've signed up for. Like, gotcha, okay. Yeah, I think I could help like, I know, our URL. Like, I don't think we had welcome emails to start. And we also, I think we manually emailed everybody who signed up. But it was so good for feedback like that early feedback was really critical for us. And it was part like, Hey, here's your documentation. But also, like, let us know if you have any questions about getting set up. Or if there was, you know, if there's anything else you're hoping that we do that we don't like, let us know. And we can see if we can add it.

Colleen Schnettler  6:27 
Yeah, that's exactly where I am. So basically, not even well, I mean, it would be a welcome email. But I want to get that as soon as they sign up. I want to fire off that email. Like, here's how you contact me, here's how I can help you. Let me know what you need. Let's let's do this. And yeah, hopefully I'll get I'll get more engagement, if I catch people early in the process of provisioning the add on.

Michele Hansen  6:52 
Yeah, that I think that sounds like a plan.

Colleen Schnettler  6:55 
Yeah. Okay. Good plan. So let's talk a little bit about the people I've talked with, I mentioned that I've been doing customer interviews, which has been super fun, I'm really enjoying it. So I did a walkthrough with a friend who's a UI/UX designer, like a very senior designer. And he gave me some tips that I really took to heart. And I thought they were great. And so actually, this week, was mostly all technical stuff. This week, when I worked on

Michele Hansen  0:00  
So we had kind of a wake up call this week.

Colleen Schnettler  0:04  
Oh, what happened?

Michele Hansen  0:07  
So we're looking at some of our competitors websites, and we realize either their employees don't have kids, or they don't care that their employees have kids or what, but they have gotten a lot more done this year than we have.

Colleen Schnettler  0:24  
Oh, okay. 

Michele Hansen  0:26  
I mean, we feel good about what we've gotten done considering everything. But it was definitely kind of a moment of, whoa, okay. Like, you know, should you know, we have this information now, like, should we do something with this knowing that some competitors are nipping at our heels a little closer than they were a year ago?

Colleen Schnettler  0:47  
So what does it mean for them to be nipping at your heels? Are they releasing new features? Are they like, what exactly did you see that made you go, Oh, we need to up our game.

Michele Hansen  0:58  
So it's, it's partly new features, I think it's one of the most visible things, there's also some administrative type features, like, you know, certain compliance, and certifications. And you know, it with this kind of thing, though, you know, you have that first moment, it's like, oh, like, they now support something that they didn't before that we do. And so that makes us tighter competitors. But also remembering that we compete on so many different levels. And like, we have no one true one to one competitor, um, which, which I think is good for us. And it was, the other thing is like, we don't really pay much attention to our competitors, which I think is somewhat unique. Um, you know, I get the sense that that most companies, if you ask them to how they divide their mental headspace, and research time, and all of that between their competitors and their customers, I'm gonna bet that most companies are somewhere around at 20 in favor of looking at what their competitors are doing, what their features are, what their pricing is, you know, what their marketing is, like, all those kinds of things. And then 20% on the customers, and even like, really great companies that are known for focusing on their customers, which most truly great companies are, are probably more like 5050. And I think we're more like 9010 in favor of listening to our customers and letting them guide our roadmap. And then it's really maybe only once or twice a year that we really check in on what our competitors are doing.

Colleen Schnettler  2:46  
Okay, so you were checking out some of your competitor sites? And like, what's your reaction? Are you concerned? Are you worried, you're gonna start? Are you seeing, are you seeing higher customer churn? Because people are going to your competitors for these additional features?

Michele Hansen  3:01  
No, that's the thing. And our growth is, you know, perfectly healthy, it's, you know, beyond a level that that we, you know, sort of, quote, unquote, need. And so all of that is healthy, and we're really busy. So we're not worried about it. And I think that's what I have been thinking a lot about is okay, you know, we have this moment of we have this new information. And whenever we get new information, there is there's the question of, what do we do with this information? And the answer to that question can be nothing, we don't do anything different. Which I think is an under appreciated answer. In business many times, and old boss of mine was sort of famous for, you know, his do nothing approach. Because, you know, we're not going to sort of run around like chickens with our heads cut off to launch a new feature. When, you know, it turns out that oh, well, the competitors pricing model is actually not as customer friendly as ours, and based on some other things are, it's very clear, they're going after a different market segment than we are. And maybe there's a small percentage of customers that view us as a one to one comparison, but it's really very few customers who do, but it's a tricky thing, right?

Colleen Schnettler  4:34  
Yeah, I can definitely see that. So I was talking to a friend the other day about his last SaaS, which did really well, he grew it and he sold it for a good chunk of money. But he was talking about like the emotional upheaval every time a competitor launched. And I thought that was really interesting, because that's got to be like, you don't know what to do. Should you implement these features like there's got to be a lot of tension there in terms of how you approach this kind of new information you have?

