Software Social

Colleen Schnettler  0:00 
So one of the things I kind of wanted to talk about was a few weeks ago on the podcast, I sat here and I told you that what I really want is a job where I only have to work nine to five. And I bring that up.

Michele Hansen
Yeah?

Colleen Schnettler
I seems great. But my husband totally called me out on this, he pointed out that I have had jobs where I've only had to work nine to five, and I have quit them all.

Michele Hansen
Really?

Colleen Schnettler
Yes. And so it just got me thinking, you know, as I go on this journey, and I, I tried to get my mental, like my headspace aligned for what I want to do in the future, I really don't want to go back to a corporate job, I think about this side project thing that I'm doing as something that like, I'm trying, and if it doesn't work out, I'll go back to a regular job. But I don't want to do that, like ever. So I think that's just an important like mental space for me to be in like, this is what I want to do, I want to build a business. And so you know what this might be a huge failure. But that doesn't mean I'm going to give up and I'm fortunate and that I can consult like fill in the gaps until I get there. So I follow this VC on Twitter, her name is Elizabeth Yin, and she had this great Twitter thread about marketing and, you know, starting a business, and one of the things she talked about is like, if you're an entrepreneur, that that is a career and some people you know, you can get five to 10 chances to get it right. And sometimes you can be brilliant and get it wrong. And sometimes you can be not so great and get it right. So you just have to keep trying.

But for me, that's a total mental shift of how I think about this process. Like, instead of thinking of this as a thing I do in my free time that might work out, I'm changing my mindset to like, this is the thing I want to do. And right now I can't afford it to do more than I can't afford to do it more than in my air quotes free time. But long term like this is the path I want to be on. So I just wanted to share that because I thought that was like important that, you know, as we go through this process.

Michele Hansen  2:00 
I remember pre-pandemic, you were working on your consulting Monday to Thursday. And then you were devoting Fridays to side projects, getting your own business going. So it was like, like an 80-20 split between consulting and I'm curious, has that shift? I mean, shifted in the last couple of months? Since you you really started focusing on your in an image management service?

Colleen Schnettler  2:29 
Yes, it really has, I think one of the things, you know, almost all developers will say is like software is harder than everyone thinks it is. And it's just like, all of these things you have to do. And you have to do. So I would say I've almost shifted that balance. I'm doing 80% file uploader and 20% consulting, maybe, you know, probably something like that. Maybe two days a week, I'm doing consulting. But I really, the thing is, I think it's important, remember, like, I really enjoy it. Like I really like this side project, I'm really having a good time. And I'm really learning a lot. And so yeah, it's just, I've just been giving it a lot of time. And I feel like you know, that's something if I'm going to try it, I'm going to try it. So that's what I'm doing.

Michele Hansen  3:16 
Something I hear in your voice is how excited you are about what you're working on. And when you mentioned your conversation with your husband about the times you had a nine to five job and how much you hated them, it sounds like there was no passion there. And so yes, the hours are important, but it sounds like something you value is being challenged. And it sounds like you weren't getting any of that challenge or excitement or newness in those nine to five jobs or even really the responsibility maybe that that comes with running your own project, which, you know, we all know in large corporations, it's the hard thing to find.

Colleen Schnettler  4:03 
Yeah, I totally agree. And it, it really hit home for me that what I really want is -- I mean if I had to pick between being bored and being stressed, but like being challenged, I would pick stressed and challenged. I mean, for me that's that's just who I am. That's what I want. I can relatively I don't wanna say easily, but like relatively, you know, painlessly get a job and that's just not what I want, at least for now. At least, you know, for as long as I see it for the next couple years. I have time. Right there's all this internet propaganda that makes it seem like if you don't have you don't start a business and you're not successful in a year, it's never gonna work for you. And like I have time you know, I can just keep keep working on it until something works.

Michele Hansen  4:48 
I think it's really an advantage is having time and being able to be patient, and I saw that Twitter thread you mentioned as well. And you know what stuck out to me from that is that is that your first business may not be your, your business for the long haul, right? And you know, I was actually just writing about this, how we snowballed small mobile app into Geocodio and basically funded it with that. That mobile app made 20 cents its first month.

Colleen Schnettler  5:22 
Wow.

Michele Hansen  5:24 
I know. It's impressive, right. And if we had been set on quitting our full time jobs as soon as possible, we would not have had the patience to go through basically the year and a half it took to get that up going, that app making enough revenue that then we are exposed to the problems that led us to creating Geocodio and then that app funded you Geocodio and then eventually that app [was] surpassed Geocodio. Do. But if we had been impatience, that would not have happened, but at the same time, you know, sort of what you said we were excited by it.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
It was thrilling in a way that we weren't really getting from the rest of our work. And that excitement was enough to carry us through even when the revenue maybe wasn't there.

Colleen Schnettler  6:21 
Yeah. So last week, we talked about me making this software available off of Heroku. Because Heroku is going to make me wait till I have 100 users before I can start charging for it. So remember you, you told me I need to figure out if anyone's going to actually pay for it, which is great advice. Great advice. So I actually sat down. So last week, I kind of like talked in generalities about pricing, but I actually like sat down and tried to figure out how much to charge. And I have no idea like, No, I can't. So I looked at these other competitors. And there's like no consistency in their pricing. I'm -- like, I have no idea. So you have to have the people we talked about are like the big image management companies and their first tier are at $89 and $45, respectively. But there's also an add on on the Heroku marketplace now. The guy just resells S3 buckets. So he doesn't help you upload your files, he literally just gives you an S3 bucket. And he starts at $5. So I feel like there's this huge range. I have no idea like, how should I start with this?

Michele Hansen  7:35 
You have some people you've talked to who asked you if you're planning to make this available off Heroku?

Colleen Schnettler
Yes.

Michele Hansen
Have you asked them what they are currently paying for this, whether that's a service or simply a three are their time? Like, have you gotten a sense of that...

Colleen Schnettler
Hey Software Social listeners! Colleen here. For their first time ever, MicroConf is putting on a SaaS podcast awards. Michele and I would be so honored if you would nominate us at saaspodcastawards.com! And here's today's show.

Michele Hansen  0:02 
So I think I already know what the title of this week's episode is going to be.

Colleen Schnettler  0:08 
Oh, that's funny, because I don't know, please tell me.

Michele Hansen  0:12 
See, normally we don't decide on the title until I've loaded everything into Transistor and cleaned up the transcript and everything else. But I think today is going to be the pricing episode.

Colleen Schnettler  0:24 
Ooh, that sounds fun.

Michele Hansen  0:27 
Because you were saying last week, do you want to talk about pricing today? Right.

Colleen Schnettler  0:30 
I did say that. But I don't know if I'm quite ready yet.

Michele Hansen  0:34 
Well, it's been on my mind a lot this week.

