Software Social

Michele Hansen 
Welcome back to software social. I'm Michele Hansen.

Colleen Schnettler 
And I'm Colleen Schnettler. So Michele, what's been on your mind this week?

Michele Hansen 
So after our conversation with Alex last week, which, by the way was so fun, I feel like we got to talk to him about like, a 10th of the things I wanted to talk about. I have been thinking a lot about what I got out of my own MBA, because his book, The Tiny MBA, and we talked about this a little bit about the differences between between that and and it's just made me reflect on some of the things I got out of mine. And one of those things is negotiation skills.

Colleen Schnettler 
Okay.

Michele Hansen 
I really learned in that program just how much of a wuss I was at negotiations.

I got to do this trip to India and the UAE and we were visiting factories and and whatnot and part of it, you know, being an India, was going to the markets. And our professor was very keen that we learn how to negotiate and I remember we would, you know, go out and buy things and our graduate assistant student in the program was from India and we would always go to him and be like, hey, like, you know, I got this scarf and you know, I got them down from from this price to this price. And he would always like, shake his head and be like, you could have done so much better than that, like you just got totally ripped off. And I remember feeling like oh my god, like and, and I realized that experience -- getting my ass kicked by India -- made me realize how little I knew about negotiation. And, and so I ended up taking a class on it.

Colleen Schnettler 
Oh, when you were getting your MBA, you took a class specifically on negotiation?

Michele Hansen 
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 
Oh, that's awesome.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, it was awesome. And we got to do exercises, simulating negotiations and learning about different styles of negotiation, and different tactics to use.

And the really, the big thing I got out of that was that you don't have to be a hard negotiator, you don't have to be mean, in order to be a good negotiator. And, and I feel like this is something that we don't have a lot of cultural exposure to negotiation, right. You know, unlike my, you know, fellow student who grew up in India and buying groceries or buying anything involved, negotiation and haggling. I didn't really observe a lot of negotiation as a child or as a teenager, right? Like, Can you recall observing that very much?

Colleen Schnettler 
No, the price is what it is and you pay for it or you don't.

Michele Hansen 
Yeah, exactly. So, um, and so I think my understanding of negotiation was very much guided by pop culture figures who are known for being you know, hard charging and you know, screwing the other side basically right like, and so I just kind of I always shied away from negotiation. But negotiation is really, really important in running a business, especially once you start dealing with enterprise customers who pretty much always want to negotiate. They're not going to, you know, just sign up for a plan on the site and then just pay for that, especially on an annual basis and then things like that. And, and so I learned that you can be a good negotiator and get what you need out of an agreement. But you don't have to be mean and you don't have to, like bend over to them, either.

Colleen Schnettler 
Okay, so let's dive into this cuz...

Michele Hansen 
Yes!

Colleen Schnettler 
I think negotiation is a fascinating topic, especially for women. I have negotiated salaries and I remember like the first time I negotiated a salary, it was like, you should always negotiate But to your earlier point, like I have no experience in negotiating. So you just kind of pick a number. You're like, Oh, this is my number. Like, let's talk a little bit more about some of these tactics and like, how does one negotiate without being a jerk?

Michele Hansen 
Yeah, so one of the most important things to remember in negotiation is knowing your BATNA.

Colleen Schnettler 
What's a BATNA?

Michele Hansen 
Your BATNA is a best alternative to a negotiated agreement.

Colleen Schnettler 
Did you make that up?

Michele Hansen 
I did not make that up. This is actually a term that like is in every piece of negotiation literature. Basically, you know, some people think of this as leverage or as your power or but it's basically your alternative, right? Like if you don't negotiate this, like if you walk away from that job, what is your alternative? And, but you always have to think about your BATNA and then your counterparty's BATNA, and maybe way to think about this is it has The word bat in it, right? Your BATNA is what allows you to fly away.

Colleen Schnettler 
Okay, so let's use your example. I like concrete examples when I'm trying to understand this. Are you comfortable? Like you can make up numbers? But let's say you're negotiating with an enterprise client. So when you say BATNA, you mean that is your number you won't go lower than.

Michele Hansen 
That's a reservation price.

Colleen Schnettler 
That's different reservation price. Okay?

Michele Hansen 
So um, so your BATNA is basically your alternatives. So, for example, let's say that you...Okay, here, here's an example. Let's say you run a customer support platform. So these things out there like intercom and whatnot. So your customers, your customers' BATNA, right, so their alternative is are there they can use one of your competitors. But maybe they don't have all of your features like maybe, let's say, you do chat and email and knowledge management. They can use one of your competitors, but they don't have one of those features. So that's their best alternative. Or they can use three different services that will cost them a lot more money than using your one service. So that's probably the simplest example is that their alternative to using your service requires them to use three other services that end up being more time and hassle for them. By knowing what their BATNA is, or what their alternative is, you have a stronger negotiating position. You don't have to give up as much. And also you can remind them Yes, for example, let's say $5,000 a year sounds like a lot of money. But if you were to not use this service, and use x, y and z instead you would be paying $15,000 a year. So you have actually just created a net positive for them of $10,000 and you haven't moved on your price at all.

Another thing that is really important in a negotiation and part of not being mean another way to put it, it's actually a book that Alex recommended last week that really piqued my interest called Just Listen. And he had mentioned how this is a book used by hostage hostage negotiators. And that really got me interested because they are some of the best negotiators out there. And one of the concepts of it is you just listen for what is important to the other side. So for example, in your salary example, what may be important to you is the number but there may be other benefits that are really important to you, that are ancillary to the salary itself, that actually aren't very difficult for the employer to give you.

So for example, let's say that you're negotiating on a salary of $100,000, and they're only willing to give you $...

Michele Hansen 
Welcome to the Software Social podcast. I'm Michele Hansen.

Colleen Schnettler
And I'm Colleen Schnettler.

Alex Hillman
And I'm Alex Hillman.

Michele Hansen 
And we have a special guest with us today, which is very exciting. Alex has recently released a book called The Tiny MBA. Colleen and I have both read it and we are super excited to talk to you today, Alex.

Alex Hillman
Um, thank you for having me. I've been enjoying listening to this show. And I feel like I got invited to the the cool kids lunch table to hang out and and talk business. So um, thank you.

Michele Hansen  
Yeah, so let's dive in. So so the book, I really like how you structured it with a bunch of sort of a bunch of nuggets of wisdom, many of which you get the sense that those were hard won on your behalf.

