Software Social

Colleen Schnettler  0:00  Hey listeners, Colleen here. This week I lead off discussing the positive uptick in my signup numbers, tempered by the fact that none of those new signups responded to my welcome email, Michele and I discussed what I'm doing wrong. And we also talked about how I should be prioritizing my time, every bootstrapper's most challenging problem, at least in the beginning. Michele talks about a detailed customer feedback email that brought her great joy. And we discussed the new book she is reading called Jobs To Be Done in the context of small business. Hope you enjoy the episode. ColleenSo I have been keeping track of my numbers every week for how many people are signing up for my service. And this week, I had quite a few signups. I had 39. Yeah. This week, I had 38 new signups.Michele Hansen  0:48  Whoa.Colleen Schnettler  Yeah.Michele Hansen I how many were the previous week? The previous week?Colleen Schnettler  0:53  I had 18.Michele Hansen  0:56  Okay, so then the week before that,Colleen Schnettler  0:59  I just started recording the past few weeks. Michele Hansen  1:05  hey, that's almost 100% growth week over week for two weeks. That's That's pretty good. I mean, not long ago, you had, like 18 ish users total.Colleen Schnettler  1:16  Yeah, I'm really happy with the number of signups I'm getting, I think part of it might be because of the holiday break. I've noticed because my service is free. And it's in the Heroku marketplace. I get a lot of hobbyists. So I'm wondering if people are like trying it out because they have downtime. But I've also done a lot to improve the documentation. And so the other thing that has happened this week is a lot more people have actually converted. I think I mentioned a week or two ago that I was getting so many signups and then only like 10% of those people were actually using the single sign on to access their custom dashboard and install the JavaScript. And this week from those 3817 made it to single sign on, which is huge compared to the numbers I was seeing before. Yeah. So I'd like to believe it's because I've added more documentation so people know what it is. And, you know, we worked out did we do it on the podcast where we worked out some of the copy on my marketing page. Yeah, yeah. So some of the things we put where we like put numbers and we're like, here's the three step process. I'd like to believe that's, that's been part of the reason this is working and more people are converting.Michele Hansen  2:30  So you have what you would like to believe about why it's working. Have you asked anybody about that?Colleen Schnettler  2:37  Why can't I just say, Oh, they converted? Can I just go with what I'd like to believe?Michele Hansen  2:42  Hunches are great. But that's not a substitute for going out and finding the answer. Colleen Schnettler  2:49  I've had this great number of signups. But something else interesting has happened. And this is not good. So I think I mentioned answer my question. No, I don't know. No---Michele Hansen  3:04  I have tried not to talk over you. But you did not answer my question of whether you have tried to figure out know why people are converting that answer is -- and so as much as we need to figure out why people are canceling and why they're not converting. And we ask them a million questions about why you canceling why you're not doing this, why you're not doing that. We also need to ask them about why they are doing things so we can help more people do those things and find more people like them who will do those things.Colleen Schnettler  3:31  So this is interesting, because I've had all these signups and I mentioned last week that I was going to start doing transactional email like a welcome email. Since I have started the welcome email zero people have responded to it. Zero before when I was hand emailing people, like maybe 10 to 20% of people responded. So my professional looking welcome email with like a footer and branding seems to be turning people off.Michele Hansen  4:01  You can just do a plain text email. I think that's gonna be that there. That's more likely to get caught in a spam filter if it has graphics in it.Colleen Schnettler  4:09  Yeah, that's what I'm going to do. Because I was really surprised. I was like, Oh, I'm getting all these signups and these people are converting, not a single person has responded to an email.Michele Hansen  4:18  Plaintext tends to have better open rates than graphical email like this is why that most, if you've ever had them made the mistake of signing up for a political campaign's email list, you will notice that even the most well funded campaigns will have plain text emails. This is something the Obama campaign discovered and then just proliferated throughout the industry that the fewer images and formatting and everything in an email, the better open and response rates you're going to get from it because there's just fewer barriers to people getting the email and then you know, formatting and everything else in it. I send most of our especially feedback emails, I always send those out plain text.Colleen Schnettler  5:06  Yeah, I'm going to, that's my next step. Because I was really surprised to see such a poor response. Now, it's kind of a little bit funny, maybe not funny. So when I went to get my transactional email set up, for some reason, I got kicked out of Sendgrid. And that was just I don't really know what happened. So I'm actually sending it from my Gmail. So I don't have open rates right now. So I can't see how many people are actually opening it. But I am going to get that sorted out. And I like the idea of going plain text because no one is responding right now. So I have no idea why more people are converting I guess I should ask them.Michele Hansen  5:42  I think it's a, you know, it's a, an easy thing to fall into. On a recent episode, we talked about loss aversion and how human beings are so much more motivated to try to avoid losing money, rather than making money. And I think feedback really plays into that, because most companies asked for feedback when somebody cancels, or if they give you a negative NPS score, or something like that, but not as many companies ask for feedback from people who are happy, which, you know, trying to find more people who are are happy, like your your current happy customers with similar processes and needs is much easier than trying to fix all of the people who don't like it. Like that's a tough hill to climb.Colleen Schnettler  6:33  Yeah, so I definitely will reach out to those people. I guess one by you know, I'll just, there's only 17 people, I can just email them and ask them.Michele Hansen 6:43  Yeah.Colleen Schnettler  6:44  it seems like I get better responses. If I don't ask open ended questions in email.Michele Hansen  6:50  What are the questions you're asking?Colleen Schnettler  6:52  So my first email which I was hand typing, which got maybe 10 to 20%? response was, Hey, my name is Colleen. From simple file upload. Do you need any help installing the service? Question mark? Please let me know. Thanks. And that got some responses. So then I ...