So there's actually can't it kind of came out of a conversation I was having on Twitter yesterday. And just talking about specifically talking about what to do when you raise prices, and and how to treat customers who would win with you for a long time versus business needs to change pricing models or, or increased prices. And then, of course, something that happened recently, which is a company that many of us use, raising their prices on us. And so all of this got me thinking about ways of dealing with prices, and how pricing model itself can be an advantage over competitors, especially entrenched competitors. And then also how there's a lot of advice about pricing. And I think all of that needs to be couched in the specifics of your own business and your own understanding of your customers. So the context here is that stripe is raising prices on their subscriptions product. So basically, you can use, you know, stripe to create your payments. And if you have products set up as subscriptions now, previously, their subscriptions API was free. And when it was announced, I think in 2018, or so the announcement they sent out was basically that it was going to be free forever, and just included in the product. And then this morning, um, this just showed up on Hacker News. I mean, maybe it was yesterday that the post actually went up. And I just saw today that they're now going to be charging a point 5% fee on any subscription, which doesn't sound like a lot. But if you extrapolate that out to making, you know, 1000 hundred thousand a million a year like that, that adds up very quickly. And I think something that's really rubbing people the wrong way is first of all, they told people at the get go that this was going to be included and that they weren't going to charge for it. And second of all, that we never even got an email about it. And we're just finding out about it on Hacker News. Yeah. And so this actually ties into a conversation I was having with Simon Bennett of snap shooter on Twitter yesterday about this sort of idea of quote, unquote, grandfathering pricing.

And I say, quote, unquote, grandfathering, by the way, so I know this is the term that people generally use. But we stopped using that term this summer. Because the concept of grandfathering, that the term comes from, after the Civil War states instituting voting policies that said you could only vote if your grandfather could vote. So which basically disqualified former slaves and their descendants from voting, and I always thought this was just like, one, like, one way the term had been used and wasn't like the origin of it. And so like, you know, once we found that out, we we change the term, how we talk about it to be loyalty discount, which I also think really more communicates what you're giving the customer and makes them feel good about themselves, rather than thinking about relatives and stuff like that.

Um, so anyway, so So Simon was talking about this, because he's saying, you know, I've left so much money on the table by by giving these loyalty discounts by by not raising prices on on old customers, and we're sort of, you know, talking about, but you can get value out of that and other ways like, like as a SaaS company, it's so valuable to have long term, customers who will reliably renew like that, you know, they're already on boarded with your product, the support volume is much, much lower. They like you, they're presumably happy with your product. You know, those are the customers we reach out to when new customers are looking for our customer reference, which especially happens with bigger companies. So, so I want to bring like two different resources that kind of helps us think about this, but then also how we think about them differently. So one of those is an article by Amy hoy, which I feel like I referenced her so much on this podcast that like we have to have her on.

Colleen Schnettler  5:09 
Aren't you guys friends?

Michele Hansen  5:11 
Like Twitter friends? Yeah, I think we like met at MicroConf. Um, yeah, through the twitterverse. So this article, such a great title, One Weird Trick to Raising your Monthly Price Without a Customer Revolt, which is basically what Stripe is looking at right now. And you know, Hacker News is full of people saying, you know, should we migrate off of stripe like up like, all this kind of stuff. So in this article basically goes through, like, you know, you see a company raised prices, there is a revolt, it scares you away from raising prices. The problem with that is that companies may need to raise prices, especially the situation you're in right now, where you may pray something right now. And then it turns out as you learn more about your customers, and what their cadence of needs are, and, and how you know how their behavior needs to be matched with a pricing model, you may need to change things in six months, or a year from now or two years from now, whether that's the actual pricing model itself, or the price levels. And so how do you do that in a way without making people revolt. And so one of the key points she makes, you know, here is that it is possible to raise prices without a revolt, like you don't have to be afraid of that. And there's a good way to do this, I think the way stripe has done it is not a good way, which is raising the prices on something people are already using for free, and then not telling them about it, those are two strikes against you.

One of the most popular ways of doing this, which I think Bugsnag is doing. I think I think we're just talked about this a couple weeks ago, and we I mean, Mathias and I, is that you basically get locked out of new features, so you can keep your price for forever. And I think Basecamp does this as well. But you don't get new features, you don't get new functionality. And so you know, eventually, you know, the percentage of their actual product that you're using is lower and lower and lower. But if you're only doing simple things with a product, and you're happy with the price you're paying, and you don't need more, that can be a really good thing. Another thing is, you know, like designing new plan levels, so you change those those different levels. And, but I think the really important thing to hear, to think about here, you know, your job as a founder, whether that's one who is just starting out or, or like me, or someone wh...

Michele Hansen  0:01 
Can I ask you an honest question?

Colleen Schnettler  0:03 
Of course, I love honest questions.

Michele Hansen  0:05 
Did you actually get any work done this week?

Colleen Schnettler  0:09 
Oh, my goodness. So it has been very challenging. For me to focus this week, I've really struggled with it. How about you?

Michele Hansen  0:19 
Between, you know, all of the checking Twitter and phone banking and everything else that has consumed this week. I have gotten some things done, though. Weirdly enough, things that require deep thinking and are complicated and less so tasks, which is really surprising because for me, as an ADD person, I tend to find that it's easier for me to churn out tasks when I'm having trouble focusing rather than thinking through something complicated, but instead, my brain is doing the opposite. And everything is just crazy this week.

Colleen Schnettler  1:01 
Yeah, I have found that I did better this week, like a deep work as well. I mean, I ended up working almost every night this week. And it was partially because I felt like it, but I think a lot of that too, was just like to give me something to focus on, so I didn't have to worry about everything else going on.

Michele Hansen  1:21 
I admit I've been spending more time on hobbies this week too. On Tuesday afternoon, I ended up spending a couple of hours sewing masks with my daughter because I just I couldn't be anywhere near a computer. Like I knew that if I was at my computer, ostensively replying to emails and everything else I would be looking at the news constantly.

But so that thinking I did do, is was working through this big, complicated thing that we're dealing with right now that some listeners have asked us about, which is this whole moving to Denmark thing.

Colleen Schnettler  1:56 
That's big. Yeah, it's a big deal.

Michele Hansen  1:58 
Yes. And a big deal of that is how it relates to the business, both how it relates to our US business, and then setting up a business here. So one of the big things to figure out is like, obviously, our business address needs to change, right. So before it was our house, it can't be our house anymore. So one of the tools we're going to use, which seems like a lot of people who are running remote companies who are US citizens, but outside the country, or even non US citizens running from outside the country, a tool called Earth Class Mail, which I hadn't heard of until six months ago and has been so awesome. And you basically just get a mailbox, you can send things to. Some of them are PO boxes, some of them look more like a real address, you know, like a suite number instead. But the big thing we're trying to figure out, which relates to the mail, too, is our incorporation in the US and whether we have to change that.

Colleen Schnettler  3:00 
Yeah, this seems like a really complicated topic. So your mail, your Earth Mail, is that a PO box in Denmark that you physically access? Or is it just like a fake address to use on business documents?

Michele Hansen  3:12 
So it's a virtual address that we use to receive mail both personally and business in the US. So we're having...

Colleen Schnettler  3:20 
But where does the actual mail go? Where does the physical mail do it?

Michele Hansen  3:24 
So it goes to a PO box in DC, and then it actually gets shipped to Earth Class Mail's facility in Beaverton, Oregon, and then they scan it. So we basically get all of our mail as email. So whenever someone sends us a letter, or even like, we can even deposit checks like that, like it'll scan the contents of an envelope and tell us when there's a check in it. And then we can deposit it. And it you know, I mean, it takes like a week or two, but it's like, other than that, what would we do? So currently, that's going to DC, but our business is registered in Virginia. And so what I've been trying to figure out is do we need to stay incorporated in Virginia? Or do we need to go through the process of dissolving our Virginia Corporation and then reincorporating in another state that is more friendly for remote businesses?

