Tracking The Elusive SaaS Sales Funnel

Show notes:
Links:
Intro CRM
Ahoy
Andrew Kane

Full transcript:
Ben:
So I am feeling great this morning.

Starr:
Oh Good. Why are you feeling great?

Ben:
So over the past couple weeks, I've been working on cleaning up the low level noise, errors that are happening, that aren't really severe and that get corrected because of retries and things like that. So stuff, that's not broken, broken, it's just annoying. And so I just, yesterday I think, finished off the last of those things. So, we had a few big things over the past several months, we had the account billing migration. We've had the Elasticsearch migration. We've had the payload storage migration. And now as of yesterday, we have no lingering, low level errors happening. It's just clean. The logs are quiet, everything is happy.

Josh:
Nice.

Starr:
That's amazing. Good job.

Ben:
Thanks.

Starr:
Would you say it's like butter?

Josh:
Thought it was kind of quiet around here.

Ben:
It's like butter.

Starr:
It's like butter.

Ben:
Yeah, it feels really good.

Starr:
Oh, good.

Josh:
I got through my to-do list items that were kind of along those lines this week, actually. So that does feel good. I'm onto having time for real work again now until I come in on Monday and I have a bunch of busy work again.

Ben:
Yeah.

Starr:
Well yesterday was my birthday, so I took it off so I'm a slacker this week.

Josh:
Happy birthday.

Starr:
Thank you.

Ben:
Happy birthday.

Starr:
Thank you. It's very nice, just like, I didn't actually really do anything special. I just went about sort of a normal day, but without any rush. I was just like, I'm going to kind of take my time and take as long as I want in whatever I'm doing. And it was very nice. It was very nice just having that off. And I mean, I didn't actually work, but I did just kind of read and stuff, so..

Josh:
Cool.

Starr:
So I was great and I-

Josh:
Sounds like the perfect birthday, to be honest.

Starr:
I know it was pretty great. Yeah. My kid was very enthusiastic until... She was super enthusiastic all week. She made all these decorations and everything and all these tiny little birthday present crafts that were just adorable. And then when my birthday dinner actually rolled around, they went to the restaurant to pick up the food and everything and they came back and she didn't like any of the food that we got. And so she just threw just a shit fit. And it's just like, ah, I was trying to have my nice dinner and you really pumped this up for me. And now you're just you're just like some sort of caveman or something.

Josh:
She definitely did it intentionally.

Starr:
Yeah.

Josh:
This was her plan all along.

Starr:
Yeah. They build you up just to tear you down. That's children for you. But other than that, I got a lot of, I mean, a lot of progress on this interesting project that we're doing, where we're going to be using our sort of blog author set up to generate some reports, to make things easier for us sort of internally, right? Because it's kind of hard for Josh and everybody who's involved with the libraries, the client libraries to keep tabs on 500 different languages at once.

Starr:
It's just like keeping tabs on one programming language is kind of hard because everything changes every six weeks. And so, yeah. So we're going to try and get some authors to sort of go in, maybe start on a quarterly basis and come up with sort of reports about what's going on in a specific community. And yeah. And if it turns out-

Josh:
I'm so excited.

Starr:
Yeah, if it turns out they're useful, we'll probably start sharing them by our blog or email or something. Whatever allows us to extract the maximum value from you people.

Josh:
This came around or it came about, because I was like Starr, I'm tired of reading 15 newsletters every week. And I just want to read one thing, once a quarter or something like that and know what's going on. And so Starr like, I can do that and now we're going to have it. It's going to be awesome.

Ben:
So in a recent episode, when we talked about the vendor that you're not going to name on air Starr-

Starr:
I'll say it. It's okay. It's love sack. I was just feeling weird about it at that time. It's a terrible name. I realized later though, that it's based on love seats. Its like love seat bean bag type thing. At first, I thought it was a pun on love shack, which seemed like a really weird way to, I mean, I guess who am I to talk like my product's in Honeybadger, but yeah.

Josh:
True.

Starr:
I'm sorry. What were you going to say, Ben?

Ben:
So I brought that up to say that we had asked, in our podcast episode where we discussed that, we had asked people to respond to us on Twitter if they had any recommendations. And we actually got a recommendation, which was great. And the person who responded, suggested that perhaps we could engage people via Twitter, more from our podcasts. And so with this report thing that you're talking that made me think, hey, if someone out there would be interested in receiving a report, like we just described, you should let us know on Twitter.

Starr:
Oh yeah. That's a good idea.

Ben:
And-

Josh:
Honeybadger intelligence report?

Ben:
Exactly. Exactly.

Starr:
I'm abbreviating it HBI. Your HBI briefing. That sounds very official. Doesn't it?

Ben:
It does. Yeah. Expect that to come out on the first Thursday of the quarter right after the payroll report or something.

Starr:
Exactly. People are going to just be like, let me just tell you, the markets are going to move when that thing drops.

Josh:
I think that there are people out there that could get benefit from this sort of thing. It's not maybe not everyone, but anyone who has to keep up with multiple, like different tech language communities as a part of their job, which is like me, I maintain all of our integrations and stuff across the entire internet. And so... Or the entire industry. And so there's a lot of news and releases and what are the trends that people are talking about on Twitter? If I tried to stay on top of all that 24/7 I'd just never leave my desk.

Starr:
Yeah. It's so much work. I honestly, I'm kind of in the same boat, even though I don't work on the client libraries. I consider myself a developer. That's not really most of my job lately, but yeah. I'm a Ruby developer and I would like to keep up with the Ruby community and everything. And, but like when you're doing a job that isn't quite... Just day in, day out Ruby development, it's kind of hard to do that, right? So I would love to have like a thing to come to me every few months. Just like I just need to spend 30 minutes reading this once a quarter and I will have a good handle on things. So if I go to a conference, I just don't sound stupid. When people come up and talk to me.

Josh:
Yeah. You'll be in the know. Starr, can we send this out? Like snail mail to people do you think? Like an old school newsletter?

Starr:
An old school newsletter.

Josh:
Like before the internet. People, anyone who had an opinion... We could even have like a section where we like prognosticate and you tell what the future trends are going to be.

Starr:
There you go.

Josh:
Do you ever see those newsletters where those guys would have like their stock tips or the economic trends that they foresee.

Starr:
And here's the thing with that...