Michele Hansen  0:02  So you remember a couple weeks ago how we were talking about competitors nipping at our heels?Colleen Schnettler  0:07  Yes.Michele Hansen  0:09  So, recently, we had a new competitor, enter the space. Colleen SchnettlerOoh, interesting. Michele HansenAmazon.Colleen Schnettler  0:18  Oh, no. That's fair. Michele Hansen  0:22  I mean, it's inevitable. Um, and we already compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft, and you know, all of these huge companies. So it's not, it's definitely not unexpected. Like, it's definitely been one of those. It's only a matter of time, things. But yeah, I, that that that happened, they launched their own location services. And, interestingly, they're just reselling to other providers, they're reselling s, ri, and here. And it's very focused on fleet management and asset tracking, which kind of makes sense based on what they're doing. Like, they're tracking packages and trucks and like, that's crucial to their operations. So it's almost kind of funny, because, you know, looking at that, and whenever people are asking about, you know, how do I bootstrap my own business? Like, where do I start? How do I get an idea? One of the most common pieces of advice and advice that I give is just start with something that you need yourself and go from there, which is what you have done. And it's also what Amazon has done here, too. So, so it's, like, I look at it, I'm like, Oh, this is clearly something they built for themselves, and now they're gonna have people paying for it definitely does, does a, you know, not a totally welcome surprise for us, right, because, um, fleet management and asset tracking is an important vertical for us, because it's expressly forbidden by some of the other major geocoder. So we do have an important amount of customers in those spaces, and overall, Amazon's pricing is much higher than us. But for asset tracking, it's, it's very favorable for that use case, because instead of paying per basically per ping from a GPS, imagine, like a truck might say, send back a GPS paying every 100 feet, for example, instead of paying every time for the new coordinates of that you only pay per asset. So you know, so I imagine we will lose some customers from this. But at the same time, what I think one of the great things about being in b2b SaaS, but especially the kind of space we're in, is that we're so diversified across industries, that we have tons of other verticals, in addition to fleet management and asset tracking. And it makes me really glad that I do that semi annual customer portfolio analysis, because I know exactly how much of our revenue is from that sector. And looking at this now and knowing Okay, there's this huge, well funded, competitor coming into the space. I can see pretty clearly like, how much revenue that directly puts at risk. But yes, certainly an interesting week.Colleen Schnettler  3:33  Yeah. So when you do your semi-annual customer portfolio, do you break up your customers by industry? Is that the purpose of that?Michele Hansen  3:43  Yeah. So basically, I look at our customers, as a portfolio, as an investor might look at, say, a mutual fund portfolio, for example. And I split it on a couple of different metrics. So I basically take the top 90% of revenue, and I look at the customers from it within that space. And I look at them by industry. So so there's like fleet management, but also say real estate or insurance, health care, things like that. By industry, I try to get a rough sense for company size. So that I can just kind of, you know, have a little bit more understanding there. And then just really trying to understand, okay, based on these different industries, like how much of our revenue is dependent on any one given industry, and should we think about diversifying whether we want a you know, a higher percentage of revenue in a particular category, we want new customers there, or do we want to purposefully pull back from a certain industry or simply just not emphasize it as much if we feel like there's too high of a concentration there, and also making sure that we don't have any high customer concentration and any one Given customer, so something an important metric for me is, you know, what are our largest customer, what percentage of overall revenue are there, they and basically making sure that that number is below 1%. And again, this also comes out of sort of investor style thinking where, you know, for example, if they're analyzing a company, and they see that a company has, say, 40% of its revenue coming from one particular customer, that's a huge red flag. Right? versus if it's highly diversified, then then let that's less of a risk. And yeah, that's, that's something I do about twice a year. And, and that's kind of one of those things are sort of had to create for ourselves, you know, I'm obviously not creating the concepts, but I think applying them in this way, is because, you know, as we've talked about a lot of the content out there on running a SAS is very much focused on growth and, you know, more well funded approaches to business that don't necessarily emphasize stability or profitability, or things like that. And so, rather than managing for growth, we manage for stability. And I find that this customer portfolio analysis is a really helpful tool for me. And, and matea stew in sort of like us communicating, okay, what are our priorities? And how do we create a more stable business and just kind of giving us a high level of that?Colleen Schnettler  6:37  So you do that as a manual process?Michele Hansen  6:40  Yes.Colleen Schnettler  6:41  So do you literally hand Google? Michele Hansen  6:44  It's because I'm a I'm a glutton for punishment, apparently,Colleen Schnettler  6:46  I know. Michele Hansen  6:50  You probably like the like the week, you know, the the week I spend on this every six months, I actually like genuinely is likeColleen Schnettler  6:56  your favorite. Yes.Michele Hansen  6:58  Making all my little pivot tables and everything and like, Oh, my gosh, I am. Yeah, it's actually really fun. Yeah, I basically just google them. And then, but a lot of them I've also had conversations with. So that's where I can fill out the rest of the picture to sort of so it's this combination of quantitative and qualitative information that we use for prioritizing. And, and this is really like kind of the first big moment I can think of where something happened. And my first thought was numbers from that analysis. And then it like made me feel better when when this happened.Colleen Schnettler  7:39  So when we talked about competitive analysis last week, the reason and this wasn't we were talking about Amazon, we were talking about some of your other competitors who had launched new features. And we talked about you guys competing on some very specific in some very specific areas. So with this Amazon launch, are you saying that now at least for the fleet management sector, you do not compete on price.Michele Hansen  8:09  So it's, it'll be it'll depend on the on the customer. So their price for pay as you go geocoding is much higher, they are $4 per 1000, versus we are 50 cents per 1000. If you want to store the data there, 50 cents per 1000, if you don't want to store the data, to anything, I read it more of a as a shot across the bow at Google than you know us. I mean, we're so small like that, you know, Amazon doesn't care about us, like, just kind of one of the nice things about being a bootstrap business. So of cour...