Colleen Schnettler  4:19 
Okay, first question, do you have to be incorporated in the United States at all?

Michele Hansen  4:24 
Yeah, I think for a lot of the services we use, like in our insurance and everything else, like it makes sense to probably -- what we're going to do is have a US company, and then just have a Danish subsidiary, but basically only for payroll purposes. That is at least according to our Danish accountants, though, our conversations with them have been somewhat delayed because our accountant and her entire family got COVID.

Colleen Schnettler  4:45 
Oh!

Michele Hansen  4:46 
She's doing better now. Thank God. Yeah, it's been. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't hear from her for a couple of weeks. And we're like, why? And then, oh, my gosh, and we felt like absolutely terrible for wondering why she hadn't followed up with us.

Colleen Schnettler  5:00 
So my first question not knowing a lot about taxes or business and corporations, why wouldn't you incorporate in a state like Florida that doesn't have state taxes? So that's income tax, isn't it?

Michele Hansen  5:10 
Yeah. So that's, that's personal income tax. I mean, so so this, this decision matters. What you decide to do is different based on your situation, because we're in Denmark, and we're going to be end up paying so much in taxes here that we're not going to have any US tax liability, it doesn't really matter a lot, we still have to file taxes, but you know, that the tax rate here is, you know, starts at 42%, basically. So, um, so actually was the way I looked into this, right. So, so in Virginia...Virginia has two really annoying taxes for businesses. So the first one is the business tangible property tax, where they will tax every piece of equipment that you use for the business. For us, that meant desk chairs, and desks and computers and everything else, and you have to pay sales tax on those every year. However, we won't have any physical presence in Virginia. So that won't be a problem. The other one we've been trying to figure out is, do we have to pay the what is called the B Paul tax or the business professional, an occupational licensing tax, which was instituted to pay for the war of 1812. And is still here?

Colleen Schnettler
Wow.

Michele Hansen
Yes, yeah. It's actually it's really funny. Like, looking into the into all of the rules for that tax. It lists out all the possible Aki occupations. And town crier is listed as one of the possible occupations. Wow, he just says a lot. And the most grating thing about that tax is that it's a gross receipts tax, which means it's based on total revenue, so you don't get to deduct your expenses from it. Now, of course, the tax rate is very low as because it's such a broad tax. But this is also why economists hate this tax. Because it's so broad and was supposed to be for a war 200 years ago, and it's just stuck around magically. Trying to figure out if we would still be liable for this, if we're incorporated in Virginia. Seems like maybe not. But just in case, I've been kind of running down some rabbit holes of, to your question, should we change our state of incorporation, which is a process.

And so I consulted a couple of different places for this. And one that I found kind of helpful, is the service called

Michele Hansen  0:00 
So last week, Colleen, you said something to me that really seemed to resonate and jump out at a lot of our listeners. And that was that you aspire to have a business that is in the position that our business is in, but that you don't want our lifestyle.

Colleen Schnettler  0:23 
Yeah, so I felt a little bit like a jerk when I was editing the podcast. And I heard myself say that, and I almost cut it out. But it's true. And I'd love to discuss some of that with you. Because kind of my vision is what I want as a solo founder is pretty specific. And you guys seem to be in a whole different place than what I envision my success looking like.

Michele Hansen  0:49 
Yeah, and I would love to talk about that. And I'm so glad you didn't cut it out, because it was echoing in my head all weekend. And I really appreciated your honesty about that.

Colleen Schnettler  1:02 
Okay, if you say so. Still feel mean!

Michele Hansen  1:06 
I appreciated it. And it really seems to resonate with a lot of people listening to that. The fit of founder and business and lifestyle is so important. And I think you this is something that is worth diving into, because it's not just about the founder and the business fit, having the expertise and the sort of know how and you know, environmental knowledge and whatnot to make a business happen. It's also about having a business that fits the kind of lifestyle that you have, or that you want. And you know, Lord knows I hate the term lifestyle business. Right. But that is one of the things about this is you basically get to choose in a way, what kind of life you're going to have. And I think that applies even if you have a corporate job, right? Like, do you want a lifestyle where you are flying to a client site four days a week and barely see your kids? Like, that's a lifestyle, that's a lifestyle choice. Do you want a business where you're home, but you are maybe managing email over dinner, which you may do as a solo founder, or you may do working in a corporate job somewhere. I think this is really worth diving into and the fact that like my business, and then the way we run our business may not be something that you want. And in an environment where we're conditioned to look at other people. And there's this expectation that if people are successful, everyone wants to emulate what they do. That's not always the case. And we need to leave way more space as a culture and as a group of people that one person's success is not somebody else's success, and may even from a certain perspective look like failure because of compromises they're making in order to get to that success.

Colleen Schnettler  3:20 
Sure. So my first question for you is, I feel like Geocodio kind of built up around your family. And it seems like, you know, you guys got on a trajectory where things moved pretty quickly. After you got a foothold in the market. What do YOU want? Like if you could go back and and think about how you would design your business that fit into your life that provided you the opportunities you you want, like, what would that look like for you?

Michele Hansen  3:53 
That's a really interesting question. I've never thought about that. I think partly because, you know, I wonder if we had changed something, maybe things wouldn't have worked out as they did. Like, there's certainly things along the way that were difficult. But I don't know if, if I would choose to not do those things or do things differently. I will say that we -- Yeah, we it has grown up around our family. You know, we launched the business when our daughter was four months old. A big reason why we even got started launching our side projects in the first place is because we had the bejesus scared out of us looking at the cost of daycare. I mean, it's more expensive than college in a majority of states. And you know, being pregnant and realizing that got us us supposed to be like, we can't be spending our weekends watching Game of Thrones anymore like we got to start launching stuff because...

Colleen
Yeah

Michele Hansen  4:45 
this is this is you know, we're gonna be pretty close to paycheck to paycheck without something else happening, you know, and, and I remember just like us talking to each other and being like, we can kill it at work, but we're Still not going to get the kind of raises we would need in order to comfortably afford, you know, $20-25,000 a year in daycare alone, plus all the other expenses that go with having a child. Like, it's like we knew it would be expensive, but what can we just, you know, until we started researching it, like, we just didn't have a concept for how bad it would be. And, and you know, that first year, like, I don't even know how much we made, but I think it was barely enough so that we didn't get charged a maintenance fee on our business bank account. So not very much. So we see we wasn't at the point where we're really making that, you know, quote, unquote, like, daycare level amount of money for a while. Um, yeah, our family absolutely grew up around it.

And I think I probably would have given myself more permission to not feel like things had to be handled immediately. In terms of like customer support, things like that were happening at night or dinnertime. But at the same time, for every time that there was something blowing up on Intercom that we need to deal with during dinner, there was something blowing up on Slack at our regular day jobs that was also getting in the way of family life. I don't think our business has gotten in the way of family life more than a, quote unquote, full time job would in fact, I think it's much more flexible, because it means we can take time off or you know, snow days aren't as much of a big deal, of course, I mean, lockdown was just awful for everyone. I mean, I guess now we sort of stare it down again. But I feel like I'm rambling.

