Software Social

Follow Kevin! https://twitter.com/SahinKevin
Check out ScrapingBee: https://www.scrapingbee.com/

AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

Colleen Schnettler  0:00 
This episode of Software Social is sponsored by Hey Check It. Does your website performance keep you up at night? The creators behind Hey Check It started it for this very reason—peace of mind about their sites and the sites they manage. Hey Check It is a website performance monitoring and suggestion tool focused on SEO, accessibility, uptime, site speed and content. It includes AI-generated SEO, data, spelling and grammar checking, custom sitemaps, and a number of other tools. If you're managing multiple websites, check their agency plans with public facing dashboards to meet your clients' needs. Start a free trial today at HeyCheckIt.com

Michele Hansen  0:39  
Hey, welcome back to Software Social. We're doing another interview this week. I am so excited to have Kevin Sahin with me. He is co-founder of ScrapingBee. Kevin, welcome to software social.

Kevin Sahin  0:57  
Well, thank you, Michele, I'm excited to be here.

Michele Hansen  1:01  
So this kind of came about because I was on Twitter, as I often am. And I noticed, I think it was actually someone tweeted about MicroConf Europe, which I had been really wanting to go to, but conflicted with a friend's wedding. So we couldn't go. So I was just sort of following and watching everything unfold on Twitter and tweeted about how peer your co founder was, was giving a talk. And he mentioned how scraping DEA offered free API credits to customers who are willing to jump on a 15 minute call with them. And you guys ask them questions like, what else have you tried, and my interest immediately perked up. And really wanted to talk to you about those calls you had and what you learned from them, and what that added for the business. But before we jump into that, perhaps you should say for a moment, just what scraping be. Is and, and whatnot. And?

Kevin Sahin  2:09  
Sure. So um, so basically scraping the is an API for web scraping. When you are extracting data from the web, you often have the two same problems, which are, there are more and more websites that are using JavaScript frameworks like Vue js, react, etc. And so you have to render the page inside a web browser. And this is kind of, it's a pain to manage, especially at scale. Because you have to, you know, there are lots of DevOps skills that you need. You need big servers, you need lots of things. And it's really handy to have, you know, a headless browser accessible with a simple API call. The other thing that you have to do when you scrape the web at scale, is to manage proxies. So you can you probably need proxies for many different reasons. For example, let's say that you are extracting data from ecommerce website. Well, most ecommerce websites are internationalized, meaning that if you access the website from an IP address in Europe, you will have the prices in euro if you access the IP address or the website from an IP address in the US you will have prices in dollars. So you need some kind of proxy management system. The other thing is IP rate limit. Some websites are limiting the number of pages you can access per day from a single IP address if you need to access more pages, you need more IP addresses etc, etc. And so we bundled this inside a single API which is scraping

Michele Hansen  4:04  
so I love how you're solving that because we have felt that pain personally. So I've kind of talked a little bit in the past about how my husband dies first project that was what so the one well, not at first, but the one right before geocoder that basically funded Juco was this mobile app called what's open nearby where you could open it up and see grocery stores convenience stores and coffee shops that were open near you. And how we ran that in the back end was we had a ton of scrapers running of like grocery store, you know Starbucks, whatever like their websites, scraping the hours off of them and we like just all the time there's issues you know, the parsers breaking or you get blocked or actually the the sort of recent side project we did Keren, which allowed people to get an alert when a grocery pick slot opened up on a on a grocery stores website because of COVID and everything that was also powered by scrapers basically and the back end. And so I have I have personally felt the pain of, you know, the impacts when when when, you know, scraping goes wrong or you know it can get frustrating at times.

Kevin Sahin  5:29  
Yeah, that's I mean, there are the, the story behind scraping is that we, we personally experienced some of those frustrations, because p&i like before launching scraping beam, we started our career in two different startups that were heavily relying on web scraping. In the business, I was working on a startup in France, which is kind of a mix between mint.com in the US and plaid.com. So for those who don't know, it's a bank account aggregation software's sublet, that comm is an API that allows third party to access your bank account. And means that comm is a bank account aggregation, personal finance management app. And so at this startup, I was really exposed to all of these issues. And Param, he was working for a real estate startup, a real estate data startup in France. And so there will relying on scraping lots of real estate portals. So we both, you know, experienced lots of these issues regarding how to handle headless browsers, how to handle proxies, how to, you know, handle blocks, etc, etc. So that was something we, we knew a little about,

Michele Hansen  7:16  
I love how you started with a pain that you had. But also as, as you've run the business, you're also actively reaching out to your customers to understand what they were trying to do, what problems they were having, and how they were solving those problems. So I wonder if you can kind of take us back to when you like, how did those emails come about where you were reaching out to people like, like, what what kind of prompted that?

Kevin Sahin  7:47  
Yeah. So that we quickly realized that we really knew when I say that we knew a little about it, it's not an a few million. Because we really knew a little about the different web scraping use cases each time. I mean, from the beginning, when we launched the API we like from day one, I'd say, we realized that some users, we're scraping, have had some use cases that we never imagined. So we quickly realized that we had to get them on the phone and knew more about about it, understand their businesses, what kind of data they they needed, what frequency for what we use case, etc, etc. But the problem that we had is that at the beginning, so we had we had the banner on the dashboard, covering that, if they had any question, they could schedule a call with me. But nobody was scheduling any call. So maybe, maybe the banner was wasn't, I mean, the copy wasn't great, maybe. The CTA wasn't clear, I don't know. But the fact is, nobody was getting any call with me. And we also had an email sequence where we, we had a few links to my county. But it wasn't working. I mean, sometimes we had a trial scheduling a call, but it was not very, not a lot. And and then we we had this idea of offering more 10x more free API calls. Then the trial offered. And then instantly, we started to get a lot of calls. So many that I had to, you know, delete some availability in my week, because I was just doing calls every day all day. And, and it was great because we will learn so much we, I mean, we will learn so many different use cases that we never thought about. For example, I don't know, we, we, we had so many diverse people. So for example, university resea...

Follow Rosie! https://twitter.com/rosiesherry
Check out Rosieland: https://rosie.land/

Michele Hansen  0:01 
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Hey, welcome back to software social. I am so excited this week to have with us the woman the myth, the legend, Rosie Sherry. Hello. So excited to have you. So you were I founder of Ministry of Testing, lead community at Indie Hackers, which is probably how many people listening know you, currently leading community for Orbit. Also have your own thing going on Rosieland, which is a community about community. So excited to talk to you.

Rosie Sherry  1:30  
Thank you, thank you. It's good to be here.

Michele Hansen  1:33  
So I want I want to start out with something something I noticed when I think about your background is how you've kind of gone between being a founder yourself, and intentionally working for other people also having sort of other things going on. And, you know, on the show in the past, we've kind of talked a little bit about how sometimes there's this perception that there's this sort of like staircase of an entrepreneurs career where you start out working for other people, and then maybe you have an info product, and then maybe you do consulting, and then you do an info product, and then you have a SAS and then I don't know, and it's like this sort of like staircase. And there's this sort of like implied increase in virtue throughout all of that. And then if you're taking backwards steps, that's seen as like, literally like a step backwards. And it's like this ladder rather than being this kind of what I'm more see in people's actual careers, which is kind of moving between different things as their interests lead them and as their life leads them. I feel like I see that in your career. And I'm kind of curious how you think about these shifts you've made between working for yourself and working for other people? And like, like, kind of all of that.