Colleen Schnettler  0:00  Welcome to Software Social. I'm Colleen. This week, Michele and I discuss my progress getting my first product, a file uploading widget to 100 users. Why 100 because I'm going to sell it in the Heroku add on store, and I need 100 users before I can start charging. We also do a deep dive into what makes a good customer interview. And Michelle gets really excited about something called Prospect Theory. Enjoy the show. So I'm excited to share my numbers with you this week. For the past couple weeks for those that are new. I have been sharing with Michelle the numbers of signup, the number of signups I have for my new widget simple file upload. And as of this morning, I have 47 active signups.Michele Hansen  0:45  Oh, it was like 31. Last time, right? Colleen Schnettler  0:50  Yeah. So I really think using this marketing channel of the Heroku add on store has been tremendous for me. That's awesome. Yeah, I'm super pumped. So it's interesting, though, because when I first looked on, when I first signed on to my admin dashboard, it said 75 teams, but then I have to cross reference that with the people who have deprovisioned or kind of like, ditched it. So I'm still seeing a lot of people click the button to sign up. And then deprovision the add on but still 47 isn't bad. I'm pretty pumped about that. That's almost halfway to my 100. I need to get to actually make it a viable product. Michele HansenYeah.Colleen Schnettler Yeah! So that's good news. I and I also spoke with someone who has a really successful add on in the marketplace. And he showed me this somewhat convoluted way where I can get the user's email address, even if they haven't gone through the single sign on process that I've mentioned in the past. So something I want to set up this week as I want to set up a wrapper so I can get the person's email address as soon as they provision the app and send them an email right away to see you know, if they're having any trouble setting it up, I think. I think that's where I'm losing people, but not that many people are communicating with me. So that's my best guess right now.Michele Hansen  2:10  So you said 47 current signups? Colleen SchnettlerYeah. Michele HansenOr current current user, so and then. So that's 16 new people since last time we talked. Do you have a sense for like, how many of those have have gotten to that, that crucial single sign on step and like, have actually added it to?Colleen Schnettler  2:30  Yes, so of those 47,34 have actually gone through the single sign on. So 34 might actually want to use it for real is how I look at that. Only 16 have actually started uploading images or not, I shouldn't say images files. So there's a pretty big gap between showing intent and actually using it. So I really want to work on closing that gap.Michele Hansen  2:57  Yeah, and it kind of makes sense to me that there would be a gap for that, when, in order to see how it works, people have to install it first versus services that you can see whether it works first, and then sign up for it, would have a lower drop off in that conversion.Colleen Schnettler  3:19  Exactly. One of the things I want to do -- I have a long list of things I want to do, but they're all small, but they are there is quite a long list. I want to put because the Heroku documentation has to be formatted in this really specific way to comply with the Heroku requirements. Once you single sign on, I have the documentation and what I consider to be a much more user friendly format. So one of the things I want to do is on my normal marketing site, I want to add the user friendly documentation. So someone can see the documentation before they install the add on to see if it's a good fit because I know I'm someone -- if I want to install like a piece of software. I want to see your docs first because I want to see how good they are. And I want to see how hard it really is and how it actually works.Michele Hansen  4:06  Yeah, that makes sense to me.Colleen Schnettler  4:08  I also -- in very like I haven't taken Amy Hoy's course but like in very I had, you know I subscribed to her email is in very Amy Hoy fashion. As we've discussed, I launched this with a lot without a lot of boilerplate things. And one of the boilerplate things I didn't have is I don't have transactional email setup. Which means what I've been doing is, every night I've been signing onto my admin dashboard, copying the email addresses of people who signed up to an Excel sheet, literally emailing each person, one by one from my support account in Gmail. So in the beginning, that was not too cumbersome. It enabled me to see exactly where they were in the process like have they added files have they not have added a lot of files and kind of customize the email but now that's getting way too cumbersome and time consuming. So one of the things I really need to get up this week is transactional email. Yeah, it doesn't even take that long. It's, I'm somewhat like I do it all the time. It's just, I find it very mundane, because it's a very boilerplate thing. But it's such a, it's not such a pain, but it's kind of a pain, right? And so I tend to procrastinate the boring things like, like maybe most people, I'm like, Oh, I want to work on this, this this other feature, that's going to be so great. Instead of set up transactional email, but I'm losing people, right? Because if I don't email if you sign up, and I don't email you for 24 hours, like your path, you're over it, you have already made that decision, like your motive when you think of like a human motivation, at least for me, if I want something I want right now. So if I sign up for your software, it's because I want to use it right now. So if I can't figure...Michele Hansen  5:50  So is this the welcome email?Colleen Schnettler Yeah, there's no welcome... Michele HansenHere like this as like, here's the documentation. And here's what you've signed up for. Like, gotcha, okay. Yeah, I think I could help like, I know, our URL. Like, I don't think we had welcome emails to start. And we also, I think we manually emailed everybody who signed up. But it was so good for feedback like that early feedback was really critical for us. And it was part like, Hey, here's your documentation. But also, like, let us know if you have any questions about getting set up. Or if there was, you know, if there's anything else you're hoping that we do that we don't like, let us know. And we can see if we can add it.Colleen Schnettler  6:27  Yeah, that's exactly where I am. So basically, not even well, I mean, it would be a welcome email. But I want to get that as soon as they sign up. I want to fire off that email. Like, here's how you contact me, here's how I can help you. Let me know what you need. Let's let's do this. And yeah, hopefully I'll get I'll get more engagement, if I catch people early in the process of provisioning the add on.Michele Hansen  6:52  Yeah, that I think that sounds like a plan. Colleen Schnettler  6:55  Yeah. Okay. Good plan. So let's talk a little bit about the people I've talked with, I mentioned that I've been doing customer interviews, which has been super fun, I'm really enjoying it. So I did a walkthrough with a friend who's a UI/UX designer, like a very senior designer. And he gave me some tips that I really took to heart. And I thought they were great. And so actually, this week, was mostly all technical stuff. This week, when I worked on

Michele Hansen  0:00  So we had kind of a wake up call this week.Colleen Schnettler  0:04  Oh, what happened?Michele Hansen  0:07  So we're looking at some of our competitors websites, and we realize either their employees don't have kids, or they don't care that their employees have kids or what, but they have gotten a lot more done this year than we have.Colleen Schnettler  0:24  Oh, okay. Michele Hansen  0:26  I mean, we feel good about what we've gotten done considering everything. But it was definitely kind of a moment of, whoa, okay. Like, you know, should you know, we have this information now, like, should we do something with this knowing that some competitors are nipping at our heels a little closer than they were a year ago?Colleen Schnettler  0:47  So what does it mean for them to be nipping at your heels? Are they releasing new features? Are they like, what exactly did you see that made you go, Oh, we need to up our game.Michele Hansen  0:58  So it's, it's partly new features, I think it's one of the most visible things, there's also some administrative type features, like, you know, certain compliance, and certifications. And you know, it with this kind of thing, though, you know, you have that first moment, it's like, oh, like, they now support something that they didn't before that we do. And so that makes us tighter competitors. But also remembering that we compete on so many different levels. And like, we have no one true one to one competitor, um, which, which I think is good for us. And it was, the other thing is like, we don't really pay much attention to our competitors, which I think is somewhat unique. Um, you know, I get the sense that that most companies, if you ask them to how they divide their mental headspace, and research time, and all of that between their competitors and their customers, I'm gonna bet that most companies are somewhere