Software Social

Get Michele's free newsletter on customer research: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/mjwhansenMichele Hansen  0:00  The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners. This episode is sponsored by Koody. Koody helps under 35 in the UK make the most of their money. Koody's website houses free money management tools, expert guidance and financial advisors. Koody's online community is the place to be if you need help with your finances, or are a finance expert, check out their website at www.Koody.co. Thank you again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit balsamiq.com/go/software-socialSo you remember a couple of weeks ago how I was reading the Jobs to Be Done Playbook?Colleen Schnettler  0:59  Yes, I sure do. Michele Hansen  1:01  I'mstill reading that book. But I'm also reading another book. And I want to talk about that other book.Colleen Schnettler  1:07  Okay.Psychology of MoneyMichele Hansen  1:09  So I finally started reading the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.Colleen Schnettler  1:15  Okay.Michele Hansen  1:16  Which has been on my to-read pile for about, I don't know, about six months or so now, since it came out early last fall. And it's such a good book, like I mean, even if you're not a finance person are particularly interested in personal finance, like, it's a book about money that's not about money. And it's and it's so good. So but there's just one quote and that reminded me of stuff that we talk a lot about together. So I'm just gonna read it to you. "In a world where intelligence is hyper competitive, and many previous technical skills have become automated, competitive advantages tilt toward nuanced and soft skills, like communication, empathy, and perhaps most of all, flexibility."Colleen Schnettler  2:08  Hmm, interesting.Michele Hansen  2:10  And this reminded me a lot of what we talk about, because it's kind of like we've been talking about as it relates to your business. The one of the like, the biggest challenges for you is not the engineering side, it's like, knowing when you should, you know, change directions, or be flexible with with like, what your image of what the business and what the product is. And also like communicating with people about what it does and what it is and pulling that information out of them. And then and then how do we use empathy to figure all of those things out, which is, which is a really big focus for me, and I read this and, like, grabbed the nearest writing utensil near me, which normally I only write in pencils in books, like I will underline things, but I only had a pen, and I was like, This is so amazing, I'm gonna underline it and pen because I'm not gonna regret that, like. That just really stuck with me. Colleen Schnettler  3:09  Interesting. Why was that in your psychology of money book? Michele Hansen  3:13  Oh, I mean, so I don't know if you've ever read Morgan's writing. Colleen Schnettler  3:16  No.Michele Hansen  3:16  He writes a lot about the sort of psychology of business. He's a very different business writer. And I used to work with him so I've sort of been been around a lot of his thinking for a while. And I'm really sort of grateful for that, because he has a very unique perspective on things. And you know, it's not very often that you read in a best selling business book that the key is empathy. Right? Colleen Schnettler  3:42  Yeah. Michele Hansen  3:42  Running a good business. Right. And it reminds me a lot of something that I have been working on lately, too. So you know, we've talked about like getting people to reply, when you are trying to talk to them about the reasons why they use your product, which can be difficult. Colleen Schnettler  4:02  Yeah. Michele Hansen  4:03  And I think I mentioned a couple weeks ago, how we like so on our NPS survey like that, that pops up, I think, you know, relatively soon after someone uses the product, but not the first time and it's, you know, just rank us one to 10. And normally, we just look at this just to make sure we're getting mostly nines and 10s. But then it also has a question that asks as a follow up, and that survey and the question have a really high response rate. And we were previously asking, 'what can we do to improve?' And I changed this question. First of all, we were you know, we're getting a lot of like, boosts out of it. Like people were saying, like, no, you're awesome, and like, that makes us feel great. And like as -- you know, it feels nice. But also, we were kind of like asking people to do our work for us by telling us what we should improve. And so I changed it instead to 'What did you use before you used Geocodio?' And this is just reminding me about how we, you know, you know, competitors, at first blush, they seem like other companies, but in so many scenarios, and I think this applies to your business a lot too, competitors are people figuring something out for themselves or like some, like manual process where they're patching things together. And it is so fascinating to see the variety of responses I get from people. And how many of them say 'nothing' like that they used no tool and that they were like, hunting and pecking, or they had something internal, or they were like stringing together different solutions. I mean, our approach to competitors is so much more like relaxed than this, I think for, like, the traditional kind of business approach is like, you know, you should know everything that your competitors are doing and like, you know, know exactly when they have new features and like, be copying their features and everything. And I'm like, Nah, dude, like, I'm going to talk to my customers, because my competitors are all the time that they spend doing it themselves.Colleen Schnettler  5:59  It's this, it kind of the same thing with my business where a lot of people in the beginning, they were just weren't really doing it, or they weren't, you know, they were just, they were just putting, like piecemealing kind of half a half usable open source solutions with with, with other things. So So to your point, like your competitors, really not the other people offering the same service, but what the user was doing before.Michele Hansen  6:26  Yeah, I mean, there's so much space in software to have products that do things that are similar to somebody else's product, because so many people are just doing things themselves.Colleen Schnettler  6:40  So one of the things from that quote, you read from the book that I thought was interesting was flexibility. And what do you think that means in a business context? Does that mean pivot? Does that mean, let go of your idea that you're super passionate about because it's not working?Michele Hansen  6:55&...