Rosie Sherry  2:45  
Yeah, it's kind of like steps going up and down, right? Or going up and down or left, I guess, an elevator? Yeah, I mean, I have like, no idea what I'm doing. But I guess like, I kind of go with the flow. When I when I stepped back from Ministry of testing, I had been doing that for 10 years. And I thought, like, as I was stepping back, I thought I'd never work for someone else's, like my plan was to take some time off and just like, take it easy for it. And just, I don't know, see what I wanted to do. And I knew I kind of wanted to, like focus in on community, but I wasn't sure how. And then, like, the opportunity with indie hackers came up. And I was like, Oh, you know, this could be fun. This could be interesting. I think I could learn a lot from how courtland has built community there. It's similar to ministry testing, in some ways, but yet, it's, it's really different. So I kind of just jumped on that, like, you know, earlier, earlier than I had planned. I was I was a contractor there for the whole time. And I was there for two years as a contractor. And basically, we just kept renewing the contract, like every three to six months. So it wasn't like it was the plan, stay there. And apparently surprised that I stayed there for two years, I thought I wouldn't last I thought I wouldn't be able to kind of work for someone else after like doing my own thing for 10 years. That was interesting. There's a lot of benefit, especially, I think, perhaps more these days where everything just seems I just feel like there's so much opportunity out there. And there's a lot of things that I didn't like about running a business. I didn't necessarily want to manage people, I didn't want to do the accounts, I didn't want to worry about money or worry about, you know, the future of, of the business. So yeah, I mean, this, you know, loads of things about running a business that I think people try to glorify, they try to hide, they try to not talk about it. But you know, it can be stressful. And I think my realization after running the Ministry of testing, is actually I don't, I don't want to run a company and employ people. I don't want to be responsible for someone's wages at the point of life that I that I am in at the moment. might might change over time, but right now Yeah, I'd rather like I guess, do something more for me something more, you know, focusing on, like my interest in things that that I need. And yeah, and I guess like contracting, bringing home a paycheck, that's great. But you know, for me, it's been, you know, it was great, I saved up a bunch of money, I didn't actually spend any of the money that I made in the hackers. So that was like a nice, consistent income for me to like, you know, get our family more and more of a safety net. Now, my Uber and I never, ever considered working for a startup people have it. Yeah, it's, it's new. For me, it's different from me. But this negative, there's a lot of pros as well. So I try to kind of be mindful of all of that. And, you know, there's days, I just want to pack it all in and say, I can't be bothered, I should just go back to being independent. But there are other days where I'm just like, no, this is actually really good. I'm enjoying what I'm doing this, you know, there's a great team that I'm working with. And again, you know, I get paid well, I don't have to worry about money, I don't have to invoice people the money every month in my bank account. And I'm like, Oh, this is nice. This is, you know, this nice not just to show up and do the work.

Michele Hansen  6:11  
You mentioned how it was stressful, being responsible for people's paychecks. And I totally relate to that. I think it's one of the reasons why we haven't really, you know, formally hired here, right? Like, I have a VA, but you strike me as someone who you know, and this comes through so much in your work for indie hackers in your work on community who like deeply cares about other people, and supporting them and encouraging them and helping them reach their goals, and you know, and be that person they want to be. And I wonder if that almost made it harder to be running a company and responsible for people's income when you felt so responsible for those outcomes and really invested in them as people?

Rosie Sherry  6:57  
Yeah, I mean, it's actually interesting, because I still own in ministry, testing, or co owner, when you're founded, you kind of like, I guess, the foundation of everything that comes later, to a certain extent. So like, the fact that I worked when I wanted, the fact that I had five kids, the fact that I just like took time off when I needed to the fact that I defined, you know, decided my own hours, all of those things, ended up becoming how things were done administrator testing, and it's become more apparent, I guess, as the team, I think about eight or nine people at the moment, at first, you know, I was only one with kids. And, you know, I was very much family friendly person, I would support, you know, everything about me is like, we need to live our own lives as well. We need to have flexibility, you know, work shouldn't stop us having having a family and ...

MIchele: This episode of Software Social is brought to you by Reform.

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Colleen: Hello, Michelle. 

MIchele: I feel like it's been awhile.

Colleen: It has been a while. It's been a few weeks. I 

MIchele: Yeah. But like, so we haven't really liked formally talked or not formally, but, you know, but we have been like, I feel like we have been talking constantly about this podcast for the past couple of weeks at the same time.

Colleen: I would agree. There's been a lot of discussion about that. 

MIchele: And we've been meaning to do like kind of a catch-up episode for a while too. And so it kind of felt this kind of feels like a good time to sort of pause and have a little bit of a meta episode where we sort of, I guess, talk about where we've come from and why w why do we do this in the first place and, and where are we going?

Colleen: Okay. I like it. 

MIchele: So let's let's rewind. So if, if this were a fancy produced podcast, this is when you would insert harp noises. So just imagine that there's a harp playing in your head. So let's rewind back to July of 20, 20, Colleen. What were you doing in July of 2020?

Colleen: Oh, geez. Well, let's see July. So we were a couple months into the pandemic. I believe I was working a full-time job and I had a desire, a strong desire to launch a product. 

MIchele: Were you consulting full time for one client or I thought you were consulting.

Colleen: Maybe I was still, yeah. Good thing. We have

MIchele: I feel like you can 

Colleen: to. 

MIchele: I feel like I remember sometime I think it was right around when COVID was heading. And I feel like I remember standing on your, like your like porch or your steps like talking through whether you should take a job and like, yeah. Like that was like right around that time.

But, and I think you didn't. 

Colleen: I think 

MIchele: And I, 

Colleen: The first time they offered it to me, I think I said, 

MIchele: And then I think you were consulting, 

Colleen: I believe you're correct. I believe I was consulting for one client. So it was kind of that cadence of a more permanent job. But at that time I was not a quote full-time employee. I had not launched a 

MIchele: I think you're like compromise with them. Was that like you would work for them. Four days a week as a consultant, and then you would get one day a week to work on like your stuff. But actually it had been like that for a while. Like, I feel like you would have this sort of, this is my phrasing here, this like Friday fun day where you got to just like do your own projects for a while.

Colleen: Yeah. that sounds right. 

MIchele: Yeah. Yeah. But that was very much, I mean, now looking back on it, I guess that was like, The end of what I term your wandering through the forest period. Wondering. 

you know, you know, if this was, if this is frozen too, for all the parents out there, this is when your power ballad of lost in the woods is playing.

Colleen: Lost in the woods. Yes. would be my lost in the woods. Power ballad period. Indeed. Agree. 

MIchele: It was a pivotal moment. And then I think. I don't know if it was like August. Oh, so of 2020 that you were kind of on, I mean, I guess we could listen to our own show and figure this out. Again, this worry, fancy produced podcast with harp noises. We would know that and there would be a clip of it right now.

