Document & Automate Your Way to a Vacation When Running a Startup

The guys talk about strategies for creating systems, documentation, and automation to separate yourself from your business so you can hire employees, get it ready for sale, or even take some time off. Balancing good customer service while being efficient with your time is also discussed along with reasons Honeybadger doesn't use automation for customer service.

Full Transcript:
Starr:              00:01          I probably should have muted that, so you couldn't hear the toilet flushing.

Josh:               00:05          I don't know whose it was, so... You just needed... There, there you...

Josh:               00:11          Okay, so, Starr. There is, there's your intro.

Announcer:          00:16          They're just three amigos making their way in the crazy old world of software as a service.

Announcer:          00:22          Welcome to Founder Quest!

Josh:               00:26          Oh, that reminds me, I was going to... during that decision-making thing, I was going to say we'd be a lot cooler, though, if we used a blockchain, like to decentralize, since, you know, we're totally like a, you know, a remote, very decentralized company, like we should have a blockchain for a decision-making process.

Ben:                00:42          For real, scan that audio trail.

Starr:              00:43          Yeah.

Ben:                00:44          To make sure that-

Starr:              00:44          The future. The future's now.

Ben:                00:46          ... make sure that Starr doesn't go back and change the decision that we made?

Starr:              00:52          What?!

Josh:               00:52          Uh-huh (affirmative).

Starr:              00:52          Why am I getting this flack?

Ben:                00:53          Well, you know, because you know that I would be the one that would actually be doing that sort of thing, so that's why I'm the...

Josh:               00:58          Well, it's more to protect against Ben, yeah, so it's like a digital gavel.

Ben:                01:01          I'm the totally random element in this outfit, that's for sure.

Josh:               01:05          Yeah. The wild card.

Ben:                01:07          Yes!

Josh:               01:08          The joker.

Ben:                01:08          The joker!

Josh:               01:10          And plus I could buy more video cards, so that I have more weight, my decisions have more weight.

Ben:                01:14          There you go.

Starr:              01:16          All right, so let's catch people up. So last week, we talked about some issues involving systems, like what are our systems for decision-making? And we talked about our quarterly conclaves, our process for doing that, and so this week we're going to be talking about systems and continuing the conversation, this is one long conversation that's just been split up into two.

Starr:              01:36          And we're going to be talking about managing employees, we're going to be talking about daily operations, about ops and all that stuff.

Starr:              01:45          Yeah, let's get going! So like what... we started with nothing, we started with no systems, errors would come in, and Ben would see them and he would manually write out an alert email, and send those out on Gmail. And since then, we've like, we have systems out the, uh... I can't say it on iTunes, I'm sorry, but we've got lots of systems!

Starr:              02:07          So how do we coordinate a bunch of, like three of us are independent workers, we've hired a bunch of independent workers, like how do we coordinate between those?

Ben:                02:15          I think that the technical term you were looking for there was "wazzoo."

Josh:               02:17          Wazzoo?

Starr:              02:18          Oh, okay, most definitely was it.

Ben:                02:20          You know, one of the things that was really crazy early on was, it accelerated so rapidly. Like, I remember, in the early-early days, when we first started this out, and most of the day I was thinking, you know, because we had jobs, so Starr and I were working for a start-up, and I was thinking, "Ah, this should be great! I have two incomes streams, right? Like I have my day job, and then Honeybadger just will be doing its thing on the side, it'd be a cash machine, it'd be awesome!" And then, it didn't go that way. Like-

Josh:               02:51          Then reality struck.

Ben:                02:52          Yeah, the reality struck, where, like, Starr and I are sitting there, at our day jobs, and all of the sudden Honeybadger's on fire, and it was like, "Oh, we got to go take a lunch break right now!", you know?

Starr:              03:00          Yeah.

Ben:                03:01          And so, like eventually, that just... its like the pressure was too much, right? We couldn't do both, and so we had to dive in on Honeybadger. But a lot of that was because things were just growing so rapidly, and traffic was coming in, and things were falling apart, and like in that one server that we bought initially, right, had to become two, and so on. But-

Starr:              03:21          Yeah.

Starr:              03:21          And we did not build this thing for a scale, people. We did not prematurely optimize.

Ben:                03:25    &n...