around at 20 in favor of looking at what their competitors are doing, what their features are, what their pricing is, you know, what their marketing is, like, all those kinds of things. And then 20% on the customers, and even like, really great companies that are known for focusing on their customers, which most truly great companies are, are probably more like 5050. And I think we're more like 9010 in favor of listening to our customers and letting them guide our roadmap. And then it's really maybe only once or twice a year that we really check in on what our competitors are doing.Colleen Schnettler  2:46  Okay, so you were checking out some of your competitor sites? And like, what's your reaction? Are you concerned? Are you worried, you're gonna start? Are you seeing, are you seeing higher customer churn? Because people are going to your competitors for these additional features?Michele Hansen  3:01  No, that's the thing. And our growth is, you know, perfectly healthy, it's, you know, beyond a level that that we, you know, sort of, quote, unquote, need. And so all of that is healthy, and we're really busy. So we're not worried about it. And I think that's what I have been thinking a lot about is okay, you know, we have this moment of we have this new information. And whenever we get new information, there is there's the question of, what do we do with this information? And the answer to that question can be nothing, we don't do anything different. Which I think is an under appreciated answer. In business many times, and old boss of mine was sort of famous for, you know, his do nothing approach. Because, you know, we're not going to sort of run around like chickens with our heads cut off to launch a new feature. When, you know, it turns out that oh, well, the competitors pricing model is actually not as customer friendly as ours, and based on some other things are, it's very clear, they're going after a different market segment than we are. And maybe there's a small percentage of customers that view us as a one to one comparison, but it's really very few customers who do, but it's a tricky thing, right?Colleen Schnettler  4:34  Yeah, I can definitely see that. So I was talking to a friend the other day about his last SaaS, which did really well, he grew it and he sold it for a good chunk of money. But he was talking about like the emotional upheaval every time a competitor launched. And I thought that was really interesting, because that's got to be like, you don't know what to do. Should you implement these features like there's got to be a lot of tension there in terms of how you approach this kind of new information you have?Michele Hansen  5:02  Yeah, and and what I tend to think about is, when I get those feelings, I pull it back to Okay, what what are the dimensions that we are truly competing on? And how many of those have really changed, and how many of those are present in this competitor, and how easy is it for this competitor, to replicate our model, because that's what makes a business unique is it you know, all the different things that go into it that make certain you know, price points possible for some companies that aren't possible for other ones, for example, you know, so we, we not only compete on the price itself, we also compete on the pricing model. So we have free tier daily free tier plus pays, you go plus subscription options. And then you know, all sorts of other more custom options after that. You know, some of our competitors are, for example, one of the major ones, they have a free tier per month, but you have to have a credit card on file. Some of them are much lower free tier per month, some of them have a free tier per day, but it's only for a three month period, like there's all and then like some of them have pays, you go on top of that some as we were talking about with you a couple of weeks ago, some of them maybe have paid you go on top of that, or they have subscriptions within a certain band on top of that, or they jump straight to enterprise after that. Um, and so the price and the pricing model are one way we can eat, then, of course, there's the the data itself, like so in our space, it's the coverage, you know, where US and Canada and some of our competitors are us only some of them are worldwide, but not at rooftop level. Some of them are rooftop, like some places rooftop some places not like all sorts of different things. And then also the different data appends that we have. So adding congressional districts, adding census data, all that kind of stuff, which most of our competitors don't have, only one has a couple of those things. So there's the data and the coverage. There's also things like the features. So we have an API, we also have the ability to upload spreadsheets, like massive spreadsheets, most of our competitors don't have spreadsheet upload support, most of them don't have batch geocoding support. And some of them actually expressly prohibit batch geocoding. Only one of them has some sort of spreadsheet support, but it's actually like copy paste, and it's very limited. And then there's also Terms of Service, which is probably the hardest one for anyone to replicate, which is our extremely permissive Terms of Use. And most of our competitors have very restrictive Terms of Use, and you know, you can't store the data, you can't reuse it, things like that. And so when we have a, you know, a new competitor Come on, or a new a competitor, add, you know, features or things like that, we're always thinking, Okay, like, how does this? Yes, there's that initial feeling of like, oh, oh, like, okay. But then what does that actually mean for us? And how does that change our competitive position? And usually, it's, you know, what, this, there's more competition, that's fine. We're still okay, we're ...

VOTE FOR US! SaaSPodcastAwards.comColleen's Heroku landing page: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/simple-file-uploadMichele Hansen  0:00  So I got a pretty exciting email yesterday. We were nominated for the MicroConf SaaS Podcast Awards!Colleen Schnettler  0:09  That's amazing. Michele Hansen  0:10  In three categories.Colleen Schnettler  0:13  Wow, that's so funny, Michele, because when we started this podcast, I was pretty sure no one was gonna listen to it except for me. So I can't believe like people listen to it. I feel like a little uncomfortable that people listen to it actually. Michele Hansen  0:30  Yeah, we kind of expected it would just be like our husbands and some close business friends of ours. I'm totally floored and surprised and so honored that people are listening, and you guys nominated us and really, really, genuinely touched by that. So it's kind of a fun thing that's going on. But there are also other fun things going on. With Colleen, because you're now in you know, the Heroku marketplace. There's people using it. And I think I saw you mentioned this week that you even got feedback from like somebody you don't know using it and they have something positive to say?!Colleen Schnettler  1:13  It's not my friend. Actually.Michele Hansen 1:16  that's always awesome.Michele Hansen  1:19  A total stranger using your thing. That's a milestone. Colleen Schnettler  1:20  That's a milestone. So I feel like this is just a really exciting time in terms of launching a product. So the product has been in beta, I think for about seven to 10 days. And as of this morning, 31 teams have signed up,Michele Hansen  1:38  Dude! Colleen SchnettlerYeah, but...Michele HansenYou're a third of the way there!Colleen Schnettler  1:41  Well, 31 teams have signed up, but they're not all right, that's true for the I have to get 100 like I'm a third of the way there. But what is interesting about this is the way the Heroku cycle works. So if you are in the Heroku marketplace, you're going to search for I don't know file upload, you see my you see my add on, you click a button to install it. Then, if you want your personalized instructions, you have to go to the dashboard for your application, and click on it again, in your application. And that's the single sign on. So they provision the application which they can use it without ever doing single sign on. But most people use single sign on because then the directions are personalized with their API key. So of those 31 people 13 have actually made it to single sign on. And of those 13. Six have actively uploaded files. So for like a week, I'm feeling really good about these numbers.Michele Hansen  2:42  Yeah,Colleen Schnettler  2:44  I think there's just a huge benefit to being in like using this marketplaces attraction channel, I think that is just been a huge benefit. Because I know so many people who have launched products, and they literally cannot get anyone to sign up. And that would be that would be tough. So basically, what I'm doing is I don't get a contact email until they hit single sign on. Now there's one team that never single signed on. And they're just using the documentation from the Heroku. Doc's so good for them. So I don't have contact information for them. But the other 13 I do have contact information for so I have hand emailed all 13 of those contacts of the 13. I emailed three have emailed me back. So that's pretty good. Not bad, right? I don't know. Like I myself tend to ignore emails. SoMichele