Transcript below. Watch the video: https://youtu.be/cfeXNzWwAEcThe hosts of the SaaS Podcast Award nominated Software Social Podcast join Rob to chat about all things SaaS, early stage marketing strategies, and more. https://microconfonair.comMicroConf Connect ➡️  http://microconfconnect.comTwitter ➡️  https://twitter.com/MicroConfE-mail ➡️  support@microconf.comMicroConf 2021 Headline PartnersStripehttps://stripe.comTwitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/StripeHeyhttps://hey.comhttps://twitter.com/@heyheyTRANSCRIPTRob Walling  0:00  Welcome to this week's episode of MicroConf On Air. I'm your host, Rob Walling. And as always, every other Wednesday at 1pm Eastern 10am Pacific we live stream for about 30 minutes, we cover topics related to building and growing ambitious SaaS startups that bring us freedom, purpose, and allow us to maintain and value healthy relationships. We know that Silicon Valley way to raise buckets and buckets of money and go big or go home. But we believe in bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped founders who are making a change in their lives, maybe not changing the world, but at least changing their little corner of it. Thanks for joining me. Welcome back. I am excited today to talk about the talk about Software Social, it's a podcast if you're not listening to it, you should be it got nominated for the Best podcast in the best podcast category in the MicroConf SaaS podcast awards. And I have the pleasure of having the co-hosts of that podcast on the show today. And we'll be talking about have some questions for them about getting started and the benefits they receive from podcasting and that kind of stuff. But if you are watching this, please chime in with your own questions. We'd love to have the listener engagement. And that's why level level and your engagement. And that's why we do live events like this, instead of just doing them asynchronously through a podcast feed. Before we dive in, I want to mention MicroConf remote, which happens at the end of the month, March 23rd 24th 25th. It's gonna be pretty amazing event producer Xander is really outdoing himself on this one, MicroConfremote.com if you want to get on the list for that, and we'll be putting tickets up for sale here in the next few days. It's an early stage event. And it's aimed at folks trying to get their really their first 100 customers and it's going to dive deep into four specific early stage marketing tactics. We're going to have folks on who have done a specific tactic to get early stage traction and example App Sumo or posting on Producthunt. And we're gonna have a founder or subject matter expert on who has done that very thing and we'll share as many numbers with us as they can. So it's going to be a real barnburner especially if you're early stage. I look forward to seeing you there here towards the end of the month. With that, let's dive into Software Social. My two guests today are Michele Hansen. She's a co founder of Geocodio. And you might remember her from Startups for the Rest of Us Episode 524 called Bootstrapping a Commodity SaaS when she and her husband Mathias came on and spoke to me about their journey of growing Geocodio to a pretty amazing bootstrap business. They started that company in 2014 as a side project, she went full time in 2017. And as I've said, she's cohost of the software social podcast, which was nominated in several categories for 2020 SaaS podcast awards. She also recently launched a free newsletter about customer research for bootstrappers. So check her out at mjwhansen on Twitter, if you want to link to that. And her co host is calling Colleen Schnettler who is @Leenyburger on Twitter. She's a Ruby on Rails consultant. She's spoken at both Rails Comp and RubyConf and loves being part of the dev community. She recently launched her first product, Simple File Upload, excuse me, which is in the Heroku app marketplace. If you haven't been following their story, it's super cool to hear this going from zero to $360 MRR in the span of about a month with this file uploader app. So again, software social podcast if you want to check that out. Colleen is a mother and a military spouse and loves chatting about all things software and business. Ladies, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me today.Colleen Schnettler  3:45  Hi, thank you for having us. Yeah, it's great to have --Rob Walling  3:49  issues are great had issues. Anders, it's great to have you here, as I read the outline where Xander says the internet is causing causing issues. So let me start with this before I try to figure out if I have to troubleshoot my internet or whatever it is. But I want to start with this question of when did you start your podcast? And what made you decide to do it?Colleen Schnettler  4:12  So I have actually been on Michele for a while, like I had been asked gel for a while if she was interested in starting a podcast. Because Michele and I used to always casually meet about once a week to talk business and I was in that really hard idea generation phase where it just feels like you're just slamming up against brick walls like you have a great idea and then you just can't get any traction or you can't ship it or you can't find someone to purchase it. And so we were already meeting and that was great. But then COVID hit and she moved across the ocean.Rob Walling  4:53  You want to take it from there, Michelle? Michele Hansen  4:55  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think it came out of it because we wanted to stay connected to each other. And we had some friends in the bootstrap community who had prodded us about it and had said, Hey, you guys should have you should have a podcast. And so we're like, you know, we'll just take the conversations we were already having. And worst case, it just like forces us to keep meeting every week. And I think during COVID, that's been really helpful to have to schedule in interaction with other people. And so it really just started as something that we were doing for ourselves. And I think we've joked that we expected that we would just have a couple of pity listeners, like our husbands and some friends of ours, and it would just sort of just be this thing we did for each other. So it's been really fun. Colleen Schnettler  5:47  Yeah, I think for me, what happened was, I was trying to stay motivated. And I was searching the internet for bootstrapped founder podcast, and there's 1000s of bootstrapped founder podcasts. But I was listening to one show, and I distinctly remember, the guy was talking about, like, how he got in his car and drove to California. And he was just such a different place in his life. Like, I was like, where the parents like the mothers and the people who are trying to build sustainable businesses, while raising a young family? And while working a job like I was looking for an approach that was would fit more like in our life, and I didn't feel like a lot of people were podcasting about that.Yeah, love it. And that's really why a lot of us I think started is we started podcast or even why we started MicroConf was that we looked around for other people trying to do what we wanted to do in the way we wanted to do it. And I like calling you just s...

Colleen Schnettler  0:00  The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners.This episode is sponsored by Intro CRM. There's a new simple sales tool built just for freelancers and early stage founders called Intro CRM. Add details in one click and know what you're earning next month. Quickly log next steps for every deal and integrate with Basecamp, Trello or Asana for managing tasks. Check out their website at introcrm.com. Thanks again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners in this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit balsamiq.com/go/software-socialMichele Hansen  0:46  So Colleen, you launched your SaaS, Simple File Upload, in December. And for the past couple of months now, we have been tracking how it's doing, how many people are signing up, your revenue, all those things. So last time we talked, you were on track for $325 in MRR and I think the previous time we had talked about before that which is maybe like two weeks before that. You're at $120 MRR. And so I'm curious, like, where are we now?Colleen Schnettler  1:29  So since we last spoke, I had one additional signups. Michele HansenNice. Colleen Schnettler So that puts me at $360 MRR. And I really I mean, I feel like I've won the lottery, Michele, like it feels amazing.Michele Hansen  1:39  Isn't SaaS great?Colleen Schnettler  1:41  So I mean, it was so hard to get to this point. But right now it just feels good. I think it's important to note that I couldn't charge for it until February 4, which was three weeks ago. So in three weeks, I've gone from zero MRR to $360. That's why I feel like I've won the lottery, like it's just.Michele Hansen  1:59  That's amazing. Have you annualize that yet? like have you let yourself like multiply that by 12. And just like think about that for a second?Colleen Schnettler  2:05  Too much. It's too much dreaming. I'm not quite ready to dream that big yet. But it feels really great. I mean, I am kind of floored -- Michele Hansen $4,000 a year, by the way --Colleen SchnettlerI could fly to Europe someday with that money when it's safe to fly. Yeah, so it feels really amazing to see this growth. And I have mentioned that I've been really busy the past couple weeks with with real paid work. And so I haven't put a lot of time or energy into this and people are still signing up.Michele Hansen  2:43  So this is real paid work the differences. Colleen Schnettler  2:47  Yeah, I shouldn't call --Michele Hansen  2:50  You don't have to be sort of like a like button chair, in order to make that revenue and make those sales, right like cuz whenever you get a consulting client, this is where these are so different. You have to work for every single customer in order to make that happen. Like you have to be out meeting people and making contacts and landing each client. But when you have customers, and they can just sign up whenever they need it. And they don't have to talk to you or do anything with you at all, before paying you, it's a huge shift.Colleen Schnettler  3:30  Yes, I mean, it's it's ultimately, you