Colleen Schnettler  6:45 
So try this on for size. So you've done that. And now you're in this position where you have said to me privately and on this podcast, like growth is not really a primary motivator, you don't want to be acquired, you don't really care how quickly you're growing. So what do you want now? So you kind of done the hard like trenches work to get you in a comfortable position? Like, are you are you happy with the status quo? Like, do you have ambitions to if it's not to grow to work less? Or what are you thinking now.

Michele Hansen  7:20 
So we do have goals, they're just not other people's goals that you would normally hear about, I guess. So I set some goals last year after doing my sort of semi-annual customer analysis from from a high level of our data. So basically, I, I look at all of our customers like a portfolio. And then I evaluate that based on industry and company size. And some other factors, just basically just like an investor would a stock portfolio, and try to see how it's balanced, you know, making sure that we're not getting too much of our revenue from one individual customer, or even from the top 90%, or the top 80% of customers. And so trying to manage for different risks that way, is more how I think about goals. We will have goals based around industry. So for example, this time last year, maybe like last summer, looking at our portfolio of customers, I realized, like 20% of our customers were in real estate. And I felt like that was too much. And so, no, it wasn't purposely going to try to get rid of those customers or anything like that. But instead, I was like, you know, I would like to focus on some industries that are maybe more stable than real estate and try to focus my marketing efforts and sales efforts on industries that are more stable than real estate. So we made a co...

Colleen Schnettler  0:00 
So for those who are just joining us, I am in the process of building my first software business.

It is a small software widget that I am trying to sell. And so right now it's invitation only in the Heroku marketplace. So I was sharing this idea I have, and it's a product, with a friend of mine. And he brought up an interesting point. And I don't think of what I'm building as a commodity, right? We all want to feel special. But at the end of the day, I am repackaging cloud storage and selling cloud storage. So we were discussing, moving to a low a more low cost storage provider. And the storage providers claimed to have S3 compatible API's, of course, like it didn't, it wasn't really compatible. So I'm trying to determine if it's worth my time to sort it out. I mean, these guys are so much cheaper than AWS. And there's two big players in this space right now, in the file management space, they can't move to a low a lower cost storage provider, right? They're like entrenched, but if I do it now, then I can just be cheaper than everyone else.

Michele Hansen  1:13 
That can be an advantage.

Colleen Schnettler
Right?

Michele Hansen
Especially in a commodity space.

Colleen Schnettler  1:17 
Right? So I again, like I don't like to think I'm a commodity, but really, it's like cloud storage with a bow on it. Right? Like, I'm like --

Michele Hansen
It's okay to be a commodity. We're a commodity.

Colleen Schnettler  1:23 
it doesn't feel special. I guess you are.

Michele Hansen  1:28 
There's some businesses that are commodities. And I think it's just knowing what you are, and then knowing how to compete in that space, right. And in a commodity business, if you have an operational cost advantage over the competitors, even if those competitors are huge companies, then that can be an advantage that you can build on.

Colleen Schnettler  1:52 
Yeah, and I think like these, these low-cost storage providers, they just released these S3 compatible API's, like last year. So I feel like this is kind of a untapped opportunity is that no one is really, as far as I can tell, no one's wrapping them up and reselling them yet. And they're much cheaper. So AWS, you're looking at point, you're looking at two cents a gig on AWS on this other provider, you're looking at .005 cents a gig,

Michele Hansen
Wow.

Colleen Schnettler
A lot cheaper. Of course, you know, when you don't have a lot of storage, like I don't right now. It's like, Oh, it's like $5 versus $3. But if I want to really be a storage provider, like this could be a cool opportunity. And I was thinking about the solutions that are already out there are very, very image heavy. And I had been thinking that way, because I approach this problem as an image problem is well, but there seems to be a hole in the market for other file types.

Michele Hansen  2:47 
Like PDFs, CSVs, and stuff?

Colleen Schnettler  2:50 
Yeah, there's doesn't seem to be anyone kind of like helping or optimizing for -- Yeah, I mean, someone, the person I was on a call with wants to host static webpages on it, custom 404 pages. So there seems like there might be an interesting hole in this space to handle non image files. And to handle image files at a cheaper price point. I've been kind of thinking is like, I'm like the Southwest of image management, the airline, like bare bones, I don't resize your images for you. I don't give you user crapping on the front end, but I deliver a simple service with no frills. And it's easy to implement.

Michele Hansen  3:27 
I think that's a good place to start. And you're kind of reminding me of where we started with Geocodio -- even when you said Southwest, you know, my first thought was not airlines. But you know, deserts and our branding from the beginning was Geocodio, rhymes with rodeo and we had all of this Southwest style branding.

If you can find a way to be cheaper than everybody else, and be easier than everybody else like that worked really, really well for us and then differentiating into other adjacent categories that are neglected by major providers. And the way someone described this to me once, you know, I was like, "Well, what if you know, one of the big companies add that adds this and then we're out of business?" If you're doing a business, that's $500,000 a year, a million dollars a year, that's not a big enough opportunity for the big companies to go after it. And if there are people in that space who have something they need, and they're not satisfied by the option, the current options, and you can build a business that makes a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. That is a great income for a one person company and not really big enough to be a threat to any larger company so that they might go into your space, it can be a good spot to be in.

Colleen Schnettler  4:49 
Yeah, that would be an amazing spot to be in. So the only thing I have a little bit of a psychological block here because I have worked on the technical side of this for quite a while now. And now I have to potentially learn a new API to integrate with these third party storage providers. And I'm just like, I started doing it yesterday. And I was just like, I don't want to, like I'm tired. So convince me that it's worth it. It's worth it to do now. Right? Like I should do it.

Michele Hansen  5:16 
Well, let's talk about the downsides too.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
Sounds like your brain is in downsides mode. So one of the risks here is a vendor lock in risk, right?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
Like, if you switch vendors.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes.

Michele Hansen
Because they're six times cheaper, if they raise their prices by six times, that creates a lot of risk for you that one of these vendors, raising their prices, or changing their policies, like you are dependent on another company to make your company happen. Now, there's a lot of people who build their companies off of another company's platform. But you're, you're creating substantial risk there.

Colleen Schnettler  6:03 
But I have the same risk if I stay on AWS, and I feel like AWS is way more likely to raise their prices, because everyone is locked. Not everyone. But they have such a lock on people, right? Because they feel more reliable. I was actually looking at the stats. So my first thought was, maybe these other cloud storage providers aren't, don't have the same kind of uptime AWS does, but they do! People act like AWS has 100% uptime. And they don't always so they just have this reputation because they're the biggest player in this space. But either way, I've got a lock in, right, like I can't, I mean, I can't, I'm going to do a probably a mirror service. So I'll use two storage providers to help but ultimately, my primary storage provider is going to be locked in. I think one of the concerns, though, is these companies. I mean, they've been around for a while, like they're not materializing out of thin air. But as I mentioned, they've only had these S3 compatible API's for like a year. So I'm putting a lot of trust in a company that doesn't have the AWS level reputation.

Michele Hansen  7:02 
And that's another risk too. Like, we get this question, sometimes from customers too, right, because they're like, why would we go with you over a big company? Like, how do we know you're not just going to shut down tomorrow?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
And when I dive deeper into that question, oftentimes something that's driving that fear is, they have integrated a critical vendor,...

GUIDE: Michele wrote an in-depth companion guide for this episode. Read a more thorough rundown of the different health insurance options.

Michele Hansen  0:00 
Remember how a couple weeks ago, you were saying, you're really excited to get feedback and questions from our listeners.