Hansen  3:37  Like my feedback emails, I think the highest I've ever gotten the open rate to know the open rate is like something like 60%. But the reply rate is usually in the eight to 10% range. So that is good.Colleen Schnettler  3:51  Yeah. And I was just kind of asking, like, I just have an email. It's like, hey, do you need help setting it up? Let me know. So that's like, a really exciting first week. I mean, I feel like things are are going well, I've been hustling. Hold on. Wait,Michele Hansen  4:05  tell us what they said though. Like, don't skip that. I want to hear what these people had to say about it.Colleen Schnettler  4:12  So the first person had a feature request, which is like a totally reasonable request. The second person had the same feature request. And the third person. Yeah, I mean, it's okay. It's embarrassing. I shifted. Okay, now I have to tell you, so I shipped a file storage solution without giving you the ability to delete files.Michele Hansen  4:34  I mean, everything is a feature. Like we shipped a product without the ability to charge peopleColleen Schnettler  4:40  It seemed like like, everything is a feature. I'm not charging them. So you know, it's not like they're paying for it. If I was asking them to pay for it, then yeah, I would have let them I would have shipped it with the ability to delete. But since I'm not charging them it doesn't matter.Michele Hansen  4:57  But when really get feature requests, like explicit feature requests for something specific, are our processes always, you know, whatever it is we always capture it. And so how this works for us is we just create an issue and GitHub related to intercom, it's not the cleanest way to do it, but it works for us. And then if somebody else or like multiple people ask us for it, then we look into it. So it's pretty interesting that you've already had two people asked for the same thing. Now granted, as you say, it's a fairly table stakes kind of thing. But it's, it's always interesting when you have multiple people asking for something, because that is pretty clearly indicates interest.Colleen Schnettler  5:38  Yeah, so I'm obviously gonna add that. I mean, I didn't add it for a very specific reason. And the reason I didn't add it is because I'm concerned, like if a user drops up, if a user adds a file, like let's say they add their avatar, and then they add, drop it again. Now, I don't know, why would they would do that. But let's say they do. So let's say they drop the same file twice, that actually gets saved in my service as two different files, because I have no way to know that that's the same file, because the font because I don't want to overwrite file names, right? Because your file might name might be avatar, and mine might be avatar, so I'm not overwriting files. And so if that happened, the developer who's implementing it is going to be saving the most recent URL in their database, so they can access that file in the cloud. If they then go into their admin dashboard, and they see two of the same files, and they delete one, and they delete the one they have linked in their database, then they're no longer going to have access to that file. Does that make any sense? I feel like I need to like whiteboard that. But basically, there's a way where if two of the same, same images get uploaded, but the URLs are different. And they have one database URL, one URL in their database pointing to the file and they delete the wrong file, that file will then be gone.Michele Hansen  7:05  So you're trying to make it sort of human error? Yes, fault tolerant, right? Yeah, they would have, like a timestamp or something to help them differentiate between them, like someone who has, you know, a scren shot ...

Colleen Schnettler  0:00  So Michelle, I saw that you recently published a blog post a little bit about the founding of your company. And I haven't read it, because I want to hear the story fresh from you. And I, this is something I've actually wanted to talk to you about, frequently, and you've always kind of just been like, Oh, yeah, you know, we just started it. And then it just, you know, happened. So I'm super excited to dive into this with you, especially where I'm coming from, like, where it seems so far away to have a successful SaaS. So tell us a little bit about how you guys got started?Michele Hansen  0:31  Yeah, this is something I get questions about, all the time. And I wanted to dive into the story and the numbers a little more. Because I think that's helpful for people when they're getting started, like yourself, to see that you don't have to have success the first day, or the first month, or the first three months or four, six months, really in order to make something work. And then also that if something, you know, does okay, but not great, you can always chase that and snowball it into something else.Colleen Schnettler  1:10  So how did you guys get started? What was your very first product?Michele Hansen  1:15  Well, my very first product? Or our very first product?Colleen Schnettler  1:18  I don't know what gave you the bug, like, let's go back, just let's talk about about you. Michele HansenOh!Colleen SchnettlerWhat was your first, like, What gave you the bug?Michele Hansen  1:25  So, so this actually, this isn't in the post, but my first business, if you can call it that was basically a blog that I started with friends, my freshman year of college, we called it an online magazine. And the whole idea of it was college kids from around the country, with different perspectives on politics, all writing about politics together and collaborating together. And that was really one of the first things that introduced me to running something online, in a sort of organized way, because I had little projects before, like, you know, we also started a satire blog at one point, but like, we didn't put our names on it. And it was very much for fun. And like that project, talking about how to use Blogger, and then this other one that we launched, that was a bit more serious, and like something we ended up putting on our resumes, was on WordPress, and just how it happened was I ended up being the person doing all the WordPress admin. So managing the site, and, you know, customizing templates and stuff like that, um, you know, my introduction to coding was MySpace. So HTML, you know, for a certain generation of us was a key skill as a teenager. And that carried over, but I think those projects, my freshman year of college really gave me the bug of like, you create something, and then you get a, like, a reaction from people. And you, people tell you, they enjoyed it. And then and then, you know, just kind of keeps you going like that. And then actually, a year later growing, though, so that blog actually never made any money. We had ads on it, but then I don't know, something happened. And it didn't work out. And we didn't make money. Um, but then we actually ended up turning it into a consulting firm, like a social media consulting firm. So that was when I was 20.Colleen Schnettler  3:39  I mean, that was 2010 ish. So that was like before, that was a big thing, right? Social media consulting wasn't the powerhouse it is now.Michele Hansen  3:47  Yeah, it really wasn't as well. And so what are our angle was, was reaching out to PR firms that were, you know, very experienced in PR, but didn't know how to use Facebook and Twitter. And that was really where I earned some more business chops, in terms of like, actually, like operating a business and writing proposals and pitching and doing sales and things like that. You know, I'd had a little bit of experience with that, like, you know, when I was a kid, my mom had an art business, and I would spend Saturdays as a teenager helping her sell her art at art and craft shows. But really, in a kind of, you know, a context that is the closest to now, it really wasn't until college. And then we actually made money doing that, but then shut down the business about six months later, because basically, the purpose of the business was to allow us to skip several layers of terrible internships and get to the ones we wanted, faster. So there is an exit strategy from the beginning. And, and so actually, by the time that we made the, Mathias and I made the products that ended up being the one that funded Geocodio, that was actually my third business. Okay. And I think all of those little experiences, you know, really added to just having more comfort with what it takes to launch a product, even if those other efforts were not quite as organized, or structured, as at you know, as the as the projects that Mathias and I have launched together.Colleen Schnettler  5:38  Yeah, yeah, well, even you were talking about, you know, back in your college days, like reaching out to ad agencies and things like that, like, for a lot of us who are just starting businesses, this is the first time we've had to do any kind of software sales or sales. Really, I was thinking about that today. Because this is just something that like, I don't do a lot, like, I'm comfortable with people, and I like to talk to people, but like, I'm basically cold emailing everyone who has signed up for my service, to be like, Hey, can I help you? And that's like, a little thing, but just, it's still outside my comfort zone. So you starting