know, right now I trade my time for money. And as a consultant, I'm very, very aware of my time almost to my own detriment. And with this, yeah, I mean, of course, I put a ton of time in upfront, but people just sign up in the middle of the night and sweet. Like, that's awesome, I didn't have to do anything!Michele Hansen  3:52  So I'm curious. When you were when you had a you know, sort of we call them corporate jobs like were you? I wonder if were you a consultant like were you time tracking? Colleen SchnettlerNo. Michele HansenOh, okay.Colleen Schnettler  4:05  So I've done them. All right. I've done the salaried not time track to time tracking as what I do now. And now the product. So it's exciting. Michele Hansen  4:14  Yeah, it is exciting. I just remember when I went from working at an agency and having to, you know, time track three minutes spent replying to an email to then working in a product company and not having to time track and it was like, Oh, my God, this is -- this is amazing.Colleen Schnettler  4:34  Yeah, it feels totally different. So I'm, you know, I'm trying to enjoy it. And I'm also trying to think about, like, how I can continue to try and find -- I don't really feel like I found any kind of real product market fit. Like I've definitely found a pain point because people are signing up. But, I mean, I think that that there's a lot of opportunity to find deeper pain points in more specific niches. Because not everyone is this is the weirdest thing I know I keep bringing this up, but like people are signing up, but only about 50% of the people who sign up and they have to pay me when they sign up, are using it. And I'm emailing them. And I'm trying to see if I can help them. But if they don't use it, they're going to churn. So I feel like I'm a little I don't want to say concerned, but I'm cognizant of the fact that I think I'm going to have a high churn rate this first month, because people are going to be like, why am I paying for this thing I don't use?Michele Hansen  5:27  Yeah, I think that's something worth diving into. And you mentioned that you're emailing people. And we've talked a little bit about different approaches, you've taken to those emails, in terms of copy and subject lines, and all those sorts of things. And so I'm curious, if you've been, like trying anything differently, or if you've had any more people get back to you. And you've kind of gotten any more insight into why that might be happening?Colleen Schnettler  5:53  Nope. I mean, I can't get anyone... Michele Hansen That sounds frustrating.Colleen SchnettlerIt is it's frustrating. So in the beginning, I had a free tier, which I no longer have, there's no free free option. And the people in the free tier would would engage with me a lot more and and they seemed it was seemed like because they were very grateful. I mean, most of them expressed gratitude that I had solved this problem for them for free. No one emailed me back who was paying me money. Now to be fair, it's only what 1012 people that are paying me money, they don't want to talk to me. So I'm right. Have you beenMichele Hansen  6:30  Like, can you like look at their email addresses and see like, are they Gmails that are signing up? Or like people at companies?Colleen Schnettler  6:38  There are Gmails? It's both. It's a combination of Gmail and custom domains. And it you know, I haven't even been looking to see if they're, you know, what, it just occurred to me, I haven't even been checking to see if those emails are opened. So there could be something else going on, or they just don't want to talk to me, which is is what it is, I think, though, like why I just I don't want to stress about it. But like, why would you sign up for something you have to pay for and not use it? Like did i know.Mic...

Michele Hansen  0:00  The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners.This episode is sponsored by Domain Mapper. Domain Mapper gives you a single place to see all of your domains from multiple registrars and their DNS settings. Automated tracking for domains includes a MX and txt records. Plus, you can get domain renewal reminders, so you never lose one of your domains. Check it out at domainmapper.app. Thanks again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners in this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit balsamiq.com/go/software-socialColleen Schnettler  0:42  So Michele, I saw a tweet you had the other day where you just casually dropped that you were quoted in Adam Grant's new book, what is that about?Michele Hansen  0:54  Yeah, it's kind of a funny story. So Adam Grant, who wrote Originals, has a new book out called Think Again. And a vignette from my application to my old job, actually is in the book. It's kind of crazy.Colleen Schnettler  1:15  So how did that happen?Michele Hansen  1:17  So he gave a talk at the place I used to work. And the talk was on sort of unexpected findings and learnings. And there was just one particular story he told that prompted me to go ask him a question and talk to him afterwards. And I love that story, if I can just tell it for a second. So he was saying how there was this startup that was pitching some venture capitalists for funding. And in addition to all of the slides, you would expect about, you know, the problem they're solving and how they're doing it, and why they are the team to do it, and how they're taking over the world and all those kinds of things. They also had a slide in there, that straight up said all of the reasons why their company may not work.Colleen Schnettler  2:08  Hmm. Okay.Michele Hansen  2:10  Yeah. And it's not something that people normally put in a slide deck. And what really stuck out to me was he said that instead of the VCs going, Yeah, you're right, like, this idea sucks, your company's never going anywhere, your team isn't qualified, like, all right. Instead, the VC started problem solving with them, and talking about how they could help the company overcome these problems and avoid these pitfalls. And it went from this kind of, I don't want to describe it, like pitching as an adversarial relationship, but it's definitely like a weird, icy dance. To one that was really collaborative, and they were diving in together and and those sort of veneers were dropped. And, and he was talking about how, you know, they they said that it wasn't going to work out. And then that made people more interested in and talking to them and helping them. And so I went up to talk to him afterwards, because that that kind of reminded me of the application that I had written to the company. Because I had written in the application, basically, that I was probably not the candidate that they were envisioning, and that I didn't meet the qualifications they were asking for, but that I had other things that I was bringing to the table. And so he, you know, tells that story. In the book, I was also on his Work/Life podcast a couple of years ago telling that story.Colleen Schnettler  3:50  It's so cool. Yeah, it's,Michele Hansen  3:51  it's kind ofColleen Schnettler  3:52  weird. You're like secretly famous, and you never told us? Like you should have.Michele Hansen  3:57  I don't I don't know if I'm, I'm sorry, Colleen. Yeah, it's, it's it's pretty wild seeing my own name in print. But anyway, so since I'm in this book, and also I just enjoy his books in general. I figured he should read it. Yes, choice choice. He did send me a free copy of it. So and I absolutely loved it. Actually, there was some the part in it that kind of reminded me of something that you've been going through, and is something that's really common that I see in entrepreneurs, people who are starting out and also people who've been doing it for a long time.Colleen Schnettler  4:39  Which is...Michele Hansen  4:40  So I'm going to if you'll bear with me for a moment, I am just I'm going to read from the book. I have it in front of me here and it's a couple of paragraphs, so just bear with me here. So he's talking about if you can train people to think more like scientists and do they end up making smarter choices. And so, he says: A quartet of European researchers ran a bold experiment with more than 100 founders of Italian startups in technology, retail furniture, food, healthcare, leisure and machinery. Most of the founders businesses had yet to bring in any revenue, making it an ideal setting to investigate how teaching scientific thinking would influence the bottom line. The entrepreneurs arrived in Milan for a training program and entrepreneurship. Over the course of four months, they learned to create a business strategy interview customers build a minimum viable product and refine a prototype. What they didn't know was that they had been randomly assigned to either a scientific thinking group or a control group. The training for both groups was identical except for that one was encouraged to view startups through scientists goggles. From their perspective, their strategies a theory, customer interviews help develop hypotheses, and their minimum viable product and prototype are experiments to test these hypotheses. Their task is to rigorously measure the results and make decisions on whether their hypotheses are supported or refuted. Over the following year, the startups in the control group average under $300 in revenue, the startups in the scientific thinking group averaged over $12,000 in revenue. They brought in revenue more than twice as fast and attracted customers sooner too. Why? The entrepreneurs in the control group tended to stay wedded to their original strategies and products. It was too easy to preach the virtues of their past decisions, prosecute the vices of alternative options and politic by catering to advisors who favored the existing direction. The entrepreneurs who had been taught to think like scientists, in contrast, pivoted more than twice as often, when their hypotheses weren't supported. They knew it was time to rethink their business models. What's surprising about these results is we typically celebrate great entrepreneurs and leaders for being strong minded and clear sighted. They're supposed to be Paragons of conviction, decisive and certain. Yet, evidence reveals that when business executives compete in tournaments to price products, the best strategies actually slow...<...

