The Bootstrapper's Guide to the Ninja Launch

Show Notes:
Links:
Cobol On Cogs
Square Hole TikTok Video
Hook Relay
Universal Honeybadger.js
FounderQuest Accounts Episode
Write for Honeybadger's Blog

Full Transcript:
Ben:
Did you see that tweet I posted in the channel, the TikTok video about the shape sorter?

Josh:
It was so good.

Starr:
So good.

Josh:
Laughed really hard.

Ben:
So good. I just loved the voice of the person doing the shapes.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
"And where do you think this one goes?"

Starr:
So it's a shape sorting thing. And they've got all different color blocks, like a kid's toy and you're supposed to match the shape to the hole in the top of the bucket, but it turns out all of the shapes just fit inside the square hole. And so-

Josh:
That's why there's a hole in there.

Starr:
Yeah, so it's a reaction video. This woman's watching it and she's just getting more and more dismayed as he just puts everything. She's like, "No, put it in the triangle hole," and he's like, "No, this one goes in the square hole." So I think this is a metaphor for how users as well use Excel for every single task in their business.

Ben:
Yeah. So I'll have to put the tweet in the show notes, but that was funny that I found.

Starr:
Yeah, that's really good. I like-

Ben:
Well, I am... Go ahead.

Starr:
I was just going to say I like watching TikTok, but I'm like I'm too old to actually watch TikTok, so I just watch video compilations of TikTok that somebody shows me.

Josh:
Yeah, TikTok on YouTube.

Ben:
Saying, yeah, I watch TikTok on Twitter.

Josh:
Twitter. Yeah.

Ben:
So, yeah.

Josh:
Yeah. That's an interesting thing about TikTok, because it's like half the people who enjoy the videos aren't even on the platform or whatsoever.

Starr:
And that's just the internet.

Josh:
But these are everywhere. They're all over Instagram. I guess, yeah, it is.

Starr:
I just want to know like how much of... So there's got to be a number out there, like the total traffic on the internet per day, like total bandwidth use. How much of that is just sending around videos and screenshots of other parts of the internet?

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah.

Josh:
Well, I guess like the same thing happened with Vine.

Ben:
It's like marketing attribution. Right? You never know where your traffic is coming from. Like TikTok, they have no idea where the video is actually being seen.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Like, is it on TikTok? Is it on Twitter? Is it on Reddit? Who knows? It's got to be tough-

Josh:
They were pretty-

Ben:
... for their engagement numbers, you know?

Josh:
They were pretty smart to put their watermark on the videos.

Ben:
Totally.

Starr:
So you were about to tell us how great you're feeling, I think, Ben?

Ben:
Yes. I'm so excited. Today has been a great day so far. I mean it's early. But-

Starr:
What happened?

Ben:
Well, I finally, after many, many weeks of having this on my to do this, I finally got it this week and this morning I finished off putting together everything required for the Heroku add-on for Hook Relay.

Starr:
Oh, awesome.

Josh:
Nice.

Ben:
Yes.

Starr:
So Hook Relay is a product you've been working on that adds sort of like push button reliability to people's implementations of webhooks. Am I right?

Ben:
That's correct.

Starr:
Did you pivot?

Ben:
I haven't pivoted yet. No.

Starr:
Okay, good.

Ben:
And as I was writing up that Heroku, for Heroku, of course you have to like put in a description of what your thing does and you have to upload some screenshots and you have to do pricing. And all that stuff was basically done. But the last thing to do, I think I kept on putting off because it's just not my strong suit. And so, you know how that goes, you just do the things you'd like to do over the things you don't like to do. But the last thing was putting together the Dev Center documentation page. So each Heroku add-on needs to have some documentation at Heroku, it tells you how to use the ad-on and how to provision it, things like that. And it's pretty straightforward and simple, but I'm just not a big fan of writing stuff like that.

Ben:
And so anyway, I kept putting it off. But bonus was Kevin had put a quick-start page together for Hook Relay, like months ago when we launched the product, which is basically like, "Here's how you use it," which is basically the same thing that Heroku wants for this page. So I copied and most of his stuff and just shifted a little bit. But the thing that kind of threw me this morning as I was finishing it off, there's a field on the Dev Center page. There's this big text blog where you put your documentation, and that's fine, but there's a field above it, and it says meta description. And I was like, what's supposed to go in there. I don't know. I mean, because there's a separate spot for doing it like you're marketing blurb. Like, "Hey, give us the one line description of your add-on that's someplace else." And so I'm like, so what is a meta description? I don't know.

Starr:
Is it like for SEO?

Josh:
Like a meta tag.

Ben:
Well, I'm not exactly sure still, but when I saved the content, like the big blurb of text that will make up the page, it took the first line of the content and put that in the meta description. I'm like, okay, so, I'm thinking maybe this is a TLDR. So I tweak that a little bit. And as I was tweaking that, I came up with a tagline for Hook Relay that, "Now, I'm no marketing specialist, I'm no guru. I'm no copywriter either. But-

Josh:
You're just the guy on podcast.

Starr:
... we're going to workshop this real time."

Ben:
But I'm pretty proud of what I came up with here.

Starr:
Ratings are going to go through the roof.

Ben:
And so here's the tagline. And Kevin helped me tweak it a little at the end. It is just, "Send a post request and let Hook Relay handle the rest."

Starr:
Nice.

Ben:
Yes. And Kevin's suggestion was that rest should be all caps because of course... Yes.

Josh:
Of course.

Ben:
Yeah. It's the rest, you know?

Josh:
There you go. I can see. Yeah.

Starr:
There you go. Yeah. The catch is that like post and delete requests cost extra, you got to pay more for those.

Ben:
Right. So there we go. So now I'm feeling pretty good. Like Hook Relay is signed, sealed and delivered. It should be on their Heroku marketplace next week. Somewhat by the time this drops, it should be there.

Starr:
Awesome. That's great.

Josh:
That's, yeah, really exciting. And don't we like have a customer or something?

Ben:
We do. We actually have a paying customer. That's pretty exciting.

Starr:
That's amazing.

Ben:
So, that's pretty impressive considering we haven't really done any real marketing or advertising for it. And I've talked about it on the podcast and I tweeted about it a few times, but it's been pretty quiet. We've done that on purpose. We're kind of laying low to do the gradual buildup, make sure things are working before they ship to the masses, but yeah-

Josh...