those lessons 10-15 years ago, you know, they just compound I'm sure to bring you guys to where you are today.Michele Hansen  6:20  Absolutely. I mean, it's totally useful, you know, on Mathias aside to his early projects, one of which was the precursor to when the first one we launched together, you know, he was funding those because he was a magician as a child. And so he had his, like, he was running his own business, like, as of the age of seven or so eight, was when he started performing magic. And so he always had that money to fund, you know, other projects that he wanted to do, or, you know, buying the latest and greatest tools and whatnot. Yeah, it's not just the most recent business, it's a history of having that, as you said that that bug of "Hey, like, this is, this is fun, and I can do it." And also, like, making a ton of mistakes in the process, like accidentally not monetizing our blog. I mean, it was or like, I think we did, but then, you know, some of our friends, like, we had ads on it. And some of our friends knew that if they clicked on them, we would get money. And so they clicked on them. I think we got shut down for having like, suspicious clicks on them or like something else going on. Like, you know, I mean, we were like 19 and idiots. And, you know, but you know, it introduced me to things like that. And it got me you know, more comfortable using a modern web tools like WordPress.Colleen Schnettler  7:54  Yeah. So then you guys, you and your husband decided you wanted to start something. And you just use the phrase, the thing that launched Geocodio. So can you tell us a little bit more about that? What was that?Michele Hansen  8:06  Yeah. And you make it sound like we just had this idea one day, and we're like, oh, like we're going to launch thing something. And the reality is, is that we were pregnant. And...

Colleen Schnettler  0:00  So one of the things I kind of wanted to talk about was a few weeks ago on the podcast, I sat here and I told you that what I really want is a job where I only have to work nine to five. And I bring that up. Michele HansenYeah?Colleen SchnettlerI seems great. But my husband totally called me out on this, he pointed out that I have had jobs where I've only had to work nine to five, and I have quit them all. Michele HansenReally?Colleen SchnettlerYes. And so it just got me thinking, you know, as I go on this journey, and I, I tried to get my mental, like my headspace aligned for what I want to do in the future, I really don't want to go back to a corporate job, I think about this side project thing that I'm doing as something that like, I'm trying, and if it doesn't work out, I'll go back to a regular job. But I don't want to do that, like ever. So I think that's just an important like mental space for me to be in like, this is what I want to do, I want to build a business. And so you know what this might be a huge failure. But that doesn't mean I'm going to give up and I'm fortunate and that I can consult like fill in the gaps until I get there. So I follow this VC on Twitter, her name is Elizabeth Yin, and she had this great Twitter thread about marketing and, you know, starting a business, and one of the things she talked about is like, if you're an entrepreneur, that that is a career and some people you know, you can get five to 10 chances to get it right. And sometimes you can be brilliant and get it wrong. And sometimes you can be not so great and get it right. So you just have to keep trying. But for me, that's a total mental shift of how I think about this process. Like, instead of thinking of this as a thing I do in my free time that might work out, I'm changing my mindset to like, this is the thing I want to do. And right now I can't afford it to do more than I can't afford to do it more than in my air quotes free time. But long term like this is the path I want to be on. So I just wanted to share that because I thought that was like important that, you know, as we go through this process.Michele Hansen  2:00  I remember pre-pandemic, you were working on your consulting Monday to Thursday. And then you were devoting Fridays to side projects, getting your own business going. So it was like, like an 80-20 split between consulting and I'm curious, has that shift? I mean, shifted in the last couple of months? Since you you really started focusing on your in an image management service? Colleen Schnettler  2:29  Yes, it really has, I think one of the things, you know, almost all developers will say is like software is harder than everyone thinks it is. And it's just like, all of these things you have to do. And you have to do. So I would say I've almost shifted that balance. I'm doing 80% file uploader and 20% consulting, maybe, you know, probably something like that. Maybe two days a week, I'm doing consulting. But I really, the thing is, I think it's important, remember, like, I really enjoy it. Like I really like this side project, I'm really having a good time. And I'm really learning a lot. And so yeah, it's just, I've just been giving it a lot of time. And I feel like you know, that's something if I'm going to try it, I'm going to try it. So that's what I'm doing.Michele Hansen  3:16  Something I hear in your voice is how excited you are about what you're working on. And when you mentioned your conversation with your husband about the times you had a nine to five job and how much you hated them, it sounds like there was no passion there. And so yes, the hours are important, but it sounds like something you value is being challenged. And it sounds like you weren't getting any of that challenge or excitement or newness in those nine to five jobs or even really the responsibility maybe that that comes with running your own project, which, you know, we all know in large corporations, it's the hard thing to find.Colleen Schnettler  4:03  Yeah, I totally agree. And it, it really hit home for me that what I really want is -- I mean if I had to pick between being bored and being stressed, but like being challenged, I would pick stressed and challenged. I mean, for me that's that's just who I am. That's what I want. I can relatively I don't wanna say easily, but like relatively, you know, painlessly get a job and that's just not what I want, at least for now. At least, you know, for as long as I see it for the next couple years. I have time. Right there's all this internet propaganda that makes it seem like if you don't have you don't start a business and you're not successful in a year, it's never gonna work for you. And like I have time you know, I can just keep keep working on it until something works.Michele Hansen  4:48  I think it's really an advantage is having time and being able to be patient, and I saw that Twitter thread you mentioned as well. And you know what stuck out to me from that is that is that your first business may not be your, your business for the long haul, right? And you know, I was actually just writing about this, how we snowballed small mobile app into Geocodio and basically funded it with that. That mobile app made 20 cents its first month.Colleen Schnettler  5:22  Wow.Michele Hansen  5:24  I know. It's impressive, right. And if we had been set on quitting our full time jobs as soon as possible, we would not have had the patience to go through basically the year and a half it took to get that up going, that app making enough revenue that then we are exposed to the problems that led us to creating Geocodio and then that app funded you Geocodio and then eventually that app [was] surpassed Geocodio. Do. But if we had been impatience, that would not have happened, but at the same time, you know, sort of what you said we were excited by it. Colleen SchnettlerYeah. Michele HansenIt was thrilling in a way that we weren't really getting from the rest of our work. And that excitement was enough to carry us through even when the revenue maybe wasn't there. Colleen Schnettler  6:21  Yeah. So last week, we talked about me making this software available off of Heroku. Because Heroku is going to make me wait till I have 100 users before I can start charging for it. So remember you, you told me I need to figure out if anyone's going to actually pay for it, which is great advice. Great advice. So I actually sat down. So last week, I kind of like talked in generalities about pricing, but I actually like sat down and tried to figure out how much to charge. And I have no idea like, No, I can't. So I looked at these other competitors. And there's like no consistency in their pricing. I'm -- like, I have no idea. So you have to have the people we talked about are like the big image management companies and their first tier are at $89 and $45, respectively. But there's also an add on on the Heroku marketplace now. The guy just resells S3 buckets. So he doesn't help you upload your files, he literally just gives you an S3 bucket. And he starts at $5. So I feel like there's this huge range. I have no idea like, how should I start with this?Michele Hansen  7:35  You have some people you've talked to who asked you if you're planning to make this available off Heroku? Colleen Schnettler Yes.Michele HansenHave you asked them what they are currently paying for this, whether that's a service or simply a three are their time? Like, have you gotten a sense of that...