Colleen Schnettler  0:00  The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners. This episode is sponsored by Diversify Tech. Diversify Tech helps companies reach candidates from underrepresented communities in tech. Their job board reaches 7,300 members. They have a free talent directory, and they have a newsletter for companies to learn about diversity, equality and inclusion. Please check them out at DiversifyTech.co Thank you again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners in this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit balsamiq.com/go/software-socialMichele Hansen  0:44  Colleen, can I ask you a question that you're not supposed to ask people?Colleen Schnettler  0:50  Are you going to ask me how old I am? Michele Hansen  0:52  No, I'm not going to ask you how old you are. I am going to ask you how much money you have made on your side project. Colleen Schnettler Ohhh!Michele HansenBecause we had talked about this a couple weeks ago, right? Like you had said that somebody had paid you $10 yet and that you had a bunch of people who would sign up on your free trial, and that their first charge was coming through in the middle of February. And now we are in the middle of February. And so I was curious if you would share with us what it is looking like, from a revenue perspective right now.Colleen Schnettler  1:29  Okay, sure. So to customers were up middle of February, one churned and one paid the $10. Michele HansenNice. Colleen SchnettlerSo that's always exciting. Yeah. But the real exciting boost for me is, as of I think about a week ago, maybe 10 days ago, it's been live on the Heroku App Store. And I've had a couple people sign up and there's no free trial. So they're signing up at $35 a month. Michele HansenSweet. Colleen SchnettlerYeah, it's actually really exciting. I'm trying to not get too excited. But um, I think the important thing to remember about Heroku though, it's not like Stripe, I don't get paid up front, you're pro-rate build. So if they sign up to try it out, and then they deprovision it or, you know, cancel it, essentially, I only get $1 or whatever, you know, the 35 amortized over the number of days in the month.Michele Hansen  2:21  Oh so it's month after? so if I say... Colleen Schnettleryes Michele HansenFebruary 1, for example, I would be billed March 1 for it. And if I cancel February 15, I'm billed on February 15, for two weeks worth of usage. Is that right?Colleen Schnettler  2:34  I think that's correct. Michele HansenOkayColleen Schnettler So I haven't actually seen any of that money yet. And so but it is really exciting. Like, I wasn't sure once I made it, you know, paid if anyone would sign up for it. And I've had a handful of people sign up. So it's really exciting. Yeah, it is, um, it is very exciting. And I kind of don't know what I should be tracking. I'm kind of struggling with that. Because I'm not actually tracking churn right now. I don't know if that's important to track, like I see if someone cancels, but I don't not like tracking that metric over time.Michele Hansen  3:14  I think more important than then the numbers and percentages right now is why did they churn, right? Colleen Schnettler I know. I emailed them. Michele HansenOkay, good, good. That's what you should have done, right? So right now you say, okay, 50% of the people cancelled, which looks really bad on the surface. But that number, knowing that one out of two people canceled, those numbers will never tell you why that happened. And so, yes, it's a good idea to be attuned to those numbers. But at this stage, the most important thing is to try to figure out why.Colleen Schnettler  3:50  That's what I figured is like, the goal here is to talk to people, so I am Michele HansenOh, my God. Finally, Colleen SchnettlerOh, my goodness. Lately, I've come around to it.Michele Hansen  4:00  It's fluttering hearing you say that! Colleen Schnettler  4:02  I mean, you know, I was thinking about something this morning. So if none of these people churn and they probably went, like I said, people are trying it out. But like, I'm at 120 MRR. I mean, that's amazing, right? Like, a lot of people never even launch a product. I've launched a product and that's amazing. 10 days, I met 120 MRR. So I'm trying like,Michele Hansen  4:25  Dude, you have been working towards this for like, so like, I feel like there's so many milestones that you've gone through. And, you know, people like listening right now. Right? Like, like you're hearing Oh, my God, like Colleen, like got this thing launched. And she got it in the marketplace. And then she went through all these hoops and now she has people paying her like -- it has taken you years to get to this point. Like, like a year ago, when we were still having our in person, weekly business chats before the pandemic and we were both in the same place and all of that, like you were trying, whatever you could even find a product find a problem you could solve, like the idea of like, if I had told you one year from now, you will have you know, 100 and something people using your product paying you 100 and something dollars for. Like, I think I don't know what you would have said you either wouldn't have believed me, or it'd be like, Can we just like fast forward to that?Colleen Schnettler  5:28  Right, can we fast forward?Michele Hansen  5:30  This is like this has this is the culmination of years worth of work for you like, yes, it looks like it's only been in the last three months. But you have been working towards this for such a long time.Colleen Schnettler  5:42  Yeah, and I think that's super important to remember. Because I was thinking about, like, I was trying to in my head, I was fast forwarding to a year from now. And probably when I tell my hopefully success story, it'll be Oh, I launched it, you know, February 4 2021. But to your point, like, that's totally a lie, I have been working on ideas and talking to people for years. I mean, the whole reason I learned to code was so I could have a product business. So this is, this is really a lot, you know, a long adventure in the making. Michele Hansen  6:14  I'm so happy for you.Colleen Schnettler  6:15  I'm so excited. So I'm trying not to I mean, this is really where the work begins. This is where a lot of people stop working, I think. And I think that's why I know so many software developers that can't quite get their products off the ground. For me, this is where the work begins. Like I think I made a joke the other day to my husband, I was like, I thought having children taught me patience. What's really teaching me patience is having a business. You know, I have to like, avoid. So what I'...