Alex Hillman
Yeah, the hard won is a good way to describe it. And I think talking to folks have since read it, a lot of folks find themselves nodding along nodding long and going, "Oof, ouch. Yeah, I've been there for that one. I wish I had heard that one sooner." And so I think for folks that haven't encountered it yet, there's maybe some warning signs. 

And then on the other side, it's it's stuff that I think people do know, including myself, but don't necessarily hear or hear often. And sometimes they just need a reminder or to hear it in a new way. So one of my favorite ways I've heard this book described so far was from a friend of mine, who is a pretty storied entrepreneur and has spent time in sort of all different categories. He's done the big venture back thing. He's done small bootstrap stuff. He's done publishing, he's done software. And he really, really enjoyed he's even been involved in reading books with entrepreneurs, so he's sort of seen behind the scenes. And he, he's like, this book is so different from other business books and there's sort of three kinds of lessons: There's one third is stuff that maybe you've heard before, but it's in kind of a new way. You know, the constraints of these, you know, everything about a thing is kind of on one page. And you don't even have the whole page in really any case, it's really a couple of sentences. There's another third, that is what he called next level thinking. And I'm not super comfortable calling it that, but what he was really describing was more, you know, a different way of seeing a thing that people have a sort of a commonly held perspective. And this was an alternative that is maybe equally true, but less commonly heard. And the third part was a kick in the ass, and something that he's heard before but needed to hear or needed to hear in a different way and to challenge himself and go, why am I doing this the hard way? And, yeah, I mean, it's, I think there are books out there that do each of those things, but it's been really nice to hear from folks that are at lots of different stages of their business, that it can do one or all of those things kind of in one sitting.

Colleen Schnettler

So Alex, you talk a lot about psychology in the book. One of the quotes is the most valuable books aren't business books. They're books about human psychology. So, you know, my background is engineering and development. And I know a lot of your audience I believe, as well. And I, I was just like, man, now I gotta learn about humans? That sounds really hard.

Alex Hillman
Yeah, I'm curious, like, Why? Why does that seem hard to you? Because I hear that and I feel that and look, people are frickin weird. So I get it. But like, from your perspective...

Michele Hansen  
I love how weird they are!

Alex Hillman
I do too. I do too. From from you, like when you say? Like, what's, how does that read for you? Like, what it what actually makes it feel hard to you?

Colleen Schnettler

Well, I already feel like I'm better with humans and most developers, but still like they're just humans are tough. I mean, they're just irrational. And you know, they don't make logical decisions. And so trying to get in someone's head and find out like, like, what I took away from the book is I really need to figure out how I'm providing value to my customers. And you know, you really just want to make them happy, which is something I've talked about with Michele before too, like you, you want them to feel like they're winning. But then I just, I just really struggle with like understanding human psychology when you get people who really aren't logical thinkers.

Alex Hillman 
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think there to your point, there's, there's the rational behavior and the irrational behavior, and which one someone's gonna be deploying at any given moment is not always consistent.

One of my favorite ways to think about psychology is -- because I come from a software development background as well. I didn't explain, I kind of said that in the book, I guess. But one of the reasons I find psychology fascinating is it's kind of like having a debugger for people because people break in wildly unpredictable ways, but they do it at wildly predictable times. Or sometimes it's the other way around, they break in unpredictable times, but in relatively predictable ways. Or no, I say break. It's not always bad things, they respond positively, consistently, just not always in the exact same way. So, you know, for, for me programming kind of clicked when I realized, "Oh, this is about patterns, right patterns and, and systems." And if you start thinking about people as patterns and systems also, I don't, I mean, I think you can get pretty far into the weeds with psychology and things that are useful, but maybe not instantly deployable. If you really just think about what are people's behaviors as patterns, like it's not just what do they do. And it's, it's also why do they do it? And then is there any consistency to why they do things or is there inconsistent consistency? And if there's inconsistency is there consistency within the consistency, so you can start to see how when you sort of pull apart the layers, it really does start feel like debugging a person.

And, you know, I think one of the other pieces is sometimes you're debugging yourself. It's like, "Am I making a decision or not doing a thing because of my own psychology?" I think that in some cases is even harder. However, I also think, you know, one of my favorite books and it's recommended in in the Tiny MBA is a book called Just Listen by an author named Mark Goulston. And Mark is a clinical psychologist. But the reason he's famous for -- famous enough to write a book that I would be recommending in a business book -- is he's a lead hostage negotiator, trainer for the FBI. And in the book, he talks about sort of the neuroscience of why we, why it's hard to listen and and why it's hard to get other people to listen to us in a really, really systematic way. And he teaches you some really specific techniques for, and he uses, he teaches these techniques to hostage negotiators. And he also uses them in his private practice with, you know, husbands and partners and wives and families who aren't talking to each other. It's all the same basics, you know, brain science, but he does this, this interesting thing where, you know, it's not a good idea to teach somebody a psychology tool, and then have them go use it on their friends and family. Bad things are likely to happen. But instead he teaches you how to use these tools on yourself. And by practicing them on yourself, you start recognizing your own internal voice, your own internal conflict when you're not listening to yourself. And you get to sort of practice t...

Michele Hansen 
Welcome back to Software Social. I'm Michele Hansen.

Colleen Schnettler 
And I'm Colleen Schnettler.

Michele Hansen 
So what's going on, Colleen?

Colleen Schnettler 
I have so many things I want to share today. Yeah. I, yes, yes, I am super excited. Because I have finally finished my image management widget. I need a better name. By the way. Image management widget is like the worst name. I need something snappy, like cool image uploader. Anyway, I'll work on that.

Michele Hansen 
Naming is one of the hardest parts honestly, like, naming and pricing.

Colleen Schnettler 
So I have finally finished what I ended up doing was, I think I was listening to a bootstrapper podcast years ago, and I remember the host said something about how he was like, Well, you know, sometimes you need to just go to a hotel for four days and finish something. And that's entirely impractical for people, you know, who are responsible for spouses and children and other things like that. So I wasn't actually able to do that, but I did manage to block out like three solid days, and I got it done.

Michele Hansen 
Nice!

Colleen Schnettler 
So I'm super pumped about that. Yeah, I'm super pumped. So that's exciting. So my next steps are, you know, kind of, not kind of my next steps. My next step is getting it deployed. And I've already deployed an app in the Heroku Store before so I know the process. So hopefully that will not be too painful.

Michele Hansen 
So when you say it's done, is it the product itself is done? Or is also like the commercialization of it done in terms of making it something people can pay for and have accounts for and stuff like that?

Colleen Schnettler 
What do you think, Michelle?

Michele Hansen 
I'm just asking!