Colleen Schnettler  0:08 
Yes, I do.

Michele Hansen  0:10 
So we got a really good question from someone recently that they asked me to address. And it is maybe one of the biggest obstacles that entrepreneurs in the US face. Can you guess what it is?

Colleen Schnettler
Healthcare?

Michele Hansen
Yes. Is it healthcare, it's healthcare. Yes, healthcare as an entrepreneur in the US is absolutely insane. And I had gone through so much getting health insurance for us, and had tweeted out a really long thread of the process, because I think people who aren't entrepreneurs don't realize just how crazy and expensive and difficult it is. And so I thought today that I would share some of the things I learned as we went through that process, the different things that we we use, and some of the tricks that I found to, you know, even convince health insurance companies that we qualified for health insurance with them.

Colleen Schnettler  1:16 
Great.

Michele Hansen  1:17 
So I want to start, because this is one of the big inflection points for people is when we were first considering running the company full time, right, so we, you know, we started to co do as a side project and ran it for three and a half years as a side project. And I think we ran it as a side project for longer than probably most people would, because we were afraid of, of health insurance. And you know, something that's really important. As an entrepreneur, I find it is understanding your own psychology. And, you know, we talked about this with Alex a lot, I keep, I feel like we keep talking about that interview. And even when I was a kid, my dad was a consultant. And so we had our own health insurance. And I remember my parents would refer to the company that we got health insurance through. And I think it was called US Healthcare, as US Health Scare. Because it was just so terrible to deal with. And they were as they're always talking about things about, oh, they wouldn't cover this or that, or this was crazy expensive, or this doctor, we need one actually take it and like, I just remember, it was just always a topic of conversation. And I remember when my dad finally went in house when I was 10, or so, like one of the big reasons was, they wouldn't have to worry about health insurance anymore. I'm sure there are other reasons but my 10 year old self that was that was one I picked up on. And so I think I always had that in the back of my mind thinking about our own company and having a family and I just had this idea in my head that getting your own health insurance as a self employed person is really difficult then when you do get it the insurance you get is awful. I still have that in my mind.

Colleen Schnettler  3:11 
I mean, that's a huge driving force for it. You know, it is for my spouse awry. One of us will always have a like, quote, corporate job just for that reason. I mean, that's exactly what I think.

Michele Hansen  3:26 
Yeah, I guess because you guys have federal, or, or VA Health?

Colleen Schnettler  3:28 
Yeah, we had, we had health insurance under my previous full time employer, which was Blue Cross Blue Shield, and now we have it through my husband's job. But especially with kids like that, to me, would be the biggest, like scary point of us both going independent.

Michele Hansen  3:45 
Exactly. So that was the big scary thing for us. And so when I went full time, the plan was that I would go full time, and then my husband wouldn't, because he had insurance through his job. And that only worked for about six months. And just things were growing and growing. And we couldn't stay on top of it with just me. And so he went to his boss and said that he wanted to quit. And his boss said, No. And we're like, well, this is a good negotiating position to be in. So he ended up negotiating down that he would work three days a week and reduce his salary, but keep his full benefits. So we didn't have to lose health insurance, which was so so great. And then six months later, like we were just growing so much more getting a lot of enterprise customers and like if stuff goes down and you can't respond to it immediately, you're going to lose customers, especially the big ones. So we end up going fully full time, two years ago, September.

And so what we did for the first 18 months, which so again, talking about this inflection point of "when do I go full time," which is kind of the next big one after, "How do I get something that works and makes money?".

We did Cobra for 18 months. So Cobra is a basically a federal program for continuation coverage. So for example, if you lose your job, then you can continue getting health insurance, you just have to pay the full premiums that the company would be paying for you. So you know, usually when you're an employee, somewhere, you pay maybe 15, 20, 50% of the premiums instead with COBRA, you get to stay on their plan. But you pay the full premium amount. And it used to be that you could be on it for 12 months. And then with the Affordable Care Act, this was extended to 18 months. And so I think for us, this was about $1,100 dollars a month, which is a lot of money. It was less than the Marketplace plans we looked at that time. And it was also made it easy, right? Because we kept our doctors, we right, we knew what we paid and co pays and what like it was a known thing. And then we had to buy dental insurance on top of that, which I think was about 150 or so a month. And that was actually really easy to buy, you can just like go on Delta Dental's website and just buy it. You still end up with huge bills, when you go to the dentist, though that was really annoying. So.

So first we did COBRA, and I was just if people have this option, it can be a really good one to just look into it. For us, you know, like family premiums were $1,100 dollars, but think about that, it is a business expense. So if you have a business that is running and is is profitable, then yes, you're going to take a hit on the health insurance. But it is a business expense. And so you get to write that off. And hopefully, since you're working full time on your business, it can grow more, you can get more customers, and you can recoup that.

So the next big inflection point for us came when COBRA was running out. And this was March of this year. And I dreaded that for 18 months having to go to the Marketplace plans because they are insanely expensive and terrible at the same time. I don't know if you've ever like looked at them just for fun. I mean, why would you look at no for fun, but..

Colleen Schnettler  7:43 
I would not do that. No.

Michele Hansen  7:51 
I remember I went and and I was like, Okay, let me figure it out what it is like, like, what is a plan that is, you know, like, takes our doctors like, that was the one thing we wanted. So at least like we didn't have to switch pediatricians and stuff, right? Because like where we live, like it's really competitive to get into pediatricians and you know, they all have waiting lists and and like, let's just keep them. S...

Michele Hansen  0:00 
Hey, welcome back to Software Social. I'm Michele Hansen.

Colleen Schnettler  0:04 
And I'm Colleen Schnettler.

Michelle Penczak
And I'm Michelle Penczak, the CEO of Squared Away.

Michele Hansen  0:09 
We are so excited to have Michele with us our guest, another Michelle. She. So she said she's the founder of Squared Away, which is a company that employs mostly military spouses to be virtual assistants. And they have over 130 remote virtual assistants working for them. So Colleen and I are super pumped to have us joining our virtual table today to learn more about her business and what they're working on.

Michelle Penczak  0:47 
Thank you guys for having me. I'm excited to chat with y'all.

Colleen Schnettler  0:52 
So Michelle, I have just so many questions about how you started this business and grew this business. And I would love to like kind of hear a little bit about the beginning of your story, I read some of your Medium articles about how you were a virtual assistant and you got laid off. So most people, when they get laid off, you know, they try to find another job, or they just don't find another job, but you decided to start an empire. So can you tell us a little bit about that.

Michelle Penczak  1:18 
I wish it started and found that cool. But um, I it kind of sounds like a really bad country song getting started. Um, I was a virtual assistant for zirtual in 2015. And this is where the sad country song part comes in. My husband had deployed two weeks before I was three months pregnant with my first little boy. And I was actually on a family vacation when it happened,

Michele Hansen  1:51 
Oh my gosh.

Michelle Penczak  1:52 
So literally woke up one morning, five years ago, and couldn't login to my email. And that's when I found out along with 399 other people that we did not have a job.

Michele Hansen  2:05 
Oh my gosh.

