When should you give up or pivot?

Michele Hansen 
Welcome to the Software Social podcast where we invite you to join our weekly conversation about what's going on in our businesses. I'm Michele Hansen.

Colleen Schnettler 
And I'm Colleen Schnettler.

Michele Hansen
How's it going, Colleen?

Colleen Schnettler 
I'm doing well. It's been a pretty exciting week for me on a tech front. So I haven't had as much time this week. I'm really trying to commit to talking to more people. I mentioned that.

Michele Hansen
Yeah!

Colleen Schnettler 
And it's kind of funny, because I've been talking to more people and they don't really care about my image management solution.

Michele Hansen
Oh :(

Colleen Schnettler 
Well, it's okay. This this kind of interesting thing has happened, where they care at there. They don't care about that, but they're really excited about the work I'm doing with AWS and Arc. I'm, I'm moving my tech over to go from kind of a monolithic Rails app to like AWS, Lambda serverless functions and everyone is really interested in that?

Michele Hansen
Really?

Colleen Schnettler 
Yeah, it's kind of been a funny thing where I've wanted to talk to people about image management. And they want to talk to me about how I'm using lambda functions to do manipulations on images.

Michele Hansen
Really...

Colleen Schnettler 
And so, yeah, and so I there's a few things I'm trying to be wary of here. One is, I feel like it's not a good idea to use new tech on a new idea. Because you're, it's like a double uphill battle. You have to both build something, ship it and learn some new tech. But this AWS stuff is really cool. I love learning it and the architecture with it really is better. It just feels cleaner. I'm I'm not a huge microservices person, but this particular, what I'm building really lends itself well to these lambda functions. So that's been really fun. But it has been an interesting thing to find out that people are more interested in that. So as you know,  one of the things I struggle with is jumping too quickly from idea to idea. But I'm seeing this opportunity where everyone wants to learn how to write lambda functions in the cloud with Ruby. And I'm like, Oh! Well, that's interesting.

Michele Hansen 
Did you course business at one point? I forget.

Colleen Schnettler 
I thought about it. I know that would be, that would be no, I thought about it. And I started doing video courses. I think I did like three or four. And it just got, I mean, it's kind of a slog to do that kind of thing, especially if it's not, it was I was building something that was more geared towards beginners. And so it was pretty boring for me to actually make them because you have to really go back and I felt like there was a lot of beginner course content out there already. So I never I never really gave that a good shot. But this is an interesting thing, because I am really when you hear these people who are successful, they're like, Oh, I was interested in this thing. And I blogged about it everyday for a year. And then boom, I'm the expert in this thing. And I have a product and this thing. I don't know, it's just I don't want to be jumping, right? This is I need to really focus, which is one of the things I struggle with. But I'm really tempted, I'm really tempted to like, get more into this AWS in the cloud serverless functions stuff. That seems to be more interesting to my developer friends.

Michele Hansen 
Maybe it's not jumping if you just hang out on a particular stepping stone for a little bit. Maybe there's like a mini course here or something or even if it's just a blog post and people get excited about that. But maybe there's, you know, a little a little stop along the way here.

Colleen Schnettler 
So I'd really like to get the image thing done. Because I think as we've been talking every week, I feel like I'm just so close.

Michele Hansen 
And you need it. Like for your sanity. On the projects you work on.

Colleen Schnettler 
Yes, I need it, I'm going to use it on my clients. And I just want to finish something like I just want to finish a side project. That's just where I am. It's like graveyard of abandoned side projects. So I want to finish it, and I'll use it. And I think it'll make my life easier. So that's great. But I wonder this is something I'm kind of like putting in the back of my mind and kind of tabling as people are interested in this, they want to learn more, they want to learn, you know, how you can use it. And the other thing, there's, I feel like serverless is huge, and there's so much opportunity for growth. And I don't know if there is like, I know, AWS has a marketplace, but I don't know anything about it. But so for example, this one serverless function I have all you do is if your images in my bucket, you can just send query parameters for the size you want of the image and it returns the image already resized and optimized and things like that. Wouldn't it be cool if you could have like a suite of little serverless functions that you could somehow bundle together? Like a whole bunch, I don't know, you'd have like, I don't know what it would look like you'd have like five different API endpoints you as my customer could hit that would handle all of your different image manipulation, like, or I could have one for video and one for images. I don't know. I feel like there might be something there. And I don't know what that looks like. But it's definitely like tucked away in the back of my mind, like what I'm working on. Now. I want to finish first. That's important. And it's so close. But I think after that might be a good time to start blogging about all this stuff I have learned in the AWS ecosystem. And once I don't forget it, but also, you know, to see if people are interested in that kind of information as well.

Michele Hansen 
It sounds like they are and like, I can't tell you how many projects and products come out of setting out to do something else. Like just earlier this week, Adam Wathan did a huge thread on the development of Tailwind. I don't know if you saw it. And he mentioned how they were working on another side project, but like the CSS was driving him nuts. And so they just he just made that. And then he open sourced it. And people were super psyched about it. And they were really surprised by that. And then it like led to this whole thing that is Tailwind. I mean, that happened with Geocodio too. To to like we set out to make an app that told you grocery store and coffee shop opening hours and ran into problems with geocoding. And you know, we got some good, good traction and some excited users on the grocery store app. But man, when you find a problem that developers have, and you solve it for them, people get really, really excited about that.

Colleen Schnettler 
Yeah. So when you guys launched Geocodio did you do that through some kind of existing marketplace, or were you just out in the free world?

Michele Hansen 
Hacker News. That was the place to launch in January 2014. Product Hunt like wasn't even a thing. Yeah. And we did a ton of, you know, posting on like StackOverflow and Reddit.

Colleen Schnettler 
And how did you know when you were ready to put it out there for other people? Had you guys been using it for your grocery store app for a while?

Michele Hansen 
Yeah, I think at least six months or so.

Colleen Schnettler 
That's quite a while.

Michele Hansen 
Yeah. And it took a good friend of ours to be like, hey, like, you should just slap a paywall in front of this and see if other people will pay f...