Colleen Schnettler 
if it was funny, you say that because I was literally thinking as I was finishing up, I was like, Alright, so now the real work starts. This was like the fun work. Now I actually have to do the real work and my plan is to deploy it in the Heroku App Store. So there is some glue, I have to work with the Heroku API, and things like that to make it available to customers. So my plan is to start using it for my own projects and my client projects immediately. And, you know, maybe after I've been using it... I think the way that Heroku App Store works as you'd have to put something in the App Store, and then you know, you have to it has to be free. And you have to get like a lot of users, I forget how many, but you're just in this alpha stage.

So that's, that's kind of my plan to kind of get it out there. But like, really, the hard work behind this now is documenting how to use it and figuring out how to use it for different use cases and all of that kind of stuff. Which yeah, like I said, that's probably the real hard work, right?

Michele Hansen 
I mean, that's the work that never ends right? Like so much of marketing is here is how you use this and here's when you would use it and...

Colleen Schnettler 
I just -- and I could be wrong, but I feel like I am uniquely equipped to handle that because I think a lot of developers who do things specific like this, especially something is technically, you know, unique, I guess, they don't really do a good job of making it easy to use. They're like, Oh, here's this thing, but you also have to go get an AWS account and set up your own IAM account. And you have to, you know, put it behind a CDN, and you have to do with all this other stuff. So, so I hope and I think that one thing I am good at is I'm really good at taking complicated processes and distilling them down into simple explanations. So that's really my goal. So

Michele Hansen 
if people wanted to use this to add images to their project, would they only need to use your image management service for this? Would they also need their own AWS account or because you'd mentioned a couple weeks ago that it would just be under your AWS account?

Colleen Schnettler 
Yes. So it's one service. I thought about doing it as to services. It would have actually been easier on me to do it as to services, but I don't think that's what the customer ultimately wants. Especially as we talked about is if I put this into even less developer, you know, friendly terrain and start to try to use it in a no code tool or something like that. You've got to extract that away, because like the AWS console is a bear, especially if you don't know what you're doing. So yeah, so it's just one service right now.

Michele Hansen 
And so you said that for the time being in the Heroku marketplace, it'll be an alpha that can only be free.

Colleen Schnettler 
There's yeah, I actually don't all the details yet. Because I wanted to finish it, but it's something like that, like you put it in and it has to be free for a while. And you have to have -- I think it's a lot I forget, there's a certain number of people you have to get trying it. So I'm going to beg all of my friends who ever used a Heroku.

Michele Hansen 
Listeners...

Colleen Schnettler 
Yeah, if you use Heroku, please, please, please send me an email or a tweet or I will let you know when this is in the App Store. Please download it!

Michele Hansen 
But hold on. So is there a free tier from AWS for what you are effectively reselling?

Colleen Schnettler 
Yeah, so that's that's the rub. Um, there's not really.

Michele Hansen 
Oh no.

Colleen Schnettler 
So it's not it sounds bad, but like, it's not that bad because I can rate limit everything. And so what I did was I got a new AWS account. And with new AWS accounts you get -- I forget how much -- but you get a certain amount of free stuff that first year. So under my new URL, like URL, email and stuff, I got the new account, so I get X amount free. But so this is like a really interesting, this will be a really interesting kind of pain point, right is because yes, if it's required to be free, Cloud Storage generally isn't free. I don't really know how it's all gonna play out. But really, I don't actually expect to get a whole bunch of people that it's going to become a problem yet.

So I was reading this blog post by Amy Hoy, the Fine Art of Flintstoning. I don't know if you've ever heard of it or read it. And she talks about -- like so sometimes you just she talks about how it took her six years to ship something, which by the way makes me feel way better. And she also talks about how there's a point where you just you just have to ship something, right. So she uses this term "flint stoning." And she uses it to mean some stuff you're going to do manually. So she was talking about when they first launched Freckle, like, if you wanted your email reset, like you, they had to do that manually. And so there were the certain steps she had to do manually TO ACTUALLY SHIP her product. And that's kind of where I am right now. Like, there's a lot I want to do on the AWS side to monitor this and, and, you know, watch the billing, but I started to get like lost and all of that. And so at least for the first couple months, like I'm just gonna have a simple script that runs independent of the app, or I'll just look at it with my own eyeballs to kind of keep track of where I am.

Michele Hansen 
Yeah, I think that kind of custom monitoring and all of that. We were doing that all manually for quite a long time. Time I want I want to say like three plus years.

Colleen Schnettler 
Really?

Michele Hansen 
We had various services that we used, you know, for,...

Michele Hansen 
Welcome to the Software Social podcast. I'm Michele Hansen.

Colleen Schnettler 
And I'm Colleen Schnettler .

Michele Hansen 
So Colleen, tell me what's going on this week.

Colleen Schnettler 
So I unfortunately have not had a whole lot of time to work on my side project this week, because life has been crazy. I've been swamped with client work and family stuff. So I didn't really do anything.

Michele Hansen 
That happens! Right? Especially during COVID times.

Colleen Schnettler 
Yes!

Michele Hansen 
How much free time does anyone really have right now, especially if you have kids?

Colleen Schnettler 
Yes. Balancing the kids and the clients and the work and the side project work has definitely been quite a lot.

Michele Hansen 
You've basically got two sets of clients because the kids themselves are, you know...

Colleen Schnettler 
Yeah!

Michele Hansen 
...Pop in every 15 minutes and need things.

Colleen Schnettler 
Yes. And I'll work for three hours. And then they'll be like, Mommy, why aren't you spending any time with us? I'm like, only worked for three hours. It's because you're here all day. You're not at school where you're supposed to be! Anyway, anyway.

Michele Hansen 
So the small amount of time you didn't get to spend on your side project.

Colleen Schnettler 
So the small amount of time I did get to spend on my side project, I was chatting with a friend of mine about some of the technical challenges I'm having. And I'm having this really one specific problem where uploading multiple images is not working the way I want it to. And he suggested I ditch that -- he thought that having a multiple image upload was beyond the purview of an MVP. And I should just get it working with one image just to get something out there. Right just to get my foot in the door.

Michele Hansen 
Hmm.

Colleen Schnettler 
What do you think about that advice?

Michele Hansen 
I was gonna ask you what you thought of it first.

Colleen Schnettler 
I think it's good advice. Because one of the things I've one of the problems I always have is taking that first step and getting something out there because I just continually -- as I've been going through this, I continually want to add features, I got totally distracted with my lambda API gateway stuff last week. And that stuff is really cool, but totally beyond the initial scope of what I was trying to build. And I think for me, like I kind of got to get in the game, like, I've just got to get something out there to keep me motivated, and to get people using it and see if people want multiple image support.