But I think it was like in August that you were like F like, I need to just. Decide, unlike one of these things. Cause like we had been meeting for a while. So like just context is like we were, we were meeting up every week for coffee for a long time. At a, so we used to live in the same place. We now live on opposite sides of the world, but we used to live in the same place, like a neighborhood over you were the only person I had ever like met in my daily life who was also doing this weird internet.

Business thing who was like in that world. And also like our kids went to the same school and we lived like two minutes from each other and it was like just perfect. Yeah. So, and then we started meeting up at a coffee shop called Northside social, which is actually how we ended up getting the name for this show.

And the show basically was, you know, I moved to Denmark to Denmark. then for us this year, you moved to California. So now we're really all over the place to keep us talking to each other, to keep those conversations happening. for a long time, we had been meeting up and you were playing around with like all of these different ideas and, and playing as like you were, you were taking it very seriously.

Like it wasn't play. There was some con like there's like a content analytics idea. I feel like, like, there's a one point. It was like, you were thinking about some sort of like, Competitor to H refs that was like for SEO consultants to like measure the value of their work. There was the, the, there was the stay at home moms doing babysitting and daycare for other the childcare thing.

And then, but like, so August of 2020, I feel like there was kind of this moment in early. Like I just gotta like pick something and go for it. And it's going to be this file upload thing, which annoys me.

Colleen: that's, that's pretty accurate. And I remember. Why was it in that stage of back to lost in the woods? It felt like every time we met, you would draw me that pain frequency graph. And, and I just, I was like, I don't know, like I just don't know where any of these ideas fall on the pain frequency graph.

So I'm going to take what feels like the smallest lift, which is a JavaScript widget, right. Something I feel like I can make in a constrained period of time. And I'm just going to do. I'm going to do everything wrong, but I'm just going to do it.

MIchele: And then you did it and then so 

Colleen: yeah, But we launched the podcast before I had a product. So part of the McColl was like, oh man, now I'm telling the world about this. So I better freaking do it like a podcast with never having launched a product would not be. 

MIchele: And so then last fall to goes through. You building it and balancing that with consulting and with parenting too, was all of the like, cause I guess your kids were in school, like part like the whole co COVID

school, like 

Colleen: some COVID school, situation. 

MIchele: And then, I think it was, was it December that simple file upload.

I remember you gave me that you gave me like a walkthrough of it in like September or October of last year, but then it was available in the Heroku marketplace and alpha in like October or so November. And then it went into beta in November, December, right? 

Colleen: Betas when you can start charging. Oh no. You're right. Cause You have to do out. No, 

MIchele: had to get like a. 

Colleen: So you have to do alpha and then you have to do beta. 

MIchele: it's like one thing where you had to get like 10 people, then...

Go to deployempathy.com to buy the audiobook private podcast, physical book, or ebook!

This episode of Software Social is brought to you by Reform.

As a business owner, you need forms all the time for lead capture, user feedback, SaaS onboarding, job applications, early access signups, and many other types of forms.

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- Your brand shines through, not Reform's

- It's accessible out-of-the-box

... And there are no silly design gimmicks, like frustrating customers by only showing one question at a time

Join indie businesses like Fathom Analytics and SavvyCal and try out Reform.

Software Social listeners get 1 month for free by going to reform.app/social and using the promo code "social" on checkout.

AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

Michele Hansen  0:01  
Hey, everyone, Michele here. Colleen is at a conference this week. So doing something a little bit different this week and wanted to give you a preview of the audio book podcast for Deploy Empathy. So as I've kind of mentioned on previous episodes, I am releasing the audio book every week as a podcast as I record it. Part of the idea of this was kind of to sort of sort of do like I did with the newsletter with the book and sort of you know, do it and you know, sort of chapters at a at a time. And so I didn't have to spend you know, two weeks recording which is just, I didn't didn't really have two weeks, you know, of full workdays to sort of lock myself in a closet and record it. So this is allowing me to record it as I have time. Which is kind of a challenge as I say this right now, my desk is literally surrounded and pillows from the last time I recorded which was like two weeks ago. So So yeah, it's been it's been kind of an interesting challenge. But I have been enjoying it. And it's also allowed me to get feedback on it as well. This is my first time recording an audio book. So if anything sounds weird, or whatnot, like people can, you know, give me feedback, and I get a chance to re record as I go. So, so yeah, so it started in I want to say the end of August. And currently, it's on Part Six, which is the how to talk so people will talk section of the book, which is maybe my favorite section of the book. I admit I was a little bit nervous going into recording these chapters because the tone of voice is so important. And I wanted to make sure that I got that right. And I think I got a little bit in my head about that. But I think it I think it came out Okay, so I think I think I'm happy with it. But so yeah, so So this week you're gonna get a chance to preview the the the private podcast, there are still spots in it if you want to join so it's limited to 500 people and right now I think there's about a little under 200 so there's quite a few spots left if you wanted to, to join along, but also you know what, once the full thing is recorded, which I don't really I guess it'll be sort of end of the year early next year. You know, it'll also be available as a regular audio book not quite sure what I'm going to do with the podcast I'm actually kind of curious to hear if people want that to stick around or whatnot. I don't I wonder if it makes it more digestible to get through but maybe that value is on the you know that it's coming out every week, right now. So yeah, hope you enjoy and Colleen and I will be next back next week.

Part Six, how to talk So people will talk. This is the most important part of this book. The tactics you'll learn build toward one goal, creating a bubble of suspended judgment, where the person feels comfortable being open. Throughout this part, you'll also find ways to practice these skills before using them in customer conversations. We'll go into each of these in depth one, use a gentle tone of voice to validate them. Three, leave pauses for them to fill for, mirror and summarize their words. Five, don't interrupt, six, use simple wording. Seven asked for clarification, even when you don't need it. Eight. Don't explain anything. Nine. Don't negate them in any way. And let them be the expert. Love it. Use their words and pronunciation 12 asked about time and money already spent. Lastly, you'll learn how to pull it all together by picturing yourself as a rubber duck. Trust me, it'll take you some time and some practice. But I think you'll notice a difference even in your personal life. By using these phrases and tactics. I want you to make me a promise, you'll only use what I'm about to teach you for good, you won't be manipulative, and you won't use what people say against them. deploying the tactics in this chapter can make someone open up to you much more than they otherwise would. Someone's confidence is a sacred gift. And it should be handled gently, respectfully and ethically. That respect should continue after the interview to I expect you to carry through the empathy you build for the customer well beyond the interview, and use empathy as part of your decision making process. Before we get into the tactics and phrases, it's important to understand just how much these tactics can transform a conversation. I got my start doing proper customer interviews in the personal finance industry. In America, people are generally very private about their personal finance decisions and situations. It's an extremely delicate topic. And because of this, I had to learn interviewing in a rigorous way. I didn't realize how much the techniques outlined in this chapter had woven themselves into my everyday conversation habits until I was at the grocery store a few years ago, I was in line with a dozen items and notice that the cashier hugged the woman in front of me, and they interacted with one another in a heartfelt way. I must have just finished an interview because I found myself asking the cashier about it. me with a smile. Oh, I noticed you hugged her. Is that your sister? cashier? No, she's just a longtime customer. I've worked here for a long time. me. Oh, you have? cashier? Yeah, almost 20 years. I'm due to retire soon. Companies changed a lot in that time. me. Oh hasn't. cashier proceeds to tell me about how the store chain was bought out by another chain 10 years ago, how they changed the retirement plan how she's worried about having enough income from Social Security, her 401k her old pension and retirement and how she's making extra 401k contributions. This was all in the span of less than five minutes. As she rang up the dozen or so items I had in my basket. It's important to note that this cashier wasn't just a particularly chatty person. This was my local grocery store. And I had been there a few times per week. For several years at this point. I'd been in this woman's line many many times. And we had never had more than a simple polite conversation about the weather, or how busy the store was that day. I went home and told a former co worker about it and joked Do I have Tell me about your retirement planning written on my forehead. I was amazed that a stranger had told me that kind of information in such a short amount of time. My former co worker pointed out that it was a sign of just how much interview skills had worked themselves into my everyday conversation style. And how I become so much more effective at digging into the heart of an issue without too much effort. For someone who's only negative mark in their first professional performance review was that I was abrasive and was diagnosed with a DD it'll 11 years old, it came as quite a shock to realize I now had an active listening conversation style without even realizing it. That experience taught me how we need to be careful with these skills, and to know when to hit the brakes. It's a person's decision what to reveal. But I always keep that story in mind and remind myself to back off or shift topics. When it seem...