Link to the marketing to developers article Colleen mentionedMichele Hansen  0:01  The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners. This episode is sponsored by SnapShooter. SnapShooter helps you keep your server safe with backups for all major VPS hosting providers like Digital Ocean, AWS, Hetzner, and more. It makes it easy to take backups for MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB. And you can also do super easy backups for applications like WordPress, Laravel, and Ghost. Check it out at snapshooter.io.Thank you again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners in this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit https://balsamiq.com/go/software-social/.Colleen Schnettler  0:49  So Michele, are you at your computer right now?Michele Hansen  0:51  I've always at my computer.Colleen Schnettler  0:55  Okay, I would like you to go to Google. And I would like you to Google file uploading on Heroku.Michele Hansen  1:01  Okay, I'm typing right now. Colleen Schnettler Okay. What came up first thing?Colleen Schnettler  1:10  First Google result.Michele Hansen  1:14  Wait, is this because I've gone to it before though? Like,Colleen Schnettler  1:17  that's what I thought I was like, is Google biasing my response by incognito. Ok, do it again.Michele Hansen  1:25  Does it file upload on her whileColleen Schnettler  1:27  uploading on Heroku?Unknown Speaker  1:28  Still number one.Unknown Speaker  1:32  Amazing. That'sMichele Hansen  1:33  amazing. Like,Colleen Schnettler  1:36  I just want to capitalize on being the number one Google response. I don't really know. Yeah. But I was super excited to see that. Yeah, that is like my exciting news for the week.Michele Hansen  1:47  That is really exciting.Colleen Schnettler  1:50  Yeah. I and you know what the best part about this is, I didn't even know. And I was having a customer interview. And I asked him how he found out about we'll talk aboutMichele Hansen  2:02  this, you're burying the lede here? Well, I don't know. It's all exciting. There's like multiple news stories here.Colleen Schnettler  2:12  Yes, it's all exciting. So this is exciting. I am the number one. Number one hit on Google for file uploading on Heroku. Your number one brilliant,Michele Hansen  2:21  your number. IColleen Schnettler  2:22  know, that's awesome. Like, I just I don't want to breathe on it in caseMichele Hansen  2:27  Google changes their mind. Okay, this means you do shouldn't work on your documentation and just don't touch it.Unknown Speaker  2:33  Don't touch anything.Colleen Schnettler  2:36  Don't breathe on the website. So I think that was really exciting to see. And I definitely want to make that landing page that you dropped to better to kind of pull in the people who are reaching me now from Google. So that's something something I'm working on. But what I alluded to is I found that out because I had a customer interview. So last week, I emailed I think I told you, I would do it ages ago. And I finally did it. Thanks to you know, the positive encouragement I received from you and friends on the internet. Thank you friends on the internet. I emailed 14 people. And as I told you with Heroku, I can get their application name. So in the subject of the email, I said, simplify, upload a end, and I put their application name. personalize it. That's smart. Yeah, I figured I'd get a better response rate, like people would actually open it instead of just saying like, simple file upload. Yeah. So of those 14 emails, I got three responses. That's great one. Yeah, I thought free for 14 isn't bad. One guy said he didn't have time to talk. But it was the best file uploader on Heroku. And I should do more marketing. Nice.Michele Hansen  3:48  I always love it when customers tell tell us to do more marketing. Like it's such a an unexpected kind of feedback. Because it's like, wait, you want me to be louder?Colleen Schnettler  4:05  So I responded to him and asked him if I could use that as a testimonial. And he said I could. So I haven't put those I haven't put the testimonial on the website yet. But that is something I want to get to do.Michele Hansen  4:15  That's awesome. testimonials are so good for growth, like when you like if you've got people clicking on it from Google. And then they come to and it's like not only it seems like it's what they need, but there's some other person saying this is exactly what I needed. That's so helpful for getting new signups. They've been really good for us.Colleen Schnettler  4:36  Yeah, I think it'll be good. So So I will add that I just haven't added that yet. So I'm going to add that to my site. And two people said they would get on the phone with me. So you'll know that this is the first time I've actually done this right.Michele Hansen  4:51  Yeah, that's that's so good.Colleen Schnettler  4:54  Yes, so it is good, but so the first person I see spoke with he was actually in Japan. So I had to do it like in the evening here, and it was morning in Japan and he was so nice, but the call lasted 10 minutes, that's okay. I feel like I totally like, I don't want to say I bungled it like it was really great. But at the same time, like I thought about you talking about how I should schedule an hour, and it was like 10 minutes, and I just ran out of things to say. So,Michele Hansen  5:28  like, I've had interviews that were, you know, 10 minutes, like you said, and then ones that were like, an hour and a half, I usually came for about half an hour. Okay, but like, 10 minutes is fine. Like, if you got a really good nugget of information, or you found something out about, like, how they found you why they were looking for something different, what they were using before, which may not have been another service, but like, it could have been, you know, a combination of manual things or patching things together, whatever. Like, if you got that information, and you feel like you got something out of that conversation. That can happen in 10 minutes. Like, that's okay. Okay.Colleen Schnettler  6:12  Because I got off the phone and my whole family. So it was dinnertime, here. So I told the kids like I have this call, I'm gonna be there for an hour. And I'm back like 10 minutes later, and they're like, Why are you back? Well, I guess I'm done. But it was like a great, it was a great interview, the person I spoke with was really kind. And I got a lot of information. As I said, that's how I found out like, he found me, because he googled file uploading on Heroku. And that's the first thing that came up. So that was exciting. Yeah. And it was also great, because he's using flask with Python. And I don't have any documentation surrounding like Pike, Python, specifically, like I have generic documentatio...

