FounderQuest How Price Sensitive Are B2B Customers?
Show Notes:
Links:
Mighty Cal
Hook Relay
Full Transcript:
Starr:
So what were you all talking about before I jumped on the call?
Ben:
We were talking about Derrick's new startup Mighty Cal.
Starr:
Mighty Cal.
Ben:
Looking pretty nice. I was telling Josh how I like the virality of it. If you're using Mighty Cal and you share those links with someone, then they're going to be like, "Oh, that's cool. I should use that too." And it's just going to help the spread. I really like that kind of... I was reflecting on Honeybadger. It's like, well we just don't really have an opportunity to get the kind of-
Josh:
Wouldn't it be fun to have that aspect of it? They got that with Drip too. That was their big thing with the Drip widget, so I'm sure Derrick, he knows what he's doing.
Starr:
We tried to do that a bit when we did our... When there's an error on your website, Honeybadger can display a form for user feedback.
Josh:
The problem is... Yeah. And it's got to be a developer who is seeing it, and then... When developers try to do something, hits an error, and then is like, oh, I should add that to my app right now. Like I just got a fail whale or something.
Ben:
Yeah, I think the population of calendar users is probably a little bigger than the population of web developers.
Starr:
That's funny, because I thought that you were going to say that the thing you liked about the idea is... I'm assuming. I'm making assumptions here. But the relatively low ops burden.
Ben:
Well, yes. There's that too.
Ben:
The problem, Starr, with the whole ops burden thing is now we're good at the high ops burden thing, so now we're supposed to take on more apps like that, so that we can leverage those skills.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
That's kind of our thing. Which we are. Right?
Ben:
Exactly. Our next one, Hook Relay, is going to be a pretty big ops burden too.
Starr:
It's like, what does your company specialize in? It's like, well we have a variety of products, all of which process a ton of traffic. That's just what we do. It's just traffic processing.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Our specialty is running services that you don't want to run yourself because it's a pain in the butt.
Starr:
That is pretty much every service. We should run a house cleaning service. I'm in dire need right now. So speaking of, I was late to the call, and I may actually... There's a chance I may have to run. There's a chance there may be a bunch of noise later on, because, well, a couple days ago my water heater just burst open. It was just like somebody blew the Hoover Dam in my little girl's room. Just been dealing with that, doing a lot of wet/dry vac-ing. Getting a lot of use out of that $30 investment.
Ben:
Have you been to the Hoover Dam?
Starr:
No, I haven't. I haven't
Ben:
You should totally go check it out. It is awesome.
Starr:
Well, now that I know what it would look like, what it's failure mode looks like, I'm not sure I want to go there. And yeah, so anyway I thought I vacuumed up everything, but it turns out there's... Your hot water pipes in your house have hot water in them. It's like when you have a straw in a drink and you hold one end of it, and then you pull it out and there's still drink in there. Well, I didn't think to go and open all the hot water faucets when I was draining the heater originally.
Starr:
And so as people were just sort of randomly accidentally turning them on, the water in the pipes would flush back into the hot water heater and then drain out again.
Josh:
Oh no.
Starr:
So I had to go take care of that. Oh, and I learned a few things I'll pass on to our listeners because I think one of the cool things about our podcast is the breadth. Some people may go deeper than we do, but we cover a pretty wide variety of topics.
Josh:
It really is the whole founder experience.
Starr:
Exactly. Exactly. Part of being a founder is dealing with your water heater bursting. And yeah, so I've got these friends. They're a couple. The husband is a maintenance man, and the wife is a forensic engineer. I was telling y'all about this yesterday, and that means that she goes in and whenever some building gets screwed and people get sued over it, she goes in and documents everything. It's like, who messed up here?
Starr:
And so I talked to them about it. Once water gets under laminate flooring, it's just a goner. You just have to pull it up. There's no way about it, because the water is never coming out. And so yesterday I pulled up half the laminate flooring, and then the guy I just mentioned, the maintenance guy helped me pull the rest of it up and did the baseboards and cut the drywall around the bottom where it soaked in there. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. Fun times. You said this happened in your daughter's room? In Ida's room?
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah.
Josh:
Did she get a cool story out... like her bed is now a pirate ship or something, or an island.
Starr:
Well, she's really into the fact that she just has a concrete floor now that looks all gnarly. She's just going around being like, "I love it!"
Josh:
Maybe you should just leave it. I mean, she's happy with it.
Starr:
Yeah, I don't think that's going to work out. It might affect the resell value.
Ben:
The actual story is that she really wanted to play the floor is lava, and so she-
Josh:
My kids are obsessed with that. They love it. Yeah.
Ben:
I saw someone tweeted about that, talking about watching the show that's on Netflix.
Josh:
The Netflix show, yeah.
Ben:
I haven't seen it. But this person said, "Yeah, I watched it for about eight minutes, and then I got too bored. And I think I would've stuck around longer if the floor actually was lava."
Josh:
I mean, that's a pretty good commentary. My kids are two and four, and this is a show that is conceivably for adults, I think. But my kids just can't get enough of it, and it's one of the few things that we can actually watch as a family and they will sit through a whole episode with us. So it's more for their benefit. But yeah, I think if it's keeping the kids engaged that long, I don't know if it's the thing I would be watching after they go to bed.
Ben:
So really this is the way for Netflix to build brand identity with the young kids, so that they'll be hooked for life.
Josh:
Yeah. But it's not a kids show, as far as I can... I mean, it's like a family show, I guess. But I don't know.
Starr:
I do get really strong Double Dare vibes from it. I was a big Double Dare fan back in the day. So she doesn't get a cool story out of it, but I think I do because the way I found out about this leak was that I was downstairs taking a bath, and I just hear, "I need to pee." So I'm like, oh okay, whatever. So I get out of the bathtub, and I go out there, and I'm noticing there's water all over the floor.
Josh:
Oh, no.
Starr:
I'm just like, "Ida, what? This is too much." there's a big hissing sound coming from her room.
Josh:
It's like a parent's worse nightmare.
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
But then the thing is she didn't even notice any of that. She just woke up and had to pee. But I think it was because there was this big giant hissing so...