Michele Hansen  0:01
This episode of Software Social is brought to you by Reform.

As a business owner, you need forms all the time for lead capture, user feedback, SaaS onboarding, job applications, early access signups, and many other types of forms.

Here's how Reform is different:

- Your brand shines through, not Reform's

- It's accessible out-of-the-box

... And there are no silly design gimmicks, like frustrating customers by only showing one question at a time

Join indie businesses like Fathom Analytics and SavvyCal and try out Reform.

Software Social listeners get 1 month for free by going to reform.app/social and using the promo code "social" on checkout.

Colleen: 

So Michelle, last time we spoke, you were rapidly approaching selling 500 books. So we'd love an update on the status of the book.

Michele: Drum roll, please. As of today 567 copies, 

Colleen: Wow. That's amazing. Congratulations.

Michele: I'm, I'm pretty pretty excited about. 

Colleen: Yeah. That's spectacular.

Michele: So I was thinking about this and, and talking about it with some friends because on my trip to the us last week and you know, talking to people about it and I realized like, why, why was the number 500? So big to me and I think it's because when I first started writing this, like, you know, the newsletter and everything else, I was like, okay, only the people on the newsletter are the only ones who are ever going to buy this book.

Right? Like, you know, worst case scenario, I'm writing this just to have a central place to send people when they ask me about doing customer research. And then as I sort of I don't know, admitted to myself that it was becoming a book then I was like, So only the people on this list are going to buy it.

Maybe like a quarter of them are like half, you know, that's like, it's going to sell like 5,000 copies, maybe like 200, like lifetime, like ever. But it's really only going to be people who have heard me talk about it, like, you know, who are basically doing this because I have implored them to do so, you know?

Cause I've been like, it's been really helpful for geocoding, so you should do it and they're taking my word for it. But 500 or 567, you know, that's like way more than, you know, the 30 odd newsletter readers that I interviewed as part of the writing process. That's more people than subscribed to the newsletter.

That's I guess about as many people listened to this podcast, as of right now on a, on a weekly basis, that's this way more than I thought. And that's only in the first two months And I mean, I feel like I keep quoting him so much that we really need to have him on, or just get a clip of him saying it.

But as our friend, Mike Buck B says that is stranger money. That is people who don't know me, who don't care about me, who, you know, aren't just buying the book to be nice. Because they're my friend, right? Like that's people who recommended it to other people who were bought it because somebody recommended it to them.

And that kind of feels like massive validation for like the concept of customer research to me, when, you know, I feel like there's all these stereotypes about, you know, developers not wanting to talk to people. And there's so many old school ways of doing business where people think that the only ideas come from, you know, sort of inside the building or that they're above talking to customers.

Right? Like it feels like repudiation of all of that for the concept. 

Colleen: You've definitely reached outside your one degree of separation network 

Michele: Yeah. 

Colleen: in terms of the reach the book has had.

Michele: Yeah. That's super. I don't know. I guess when you set your expectations very low, you're always going to be pleasantly surprised. So I feel like, even when I had five people subscribing to the newsletter even I was like, wow. Even my friends are tolerating me on, like, that was even a surprise.

So, so yeah. Yeah. 

Colleen: It's amazing. I don't know if you've had a chance yet to listen to the podcast with Nadia, but she talked about, she was on last week. I had her on while you were out. She did three months of customer research. So for three months. So before she built her alpha. I interviewed customers for three months. I was like, yes, that's amazing.

And she talked a lot about how that was. So she's been incredibly successful. She has 500,000 users and she talked about how that was the critical, like the critical piece to her building. Her business was taking that time out. And of course this is before your book existed, but like taking that time out to do that customer research, and she used this term called synthesis, which I loved.

So she would do. was like, she had read your book, even though your book didn't exist, she would videotape her customer interviews and then she would go back and she would said, and then I would go back and I would, I would, I think she said she would synthesize them, but basically what she meant is she would watch the whole interview over and really try to absorb and hear what they were saying.

It was really, it was fascinating. But to your point, the importance of customer research is becoming more and more evident. To all of us, especially developers who just want to build buildings and not.

Michele: I mean, I guess I want to clarify that, like, I, you know, I didn't invent any of this stuff. You know, it's been around 

for 

yeah, 

Colleen: feel like, sorry to interrupt. I feel like the key is there's a hole, there's a hole in the market because we don't know how to do 

Michele: yeah. 

Colleen: mean that, that's the thing we know this is a thing we know this is important, but most of the. I don't know, literally what do you do? And I think your book meets such a need, cause it's like, literally, if you don't know what to say, say these words here are the words you can say when you get confused or lost or scared,

Michele: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's like, there's a, there's an amazing, wonderful body of. Work on, on customer research and yes. So I always, I, I hear what you're saying. I always want to be very clear, like I did not invent this concept. And I've referenced a lot of that in the book and I'm more so I guess I'm, I'm re phrasing it and sort of, I'm reminded of a quote from GOTA that I'm going to garble, which is basically that all brilliant thoughts have already been thoughts and. Merely have to rethink them in our, our own experience and our own words. And I guess that's sort of what I have tried to do is to, to Yeah, Bring my own kind of voice and perspective to it for, for that, for that level of, of here is if you, if you truly do not know what to say, then here's what you can say. I mean rides we've went what Sean did too. Didn't he say that he did like hundreds of hours of research

before 

Colleen: lot. I 

Michele: he launched his stuff to, 

Colleen: my head, but it was quite a lot of hours.

Michele: I wonder how you feel about hearing that, because you have said a couple of times in the past, how you wished you could just. I don't know if you wished it, but like you, you felt like you needed to like go in a cave for like three months and then just research. And I have been like, no, like do it alongside, which are already doing, like, you don't have to go quote unquote in the cave, you know, to to, to figure this out and see, but it sounds like you were her story left a really strong impression on you.

And I'm curious how that changes your. 

Colleen: so her story left a really strong impres...