Michele Hansen 
And also to get you using it right, because you've mentioned that you would use this with your clients and your time is at a premium. And so if you can start using it, that will be a form of feedback on on the product.

Colleen Schnettler 
Right? Like I am going to be hopefully my own best user of my own product, because I will get to use it and see like where the errors are. I know I want multiple image support. But what I can put out now is still better than what they're using. And I can still use it, you know, adding one image at a time, if I want, or I could use my part for the single images and use something else, a custom solution, for multiple images. I just feel like this is something that is taking me forever. And it's not really taking forever, but it's just something I need to get out there. And I was reading this article about like, what makes a good MVP and it wasn't about having a ton of features it was but it was also not about having a crappy product, like you need a tight product, you need a really good product with the minimal amount of features to make it viable.

Michele Hansen 
It's a tough concept, right? Because there there's this graphic that I I'm gonna have to share it because I'm gonna totally butcher it. But basically it's you know, the MVP of a car is not, you know, four wheels with a platform. The MVP of a car is a scooter because it still gets you from A to B like that's the the job of the product is to transport you from one place to another. But it's a very simple version of it, you know, it doesn't have features like a roof or, you know, multiple seating support, right? But it still gets you there. But there's very often when you see MVPs built, it's, you know, something that is a shell of what the product was supposed to be and isn't actually useful.

Colleen Schnettler 
Right! So that's my goal.

Michele Hansen 
So I think there definitely, there is that temptation, though, to sit on it until you've built you know, a Tesla, right? And you need to get it out there sooner than that and get feedback and I think there's also a certain pressure to not put things out there until it's perfect because I think we get afraid that it's gonna, it's gonna be criticized and people aren't gonna like it and they're gonna tell you how it's incomplete in ways that you already know. And I think it's really easy to build up a lot of fear around that, I mean. I'll tell you that like, features that people told us were boilerplate when we launched, we still haven't launched them, and we may never launch them. So...

Colleen Schnettler 
Oh, wow.

Michele Hansen 
Yeah. Like we don't have global support. And it has not been a problem for us. But that was something that people asked for on day one. And if we had waited until we had global support, we never would have launched.

Colleen Schnettler 
Right.

Michele Hansen 
We launched with just what we needed, which was coverage for the US, and honestly was not that great when we launched it either. But we launched with that, which was very simple. It was what we needed. And then we took it from there. But we didn't wait until it was totally perfect mirror image of major competitor products out there.

Colleen Schnettler 
Yeah, so I think for me, what I have now for these guys is single file, upload one at a time, and so I can build it as a single file upload one at a time. And I can utilize it on my existing application. And it could still be useful for people. And then I could, I mean, I could get that version out there. And then I could work on the multiple file support. And some of the other things if I decide that I need it.

Michele Hansen 
Yeah, and if there's demand for it, and, you know, of course, there's always the complication of when you build something, it's not always easy to build other things on top of it that it wasn't built for. And so, you know, something to keep in mind that you know, at some point, you're going to want batch support, and so making architectural decisions that won't inhibit that, but also not committing yourself to that and the architecture at the same time is a tricky thing to do.

Colleen Schnettler 
Yeah, I think I can do it with this, with this setup that I have now. So I think that'll work. So I think that's my new plan is just to finish it. Just to finish. So that's my short but sweet update for this week. So what have you been doing?

Michele Hansen 
So I've been thinking a lot about customer research which, you know...

Colleen Schnettler 
This is my favorite topic.

Michele Hansen 
This is MY favorite topic!

[laughter]

So we are going to be launching a new version of our dashboard. So our dashboard is wh...

Michele Hansen 
Welcome to the Software Social podcast where we invite you to join our weekly conversation about what's going on in our businesses. I'm Michele Hansen.

Colleen Schnettler 
And I'm Colleen Schnettler.

Michele Hansen
How's it going, Colleen?

Colleen Schnettler 
I'm doing well. It's been a pretty exciting week for me on a tech front. So I haven't had as much time this week. I'm really trying to commit to talking to more people. I mentioned that.

Michele Hansen
Yeah!

Colleen Schnettler 
And it's kind of funny, because I've been talking to more people and they don't really care about my image management solution.

Michele Hansen
Oh :(

Colleen Schnettler 
Well, it's okay. This this kind of interesting thing has happened, where they care at there. They don't care about that, but they're really excited about the work I'm doing with AWS and Arc. I'm, I'm moving my tech over to go from kind of a monolithic Rails app to like AWS, Lambda serverless functions and everyone is really interested in that?

Michele Hansen
Really?

Colleen Schnettler 
Yeah, it's kind of been a funny thing where I've wanted to talk to people about image management. And they want to talk to me about how I'm using lambda functions to do manipulations on images.

Michele Hansen
Really...

Colleen Schnettler 
And so, yeah, and so I there's a few things I'm trying to be wary of here. One is, I feel like it's not a good idea to use new tech on a new idea. Because you're, it's like a double uphill battle. You have to both build something, ship it and learn some new tech. But this AWS stuff is really cool. I love learning it and the architecture with it really is better. It just feels cleaner. I'm I'm not a huge microservices person, but this particular, what I'm building really lends itself well to these lambda functions. So that's been really fun. But it has been an interesting thing to find out that people are more interested in that. So as you know,  one of the things I struggle with is jumping too quickly from idea to idea. But I'm seeing this opportunity where everyone wants to learn how to write lambda functions in the cloud with Ruby. And I'm like, Oh! Well, that's interesting.

Michele Hansen 
Did you course business at one point? I forget.

Colleen Schnettler 
I thought about it. I know that would be, that would be no, I thought about it. And I started doing video courses. I think I did like three or four. And it just got, I mean, it's kind of a slog to do that kind of thing, especially if it's not, it was I was building something that was more geared towards beginners. And so it was pretty boring for me to actually make them because you have to really go back and I felt like there was a lot of beginner course content out there already. So I never I never really gave that a good shot. But this is an interesting thing, because I am really when you hear these people who are successful, they're like, Oh, I was interested in this thing. And I blogged about it everyday for a year. And then boom, I'm the expert in this thing. And I have a product and this thing. I don't know, it's just I don't want to be jumping, right? This is I need to really focus, which is one of the things I struggle with. But I'm really tempted, I'm really tempted to like, get more into this AWS in the cloud serverless functions stuff. That seems to be more interesting to my developer friends.

Michele Hansen 
Maybe it's not jumping if you just hang out on a particular stepping stone for a little bit. Maybe there's like a mini course here or something or even if it's just a blog post and people get excited about that. But maybe there's, you know, a little a little stop along the way here.