Colleen SchnettlerHey Software Social listeners! Colleen here. For their first time ever, MicroConf is putting on a SaaS podcast awards. Michele and I would be so honored if you would nominate us at saaspodcastawards.com! And here's today's show.Michele Hansen  0:02  So I think I already know what the title of this week's episode is going to be.Colleen Schnettler  0:08  Oh, that's funny, because I don't know, please tell me.Michele Hansen  0:12  See, normally we don't decide on the title until I've loaded everything into Transistor and cleaned up the transcript and everything else. But I think today is going to be the pricing episode.Colleen Schnettler  0:24  Ooh, that sounds fun. Michele Hansen  0:27  Because you were saying last week, do you want to talk about pricing today? Right.Colleen Schnettler  0:30  I did say that. But I don't know if I'm quite ready yet. Michele Hansen  0:34  Well, it's been on my mind a lot this week. So there's actually can't it kind of came out of a conversation I was having on Twitter yesterday. And just talking about specifically talking about what to do when you raise prices, and and how to treat customers who would win with you for a long time versus business needs to change pricing models or, or increased prices. And then, of course, something that happened recently, which is a company that many of us use, raising their prices on us. And so all of this got me thinking about ways of dealing with prices, and how pricing model itself can be an advantage over competitors, especially entrenched competitors. And then also how there's a lot of advice about pricing. And I think all of that needs to be couched in the specifics of your own business and your own understanding of your customers. So the context here is that stripe is raising prices on their subscriptions product. So basically, you can use, you know, stripe to create your payments. And if you have products set up as subscriptions now, previously, their subscriptions API was free. And when it was announced, I think in 2018, or so the announcement they sent out was basically that it was going to be free forever, and just included in the product. And then this morning, um, this just showed up on Hacker News. I mean, maybe it was yesterday that the post actually went up. And I just saw today that they're now going to be charging a point 5% fee on any subscription, which doesn't sound like a lot. But if you extrapolate that out to making, you know, 1000 hundred thousand a million a year like that, that adds up very quickly. And I think something that's really rubbing people the wrong way is first of all, they told people at the get go that this was going to be included and that they weren't going to charge for it. And second of all, that we never even got an email about it. And we're just finding out about it on Hacker News. Yeah. And so this actually ties into a conversation I was having with Simon Bennett of snap shooter on Twitter yesterday about this sort of idea of quote, unquote, grandfathering pricing. And I say, quote, unquote, grandfathering, by the way, so I know this is the term that people generally use. But we stopped using that term this summer. Because the concept of grandfathering, that the term comes from, after the Civil War states instituting voting policies that said you could only vote if your grandfather could vote. So which basically disqualified former slaves and their descendants from voting, and I always thought this was just like, one, like, one way the term had been used and wasn't like the origin of it. And so like, you know, once we found that out, we we change the term, how we talk about it to be loyalty discount, which I also think really more communicates what you're giving the customer and makes them feel good about themselves, rather than thinking about relatives and stuff like that. Um, so anyway, so So Simon was talking about this, because he's saying, you know, I've left so much money on the table by by giving these loyalty discounts by by not raising prices on on old customers, and we're sort of, you know, talking about, but you can get value out of that and other ways like, like as a SaaS company, it's so valuable to have long term, customers who will reliably renew like that, you know, they're already on boarded with your product, the support volume is much, much lower. They like you, they're presumably happy with your product. You know, those are the customers we reach out to when new customers are looking for our customer reference, which especially happens with bigger companies. So, so I want to bring like two different resources that kind of helps us think about this, but then also how we think about them differently. So one of those is an article by Amy hoy, which I feel like I referenced her so much on this podcast that like we have to have her on.Colleen Schnettler  5:09  Aren't you guys friends? Michele Hansen  5:11  Like Twitter friends? Yeah, I think we like met at MicroConf. Um, yeah, through the twitterverse. So this article, such a great title, One Weird Trick to Raising your Monthly Price Without a Customer Revolt, which is basically what Stripe is looking at right now. And you know, Hacker News is full of people saying, you know, should we migrate off of stripe like up like, all this kind of stuff. So in this article basically goes through, like, you know, you see a company raised prices, there is a revolt, it scares you away from raising prices. The problem with that is that companies may need to raise prices, especially the situation you're in right now, where you may pray something right now. And then it turns out as you learn more about your customers, and what their cadence of needs are, and, and how you know how their behavior needs to be matched with a pricing model, you may need to change things in six months, or a year from now or two years from now, whether that's the actual pricing model itself, or the price levels. And so how do you do that in a way without making people revolt. And so one of the key points she makes, you know, here is that it is possible to raise prices without a revolt, like you don't have to be afraid of that. And there's a good way to do this, I think the way stripe has done it is not a good way, which is raising the prices on something people are already using for free, and then not telling them about it, those are two strikes against you. One of the most popular ways of doing this, which I think Bugsnag is doing. I think I think we're just talked about this a couple weeks ago, and we I mean, Mathias and I, is that you basically get locked out of new features, so you can keep your price for forever. And I think Basecamp does this as well. But you don't get new features, you don't get new functionality. And so you know, eventually, you know, the percentage of their actual product that you're using is lower and lower and lower. But if you're only doing simple things with a product, and you're happy with the price you're paying, and you don't need more, that can be a really good thing. Another thing is, you know, like designing new plan levels, so you change those those different levels. And, but I think the really important thing to hear, to think about here, you know, your job as a founder, whether that's one who is just starting out or, or like me, or someone wh...