Colleen Schnettler  0:00  The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners. This episode is sponsored by Teleprompt.me. Teleprompt.me is a voice activated teleprompter service. You can write and save scripts and read them in multiple languages. Check it out at teleprompt.me. Thank you again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners in this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit https://balsamiq.com/go/software-social/.Michele Hansen  0:36  So Colleen, the last time we talked about your SaaS, Simple File Upload, you had 89 users on Heroku 40 of which had uploaded files. And in order for your service to be released into the broader Heroku ecosystem, you have been working for months to get to 100 users. So it's been two weeks. Tell me, did you get to 100.Colleen Schnettler  1:07  I did 117 users. Last week I was approved for what they call general availability is when you can sell it in the marketplace. So my vendor documents are pending with Salesforce. Awesome, by the time this podcast airs, it will be available for sale.Michele Hansen  1:27  That's so exciting.Colleen Schnettler  1:29  Yeah, I'm super excited. It's really interesting though, Michelle, because this is a huge milestone, and you'd think I would get have gotten like a ton of energy and excitement about this project. But I've really been struggling the last two weeks, I have really kind of been down on myself thinking that this is a terrible idea. I need to start something new, and I need to find a new idea.Michele Hansen  1:54  Where do you think that feeling is coming from?Colleen Schnettler  1:57  I have no idea. I mean, it's, it's this really exciting time I've reached the milestone I've been trying to achieve. And so you know, I stumbled across this article by Amy Hoy called, why what's it called? Why Women Entrepreneurs Fail. Oh, and yeah, like speaks to me. And it's not just applicable to to women. But she does say in the article that she sees it a lot more in women. And let me let me pull out a few gems from this, quote, I'm tired of sitting by while you ship your thing and refuse to market it. Or you make a few sales your first time out, but it's not enough sales. So you sink into a funk and quit. Or you make it to the 90% mark, you tow up to the line of doing something, then refuse to cross it. I mean, that's like, right where I am, I'm finally getting some success. And I like want to run away and hide. And it's almost like I'm scared of my own success. It's super weird.Michele Hansen  2:54  So you say it's weird. But also, you know, Amy was able to write an article describing this. It makes it sound normal.Colleen Schnettler  3:05  She must see it all the time. And she wrote a whole article about it. I mean, I don't know her. She didn't write it for me.Michele Hansen  3:10  So does it make you feel better to know that this is a common feeling?Colleen Schnettler  3:16  Yeah, I mean, it totally, it was so weird, because I'm not kidding. Like two weeks ago, I was like, this is a terrible idea. I should shut this down. And I had just reached 100 users. And so I mean, the psychology sometimes we kind of talk a little bit about a psychology of trying to start your own thing. But, you know, I thought I was above that. sounds terrible. Like I didn't think it was going to impact me because I got my shit together. Everyone is above average. Right. And I'm aboveMichele Hansen  3:45  you. It's so interesting. Like, it's so interesting. And and as you said, I really think that does apply, you know, to both men and women. But maybe it's more acute, because the standards were held to are so much higher, you know, especially in an in a male dominated field. Right. But I think anybody could feel that way.Colleen Schnettler  4:07  Yeah, I think so. I don't know. So I it's been really interesting. And like I said, I really just wanted to throw the whole thing away last week. And then I found this article, and I talked to a lot of other people in the space. And those people were like, you're doing really well. Why would you walk away now? And I think it's a fear. So I think it's just a combination of a fear of failure. Like, once you start to have some success, like is that actually going to translate into something? It's a fear of learning a new skill set, there was this other great article I stumbled upon? Yeah. So Alex Hillman has a great article called The Fear of Beginning Again. And this article is about how all of the developers that take his class, like freak out, because now they have work. We're kind of experts in our field, right? And we spent years building up, you know, this career as a developer. And so now we have to learn how to do like sales and marketing. And it's like starting from scratch, because we don't know we're doing and it's hard and it's scary. And that's where I am right now.Michele Hansen  5:07  That totally makes sense, especially if you're switching from going from a consultant who has a defined scope. And you know, there's a little bit of sales, a little bit of accounting involved in that. But the vast majority of your time is spent on engineering work. And now running a SaaS, engineering work is a huge percentage of that. But it's no more than 50% of the work of the business. There's marketing, there's sales, there's, there's customer support, there's all of those other things that weren't really skillsets that you would have done in a developer job or really as much in a consulting setting. So it makes sense that it's scary to to feel like you're starting from nothing in totally new fields, and that this project, unlike past projects, does not just hinge on your engineering abilities.Colleen Schnettler  6:10  Right. I think that's the biggest thing. I've always been able to kind of prove myself, quote, unquote, from an engineering perspective. And so this is a whole This is a whole different skill set. It's like a whole different ballgame.Michele Hansen  6:25  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.Colleen Schnettler  6:29  Okay, well, you're my pseudo business psychologist. So it's good. We have this podcast, so you can you can remind me not to quit when I'm like, this is a terrible idea. Probably not a terrible idea. No, I thought it like it's a great idea. Like, it's a proven market. It's like, I don't know, 100.Michele Hansen  6:46  People, you started out with like, zero people. And I remember when you first launched it, you're like, well, maybe I can get a couple of friends who don't actually need it. But use Heroku to use it. And like that's your first milestone was 10 people, right? or something? Yeah. And it's like, okay, like, none of them are really using it. And like they're just kind of pity users. And,Colleen Schnettler  7:11  and but like, nature, though,Michele Hansen  7:12  like so last time, we talked, you had 40 people who had actually uploaded a file. How many people have uploaded files now?Colleen Sc...

Michele Hansen  0:00  This episode of Software Social is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners. This episode is sponsored by GetTheAudience. Every entrepreneur has the same problem. Find out who their audience of their product or service is, what they talk about a need, and when to engage with them in a fruitful conversation. Get the Audience helps entrepreneurs to understand and develop their audience much easier than before. It's a web based tool with a monthly or yearly subscription, created by a bootstrapped founder, Matthias Bohlen. You can get GetTheAudience at gettheaudience.com. Thanks again to Balsamiq for generously sponsoring our listeners this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsalmiq, visit balsalmiq.com/go/software-social.Colleen Schnettler  0:55  We are super excited to have a guest on today's podcast. We are joined today by Danielle Simpson, the co-founder of Feedback Panda. Danielle SimpsonHi, Colleen. Hi, Michelle.Michele Hansen  1:07  Hey, Danielle, I am so excited to have you on today.Danielle Simpson  1:11  Thank you for having me. Michele Hansen  1:13  So, so excited. So I want to give a quick background on you. And then we're gonna dive right in. So Danielle is the co-founder of Feedback Panda. And how this came about is Danielle is a classically trained opera singer, who moved to Berlin. And while she was singing, she started teaching English online. And part of that process for teaching the students is to provide them with feedback. And her she and her partner Arvid Kahl who many of you probably know from Twitter, figured out that the process for this feedback could be much more efficient. And there was actually a software solution in here to make that easier for teachers. And so they launched feedback panda together. And then they sold feedback panda in 2019. And so I am so excited to have you here, Danielle, because I feel like there's so much for us to learn from from you. And just so many different points, whether that's, you know, starting a company based on your own needs, scaling that company, figuring out what other people need, even you know, selling that company, and then what do you do after selling that company? There's so much in your story that I think really resonates with people. And so I'm so excited to hear your perspective on everything.Danielle Simpson  2:38  Thanks. Yeah, it's my privilege to be here and to share it with you.Michele Hansen  2:44  So my first question, you started Feedback Panda based on your own needs. And this is a recurring theme of our show, it's where Geocodio came from. It's where Colleen's Simple File Upload came from. It's where a lot of great bootstraped companies come from. And in those early days, it can be really hard to prioritize your different needs. And when you're solving something for yourself, you know, there's a million things that could be done. And so I'm really curious to hear more like, like, when you first started it, how did you even figure out what you should work on and what you should work on next?Danielle Simpson  3:22  So thank you so much for asking this question. Because it's definitely, you know, if you didn't bring it up, this was something I really wanted to share, about how we prioritized work. In the beginning, it was really easy to divide the different work because Arvid was the programmer and, you know, I would have the ideas, I have the knowledge about what the teachers need, what I needed. So I could tell him what to build. And then he would build it. And then so we work super closely. In this kind of like feedback loop where he would build something, I would test it