Michele Hansen  5:02  
Yeah, and and what I tend to think about is, when I get those feelings, I pull it back to Okay, what what are the dimensions that we are truly competing on? And how many of those have really changed, and how many of those are present in this competitor, and how easy is it for this competitor, to replicate our model, because that's what makes a business unique is it you know, all the different things that go into it that make certain you know, price points possible for some companies that aren't possible for other ones, for example, you know, so we, we not only compete on the price itself, we also compete on the pricing model. So we have free tier daily free tier plus pays, you go plus subscription options. And then you know, all sorts of other more custom options after that. You know, some of our competitors are, for example, one of the major ones, they have a free tier per month, but you have to have a credit card on file. Some of them are much lower free tier per month, some of them have a free tier per day, but it's only for a three month period, like there's all and then like some of them have pays, you go on top of that some as we were talking about with you a couple of weeks ago, some of them maybe have paid you go on top of that, or they have subscriptions within a certain band on top of that, or they jump straight to enterprise after that. Um, and so the price and the pricing model are one way we can eat, then, of course, there's the the data itself, like so in our space, it's the coverage, you know, where US and Canada and some of our competitors are us only some of them are worldwide, but not at rooftop level. Some of them are rooftop, like some places rooftop some places not like all sorts of different things. And then also the different data appends that we have. So adding congressional districts, adding census data, all that kind of stuff, which most of our competitors don't have, only one has a couple of those things. So there's the data and the coverage. There's also things like the features. So we have an API, we also have the ability to upload spreadsheets, like massive spreadsheets, most of our competitors don't have spreadsheet upload support, most of them don't have batch geocoding support. And some of them actually expressly prohibit batch geocoding. Only one of them has some sort of spreadsheet support, but it's actually like copy paste, and it's very limited. And then there's also Terms of Service, which is probably the hardest one for anyone to replicate, which is our extremely permissive Terms of Use. And most of our competitors have very restrictive Terms of Use, and you know, you can't store the data, you can't reuse it, things like that. And so when we have a, you know, a new competitor Come on, or a new a competitor, add, you know, features or things like that, we're always thinking, Okay, like, how does this? Yes, there's that initial feeling of like, oh, oh, like, okay. But then what does that actually mean for us? And how does that change our competitive position? And usually, it's, you know, what, this, there's more competition, that's fine. We're still okay, we're ...

VOTE FOR US! SaaSPodcastAwards.com

Colleen's Heroku landing page: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/simple-file-upload

Michele Hansen  0:00 
So I got a pretty exciting email yesterday. We were nominated for the MicroConf SaaS Podcast Awards!

Colleen Schnettler  0:09 
That's amazing.

Michele Hansen  0:10 
In three categories.

Colleen Schnettler  0:13 
Wow, that's so funny, Michele, because when we started this podcast, I was pretty sure no one was gonna listen to it except for me. So I can't believe like people listen to it. I feel like a little uncomfortable that people listen to it actually.

Michele Hansen  0:30 
Yeah, we kind of expected it would just be like our husbands and some close business friends of ours. I'm totally floored and surprised and so honored that people are listening, and you guys nominated us and really, really, genuinely touched by that. So it's kind of a fun thing that's going on.

But there are also other fun things going on. With Colleen, because you're now in you know, the Heroku marketplace. There's people using it. And I think I saw you mentioned this week that you even got feedback from like somebody you don't know using it and they have something positive to say?!

Colleen Schnettler  1:13 
It's not my friend. Actually.

Michele Hansen 1:16 
that's always awesome.

Michele Hansen  1:19 
A total stranger using your thing. That's a milestone.

Colleen Schnettler  1:20 
That's a milestone. So I feel like this is just a really exciting time in terms of launching a product. So the product has been in beta, I think for about seven to 10 days. And as of this morning, 31 teams have signed up,

Michele Hansen  1:38 
Dude!

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, but...

Michele Hansen
You're a third of the way there!

Colleen Schnettler  1:41 
Well, 31 teams have signed up, but they're not all right, that's true for the I have to get 100 like I'm a third of the way there. But what is interesting about this is the way the Heroku cycle works. So if you are in the Heroku marketplace, you're going to search for I don't know file upload, you see my you see my add on, you click a button to install it. Then, if you want your personalized instructions, you have to go to the dashboard for your application, and click on it again, in your application. And that's the single sign on. So they provision the application which they can use it without ever doing single sign on. But most people use single sign on because then the directions are personalized with their API key. So of those 31 people 13 have actually made it to single sign on. And of those 13. Six have actively uploaded files. So for like a week, I'm feeling really good about these numbers.