Michelle Penczak  2:07 
I still am like, Oh my god, I can't believe that happened. even five years later, it's kind of crazy. But, um, I called one of my clients who was to be honest, my favorite client at that point, and I kind of had a mini meltdown on the phone with him. And he was like, "You know what, it's going to be okay, because we're going to get you more clients, and I'm going to keep working with you." And he told me that and I was like, You know what, yes, I'm going to kick ass regardless of what's happening right now. And I'm going to do my thing. And I did that and started my own independent contractor business as a VA. And I worked literally, my husband will tell you, I worked up until the moment I got my epidural, with my four year -- now-four-year-old, but I was literally like, putting my out of office email up when I was going into labor. And I took a grand total of two weeks off. And because it was just me, at that point, supporting my clients, and worked with them with a newborn and that whole thing and becoming a new mom and all the craziness that goes into that.

And in true military fashion, Colleen, I'm sure you are familiar with the military fun, um, my husband came home one day and was like, hey, guess what, we have orders to Hawaii. And I was like, shut the front door. Get outta here. I cannot even entertain this idea right now. And, um, I can't, you know, working with my clients. Um, I told them when we were getting ready to move to Hawaii that I was taking a week off to move. And I took a week off, we moved to Hawaii, and I started working with them like normal. I just started getting up at 3am to work Eastern standard time hours with them. And still had, you know, a nine month old at that point. And I told my husband was like, I am either insane, or I have way too much of a coffee addiction to stop this. And he was like, you know what it's working. And I did that for about six months before Squared Away was kind of implanted in my brain.

Colleen Schnettler
Wow.

Michele Hansen  4:31 
Can you talk to us about how you're, you're in this state where you are waking up at 3am every day with a newborn, navigating everything that comes with having a baby and attempting to work and then you decide to create a company and -- talk to us about that. So I like I'm so excited to hear this, I have to say cuz like we started Geocodio when our daughter was four months old. And people always think we're crazy. And I don't think I've come across anyone else who started a company with a baby. And so I'm really excited to hear from you about how that came about.

Michelle Penczak  5:26 
I, so my co founder, Shane, he was one of my clients, and his company was doing really well. And he had always told people about, you know, the glory of having a virtual assistant as a resource on your team. And he was like, you know, what, I need you to scale. I need you to clone yourself. And I was like, Huh, this is as good as you get like, you get me. And he told me, he was like, you know, we need more of you. How can we do that? And I said, I told him, I was like, let me think about it. And I called him a couple days later, I said, I figured it out. We're good. We can do it with military spouses. Because I had always heard, you know, in my journey, as an assistant, how can you work? How can you have a baby and work? How can you still be able to do this as a military spouse? And you know, I would tell people, hey, I work as a virtual assistant. And they would say, Well, how will How can I do that? How can I get into this, and I didn't really have a good path for them I, at that point, I just kind of fallen into it with my circumstances. And this was a really clear cut path for me to say, this is what I did. This is how I provided help provide for my family. And this is how we can make a path forward for other military spouses as well. So yeah, it all kind of happened by circumstance. But um, my when the idea came about, I'd been in Hawaii for about six months. And my son was thriving, he was going to preschool. And I was like, You know what, because I don't get enough sleep as it is, let's take this journey. Squared Away started, was officially formed in March of 2017. And I brought on my very first assistant, who is now my director of operations, in July of 2017.

Michele Hansen  7:26 
That's amazing. And I think I think maybe, almost with both of you, it's probably worth diving in a little bit more on just what it's like to be a military spouse and how hard it is for military spouses to work. Because I think, you know, being sort of like non military, myself and not coming from a military family, like, this isn't something that that you really come across. And like the unique challenges there.

Michelle Penczak  8:00 
Yeah. And I, I can speak to the pilot side of the house, I know calling you said your husband's a Navy pilot, as well. So their schedules are so unpredictable. Like sometimes they're flying in the mornings, sometimes they're flying in the afternoon, sometimes they're flying at night, and they're just kind of all over the place. And when you have to be that constant for your family and for your kids saying, Okay, well, I'll pick you up from school, I'll do bedtime routine, and all that good stuff. That's something that's very fluid with every single day. And it's not predictable, and the following week, and being able to say I have this job or career that I'm working towards during the day and being able to support your family is huge for a military spouse, because a lot of times it's so reactive to the military members schedule that, you know, you can't typically work a regular nine to fi...

Michele Hansen  0:00 
Welcome back to Software Social. I'm Michele Hansen.

Colleen Schnettler  0:03 
And I'm Colleen Schnettler.

Michele Hansen  0:06 
Hey, Colleen!

Colleen Schnettler  0:07 
Hey, Michele, how are you doing?

Michele Hansen  0:10 
I'm good. I'm good. I had a pretty productive day today. Little ADD in the morning, but it was good.

Colleen Schnettler  0:16 
What does that mean?

Michele Hansen  0:19 
Well, so I was diagnosed with ADD as a kid when I was 10. And so it's always been something that I have to work with, you know, working against it is not going to happen. And you know, recognizing the procrastination of it is really just me being a perfectionist in a lot of ways. Um, you know, it can also make for a fun morning, though, I made some good memes, I think.

Colleen Schnettler
Nice.

Michele Hansen
No, actually, I actually, I got a lot of stuff done. You know, a couple weeks ago, when you asked me what I was working on, I mentioned landing pages. And then, and then I was kind of like, Ah, that actually wasn't what I was planning to talk about. And, and I feel like you were kind of disappointed. But I actually did a ton of work on landing pages this week. So we can talk about that if you want.

Colleen Schnettler  1:11 
Oh, yay! Yes, I do.

Michele Hansen  1:13 
Yeah, so this is a huge thing for us. Because we don't do any paid marketing. We don't do any outbound sales. We just do SEO.

And a couple weeks ago, we were talking to Alex Hillman. And something that really stuck out to me from his book, Tiny MBA was, you know, when done well, marketing and teaching are almost indistinguishable. And I think that's so true. Because a lot of what we do when I'm writing a like landing page, is just explaining how our service works, and how to do something, or, or how to do something in general, that happens to relate to our product.

Colleen Schnettler  1:59 
Okay, so can we take several steps back here and talk about landing pages?

Michele Hansen
Sure!

Colleen Schnettler
Because people talk about landing pages, like they're these things, they just throw up real quick. And so I kind of want to talk about strategy. And like, practically speaking, do you have? Do you always use the same template? Do you try to, you know, like, when you're marketing towards a specific group, like how do you tailor your landing page for that group?

Michele Hansen  2:25 
There's a lot of different types of landing pages. So what I'm doing is generally very product focused. There's a whole huge segment of landing pages that is sales landing pages and writing conversion copy, which is --

Colleen Schnettler  2:46 
Conversion means I convert, I buy something from you?

Michele Hansen
Exactly.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes.

Michele Hansen  2:50 
The idea is, you know, basically, you run some ads for people who are looking at a specific search term, or you or you have, you know, SEO targeted to that search term. And then you bring them into a sales page. And there's tons and tons and tons and tons of copy. And there's a story and like all of these sorts of things. And there's there's like these calls to action that are building up to it, right, like, and then they want you to convert and buy immediately from that page.

That that is a whole school on its own. And not really something that we do, because we don't really need to do a lot of convincing for people since we have a free tier and people can just try it and figure it out if they need it or not, before they even buy it.

