Decisions & Events That Made Honeybadger What It Is Today

Looking at the major events in our lives, we can often trace them back to turning points -- decisions big and small that had outsized effects. In this episode the dudes reflect on some of their major decisions, good and bad.

Full Transcript:
Starr:              So I was like, "Okay, we've got no heat now. We're just going to have to slaughter the horses and crawl inside of them or-

Josh:               You guys have horses in Seattle?

Starr:              Slaughter the neighbor's horses.

Josh:               I thought all the horses were in Kirkland.

Announcer:          It's like Steve Jobs and the dude had triplets and they built an app. This is Founder Quest.

Starr:              I got back the work from the Barney guy. The Barney guy is going to do our intros and it's all pretty great.

Ben:                Cool.

Starr:              It is excruciatingly difficult for me to listen to it though. I don't know why but.

Josh:               Let's just clarify. He doesn't actually sound like Barney. I assume like he is [crosstalk] voices right?

Starr:              No, he like sounds like announcer dude. Yeah. He sounds like sort of cheesy announcer dude but it's excruciating. I was listening to these introductions that this guy recorded for us and I'm like, "I have to listen to this so I can spot errors and stuff" but I'm just clenching my fists. I'm kind of in a fetal position because it's so painful to listen to this professional man who has been the voice of Barney amongst many other roles, reading out the really stupid shit I ask him to read. So anyway, I'm sure I'm making you guys feel great about the future direction of this podcast.

Josh:               I'm sure it's going to be awesome and I mean by the time people are actually hearing this, they're going to have already heard the announcer. So I guess they'll know whether it's shit or not.

Starr:              Oh yeah, that's right. Maybe.

Josh:               I mean they can tell us. I guess.

Starr:              One thing that I get asked a lot and I'm sure you guys get asked a lot too is how do we do it right? The three of us have this pretty cool little software company. We build things we like. We do it on our own terms. How did we do it? Because a lot of people are interested in doing similar things. So I thought it would be fun to have a show where we talk a little bit about that. So what would you guys think about that?

Josh:               Yeah. Sounds good. I mean I think it's just pure blind luck obviously. I don't know about you but.

Starr:              Oh 100%.

Josh:               I don't know how I the hell I do it.

Starr:              Show is over.

Josh:               Show is over.

Ben:                There may have been a little bit of work involved.

Starr:              I guess I should start out and explain a little bit about what we have right? So the three of us started Honeybadger about like, how long ago was it?

Ben:                Yeah, we started in 2012.

Josh:               2012.

Ben:                Yeah. So it would be seven years old in the summer.

Starr:              Oh Man. What grade is that like second grade?

Ben:                Yep.

Josh:               I just don't. I don't want to see Honeybadger when it's a teenager. I don't know. I thought that's going to be pretty scary.

Starr:              Yeah. So seven years ago we set out to build this app to monitor our web apps for errors. We were using an old service that does a similar thing called Hoptoad. Eventually turned into a thing called Airbrake and it just wasn't doing it for us. It had a lot of problems. It had a lot of service degradations and we eventually just kind of got fed up and decided to build our own thing and fortunately for us, a lot of other people were thinking the same thing. So we had a lot of early customers out the gate who were Airbrake customers originally and looking around for a more stable replacement that was being actively developed instead of just kind of milked like a cash cow.

Josh:               I think one of the things that we did, I mean that kind of just came naturally is that we were solving our own problem or I guess they say scratching your own itch, but it was something that we really wanted ourselves and that was a big in doing it in the first place. I mean we did want to build a product and sell it but we also really had this need that we wanted to solve for ourselves and we kind of did that. That was the initial motivation, how we chose what to actually build in the first place was we used ourselves kind of as guinea pigs.

Starr:              Yeah, because we were like freelancers for a long time and we weren't really in the same company, but we worked on similar projects and we all used Airbrake. Actually at the time that we started on Honeybadger Ben and I were working at another company as employees and we used Airbrake then too and it was just not doing it for us.

Ben:                Yeah. I think the thing about scratching or itch is you can have a lot of itches, right? And there are some that are more interesting than others and some that are more painful than others. And you've heard that phrase like, "Is your product a vitamin or is it an aspirin?" Right? Is it solving a real pain or is it something that it's kind of nice to have and I think one of the things that made a difference was we felt that Airbrake was a painful experience. We were really pissed off about how the service had degraded and we decided that we had to fix that. So we felt the pain keenly. It wasn't just, "Oh, it'd be nice to have this thing". It was like, "We gotta have this thing".

Starr:              Oh yeah, totally. I remember this and this, you might say that one of the things that set me off being interested in Honeybadger was a mistake on my part. I was having trouble with Airbrake. I was having an issue and so I posted a question on their customer service forum which was literally the only way to get customer service. And maybe a day later somebody responded and it was kind of a flip, non-response answer. And that just made me so angry that these people who I'm paying or my boss is paying I guess are writing me off like this and not even giving me a decent customer support answer and it was only a couple of months later when I went back and realized, "Oh man, that was just another customer". They were in the same boat as I was. That wasn't even Airbrake support but I guess if they would've really had support in the first place, that wouldn't have happened. So it's still the...