Colleen Schnettler 
So I'd really like to get the image thing done. Because I think as we've been talking every week, I feel like I'm just so close.

Michele Hansen 
And you need it. Like for your sanity. On the projects you work on.

Colleen Schnettler 
Yes, I need it, I'm going to use it on my clients. And I just want to finish something like I just want to finish a side project. That's just where I am. It's like graveyard of abandoned side projects. So I want to finish it, and I'll use it. And I think it'll make my life easier. So that's great. But I wonder this is something I'm kind of like putting in the back of my mind and kind of tabling as people are interested in this, they want to learn more, they want to learn, you know, how you can use it. And the other thing, there's, I feel like serverless is huge, and there's so much opportunity for growth. And I don't know if there is like, I know, AWS has a marketplace, but I don't know anything about it. But so for example, this one serverless function I have all you do is if your images in my bucket, you can just send query parameters for the size you want of the image and it returns the image already resized and optimized and things like that. Wouldn't it be cool if you could have like a suite of little serverless functions that you could somehow bundle together? Like a whole bunch, I don't know, you'd have like, I don't know what it would look like you'd have like five different API endpoints you as my customer could hit that would handle all of your different image manipulation, like, or I could have one for video and one for images. I don't know. I feel like there might be something there. And I don't know what that looks like. But it's definitely like tucked away in the back of my mind, like what I'm working on. Now. I want to finish first. That's important. And it's so close. But I think after that might be a good time to start blogging about all this stuff I have learned in the AWS ecosystem. And once I don't forget it, but also, you know, to see if people are interested in that kind of information as well.

Michele Hansen 
It sounds like they are and like, I can't tell you how many projects and products come out of setting out to do something else. Like just earlier this week, Adam Wathan did a huge thread on the development of Tailwind. I don't know if you saw it. And he mentioned how they were working on another side project, but like the CSS was driving him nuts. And so they just he just made that. And then he open sourced it. And people were super psyched about it. And they were really surprised by that. And then it like led to this whole thing that is Tailwind. I mean, that happened with Geocodio too. To to like we set out to make an app that told you grocery store and coffee shop opening hours and ran into problems with geocoding. And you know, we got some good, good traction and some excited users on the grocery store app. But man, when you find a problem that developers have, and you solve it for them, people get really, really excited about that.

Colleen Schnettler 
Yeah. So when you guys launched Geocodio did you do that through some kind of existing marketplace, or were you just out in the free world?

Michele Hansen 
Hacker News. That was the place to launch in January 2014. Product Hunt like wasn't even a thing. Yeah. And we did a ton of, you know, posting on like StackOverflow and Reddit.

Colleen Schnettler 
And how did you know when you were ready to put it out there for other people? Had you guys been using it for your grocery store app for a while?

Michele Hansen 
Yeah, I think at least six months or so.

Colleen Schnettler 
That's quite a while.

Michele Hansen 
Yeah. And it took a good friend of ours to be like, hey, like, you should just slap a paywall in front of this and see if other people will pay f...

MICHELE HANSEN 
Hey, and welcome back to software social. I'm Michele

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER
and I'm Colleen. 

MICHELE HANSEN
And we're inviting you to join our conversation about what's going on in our businesses.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER

Michele, do you want to get started today?

MICHELE HANSEN
Yeah, so something I'm thinking a lot about is the golden goose of software: enterprise software.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER

Oh, man. Okay.

MICHELE HANSEN
Yeah. So I mean, you had mentioned a couple weeks ago how you have this dream that if you had a SaaS business, everything would be roses, and amazing. And there wouldn't be any problems. Right?

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER

Correct.

MICHELE HANSEN
And so the next level of that dream that a lot of people have is if they could just sell enterprise software, where, you know, the companies would never cancel. And they have these giant expensive contracts and like, everything is amazing, right?

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER
Yep.

MICHELE HANSEN
Yeah. So I'm thinking about this a lot, because I feel like there's a lot of different ways to do enterprise and there's a lot of granularity in it that gets lost. And at a high level though, what I want to talk about first is how, one of the reasons why SaaS and especially small customer funded SaaS works and a company like ours, which only has my husband and I running it, but we have tens of thousands of customers is because our work has a one:many relationship. And so if you can picture that, every time we do work, we add a new feature, we add a landing page, you know, anytime we're doing work on our service, most of the time that work has a one:many relationship, we add a feature and it helps tens of thousands of people simultaneously, right? Or we add a new landing page and that helps us attract thousands of customers simultaneously.

COLLEEN
Sure.

MICHELE
The thing about enterprise work on the other hand, it has a one to one relationship. There's a lot of custom work that has to be done. And so in that way, it's almost a little bit more like freelance work.

COLLEEN
Okay.

MICHELE
And so that's important because when when looking at enterprise software and serving enterprise markets, there's all these different things that companies have as requirements. And very often those things can be things that maybe only that one particular customer has, or if you're doing something like on premise, that's a one:one relationship. And as a really small company, we need to maximize for work that has a one:many relationship. If I'm sure any sense at all, stop me.

COLLEEN
Yeah, no, you're making great sense. I just, I am curious why you're even thinking about enterprise software. And I say that because I used to work for a Fortune 500 company, and, man, we bought really expensive software, but you probably had to sit in 20 meetings before we agreed to buy it. So I know that there's, I guess, like, why are you even thinking of it? Is it is it just to have a different revenue stream?

MICHELE 
We reached out to buy big enterprises.

COLLEEN
Oh, I didn't know that.

MICHELE
This is my next sort of thing, that there's different ways to serve big enterprises. And so the traditional way, as you mentioned, is 20 meetings, you know, three golf outings, you know, five fancy dinners, right, like all that kind of sales cycle, right? So there's that level of it. We're not doing that level. But we do have people in large organizations who reach out to us but this has some different flavors. So one of my favorite ways of serving enterprises is basically when someone within a team has something that they need to get done as part of their everyday work. And for whatever reason, they need to do it faster or they need to do it better. They don't like the tools they have and so they go off and find something themselves. And then they make the case to their boss or to their leadership, that you should use the product. And this either gets put on that team's credit card, called a P Card in most places, which might have a say a $500 monthly limit per service, which is why people like Patrick McKenzie, recommend that price point so often, $499 or $999, because those are sign off levels for price points, actually. So enterprises have a word for this, they call it "shadow IT" which is this kind of like derisive name, because they're implying that it hasn't gone through the big procurement process and the security reviews and everything, but it's a great way to sort of shortcut into a big organization that has reliable ongoing needs, that's going to keep reliably paying you.