Michele Hansen  2:42 
Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler  2:44 
I think there's just a huge benefit to being in like using this marketplaces attraction channel, I think that is just been a huge benefit. Because I know so many people who have launched products, and they literally cannot get anyone to sign up. And that would be that would be tough. So basically, what I'm doing is I don't get a contact email until they hit single sign on. Now there's one team that never single signed on. And they're just using the documentation from the Heroku. Doc's so good for them. So I don't have contact information for them. But the other 13 I do have contact information for so I have hand emailed all 13 of those contacts of the 13. I emailed three have emailed me back. So that's pretty good. Not bad, right? I don't know. Like I myself tend to ignore emails. So

Michele Hansen  3:37 
Like my feedback emails, I think the highest I've ever gotten the open rate to know the open rate is like something like 60%. But the reply rate is usually in the eight to 10% range. So that is good.

Colleen Schnettler  3:51 
Yeah. And I was just kind of asking, like, I just have an email. It's like, hey, do you need help setting it up? Let me know. So that's like, a really exciting first week. I mean, I feel like things are are going well, I've been hustling. Hold on. Wait,

Michele Hansen  4:05 
tell us what they said though. Like, don't skip that. I want to hear what these people had to say about it.

Colleen Schnettler  4:12 
So the first person had a feature request, which is like a totally reasonable request. The second person had the same feature request. And the third person. Yeah, I mean, it's okay. It's embarrassing. I shifted. Okay, now I have to tell you, so I shipped a file storage solution without giving you the ability to delete files.

Michele Hansen  4:34 
I mean, everything is a feature. Like we shipped a product without the ability to charge people

Colleen Schnettler  4:40 
It seemed like like, everything is a feature. I'm not charging them. So you know, it's not like they're paying for it. If I was asking them to pay for it, then yeah, I would have let them I would have shipped it with the ability to delete. But since I'm not charging them it doesn't matter.

Michele Hansen  4:57 
But when really get feature requests, like explicit feature requests for something specific, are our processes always, you know, whatever it is we always capture it. And so how this works for us is we just create an issue and GitHub related to intercom, it's not the cleanest way to do it, but it works for us. And then if somebody else or like multiple people ask us for it, then we look into it. So it's pretty interesting that you've already had two people asked for the same thing. Now granted, as you say, it's a fairly table stakes kind of thing. But it's, it's always interesting when you have multiple people asking for something, because that is pretty clearly indicates interest.

Colleen Schnettler  5:38 
Yeah, so I'm obviously gonna add that. I mean, I didn't add it for a very specific reason. And the reason I didn't add it is because I'm concerned, like if a user drops up, if a user adds a file, like let's say they add their avatar, and then they add, drop it again. Now, I don't know, why would they would do that. But let's say they do. So let's say they drop the same file twice, that actually gets saved in my service as two different files, because I have no way to know that that's the same file, because the font because I don't want to overwrite file names, right? Because your file might name might be avatar, and mine might be avatar, so I'm not overwriting files. And so if that happened, the developer who's implementing it is going to be saving the most recent URL in their database, so they can access that file in the cloud. If they then go into their admin dashboard, and they see two of the same files, and they delete one, and they delete the one they have linked in their database, then they're no longer going to have access to that file. Does that make any sense? I feel like I need to like whiteboard that. But basically, there's a way where if two of the same, same images get uploaded, but the URLs are different. And they have one database URL, one URL in their database pointing to the file and they delete the wrong file, that file will then be gone.

Michele Hansen  7:05 
So you're trying to make it sort of human error? Yes, fault tolerant, right? Yeah, they would have, like a timestamp or something to help them differentiate between them, like someone who has, you know, a scren shot ...

Colleen Schnettler  0:00 
So Michelle, I saw that you recently published a blog post a little bit about the founding of your company. And I haven't read it, because I want to hear the story fresh from you. And I, this is something I've actually wanted to talk to you about, frequently, and you've always kind of just been like, Oh, yeah, you know, we just started it. And then it just, you know, happened. So I'm super excited to dive into this with you, especially where I'm coming from, like, where it seems so far away to have a successful SaaS. So tell us a little bit about how you guys got started?

Michele Hansen  0:31 
Yeah, this is something I get questions about, all the time. And I wanted to dive into the story and the numbers a little more. Because I think that's helpful for people when they're getting started, like yourself, to see that you don't have to have success the first day, or the first month, or the first three months or four, six months, really in order to make something work. And then also that if something, you know, does okay, but not great, you can always chase that and snowball it into something else.

Colleen Schnettler  1:10 
So how did you guys get started? What was your very first product?

Michele Hansen  1:15 
Well, my very first product? Or our very first product?

Colleen Schnettler  1:18 
I don't know what gave you the bug, like, let's go back, just let's talk about about you.