Michele Hansen  0:01
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Colleen: Welcome back software, social listeners, Colleen here, and I am super excited to bring you a special guest today. Today on the podcast we have Nadia the founder of story graph. Story graph is a site that helps you track your reading and choose your neck next book based on your mood, mood, and your favorite topics and themes.
Nadia, thank you so much for coming on.
Nadia: Thank you so much for inviting me. 
Colleen: I would love to start with a little bit about your background. You are an economist by trade, right?
Nadia: Right. So my degree was philosophy politics and economics, and I focused, I focused mainly on the economic side, I was moving to the math mathematical side of things and I was heading into investment banking, post university. 
Colleen: Wow.
Nadia: Yeah. And I was just lucky with the people I met in my final year of uni. I'd done a summer internship in the banking world and I was just very, not very enthused with it.
It just felt, I felt like there was more to life and I'm in my final year of uni, I met so many young entrepreneurs and people running social enterprises and charities, and I just felt like I've always felt entrepreneurial. And I just thought, you know, I want to go into that feels more like. And I'd also started a creative writing online publication called the story graph. 
Colleen: Oh, I didn't know that.
Nadia: yeah. That had given me the first taste of running my own thing. And so I, yeah, and I was lucky to meet people who were in the tech space as well. And that's when I started to be familiar with, oh, maybe I should learn how to code. And yeah, essentially, I, I got, I want a couple of places on coding courses and that's how I got into software post universe. 
Colleen: So, did you go work at all in investment banking or did you go right from college or university to learning how to code? 
Nadia: So I had a graduate offer for bank and I turned that down and then I wasn't sure what I was going to do. And I'd applied for this entrepreneurship scheme and it got to the final round. And I remembered that when I was filling out the form, there was a checkbox that said we may be piloting a new coding course for women.
Do you want to be considered for this? And I was just like, why not check the box? I wasn't really interested. And I thought, why not? You know? And so when I remember I got the call from the, one of the people who run the program and they said, we've got good news and bad news. And I was like, I immediately knew I didn't get into the main program.
So I said, well, what's the, what's the bad news. And I was like, yeah, you didn't quite make it. And I was like, Okay.
what's the good news. And she said we're going to give you, we're going to do this program. It's called code first girls, and we're going to give you a place. And I remember at the time I was just so disappointed and not getting a place in this entrepreneurship program because it was meant to be my ticket out of not going into the bank.
That I just thought, what do I want with this coding course? And then I remember thinking about it and realizing that I was also. Like the next day, I was offered a summer internship at my college at Oxford where I was. And so I thought, you know what, I'm going to come to work at Oxford for a bit after uni, I'm going to travel to London twice a week.
I was from London, but I was at, I was in Oxford and and I'm going to learn to code and then figure it out from there. And it's so, I'm so glad I did that. And then while I was. Twice a week coding course, I saw a tweet saying we're doing a competition for someone to win a free place at makers academy, which was a new software boot camp in London at the time.
And I had a taste of this coding thing. I saw how powerful. It was. And so I said, I'm going to apply for this scholarship free place. And I got the scholarship. And so then I did a three month bootcamp at the beginning of 2014, immediately after. Well, at the end of 2013, rather immediately after the two months that I spent at Oxford traveling twice a week to do the part-time cutting costs.
So that's how I 
Colleen: Wow.
Nadia: into software from being like all along since I was like 12, 13, I was going down the investment banking. 
Colleen: Wow. Did you get pushback from yourself or from your family to have invested so much time at Oxford? No less. And then be like, I'm going to go do this coding bootcamp.
Nadia: Yes. So it was actually quite funny. I come from a poor background and I remember that, you know, the reason why I was going down the investment banking route since I was young is because when I was at school, you know, it was always this typical doctor, lawyer and your banker or something like that.
And I remember we had this day where you could go with your parents or a parent to work with them. And I remember trying to go with my dad who's an accountant or like, um, my mom worked for herself at home and, and my dad was like, no, you should find someone who acts in a bank or something like that.
And so I went with my best friend at the time her dad worked at. And, you know, when you're 14, everything looks so amazing. And like I, so I remember going and seeing the trading floor and seeing all these, like men and women dressed up in their suits and carrying their blackberries. And I remember at the time thinking I want to be like them.
And it wasn't until I was doing the internship when I was in between my second and third year of uni that I was just disillusioned. And I was like, oh, like, this is not very fulfilling. This is not like, I feel like there's more I can do and give. And, and so that's when I got disillusioned when I was like about 18 and I was thinking.
This isn't really exciting. I'm not sure of the value that I'm bringing while doing this work. And I also just thought there must be more cause I was working so hard at, it was quite academic. I was working so hard at my studies and I thought, is this it? And so when this whole entrepreneurship software thing came up, it was very, yeah, it was so much more appealing and. 
Colleen: Wow. So after you did the bootcamp, did you then get a job, your rails background, right? 
Nadia: Ruby Rails So back then the, the main focus was Ruby rails and it was funny because I went to that was this jobs, fair tech jobs fair. And it was during during the course, the point of the courses you do the 12 weeks, and then they help you get a job. And I just thought I didn't plan to get a job.
I just said, let me go to this job fair and see what's out there. Even when I started the bootcamp in my mind, I still thought, oh, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I didn't know what that meant. I was just like, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. But you know, since I'll know about coding, I'll know how to talk to developers.
Like I had just, you know, stereotypes in my head of, you know, developers, don't talk to people, and I can never be a good developer anyway, cause I'm starting, you know, 19. But 
Colleen: at like 32 
Nadia: like 2...

Michele Hansen  0:01 
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Colleen Schnettler  0:51  
So Michelle, how are things going with your book tour?

Michele Hansen  0:54  
So the book tour itself is going well, I did indie hackers build your SAS searching for SAS one end product? I just recorded another one. yesterday. No, no, no, today? No, that was I feel like I'm doing a lot with it. Because that's what says because I had I love it. Let's see yesterday, no Tuesday, I did a session with founder summit. And then I also had a call with someone about being on their podcast yesterday. That'll be in November, and then I've scheduled another one for October. And then I did another group session today. And then yeah, actually, it was when I got off of that and Mateus was like, you know what you just did? And I was like, What? Like, he was like, you just did consulting? And I was like, No, I did. Like cuz it was Yeah. No, I did. I was like, it wasn't personalized. It was just like a workshop and people asked like questions, like, I just, I just talked about the book. And I was like, No, it wasn't he was like, yeah, it wasn't like that. No, it wasn't. Um, yeah, I think I actually kind of need to like, Cool it a bit on the promotion stuff. Like dude, like, this week, I spent like two days this week, creating a Google Sheets plugin for geocoder Oh, it was so nice to like, be playing around with spreadsheet functions again, like, after doing all this like writing and then talking about this stuff I wrote like, it was very comfortable. It was much more comfortable than talking about.

Colleen Schnettler  2:42  
Like, I don't know, it was your happy was when you went Excel.

Michele Hansen  2:46  
It really is. Um, but actually, so I have another spreadsheet that doesn't have any fun functions in it is the number of books I have sold, adding up, you know. Okay. For 490 400

Colleen Schnettler  3:03  
my gosh, that's amazing.