And then the other way that we often get it is people reach out to us and they do need to use it across the entire organization. And we have to go through security reviews and contract negotiations and whatnot. And this is all my mind because I realized the other day that I probably spend about a third of my time on this kind of work, whether that's having phone calls or negotiating contracts, or any of those other details that go into it. But that I don't think we've ever had a single customer with a custom negotiated contract cancel on us.

COLLEEN
Ah, yeah.

MICHELE
But you don't necessarily have to have a big sales force to get that kind of thing that kind of plan levels through, but it does, it does take a lot of specific work. And the thing is, is when I'm doing that, when I'm having a call with one huge customer, or I'm negotiating contract with them, that's work that's going for just that one customer. It's a one to one relationship. And so, this is where this really comes into play for a small SaaS company like us, is when we're talking about things like on premise where it's a one to one relationship. But so any work that we might do on that, or like help, we might need to give them with their installation of it, that's all one to one and needs to be priced accordingly. But the thing is, is customers who request that often have these, you know, compliance requirements, you know, whatever industries they're in, that they can't get around it. And so they have to pay a lot more for something.

So I'm thinking about all this, but there's a there's a great site that I found recently called enterpriseready.io. And it goes through a lot of the features that enterprises might require. And it was interesting looking through this, you have things like Single Sign On, audit logs, integrations, things like that, because absolutely, these are things that big companies require. But we don't have all of them. And we're selling to big companies all the time. And so my point here is that you can be selling to enterprise without necessarily doing that whole enterprise song and dance on the sales side. And you can say like, you know, we'd love to work with you, here's what we have. We don't have single sign on, or we don't have, you know, SOC2 audits, or we don't have audits of our financial statements every year. And if the buyer in the organization loves your product enough, maybe they've gotten to try it for free or on a lower plan with their boss's P Card, they can advocate to their legal department and actually get through those things. And you don't even need whatever those requirements are. Doesn't happen all the time, but I think it's really helpful to look at a list like this, and then also remember that it's not necessarily all requirements that you might need before you try to launch into that space, which I think is a headspace that people get in in a lot of different ways of, "My product doesn't have every single feature that someone could possibly ask for. So I'm not going to launch it yet."

COLLEEN
So So do you guys ever reach out to enterprise?

...

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Transcript

MICHELE HANSEN
Hey, Michele here. Just a quick note before this week's episode, in the second half [NOTE: starting @ 12 minutes] I talk about a controversial topic and use some strong language. So just a heads up in case there are little ears around. 

MICHELE HANSEN
Welcome to the software social podcast where we invite you to join our weekly discussion about what's going on in our businesses.

MICHELE HANSEN  
I'm Michele Hansen. 

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER
And I'm Colleen Schnettler.

MICHELE HANSEN  
So Colleen, tell me, what's going on with your business this week?

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER
So Michele, last week, I told you that I am building an image management service. And you asked me if anyone wanted that service. Do you remember what I said?

MICHELE HANSEN
You said maybe but at the very least you want it [yourself]...

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER

Right. And also, I haven't really asked anyone if they want it. So I kind of think, what I want to start doing this week is in conjunction with building the service -- which is pretty much almost done -- I want to start finding out if anyone wants it. So, right, it seems like such an obvious step [Michele: Magic words!] that I should be taking. So my commitment is to spend one hour a day trying to figure this out. First problem. Who are my customers?

MICHELE
And where are they?

COLLEEN
And where are they? How do I find them? So since I'm building this as a JavaScript plugin, my customers or other developers, probably developers like me who do consulting so they want to optimize for time. I don't know how to find these people and ask them.

MICHELE
Have you looked in places yet? Like what have you explored?

COLLEEN
So here's what I've explored I put something on indie hackers literally no one okay. That's a good start. That's what I thought but literally no one responded.

MICHELE
No, I you know, I so I love any hackers but also I find that it can be very much like unless you get to one of the bigger threads there, it can be kind of a drive by with like people just putting their projects and there's just like so much and a lot of it's really good. Yeah, that it can be a bit tough to filter.

COLLEEN
Yeah, I've really I've, I've posted on Indie Hackers a few times, and I've never gotten any kind of engagement. And maybe it's if you I've noticed that the posts that are like, here's how my business was so successful, like those get a lot of engagement.

MICHELE
I wrote one of those (laughing)

COLLEEN
But there's nothing wrong with that, like, everyone loves those, right? Those are inspirational, like I love those posts, and I love getting advice from successful founders. But it feels like there's just not a lot of engagement with people who are just starting out. So that didn't work. So I tried Indie Hackers, I think I put something on Twitter and I had like three people respond, which is better than no better than no people. Right? What do you think? Like let's say I'm starting from zero and I'm also like, open into seeing what other ideas are out there as well. As we as you know, I've kind of been plugging away at idea generation for quite a while now. I'm definitely making my image management service, because I'm almost done. I'm going to use it for my clients. But I'm also open to hearing about, you know, other problems and other ideas. I like targeting developers, because I like using existing marketplaces, to try and sell what I'm building.

MICHELE
Have you looked at Reddit?

COLLEEN
So Reddit confuses me...

MICHELE
It is one of my favorite places to recruit is it really can be a little bit. Yeah. Because if you find the right niche within Reddit and Reddit has, I mean, there are so many weird corners of Reddit, right? Which I think is part of what makes it a little bit intimidating from the outside. But there's so many great niches within Reddit that are so great to recruit from. There's also some really big communities. So there's, for example, the webdev community. There, but there's also some really small ones. You know, for example, when we were launching a HIPAA compliant geocoding service couple years ago, we wanted to do some usability testing. And there was a health GIS subreddit with like, 5,000 people in it. And I posted something saying I wanted to do some testing with people. And I'd give them a $25 Amazon gift card if they participated. And I got 70 responses. Wow. Like all from our target market customers. Like it was -- I was floored.

COLLEEN
Wow! That's amazing.

MICHELE
Yeah. And so I think if you find the right, you know, the right community within Reddit, and you have, you know, a good, genuine post, explaining who you're looking for. And you have some sort of incentive there. I think even $10 to Amazon, or whatever, is, is probably good, you know, because people's time is valuable, and they're giving you something valuable, so I feel strongly that there should be something there. But you know, you really only need to talk to five people just as a baseline. So you're looking at $50 worth of investment plus your time, which could, you know, save you weeks or months of dev time that, you know, ends up getting wasted, because it wasn't what people wanted.