Michele Hansen
Oh!

Colleen Schnettler
What was your first, like, What gave you the bug?

Michele Hansen  1:25 
So, so this actually, this isn't in the post, but my first business, if you can call it that was basically a blog that I started with friends, my freshman year of college, we called it an online magazine. And the whole idea of it was college kids from around the country, with different perspectives on politics, all writing about politics together and collaborating together. And that was really one of the first things that introduced me to running something online, in a sort of organized way, because I had little projects before, like, you know, we also started a satire blog at one point, but like, we didn't put our names on it. And it was very much for fun. And like that project, talking about how to use Blogger, and then this other one that we launched, that was a bit more serious, and like something we ended up putting on our resumes, was on WordPress, and just how it happened was I ended up being the person doing all the WordPress admin. So managing the site, and, you know, customizing templates and stuff like that, um, you know, my introduction to coding was MySpace. So HTML, you know, for a certain generation of us was a key skill as a teenager. And that carried over, but I think those projects, my freshman year of college really gave me the bug of like, you create something, and then you get a, like, a reaction from people. And you, people tell you, they enjoyed it. And then and then, you know, just kind of keeps you going like that. And then actually, a year later growing, though, so that blog actually never made any money. We had ads on it, but then I don't know, something happened. And it didn't work out. And we didn't make money. Um, but then we actually ended up turning it into a consulting firm, like a social media consulting firm. So that was when I was 20.

Colleen Schnettler  3:39 
I mean, that was 2010 ish. So that was like before, that was a big thing, right? Social media consulting wasn't the powerhouse it is now.

Michele Hansen  3:47 
Yeah, it really wasn't as well. And so what are our angle was, was reaching out to PR firms that were, you know, very experienced in PR, but didn't know how to use Facebook and Twitter. And that was really where I earned some more business chops, in terms of like, actually, like operating a business and writing proposals and pitching and doing sales and things like that. You know, I'd had a little bit of experience with that, like, you know, when I was a kid, my mom had an art business, and I would spend Saturdays as a teenager helping her sell her art at art and craft shows. But really, in a kind of, you know, a context that is the closest to now, it really wasn't until college. And then we actually made money doing that, but then shut down the business about six months later, because basically, the purpose of the business was to allow us to skip several layers of terrible internships and get to the ones we wanted, faster. So there is an exit strategy from the beginning. And, and so actually, by the time that we made the, Mathias and I made the products that ended up being the one that funded Geocodio, that was actually my third business. Okay. And I think all of those little experiences, you know, really added to just having more comfort with what it takes to launch a product, even if those other efforts were not quite as organized, or structured, as at you know, as the as the projects that Mathias and I have launched together.

Colleen Schnettler  5:38 
Yeah, yeah, well, even you were talking about, you know, back in your college days, like reaching out to ad agencies and things like that, like, for a lot of us who are just starting businesses, this is the first time we've had to do any kind of software sales or sales. Really, I was thinking about that today. Because this is just something that like, I don't do a lot, like, I'm comfortable with people, and I like to talk to people, but like, I'm basically cold emailing everyone who has signed up for my service, to be like, Hey, can I help you? And that's like, a little thing, but just, it's still outside my comfort zone. So you starting those lessons 10-15 years ago, you know, they just compound I'm sure to bring you guys to where you are today.

Michele Hansen  6:20 
Absolutely. I mean, it's totally useful, you know, on Mathias aside to his early projects, one of which was the precursor to when the first one we launched together, you know, he was funding those because he was a magician as a child. And so he had his, like, he was running his own business, like, as of the age of seven or so eight, was when he started performing magic. And so he always had that money to fund, you know, other projects that he wanted to do, or, you know, buying the latest and greatest tools and whatnot. Yeah, it's not just the most recent business, it's a history of having that, as you said that that bug of "Hey, like, this is, this is fun, and I can do it." And also, like, making a ton of mistakes in the process, like accidentally not monetizing our blog. I mean, it was or like, I think we did, but then, you know, some of our friends, like, we had ads on it. And some of our friends knew that if they clicked on them, we would get money. And so they clicked on them. I think we got shut down for having like, suspicious clicks on them or like something else going on. Like, you know, I mean, we were like 19 and idiots. And, you know, but you know, it introduced me to things like that. And it got me you know, more comfortable using a modern web tools like WordPress.

Colleen Schnettler  7:54 
Yeah. So then you guys, you and your husband decided you wanted to start something. And you just use the phrase, the thing that launched Geocodio. So can you tell us a little bit more about that? What was that?

Michele Hansen  8:06 
Yeah. And you make it sound like we just had this idea one day, and we're like, oh, like we're going to launch thing something. And the reality is, is that we were pregnant. And...