Michele Hansen  3:07  
I know, it's so close to 500. And it's been so close to 100 500 for like days. And like, the other day, I was like, maybe I'm, like, tapped out the market for this at 490. Like, that's really good. Like the average book sells like 300. So like, that's really good. Um, and, yeah, so so I'm going to do like, I'm going to be on some other podcasts and whatnot. And like, I remember seeing once. Rob Fitzpatrick once, I think actually, it's in his new book. He has a graph of the revenue of the mom test and like, the growth of that book is I mean, a case in compounding.

Colleen Schnettler  3:52  
Okay, so, right. So

Michele Hansen  3:54  
you know, it's not all like in the beginning, and like, there's really positive signs, like people are recommending to other people, people are writing reviews, like, so. So yeah, I feel good. But man, I really want to get to 500. I don't know, I haven't been thinking about the numbers very much. I mean, it's only six but like, I really, I really want to get to 500. I don't know why, like it's like getting to like, you know, 1000 or what it like that's that's not even like remotely like a possibility to me, like I don't even really think about it. But now it's like so close. And like that would be so awesome.

Colleen Schnettler  4:25  
I wager a guess that by the time this podcast airs on Tuesday, you will be at 500.

Michele Hansen  4:31  
That's only six more books. Maybe Maybe. And by the way, if people want a free copy of this of the book, so if you are listening, when it comes out on on Tuesday or Wednesday, transistor.fm is running a little giveaway on their Twitter account. I think Justin saw my like, I think 490 is all I'm ever gonna sell. Okay. And I was like, no. So they're giving away five copies of the book. You just have to go retweet the tweets about the book. So yeah, nice. Yeah. If you just go to the deploy wonderful,

Colleen Schnettler  5:05  
that'll help expand your reach.

Michele Hansen  5:07  
Yeah, it was interesting hearing that I was like helping you interview people on podcast. I'm like, Yeah, I guess you could. I mean, it doesn't have to just be for. for customers.

Colleen Schnettler  5:19  
Anyway, oh, yeah, your book applies to so much. So that's where the,

Michele Hansen  5:23  
that's that's where the book is. But I gotta say, I think I think I need to give myself a little break on promotion. Otherwise, I'm gonna, I'm gonna burn out on that

Colleen Schnettler  5:33  
for right now. Yeah, I was thinking about that when you were talking about like, how you're hitting it so hard. I was like, wait, Isn't this what happened with writing the book? And then afterwards, you're like,

Michele Hansen  5:43  
Yes, I have a pattern. Yes. way overboard. And then I exhaust myself.

Colleen Schnettler  5:53  
So maybe we should approach it like a marathon instead of a sprint? Yeah,

Michele Hansen  5:57  
I think so. I haven't scheduled anything for next week. So I don't have anything scheduled until the first week of October. So okay. Yeah, kind of just, yeah. So so you know, hopefully by the, you know, yeah. Bye. By the time I'm on again, because I'm off next week. I vacation. Yeah. Oh my god, dude, I'm going to American, I'm so excited. So happy for you. Okay, um, I can't wait to just go to Target and Trader Joe's anyway.

Colleen Schnettler  6:34  
So if you're not have target, and then we do not

Michele Hansen  6:36  
have target, we have a story that's inspired by target or like more like, inspired by Walmart. But like, it's just like, there's just nothing like getting a Starbucks and walking around target. You know, it's just true story. Anyway, um, what's going on with you?

Colleen Schnettler  6:52  
So I did quite a bit of work on simple file uploads. Since we last talked, I actually spent a good chunk of time doing some technical work, some cleanup work that needed to be done. But I have gotten the demo on my homepage. Oh, it's really exciting. Yeah,

Michele Hansen  7:10  
the like, code pen demo thing that we've been talking about for a while, right? Correct.

Colleen Schnettler  7:15  
Okay, instead of putting a code pen up, I actually just put a drop zone. So you can literally, if you go into my site, it just says drop a file to try it. And you can drop a file. Wait, so that is something I know. Right? So that's something I've been talking about doing for a long time, which I finally got done. So that's exciting. Yeah. And there was some other stuff with like the log on flow, that wasn't really quite correct. It wasn't wrong, it just wasn't really right. So I just spent a lot of time kind of getting that cleaned up. Oh, and the API for deleting events. So that was a real hustle for me, because I have someone who reached out to me, and they were like, Hey, we totally want to use your thing. But we have to be ab...

Send Cam some love and support! https://twitter.com/SloanCam
Check out Hopscotch: https://hopscotch.club/

Michele Hansen  0:01 
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Michele Hansen  0:01  
So today, I'm so excited we have a friend joining us, Cam Sloane. Hello, Cam. So we invited you on today because you had tweeted the other day about how you're kind of feeling stuck right now. And we're like, you know what? Maybe we like we can chat about it and help you get unstuck.

Cam Sloan  1:17  
Yeah, that was, I guess, shout out to Aaron Francis, who kind of like just was like, Hey, bring him on. And, and I was like, Yeah, let's do it. That'd be awesome. And I think that, you know, just speaking that tweet, it really seemed to resonate with a lot of other people, like other founders who are trying to do this. And because I had an outpouring of, you know, comments and support, and DMS, from people I don't know, and people that I do know and invite stuff like this show and stuff to just like, it's amazing, the community that has reached out to kind of say, like, well, all sorts of things I'm sure we'll get into today. So it's been really nice to it's always nice to have that because sometimes you're just going at this and you feel like super alone. So for context, I just feel kind of stuck in like, you know, do I keep going do I switch to something else? Or do I? You know, yeah, like, I've contemplated like just doing contract work. And you know, just make money that way, because it's a bit easier. So all sorts of stuff that is going through my head over the past few months? Because it's just slow, slow going.

Colleen Schnettler  2:32  
Yeah, Cam to get us started. Could you give us a little background about your product? And how long you've been working on it?

Cam Sloan  2:40  
Yeah, definitely. That would be helpful for listeners. So yeah, I am working on hopscotch. It's a user onboarding tool, specifically focusing on product tours, and kind of in app messaging and guides to kind of, you know, when a user signs up for your product, sometimes you want to kind of hold their hand a bit to show them what their next step should be, in order to help prevent them from churning by actually showing them to the thing that they want to do. And so yeah, I mean, product tours, to be honest, like, it's not the right fit for every every business. But sometimes, there are really good use cases, like if you have a complex product that has, like you get in like a CRM, or like an analytics tool that has like 10 options on the top menu and 10 on the side, and your users just get dumped, or, you know, Landon, this page with no idea what to do next, then a really good way to show them is to guide them, you know, and kind of say, you know, here's, here's what your next step should be, so that you can see value out of the product. So I've been working on this for, I mean, about a year since the inception of like, actually like the idea, but really kind of steadily since January of this year in 2021. And kind of focusing most of my time on it. Because outside of that I do freelancing contract work for you know, larger companies just doing web development work for them. And that kind of helps me to stay self funded to do my projects like this and, and hopefully grow my own software business.