So when I'm talking about landing pages, it's generally very product focused copy that is sort of either describing features of the product, or is like a step by step how to do something with the product, or is somehow just better describing what we do. Very often that comes out of conversations that we have with customers in Intercom where, you know, if we get the same question more than two or three times, we usually take that as a sign that either we need some more copy on that or, you know, maybe we need to fix something in the product to make something more discoverable (that is, easier for people to find it). Or add affordances, which is the ability for them to do something. That's generally where we focus when it when I talk about landing pages.

Colleen Schnettler  4:34 
Okay, so do you have specific rules like in your head, like from a design like should it only should it fit on a visible window? Should they not have to scroll? Do you even think about these things? Are they not important at all?

Michele Hansen  4:47 
Yeah, I don't really think about that, actually.

Colleen Schnettler  4:50 
Okay, I don't know. Like, that's why I'm wondering like, I've never I'm telling you for me. Like I feel like I could write a whole back end system API to do whatever but you asked me to make like marketing page and oh, my gosh!

Michele Hansen 5:02
It's scary, right? Like I blank page is very intimidating.

Colleen Schnettler  5:07 
And it's like, the whole thing, where do I put the images? What do I say?

Michele Hansen  5:15 
Like, yeah, how far it's a lot, I have so many hang ups around this because I'm so afraid of coming off as spammy or, like too heavy handed of a sale that when I'm trying to write copy, it sounds so boring. Like, it's just so so dry.

And what really helped me was thinking about marketing as education.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
And thinking about it, okay, maybe this is just, this can just be a step by step how to do something, you know, for example, how to add metropolitan statistical areas to a list of addresses, which is something that, for example, somebody who works in sales might do because they need to know which of their customers live in and around Boston, and in and around Chicago, because they're planning a trip during normal times when you go on trips... For example, and so it's just like a step by step list and and then there's, you know, the SEO tactics, bringing into that, like, you know, all of the, the list items need to be headers and saying, first, organize your spreadsheet of addresses that you want to add the Metropolitan Statistical Areas to, like, the next step, upload the list of addresses that you want the Metropolitan Statistical Areas for to Geocodio, it's like using the same words over and over and over again, so that, you know, Google or search engine will pick up on that using those terms in the URL is a really basic one. That is easy to overlook.

I actually I realized this morning, that we had someone reach out to us asking about features of our unlimited plan. And I realized, like, Oh, my gosh, I typed like the same reply multiple times a week. And we don't actually have a page on our site that is just devoted to this plan that I can send someone and the same way. We also don't have any page, specifically devoted to free geocoding or our pay as you go tier. And so now, almost seven years into doing this, we finally have a URL that is geocod.io/free-geocoding, which is the number one search term that brings people to us and it like never occurred to me until this morning, that we should have a page with the you know, h1 and URL of free geocoding. Like sometimes it's just so, so obvious.

Colleen Schnettler...

Michele Hansen  0:00 
Welcome back to Software Social. I'm Michele Hansen.

Colleen Schnettler  0:03 
And I'm Colleen Schnettler.

Michele Hansen
Hey, Colleen.

Colleen Schnettler
Hey, Michele!

Michele Hansen
How's it going?

Colleen Schnettler
I'm doing well. I'm excited to hear what you have to share with us this week since we didn't get to share last week since we did my little video intro. So what has been going on with you and your business?

Michele Hansen  0:22 
Honestly, not a whole lot.

Colleen Schnettler 
Okay, fair enough!

Michele Hansen  0:28 
You know, I was thinking about this. And, and I think that's kind of one of the things when you get to the stage that you have weeks when you're just kind of doing, like, normal work, you know, dealing with invoices, and cleaning up stuff from the past and responding when customers, you know, report an issue or bug with something and answering questions. And, and, and not a whole lot happens. And that's kind of what's going on.

Colleen Schnettler  1:03 
I still think that's good for people to hear. Because I think when you, like me, as we've discussed, read a lot of like, these really exciting startup stories, it makes it sound like it's so exciting all the time. And ultimately, it's still a job, like you're still doing kind of mundane, but important work.

Michele Hansen  1:19 
Yeah, I mean, it's the big project, if you can call it that, that I was working on this week was a lot of things dealing with invoicing. And, you know, we've been migrating customers over from QuickBooks to Stripe, which is just as thrilling as it sounds, let me tell you, but it's also super necessary. And it's the kind of thing that you write really have to do when you've got a business that's going and it's working.

And so for, for a long time, we had it set up so that if customers paid us with a credit card, they paid via Stripe, but if they paid us any other way, you know, a ACH, paper check, carrier pigeon, like that was all through QuickBooks. And I don't know why we did that. I think it's because we weren't using invoices for Stripe for a long time. And but that's created all sorts of accounting issues where when we actually want to make our financial statements in QuickBooks, which, you know, things like insurance companies and whatnot want... It always made such a mess in QuickBooks, because there was like, some payments would be counted twice. And then like we didn't really have one true source of revenue numbers. And I was always like manually patching it together with spreadsheets. And so that just you know, involved a lot of thing of, you know, setting up new subscriptions and checking once and twice and three times that everything is set up. And, you know, like, it's interesting, you do a lot of things early on that don't scale. And you do that intentionally because you don't know if you're going to be successful. And then when things do start working out, you you kind of have to, you know, basically bat your own cleanup.

Colleen Schnettler
Mm hmm.

Michele Hansen
And I did a lot of that actually, in my in my first job. And I think that was such a valuable thing, because I think it's something every business goes through, especially as they grow.

Colleen Schnettler  3:14 
Yeah, I absolutely know what you mean, because I'm right in that very beginning stages where I don't know if this is going to work. And so I have absolutely made decisions that might be hard to change later if I have, if it is successful. And I can see that now. But I can see it now. But it doesn't seem like it's worth the time to put this really impressive architecture in place for you know, my three customers. So I can but I could definitely see you know where to work out down the line, I'd be like, "Alright, we got to really beef up, you know, change some of the things we made."

Michele Hansen  3:48 
Exactly, I think we're, we're looking at doing something like that pretty soon with how we handle failed payments. So I mentioned you we have most of our customers are paying us via credit card. And when those payments fail, like usually the process right now is we just go through manually and follow up with them. Like they get emails from Stripe, they get emails from Intercom. Sometimes I have to, you know, oftentimes email them personally, like from my own email, but I've had to go as far as like calling the front office and asking for the accounting department, DMing them on Twitter, like finding any random contact information, finding people on LinkedIn.

Colleen Schnettle
Wow.

Michele Hansen
And yeah, and it's always so satisfying when you finally get it paid. And you're like, wow, but I spent what, like six hours chasing that down for $150 like, was that really the best of my time? And so we've been kind of thinking through like, how we might, how we might like automate some of that and any, you know, introduce kinds of things like you know, Your Account isn't paid. Like, you can't do anything until you've paid up or, like, actually, as of right now, even if you have an outstanding balance, people have to contact us in order to pay, like, there isn't a way to do it in the dashboard. Like all of those small things, I think if you're using a product, you don't realize that like, every single one of those is a feature, there's no like real, you know, there's no just sort of out of the box that comes with every single feature that you might need, like deleting an account and changing your email address and updating your credit card and paying a past invoice. Like, every single one of those is a feature and you're prioritizing that against something that's going to get new customers or have existing customers, you know, pay you more add more features for them, right. Like there's like boring business improvements, versus things like new features, and, you know, marketing related initiatives that are shinier objects.