COLLEEN
So how would you recommend? This is like, this feels like Cold Calling Strangers like this feels very awkward, which is fine. I like people. But how would you like even recommend going about that?

MICHELE
Yeah, so if I found a community...so let's, for example, say you doing web dev, though, that might be too broad of a community and I'm not super active on it myself. So I can't really speak to community norms. Some for example, don't allow you to, to post various things, so just always check their rules. Okay. Um, but I would say something to the effect of, you know, I'm building an image management service, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah is your -- you know -- and I need feedback. That's your post. And then in your, sorry, that's your title. And then in your posts, say something effective, you know, Hi, I'm building the service, like, here's what it's aiming to do. And I'm looking for some people to give me some feedback on it. If you can give me a half an hour of your time, I'll give you a $10 Amazon gift card, just send me a PM with some details about, you know, what kind of work you do and what interests you in trying the service and, you know, and make it very clear that it's not a sales call or anything like that. It's strictly for the feedback, because people sometimes are, justifiably wary that that it's not what it purports to be, right. Also, I would recommend creating a Reddit username specifically for this, whether that's your real name or your company name or whatever. Just so some weird post you made 10 years ago doesn't mean that surfaced with your name attached to it, you know. Yeah.

COLLEEN
Okay, that's great. Okay, so that will be my, my weekly goal this week will be to actually talk to people who might be potential customers and see what they have to say.

MICHELE
Do you know what you want to ask them?

COLLEEN
Well, I guess I'd kind of want to drill down on is this really -- to me, it's a pain point. And like I said, every client minus maybe two has had this problem. And there's so many different ways to solve it. And they're all kind of none of them are super easy. So I guess the answer to your question is no, I don't know what I want to ask them.

MICHELE
It sounds like you want to find pain and frequency.

COLLEEN
Yes. Right. I mean, how big of a pr...

MICHELE HANSEN: Welcome to the software social podcast where we invite you to join our weekly conversation about what's going on in our businesses. I'm Michele Hansen.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: And I'm Colleen Schnettler.

MICHELE HANSEN: So tell me, Colleen, what's going on with your consulting/transition-to -product business this week?

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: So, I have been stuck in the idea generation phase of trying to start a small business for quite a while. And I've had a lot of different ideas that I've chased down and they really have not amounted to much. So I've decided instead of continually searching for something, I'm going to build something that I want that I know I will use with my clients and throw it out in the world and hope it sticks. Exactly.

MICHELE HANSEN: Dogfooding!

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: This, really, for me like a lot of the literature, I read about startups -- and I read a lot of literature about startups -- says not to code before you have an established market. But the truth is, it's something I want, it's something I know my clients will use (because I am their developer!), and I'm sick of kind of spinning my wheels. I feel like I need to take more action.

MICHELE HANSEN: So, Colleen, what is this idea you're working on?

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: So I am working on an image hosting platform, I hate to use the word term platform, it's not really a platform. Basically, what I'm trying what I'm building is something that's going to be a JavaScript widget that you install into your site that's going to provide you with a drop zone UI, and then your users can drop their images into your drop zone UI. It puts them -- it's going to create cloud storage for you, and it's going to save them to the cloud, and the cloud will be under my business. I don't know if I explained that well. Well, it'll be in the cloud. I'll put them in front of a CDN. Because I think the CDN part's really important. And it's just going to return the URL. So that's my plan. And there's a lot of image management software out there. Actually, there's a ton of image management software out there. But there's nothing that's just really easy. Like when you're working on a small SaaS app, in my opinion, you just want to move forward as quickly as possible and you want to make progress and the stuff out there isn't bad... but I just want to make it dead simple, especially for like newer developers or developers who don't want to deal with a lot of image management or they don't want to figure out how to use AWS. When you're a newer developer, you're just learning how to develop, you don't want to then have to go spend hours and hours figuring out AWS, in my opinion. So it's just gonna make the process simple. It's gonna be a five minute install. You just drop the snippet in, you put the button on, and it will provide your users their drop zone and all you have to do is save the URL of the image. So now you automatically have your image hosted on the cloud. So you don't have to worry about that. Like I said, I have not yet, but my goal is to put in front of the CDN so you don't have to worry about that. And then you can use the image, you know, like you would any cloud image.

MICHELE HANSEN: So have you talked to other developers who have talked about their frustrations with other image management platforms?

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: No.

MICHELE HANSEN: Colleen!

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: So here's the thing I know. So here's okay. I know but like, I have come every client I have, I have this freakin problem and it really irks me that there's not a better solution.

MICHELE HANSEN: That's worth something.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: That's worth something! And so when I do talk, okay, that's not fair when I first started to talk to people, and there is -- I did talk to other people.

MICHELE HANSEN: Before the pandemic, we talked to other people, right? In general...

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Yes, before when I could TALK to people. So I have talked to people about this. And a lot of them use big. So so the people I know like they use big powerful solutions like enterprise-level solutions because they work for enterprise-level clientele, right. So a lot of my friends work for big, you know, fancy companies. And so they have these big enterprise solutions. And so I have looked at those solutions. And they're not bad, but they're a pain to set up. It's way more like there's one that's really popular in the Rails community. And it's fine, but like, it's just way more overhead when you just want your user to be able to add a couple images, right? Like it's a huge overhead to import this third party library and configure it, it's a whole thing. You got to figure out how to use it. It's a whole thing. Like, it's just too hard for what you're trying to do. So I am trying to take this thing that almost every application needs, your user usually has some kind of avatar most applicant. Most applications use some kind of images. So I'm just trying to take this thing that everyone needs and make it really, really easy. Like, just simplify the heck out of it.

MICHELE HANSEN: It sounds like this is something that you experience frequently and is pretty annoying for you, which is a great place to be for a potential product is something that a user experiences frequently. And is something painful, you know, if you had if you had an idea, and it's something that isn't very painful for people and doesn't happen very often, that's usually kind of a red flag. But if you can find something that's pretty frequent and pretty painful, that can be promising.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Yeah, so the first iteration of this I built was just for public images. So it was like for your static assets. And I built that because like images are just a pain point for me because they're just annoying, right? Users -- they take these like they have these huge files, your designers give you these huge files. And you have to, you know, compress them and resize them and all this stuff. But the first thing I kind of built, which is this, the building blocks to what I'm working on now, was just public image hosting amongst teams. And that was cool. And I like that. But like, no one was really interested in that because no one cares so much about web performance. Very few people care so much about web performance was my experience that they're actually going to, you know, resize all of their images that are just their static everyday images, or they're just going to throw them behind a CDN anyway, so they don't care. But this problem, I think the thing about this problem is, it's a common problem. And there's many, many, many different ways to solve it. And I have seen as a consultant, I work for a lot of different companies over the past years, and I have seen all these different kinds of ways to solve it. And there's just no, but it just doesn't feel like there's an easy, consistent way like you'll have one app that uses this gem then one app and you and then one app that does it this way. And I feel like we're taking this problem that doesn't have to be so hard and making it harder than it needs to be.