Michele Hansen  4:28  
Yeah, so. So I kind of want to propose a structure for this conversation. So I've mentioned a little bit in my book, how the sort of core questions that you're trying to answer when you talk to a customer can also be used when maybe you're helping somebody think through something, which are what are they trying to do overall? Why? What are the steps in that process they're going through what if they already Tried, and where are they stuck? And so I feel like you've kind of you've started to give us a little bit of overview on the what you're trying to do. And why. I'm curious what led you to be interested in building an onboarding tool?

Cam Sloan  5:23  
Yeah. So the, you know, like, as I don't know, if you did this as well, when you were coming up with, you know, what business to go into you like make a list, you're trying to make a list of ideas, and like, most of them are pretty terrible. And, like, I had maybe 50 ideas. And this was kind of one of them that I didn't really think too much about until I actually I met someone who I, who wanted to hire me to build to work on their software company, and just doing web development for them. And we actually ended up, I didn't work for him, it wasn't the right fit for taking on that contract. But we ended up like really getting along well, kind of both having founder ambitions. And he was almost like, in the position that I'm at right now where he was feeling a bit stuck. And so we ended up saying, Hey, we should like try and work on something together. And, and we were thrown, like, what ideas have you been having, and, and we both checked kind of our lists. And, and this was one of them. So for him, he was actually experiencing, like, the pain point more than I had previously. So really, he was searching around for tools. And like came across intercom product tours and other app cues and realizing like, you know, he's a bootstrap founder cannot justify the price at like, $300 plus a month, and was looking for a tool that was maybe affordable that that could get them up and running. And we kind of ran with that together. In like, just real quick summary. Like he ended up going and building another business. So I kept going on hopscotch. And, yeah, like, as soon as I dove into the problem, like I really enjoyed it, both technically, because like you're you're kind of embedding your yourself into another SAS product by default, like by the definition of what these tools do. And so there's a lot of like, really interesting technical learnings that I've had to had to go through with that, like anytime you're dealing with like widget, embed scripts and other people's code, it's, it's a lot of interesting stuff on the technical side. But then also just realizing like that, there's a lot of interesting stuff in the human and business side of this as well. Like, I started soaking in resources from Samuel Kulik, and like the user less team and, you know, anywhere that I could find people who are talking about onboarding and realizing like how crucial it can be to a business's success. Because, you know, if you can reduce that initial churn in the first month or two, then then it can have a wild impact on the like, lifetime value of customers and how your product retains users. And so it just kept me interested From then on, which is why I didn't like end up going work on something else. After, after he, like my co founder went to do something else.

Michele Hansen  8:23  
So let's talk a little bit about where you are now. So you launched in April. Is that right?

Cam Sloan  8:30  
or me? Yeah. So I think so. Time is a blur? Yeah, like I because I've kind of been doing, like, I did a lot of stuff with early access of just onboarding one on one, like peo...

Listen to the latest from Michele's podcast book tour!
Searching for SaaS: https://searchingforsaas.com/podcast/ep25-local-restaurant-app-to-geocoding-as-a-service-michele-hansen-from-geocodio/
One Knight In Product: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/michele-hansen/
Indie Hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/224-michele-hansen

Michele Hansen  0:01 
This episode of Software Social is brought to you by Reform.

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- It's accessible out-of-the-box

... And there are no silly design gimmicks, like frustrating customers by only showing one question at a time

Join indie businesses like Fathom Analytics and SavvyCal and try out Reform.

Software Social listeners get 1 month for free by going to reform.app/social and using the promo code "social" on checkout.

Hey, Colleen,

Colleen Schnettler  0:51  
hey, Michelle.

Michele Hansen  0:54  
How are you?

Colleen Schnettler  0:56  
I'm good. I'm good. How about you?

Michele Hansen  0:58  
How goes week three now of doing Hammerstone and simple file upload.

Colleen Schnettler  1:08  
It's going well, today, I'm going to dedicate most of the day to simple file uploads. So I'm pretty excited about that. I'm finally back into my theoretical four days client work one day, my own thing and never really works out that way. Because I make myself way too available. But I have a lot of plans. But I do want to talk to you about something. Okay. I am I have not had any new signups in six weeks. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm not in the pit of despair, because I'm just generally pretty happy about everything else. But I haven't been really on top of I know, six weeks. Right. That's really. I mean, I

Michele Hansen  1:54  
I hate to say it, but that does give me a little bit of like trough of sorrow vibes.

Colleen Schnettler  1:58  
Yeah. I mean, I honestly, I hadn't even really noticed, which is a different a different thing. Has anybody been canceled? I don't know. Because I, yeah, so I don't track that as well as I should. And I think with everything that's been going on, I have been so busy that I haven't. Honestly, I've just been letting it run itself. I checked my email every day, but no one ever emails me, which is nice, by the way. So I hadn't checked it in a while a and I checked it in preparation to do this podcast with you. And I was like, Oh, crap. I haven't had a sign up since July. This is September 2.

Michele Hansen  2:39  
So have I mean, has your revenue gone down? Like?

Colleen Schnettler  2:44  
No, actually, it hasn't. So I've been pretty consistent. So without doing a full churn analysis, I don't think people are churning. But they're not signing up. Okay, that's not okay. Let me stop. That's not entirely true. People are putting their email address in and then bouncing. So people are still finding my website. But yeah,

Michele Hansen  3:12  
I feel like it was like the people who are paying you is that mostly people from Heroku? or from your website?

Colleen Schnettler  3:19  
It's mostly people from Heroku.

Michele Hansen  3:21  
So are you still getting that like you had this problem where people were like, signing up on Heroku, but then not actually activating it? And like starting to use it, like, Are people still doing that first step on Heroku.

Colleen Schnettler  3:37  
So people are using it. I actually had one person respond with what he's doing. So that was cool. In terms of like a new signup. So people are using it that sign up on Heroku, which is good. It's just a lack of new signups is really confusing to me.

Michele Hansen  3:55  
Did you ever get that work done on the homepage like and Roku site like we were talking about the code pen and improving the documentation? And like, did did all that happen?

Colleen Schnettler  4:10  
So I have a whole list of great things I'm going to do so what I have done this week last week is I actually started writing a piece of I wrote an article right, it didn't take that long. I should have what it doesn't matter what I should have done. I did it. So that's good. So I have seen on Google Analytics said that is getting a decent amount of traffic. Today, literally today. I'm going to get that freakin try it now on the homepage. That is my plan to do that today. Nice. I'm speaking it into existence. The documentation is a whole different animal because I don't think I mean, I really need to redo the documentation. But that's like a whole thing. Like it's not I need to add some things. I think I need to take it in baby steps because I added some things to the tech side that are not reflected in the documentation that are kind of cool. So I think, but of course, instead of just adding that to my existing documentation, which I don't really like the way it presents, like, I just don't like the way it looks. I want to tear that all down and make a new app just for documentation, which I will do someday, but

Michele Hansen  5:17  
so it kind of sounds like you need to put away your laundry. But you don't want to do that. So instead, you're going to completely build yourself a new closet, but

Colleen Schnettler  5:26  
my closets gonna be so pretty, and so organized.

Michele Hansen  5:33  
Yeah, I'm sensing a theme where like, you have a task that you don't want to do, or it seems overwhelming to you or you don't feel like it plays into your strengths. And so your way to do it is to make it something that is one of your strengths, which is actually just throwing more hurdles in front of you actually doing the task.