Colleen Schnettler  6:01 
Yeah, that's actually kind of interesting that you guys are this far along, and you're still handling all of that manually. I also think there's a way and we've talked about this quite a lot, like what do you need to ship. And there's always this, this temptation, I think, is a good word, to put everything in place before you put anything out there. So it's encouraging to me, I guess, is the right word to hear that, like you guys are still handling some of that manually, like those are things that you have been able to handle manually for quite a while.

Michele Hansen  6:32 
We didn't even have billing code when we launched!

Colleen Schnettler
That's amazing, by the way.

Michele Hansen
Like we had integrated amazing Stripe, like we literally didn't expect anyone to pay us. And then you know, and we had that sort of like monthly payment cycle. And the first of the month came a couple of weeks later, and we're like, oh, we have to charge people today. Oh, we forgot to write the ability to charge people.

Colleen Schnettler  6:59 
It's amazing.

Michele Hansen  7:01 
Yeah, I mean, all of those things are just, you know, gradual, like, like, for a long time, actually, I think in Stripe, we were the way we were creating the payments was literally as individual payments, they weren't as invoices. And so if a payment failed, we had to manually go through and recreate the payment and retry it.

Colleen Schnettler
Oh wow

Michele Hansen
And it was like that for like, three or four years.

Colleen Schnettler
Wow.

Michele Hansen
So every month, I would go through and recreate all of t...

See Colleen's product! Video at https://youtu.be/vdO7uFT63dw

TRANSCRIPT

Michele Hansen  0:00 
We're doing something a little bit different. Colleen's product is ready to have a little walkthrough of it. So this will be the first time I'm seeing it. So we're doing something different. This week's episode is going to be a podcast as normal, but it is also going to be a video. So you can see what Colleen's product looks like. So hopefully this is just as enjoyable as whether you're listening to the podcast, or you're watching the video, we'll put a link to the YouTube video in the shownotes. Definitely let us know what you think of the format. And hopefully, it's interesting. 

Colleen Schnettler  0:49  
Okay, this is great. I'm super pumped to show you this. Michele, I'm going to share my screen with you so you can see it. Alright, can you see my screen? Yes. All right. So let's start from what the very beginning kind of what I'm trying to accomplish here. So this window right here that says new listing details, let's say this is your existing user interface. So your user is adding listings for I don't know, an event or a real estate site or something like that. So what you a typical kind of quick, easy implementation is just your typical HTML file tag, which is what you have right here. Now, I have found this to be like, really ugly, and I just don't care for it the way it looks. And plus, even if you're importing a file, this way, you still are responsible for setting up your cloud storage account, as we've talked about ad infinitum I know, but basically, you still have to get all the other back end stuff set up. So what you do is you would go to Heroku, you'd provision my application, and then you'd sign on to my application. And I would give you this script, like so basically, and I have not finished or like really worked out the documentation yet. But basically, I'm going to have a site, like once you've signed up for my application that says, Put this script in the head of your file of your website. So then you add this script to your site, save it, I'm running this locally, so we could see the changes kind of as they're happening. And now you get something like this. So Oh, thanks.

Michele Hansen  2:29  
Well, there's a drop file.

Colleen Schnettler  2:31  
Now there's a drop file, boxy

Michele Hansen  2:33  
way of having, right.

Colleen Schnettler  2:35  
So and I think one of the things that's really important here is I think, Heroku, I could be wrong, but like, it's mostly like Node and Rails developers. So there's people that are more focused on the back end. So anything I can do to make the UI less painful for you, is what I want to do. So So I worked for an events company at one time, so we had to deal with tons of images. And we implemented a drop zone like this, but we had so many problems with users trying to drop files that were too big files of the incorrect, you know, format, things like that. So what this does for you is if I wanted to drop some images, so if I try to drop a file, right now, I want to say I have a two Meg limit. And I'm probably going to change that I haven't worked out that detail yet. Let's say I have a two Meg limit. So if you try to drop a file that's bigger than two Meg's you're going to get this exe. And it's going to tell you the files too big. And then it's going to remove the file from the drop zone. So your user can drop a new file.

Michele Hansen  3:36  
Ah.

Colleen Schnettler  3:38  
okay. So I mean, even that I have a lot of like thoughts about like, right now you drop it, you and it's a timeout, like, I don't know if I should wait and let the user exit out. Or, you know how

Unknown Speaker  3:51  
little

Michele Hansen  3:52  
quick I didn't get to fully read read it the text until the second time. You did it, because you

Colleen Schnettler  3:59  
need to look for it the second time. Yeah, I

Michele Hansen  4:02  
didn't really know what was going to happen. But I knew there was some errors. So yeah, I would probably try to upload it twice just to see what that error was.

Colleen Schnettler  4:13  
Okay, that's good feedback. And again, I can slow it down. I mean, maybe I should slow it down a little bit.

Michele Hansen  4:20  
I also wonder about accessibility for that.

Colleen Schnettler  4:24  
Right. That is an excellent point. I will look into that, because that's definitely something I need to address. That's a really good point. So that's kind of what I have now. And those are two good comments for a bad file. But what I really have gone back and forth, and left and right about is what about a good file. So let's drop a good file in here. And so there's all kinds of things I can do here and I'm probably just overthinking it, but like how opinion Am I going to be like that little green checkmark? Should that stay? Should I go? Should I keep the reason I kept I went back and forth on keeping this dashed blue line. And the reason I kept it was to show you if you change your mind, you can just drop a new file in there, right? You can,

Michele Hansen  5:18  
yeah. And I guess, to me, a dashed line around the image implies that it's in a draft state and that they need to do something else in order for that to be saved.

Colleen Schnettler  5:29  
Okay, that is what you think. Okay. Yeah, cuz I went back and forth on that. Like, should I read, because what I had originally, is I actually removed the drop zone and just put the image on the page. But when I removed the job zone, I then had to add a button so that they could bring the drop zone back up. So it started to get more complicated.

Michele Hansen  5:53  
And I noticed that it shows the file size, even when the file size is an acceptable size. Yes, you walk me through why that is?

Colleen Schnettler  6:03  
I think that's partially like, you know, when I started this, I was just trying to kind of keep track. So I would know immediately, like, Oh, this one is one fits, this one doesn't fit. But I, you know, have no strong opinions about whether that's helpful or whether the user even cares, which probably they don't care, right. They just want to know if it's successful or not.

Michele Hansen  6:28  
Yeah, I, I would be curious to I mean, maybe there are people who get value out of that, maybe I won't discount that.

Colleen Schnettler  6:36  
So I was showing this to a friend of mine. And he has a few apps on Heroku. And he suggested accepting other file types. Because his point was, if you have a really image heavy site, you're probably already using one of the big players in the image, site market. But there's a huge problem with like, if you want to email someone a PDF, or, you know, you're collecting resumes, or all the other kinds of file types that people might want to upload. So that kind of gets interesting, because then I was thinking, Okay, let's say we want I have a PDF here for my children's school, welcome newsletter. So if I try to drop a PDF, that works, but I don't ever have any kind of preview image. So you think that I mean, should I just leave it like that? You have thoughts on that?

Michele Hansen  7:24  
Is there some sort of icon you can use for the image or file type like,

Colleen Schnettler  7:30  
like a PDF icon? Yeah, that's a good idea. pdf. And maybe like, same thing for like a Word document or something like that.
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