MICHELE HANSEN: And you know, as I hear you talk, what I what I think about is you were mentioning earlier how you consume a lot of startup literature and talks and advice on starting a business. And something that always comes across in those kinds of venues is how, you know, you should be passionate about it, you should be passionate about the business and you should be passionate about about what you're solving and whatnot. And, you know, I don't think there are any, you know, eight year old kids out there saying, "Mom and Dad when I grew up, I'm gonna solve image management software." But what does drive someone is experiencing a problem so often, that you are passionate about solving that feeling of pain, and I think...

MICHELE HANSEN: Welcome to the Software Social podcast, where we invite you to join our weekly conversation about what's going on in our businesses. I'm Michele Hansen,

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: and I'm Colleen Schnettler.

MICHELE HANSEN: And this week we're giving you an intro to what this podcast is about and who we are and why we're doing this and why we're hoping you'll join us.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: So Michele can you start by telling us a little about your software business?

MICHELE HANSEN: Yes, so I am a co-founder of Geocodio (https://www.geocod.io/) which is a software as a service company. We do geocoding for US and Canada as well as data matching, and my husband and I started it about six and a half years ago now as a side project and we have run it full-time for the past three years. 

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: So you're basically living the dream, is what you're telling me?

MICHELE HANSEN: Some people would say that, I bristle at that a little bit, there's definitely a lot more dream to be had. But yeah, people do say that to me, especially people who are looking to create their own software businesses. Which is kinda the boat you're in. 

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Much like myself! I am a Ruby on Rails developer, I've kind of had a varied career. Always in tech. I started as an electrical engineer, stayed home with my kids for a few years, and then I started learning Rails and I built up a really successful consultancy. And that has been amazing, and a really wonderful journey for me, but I have always wanted to start a product business. There is just this dream of having a product business that you are in charge of your own life and your own business, you get to make your own decisions. That's something I've always wanted. And man, it's hard! 

MICHELE HANSEN: It is hard!

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Right? You know, I read a lot of startup content. I have read a lot of books and I follow a lot of successful startup founders and there's so many stories out there that make it seem like -- I mean you don't hear about it until they're successful, so it makes it seem like it's easy, and I'm at the very beginning of this journey, and you know, I'm just getting started! So part of my impetus for doing this podcast with you is obviously to learn a lot about what you can teach people who are in the early stages of their business, and also to stay inspired and to share with people what it's really like to start a business.

MICHELE HANSEN: I don't think you give yourself enough credit, Colleen, in saying that you're just at the very beginning. You have been working intently on this for over a year now -- I remember it was last summer when you came to me and you were so excited about an idea and this passion you had that was leading you to toward that idea, and you started doing user research on it, and having something that you're passionate about, and doing the work to see if there's legs to it, and then realizing that there aren't -- that is work. That is valuable productive work.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: I hope so! Because it was quite a lot of work. And so just a brief overview, I had an idea to do something with the childcare industry. And I had a founder, someone I was going to work with, and she and I interviewed quite a few people  who would have been in our target market. So we kind of took the steps you learn about with idea generation and honestly the truth is -- we put in a lot of time and effort and found out it really was not a profitable business idea. So it's hard to get really excited about something and climb that mountain and then realize -- up! no one wants to buy it. 

MICHELE HANSEN: Right

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: You know? At least we found that out before we started writing code.

MICHELE HANSEN: Right

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Didn't you guys have some side projects before Geocodio?

MICHELE HANSEN: Oh, many. And we had many projects in between that, too, that we've launched in the interim. And it's -- there's no lying that it's hard to find something that sticks, and as you said, no one cares about something until you're a success -- which is a really really lonely place to be for a very long time. You know, our first month we launched Geocodio, we made $31. We thought we were a ridiculous success because we were shocked that anybody wanted to pay us. We thought our product was pretty terrible. And we were we were truly -- we were so shocked that we hadn't even written the code that would tell Stripe to bill people. That was how surprised we were that anyone wanted to pay us. And we worked on it as a side project for a very long time. And it wasn't until just before I went full time, that people started kind of noticing what we were doing and asking us to talk at conferences or, or being a podcast. There's that was a very long time. Where Yeah, exactly like you were saying, you don't hear a lot of those stories. You only hear the stories when people are successful. And I think what we're hoping to capture here is some of that granularity that goes in week by week when you're launching something. And then also the kinds of things you face on a daily basis when you have launched something and it's gotten to the point where you can work full time on it, what what are the kinds of things that you might be facing at that point, and and how do we tackle them

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: So you guys had the business for a few years before you went full time, right?

MICHELE HANSEN: Yeah. Yeah, three, it was like three and a half years until I went full time. And then my husband went part time, six months later. And then full time, six months after that, like, honestly, we were terrified of paying for health insurance on our own. And that was a big thing that kept us from going full time. We probably could have gone full time a lot sooner. But given the experience I had just a couple months ago trying to buy health insurance, I'm glad I put that off. But it's possible -- not to scare anyone. But there's a very real fears that come into it. Even when you do have something that works and you have customers and your revenue is increasing. You're going to have a whole new set of anxieties to face so -- congratulations! Yeah, no. Everything is solvable.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: I think when you're where I am in this process it seems like so far away right like like it seems like "Man, if I could just make a product that people want to buy my life will be rainbows and sunshine and easy every day!"

MICHELE HANSEN:  I can see that and also you know our everyday is we've got something that's that's launched that, you know, has recurring revenue and you know supports us and everything and every day there's still people who are upset with us. Every day we discover things with our product that we're like, "Oh my, that is so obviously bad. Like we need to fix that. Like how is that been like that for so long? This is embarrassing." Like that, that happens to happened... today. It happened yesterday. And the same time you know some of the things you were talking about earlier that the dream so many people have for having a product business. Being able to be your own boss, getting to make decisions, getting to have that level of autonomy and authority and direction over your own work. That doesn't go away. And that definitely keeps me going. And really, what makes it worth it when not everything is rarely otherwise.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Yeah, I imagine you're a parent as well as am I? And I imagine it goes both ways, right? Like I imagine the flexibility you have with running your own business is amazing to help you parent. But on the other hand, can you ever take a vacation?