out, I would give him feedback. He iterate on that. And so before we had customers -- super easy, super easy to just kind of build a prototype of a product. And then about a year, no, sorry, about four months in when we actually had customers. And before this, like adrenaline of something needs to be done and you just are like on autopilot, you just figure out a way to do it. We actually made this pretty expansive chart of 52 roles that we thought our company had. We're a company of two, but we got really specific about different departments, different positions in each department. And then what job what responsibilities each of those, call them people or positions had. So whenever we were kind of stuck for, okay, there's a million things that need to be done today, but what role hasn't seen some attention from us? Or what role kind of gets forgotten about because there's customer service is always something that's like super prominent, because it's actually somebody on the other line that's wanting your attention. But so in that kind of part of the company for, you know, customer experience and customer success, of course, the person on the desk is getting a lot of attention. But what about, you know, who's building the knowledge base? Is that getting a priority, and then, you know, that's going to help the person on the customer desk. And so we got super specific on these different roles. And also, who was going to be responsible for them, which was important that Arvid knew what he was responsible for, I knew what my responsibilities were. And, and so I think part of the the issue with priority is that we don't always know what the work is, we don't always have this clear understanding of what is this role? And I know, I need to work on marketing, but like, what does that mean? I don't know. So, getting really specific about what the marketing role is, or, you know, the content writer, or all of these different, who's posting to Instagram, all of these different little jobs, even, we're little roles that our company had. So we were very, we had a very clear picture, visually, to consult to when things were getting a bit overwhelming, then we could just look at this and see what needed to be done.Michele Hansen  6:47  That's so fascinating. I've never heard of anyone doing that for a two person company. I mean, it's it's ingenious, and, and it sounds like as much as it is defining what the roles and tasks are. Because I think that's a challenge I definitely face into a lot of other people. face too is, you know, figuring out what even needs to be done. And you're also defining what that role isn't, right, like you defined 52 roles, but not 100 roles, like -- there you are, you're scoping the company itself. It's, it sounds like, not just tasks.Danielle Simpson  7:27  Absolutely. And then this also became kind of the the structure of who do we want our first hires to be? You know, this role is taking up so much of our time, is it time to bring somebody in, of course, long story short, we never ended up hiring anyone. But you know, we had that layout that structure so that we knew where we could possibly, you know, substitute ourselves out and put someone else in.Michele Hansen  7:57  That makes a ton of sense.Colleen Schnettler  8:00  So when you guys were this far along, were you both full time by this point?Danielle Simpson  8:05  Not quite. So we did this for months after launching this big, you know, 52 person...

Colleen Schnettler  0:00  This episode of Software Social is sponsored by Balsamiq, makers of Balsamiq Wireframes, everyone's favorite low-fidelity wireframing tool.  Balsamiq is designed for founders who have great ideas for their apps, but can't afford to hire a full-time UX designer. Balsamiq is as easy as using Keynote. Drag and drop elements on the page and you'll have the screens for your app designed in no time.  You can then review your designs with a developer or prospective clients, before writing any code.Because they're already well known in our community, Balsamiq have decided to donate their airtime to YOU, listeners of this show, starting with the next episode.If you want a promo code for Balsamiq, visit balsamiq.com/go/software-social/Michele Hansen  0:43  So as you may have just noticed, we have a sponsor now. So exciting. I mean, we, even we so we got we got reached out to you by balsalmic in October, to our official podcast email address, which I actually never checked, because I didn't expect anyone to email us and I found this email sitting there in December. And I was like, Oh my God.Colleen Schnettler  1:10  That's funny. I had no idea that they they did that. Yeah, I've never checked our email address either.Michele Hansen  1:15  We check it now.Colleen Schnettler  1:17  Yeah, it's really it. You know what I'm really happy it was balsamic because I do use them. And I just think it's really cool to have a sponsor. Although now my podcast about my product is making more money than my product.Michele Hansen  1:29  You'll get there. It's okay. I don'tColleen Schnettler  1:32  get there. I did have one more person sign up. stripe paid me $10 I know $10 I went That's awesome. Wait.Michele Hansen  1:42  We straight paid you $10? Is that the first money you've gotten for it? Yes, ma'am.Colleen Schnettler  1:47  It sure is.Unknown Speaker  1:48  That's a huge moment. Oh my gosh,Colleen Schnettler  1:50  it is a huge moment. It's It's exciting.Michele Hansen  1:54  I wish you could tape $1 bill to your terminal likeColleen Schnettler  2:00  I should ask like, can you like send me like $1 bill from this? tape it up on my wall.Michele Hansen  2:07  So this is really exciting. We're really excited to have a sponsor. But you know, this reminds me of something else, which is, it's really hard times right now in the world. Like there's, there's just no getting past that. And if you're listening to this show, you're probably interested in running a bootstrap company, or you're trying to start a side project yourself. And, and I, and I just want to say for a second how, like, yes, this is amazing. And we just got a sponsor. But I also don't want to add to this perception that sort of that I pick up sometimes it's sort of everybody else is doing well, except for oneself. Right? Like, I feel like, you know, on Twitter and everywhere else where the, the community kind of congregates. Like, we tend to share positive things more than we do. things we're struggling with. Right? Yeah. And and I've noticed in a couple of smaller communities I'm in and sort of private places. This this past couple weeks that I've seen more people saying like, Wow, it feels like everybody's killing it except for me.Colleen Schnettler  3:16  Yeah, I agree. I think there, there's so much when we share publicly, you know, we're protecting ourselves, and we're protecting our ego. And so we share the good things, and we don't share the challenging things. And it isn't really challenging time. And, and I agree with you, it's important to remember that things are hard. And everyone's coping with the situation differently. Like, just three days ago, I was lamenting how much I missed my full time job because it was so low stress, like it was so much easier than this. And, and you know, some of my friends were able to give me a pep talk. But I was just like, this is a terrible idea. I'm wasting my time. So So I think those emotional highs and lows are, are normal. And I think they're exacerbated right now because of external stresses.Michele Hansen  4:01  Absolutely. And, and so I just kind of want to say that, like, if you're finding yourself, not able to focus and are feeling like you're spinning your wheels and things aren't working, like that's okay. And you're okay. And you will be okay. And also at the same time that if you find yourself working compulsively and unable to stop working to the point of, you know, working instead of being your friends and family or things like like like that is also a trauma response in the same way that not being able to do anything is as well. And we all respond to trauma and stressors differently. And no matter how you're reacting, you're okay. And other people aren't sharing the full story of what's going on in their life. So it's not just you that struggling. Other people are too but this is not a current events podcast. It's not a mental health podcast. We're not gonna go into that too much more. But I did just want to make a note of that since I mean, like the last few weeks have been just really hard. But you do have good news, right? amidst all of this, there are somehow good things happening to which is also just mentally confusing.Colleen Schnettler  5:21  Yes, so I, you know, I just did mention that emotional swing I had this week, I was like, this was a terrible idea. But, um, things my signups have been pretty steady. And I did get one more customer who has signed up, put a credit card down outside of Heroku. So that makes four or five now. And I have 89 Heroku users. So anticipate being ready to start charging in the Heroku marketplace in a couple weeks. Since I'm averaging. so far. It's been about Yeah, it's pretty exciting. Like I think we're super excited. So of those 89 people or teams, I 40 have actually uploaded files. So for me, what makes it sticky is using it right. So considering how easy it is to sign up, I'm not upset. I feel like that's actually a pretty good number. I'm trying to take each week and focus on one technical thing and one marketing thing.Unknown Speaker  6:18  SoColleen Schnettler  6:20  because I'm just really struggling with like, I feel like we talked about this every week now that I've launched something is how to prioritize my time, I have to actually figure out what to charge because I'm going to be charging people. Hopefully in two weeks,Michele Hansen  6:31  you said you had to the stripe signups for those people who added their credit cards, but they don't have they haven't incurred a charge yet.Colleen Schnettler  6:38  No, they had I mean, it's $10. But some one of my friends recommended I changed, I changed the price significantly. His argument was that I'm not really a commodity, I'm acting like a commodity when I talk to you when I think of it in my head. But I'm not really a commodity, because I'm not just providing storage, I'm providing all of this architecture, around storage to help you deal with your files. Like I'm not just reselling AWS buckets, there is someone who does this, by the way. It's you know, and his point was my closest competitor is charging $89. So I should have he his su...