Colleen Schnettler  6:00  
Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, that's, like, it's funny, because before we got on this podcast, my plan was still to rewrite the whole documentation and make it its own site, blah, blah, blah. And as soon as I spoke those words to you, as I do, I've really is that really a super high priority, like, the higher priority should be getting the fact that like, I emit events on, you know, successful uploads, that's cool. People can use that. It's literally nowhere in my documentation that I do that. So I'm probably the priority should just be getting it out there with what I have. And then someday, when I have more time, I can rewrite the whole documentation site.

Michele Hansen  6:39  
This is your problem with the documentation that it's ugly, or that people email you telling you that it's janky. And, like, difficult to use documentation specifically, or is it just an eyesore? It's

Colleen Schnettler  6:53  
a it's an eyesore. I don't like the way it looks. I don't like the way I navigate with tabs. I don't like the tabs. Like I think you can still find everything no one has emailed me saying I don't understand how to use this. Hold on.

Michele Hansen  7:05  
I need to like I'm I'm pulling look at it. So now

Colleen Schnettler  7:08  
Yeah, pull it up. Okay, so if you go to simple file, upload.com, and then click on Doc's documentation,

Michele Hansen  7:15  
you got that calm, like,

Colleen Schnettler  7:17  
I know, I win it names. So if you look at it, I was like so I also bought unrelated simple file. Wait, what did I buy? I bought simple image upload calm. Hmm, I ha...

Michele Hansen  0:00  
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Colleen Schnettler  0:52  
Michele, it's so good to talk to you. So I have been following some of the things you've been tweeting about recently, and I saw that you did a Product Hunt launch for the book.

Michele Hansen  1:05  
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler  1:06  
Tell us about that was quite a roller coaster. Yeah, I am fascinated. I want to hear all about it. 

Michele Hansen  1:14  
So um, gosh, I don't even I don't even know where to start. Because it was it was kind of it was kind of a spur of the moment thing. Like I've been planning to do a Product Hunt launch for a long time, but I didn't really know exactly when. And I think it was a we've talked about how my, like, original deadline for the book was before I started Danish language classes, right. I feel like we I don't know. But yeah, okay. So I actually started them last Monday. So you know, even though like, when I finished my MBA, I was like, I am done with school forever, like, never again. And you know, here I am again. Um, so I started Monday of this week. And so the 20th I was like, I saw I was starting, you know, the in a couple of days. And I was like, You know what, I just need to do this. Now I want to get this launch done. Before I'm like thinking about school again, cuz I'm not gonna have as much time. So that's basically like, why I did it on Friday morning. Now, apparently, when you launch on product time, you're supposed to get someone like, well known to basically hunt the product for you and submit it for you. And then I guess it notifies all of that person's followers, and then it helps with your ranking and stuff like that. I did not do that. I just submitted it myself.

Colleen Schnettler  2:46  
Wait, okay. pause, pause, pause. Okay, so let's back up a little bit. So you were on Friday morning, you woke up and you're like, I should put the book on Product Hunt today? Is that like, what happened? No. No, I

Michele Hansen  2:57  
needed to send out a newsletter that morning. Because I had I had something I wanted to send out. And I was like, you know, why don't I just throw it up on product time. Like, let's just get that over with and do it and like, so like, I just like wrote up a post, I took a couple of screenshots of like the book and the table of contents. And like, I like put it up, like, apparently people hire like consultants and pay them like 1000s of dollars to try to get a good ranking on on product ton. And they spend all this time recruiting someone to hunt it for them. And like there's this whole, like product launch a Product Hunt launch strategy that I was completely oblivious to. So

Colleen Schnettler  3:37  
yeah, I've heard that. That's a hole that if you there's like so many articles about how to properly do product on and there's consultants, yes. Okay, so tell us what you did. Yeah,

Michele Hansen  3:47  
I guess it didn't. I don't know. I it didn't occur to me to research it first. Because I don't know. I just didn't so I just threw it up there. And then I sent it out to the newsletter and was like, hey, like, you know, Product Hunt today. And so it was like going pretty well. Like I sent it out like first thing in the morning European time. And by like lunchtime or so here it had like 30 or 40 upvotes which was like way more than most of the other products on the homepage. And I started being like in the people started being like I can't find your product like I searched for it. It doesn't show up like it's not on the homepage like like she usually like reach out to them or something because something is wrong. And this is somebody on Twitter who jumped in and they're like, Oh, they shadow ban info products, because there's so many of them that they shadow ban them by defaults, if you're submitting it and you're not like a you know a sort of name brand person submitting it.

Colleen Schnettler  4:47  
What is shadow ban mean?

Michele Hansen  4:48  
Oh, so shot. Shadow banning is when you post it and it looks normal to you and you can send people the link, but it doesn't show up on the homepage and it doesn't show up in search.

Colleen Schnettler  5:00  
Oh, wow.

Michele Hansen  5:01  
So basically you don't know you're banned from the homepage. So, so weird, but I guess there's like so many that I currently the logic is that there's so many info products that like, they basically want to cut down on the number of them going to the front page of product on. So and then I kind of like started tweeting about this and I'm not really sure what happened. But I like reached out to their support on their website and on Twitter. And then I think some other people also backchannel that to community people at Product Hunt. And then yeah, it was on the the front page. Like it just appeared at number four. And it was like, Oh, this is kind of fun. Like, we went from being like, completely invisible and thinking this was a huge waste of time. to like, now it's ranked number four. That's pretty amazing. And I just woke up and did this this morning. Like, this is fun. And that's all and then it kind of just kept going. Wonderful. Yeah. And I was actually I was getting like, last minute, like, you know, sort of, like, play by play advice from Arvid call in my DMS. I'm like, okay, like, here's what you do, like, make sure you reply to everybody, like, you know, all this stuff. And I was like, okay, okay, okay. Like, I was like, such like totally green at this. Um, and, yeah, it was it was wild. And then it ended up going up to number one. And oh, that's exciting day. And I just checked it a 512 up votes.

Colleen Schnettler  6:36  
That's amazing. Wild.

Michele Hansen  6:40  
Super wild. I've never really done a, like a Product Hunt launch. Like, we I mean, we didn't launch geocoder one Product Hunt. Like we actually launched before Product Hunt had their show h n launch, which when geocoder launched a show h n launch was like, what a Product Hunt launches now. I guess. Yeah. It was so funny. I remember coming across it in our refers for geocoder to and I was like, What is this product on thing and like, signed up? Um, so yeah, anyway, so that was, that was pretty crazy. Um, that's

Colleen Schnettler  7:20  
really cool. Yeah, it

Michele Hansen  7:21  
was it the whole thing about it, like, not showing up and like what was wrong and like, all these people kind of like rallying around it too. And like so many people tweeting out the the posts and commenting and like, I just felt like I was collectively being lifted up by people all over the world simultaneously. And it was, it was lovely. It was pretty, it was pretty surreal. It was it is

Colleen Schnettler  7:49  
as bad. It's awesome. So have you seen the Product Hunt success? increase the number of sales of the book?

Michele Hansen  8:00  
Yeah, so I actually did get a little bit of a nice little bump ou...