Michele Hansen  0:00  So Colleen, you launched your new SaaS -- actually your first SaaS -- about a month ago, Simple File Upload. And you launched it first on the Heroku marketplace. But you also launched it off of the Heroku marketplace so that people who are not on Heroku can use it as well. And I was thinking about this. And I'm really curious if anyone has signed up off of Heroku, and how that's gone?Colleen Schnettler  0:30  Yes. So I got the most wonderful surprise yesterday, when I actually checked my subscriptions and saw that there were three people who have actually put their credit card. Michele Hansen Oh, my gosh! Colleen Schnettler I know, super exciting. The funny thing is, as I think I've mentioned before, Heroku requires you to get 100 users before you can charge. So I have been so focused on getting that 100 user number. I hadn't even been checking my Stripe subscriptions. So I logged on the other day. And I have it in my admin dashboard. But I literally never check it. And I saw like three subscriptions. And I was like, That can't be right. Michele Hansen  1:09  So are these people paying you or they just added their credit cards to Stripe?Colleen Schnettler  1:14  They've added their credit cards to Stripe, I am currently offering a free 30 day trial. And so they may cancel one of the people has already reached out to me, and we've had a pretty in depth email conversation about her needs. So I anticipate she'll stick around. But I have not actually heard from the other two people yet. So we'll see. I don't know.Michele Hansen  1:34  Tell me more about this email exchange you had.Colleen Schnettler  1:37  Yeah. So based on our conversation last week, I significantly changed the email, I changed, I got rid of all the graphics, I tried to be more concise and what I was asking and give a little more context. And you were right people like when you have more context, I think. And so I've been hearing back from people. So I've actually been spending a good part of this week, like handling email stuff and talking to people and listening to their feature requests. But there's one person who actually put her credit card in, you know, she actually shared with me her application, and there was an error. It was like a really subtle bug in the React component. And it actually worked with the bug, like it still worked most of the time. But she was running into an issue where it was not working consistently. So I was able to troubleshoot that and get that fixed. And so you know, we've kind of had had a dialogue going, it's been very exciting. Michele Hansen  2:34  It sounds like you've been able to build a rapport and a little bit of a relationship with her.Colleen Schnettler  2:40  I'd like to think so. I'd like to think so every time someone gets beat, every time someone emails me, I get super excited. So I'm still at that phase where I'm like, tell me about your thing. Like what's going on? What are you working on?Michele Hansen  2:54  I'm still in that phase. Like, honestly, I mean, anytime someone replies back to one of my feedback emails, so I have them going out with after a couple of days, the first time we charge someone, and I have different emails that go out based on, you know, different plans, they're on and whatnot. But every time somebody replies to one of those, I'm always like, Oh my god, somebody replied, like, this is so exciting. And then they're giving me this feedback. And I always learn things about industries that I had just, I never even realized existed like, and they're doing things I didn't even realize was happening. And then, like, somehow we're part of that process. And it feels so magical and exciting. And I feel so you know, like privileged that they've let me into their little world and told me all about how they're, for example, need to get timezone stamped reports back from tractors and how we make that easier for them. And I'm just like, yes, this is so cool. Like I'm, I think I'm just a huge business nerd. But and and i love i think that'sColleen Schnettler  3:59  awesome learning about business.Michele Hansen  4:01  So you know that that phase has, you know, been going for? Oh, wow, seven years now. For me.Colleen Schnettler  4:10  Wow. Yeah.Michele Hansen  4:11  Oh, wow. Geocodio turns seven this month. So, so tell me tell me more about about what you talk to.Colleen Schnettler  4:17  Ya. So it's been great. Like I said, I changed an email copy. And some people like reached out to me on Twitter. I love I love hearing from people. Thank you. I love ideas and shared with me the email copy they use. And like I said, so people started engaging. And I got a lot of good feedback. I got one person who was like really excited, who was like, Oh my gosh, Heroku has a file system, you know, was really troublesome. And so this is just what I needed. I got a lot of feature requests, which is something we'll talk about in a minute. I got one guy who was like, Oh my gosh, thank you so much for emailing me. Okay. So it was really fun. It's still just a handful of people, right? But I love it. Like I love hearing from people. And some of them, like I said, are comfortable sharing what they're working on, which has been cool, too. And there have been a lot of suggestions for utilizing the uploader in a way I did not anticipate. Ooh, so yeah, so this is like, the next thing. And I know I remember months ago, you said something about every new feature request should sit out in the rain on the porch for three days.Michele Hansen  5:27  Yes, I think that is taken from one of the early Basecamp books getting real, badly adjusted adjacent free, yeah, that new features should have to stand on the porch in the rain for three days before you let them in.Colleen Schnettler  5:44  And so I appreciate that. But at the same time, I feel like that's more appropriate for mature products. This is just a little baby product. And I'm trying to turn it into something amazing. And I think so. So I mean, when you're only talking to eight to 10 people, I think that every feature request, you know, I should really consider now I understand, like I was preparing for this podcast, I tried to look back at what I did this week, because I had, I didn't really do many things on the list of things I wanted to do. And it's because I spent so much time like doing these emails and talking to people and looking into their feature requests. And so I don't want to just throw them out there as quickly as possible. But I do think the product really has space to grow. And I love hearing what people are asking, and some of them are not too hard, like I can do, but I don't know, it's just it's just a struggle of like balancing all that, like do I impure, I have active people. And again, it's like a people who are talking to me. And so when they request something, if it's within my ability, and I think it's going to make the product better, because then other people might want that same feature. I want to do it. But of course, I'm balancing that with trying to do marketing and trying to do documentation, which I really need to do more documentation. So it's just like the challenge of balancing Oh, and you know, my paid work, balancing all of that.Michele Hansen  7:13  So it sounds like you're balancing a lot right now. And I'm curious with all of those feature requests coming in? are you saving them like, like, how are you sort o...