Michele Hansen  0:01  Can I ask you an honest question?Colleen Schnettler  0:03  Of course, I love honest questions.Michele Hansen  0:05  Did you actually get any work done this week?Colleen Schnettler  0:09  Oh, my goodness. So it has been very challenging. For me to focus this week, I've really struggled with it. How about you?Michele Hansen  0:19  Between, you know, all of the checking Twitter and phone banking and everything else that has consumed this week. I have gotten some things done, though. Weirdly enough, things that require deep thinking and are complicated and less so tasks, which is really surprising because for me, as an ADD person, I tend to find that it's easier for me to churn out tasks when I'm having trouble focusing rather than thinking through something complicated, but instead, my brain is doing the opposite. And everything is just crazy this week.Colleen Schnettler  1:01  Yeah, I have found that I did better this week, like a deep work as well. I mean, I ended up working almost every night this week. And it was partially because I felt like it, but I think a lot of that too, was just like to give me something to focus on, so I didn't have to worry about everything else going on.Michele Hansen  1:21  I admit I've been spending more time on hobbies this week too. On Tuesday afternoon, I ended up spending a couple of hours sewing masks with my daughter because I just I couldn't be anywhere near a computer. Like I knew that if I was at my computer, ostensively replying to emails and everything else I would be looking at the news constantly. But so that thinking I did do, is was working through this big, complicated thing that we're dealing with right now that some listeners have asked us about, which is this whole moving to Denmark thing.Colleen Schnettler  1:56  That's big. Yeah, it's a big deal.Michele Hansen  1:58  Yes. And a big deal of that is how it relates to the business, both how it relates to our US business, and then setting up a business here. So one of the big things to figure out is like, obviously, our business address needs to change, right. So before it was our house, it can't be our house anymore. So one of the tools we're going to use, which seems like a lot of people who are running remote companies who are US citizens, but outside the country, or even non US citizens running from outside the country, a tool called Earth Class Mail, which I hadn't heard of until six months ago and has been so awesome. And you basically just get a mailbox, you can send things to. Some of them are PO boxes, some of them look more like a real address, you know, like a suite number instead. But the big thing we're trying to figure out, which relates to the mail, too, is our incorporation in the US and whether we have to change that.Colleen Schnettler  3:00  Yeah, this seems like a really complicated topic. So your mail, your Earth Mail, is that a PO box in Denmark that you physically access? Or is it just like a fake address to use on business documents?Michele Hansen  3:12  So it's a virtual address that we use to receive mail both personally and business in the US. So we're having...Colleen Schnettler  3:20  But where does the actual mail go? Where does the physical mail do it? Michele Hansen  3:24  So it goes to a PO box in DC, and then it actually gets shipped to Earth Class Mail's facility in Beaverton, Oregon, and then they scan it. So we basically get all of our mail as email. So whenever someone sends us a letter, or even like, we can even deposit checks like that, like it'll scan the contents of an envelope and tell us when there's a check in it. And then we can deposit it. And it you know, I mean, it takes like a week or two, but it's like, other than that, what would we do? So currently, that's going to DC, but our business is registered in Virginia. And so what I've been trying to figure out is do we need to stay incorporated in Virginia? Or do we need to go through the process of dissolving our Virginia Corporation and then reincorporating in another state that is more friendly for remote businesses?Colleen Schnettler  4:19  Okay, first question, do you have to be incorporated in the United States at all?Michele Hansen  4:24  Yeah, I think for a lot of the services we use, like in our insurance and everything else, like it makes sense to probably -- what we're going to do is have a US company, and then just have a Danish subsidiary, but basically only for payroll purposes. That is at least according to our Danish accountants, though, our conversations with them have been somewhat delayed because our accountant and her entire family got COVID.Colleen Schnettler  4:45  Oh!Michele Hansen  4:46  She's doing better now. Thank God. Yeah, it's been. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't hear from her for a couple of weeks. And we're like, why? And then, oh, my gosh, and we felt like absolutely terrible for wondering why she hadn't followed up with us.Colleen Schnettler  5:00  So my first question not knowing a lot about taxes or business and corporations, why wouldn't you incorporate in a state like Florida that doesn't have state taxes? So that's income tax, isn't it?Michele Hansen  5:10  Yeah. So that's, that's personal income tax. I mean, so so this, this decision matters. What you decide to do is different based on your situation, because we're in Denmark, and we're going to be end up paying so much in taxes here that we're not going to have any US tax liability, it doesn't really matter a lot, we still have to file taxes, but you know, that the tax rate here is, you know, starts at 42%, basically. So, um, so actually was the way I looked into this, right. So, so in Virginia...Virginia has two really annoying taxes for businesses. So the first one is the business tangible property tax, where they will tax every piece of equipment that you use for the business. For us, that meant desk chairs, and desks and computers and everything else, and you have to pay sales tax on those every year. However, we won't have any physical presence in Virginia. So that won't be a problem. The other one we've been trying to figure out is, do we have to pay the what is called the B Paul tax or the business professional, an occupational licensing tax, which was instituted to pay for the war of 1812. And is still here? Colleen Schnettler Wow. Michele HansenYes, yeah. It's actually it's really funny. Like, looking into the into all of the rules for that tax. It lists out all the possible Aki occupations. And town crier is listed as one of the possible occupations. Wow, he just says a lot. And the most grating thing about that tax is that it's a gross receipts tax, which means it's based on total revenue, so you don't get to deduct your expenses from it. Now, of course, the tax rate is very low as because it's such a broad tax. But this is also why economists hate this tax. Because it's so broad and was supposed to be for a war 200 years ago, and it's just stuck around magically. Trying to figure out if we would still be liable for this, if we're incorporated in Virginia. Seems like maybe not. But just in case, I've been kind of running down some rabbit holes of, to your question, should we change our state of incorporation, which is a process. And so I consulted a couple of different places for this. And one that I found kind of helpful, is the service called

Michele Hansen  0:00  So last week, Colleen, you said something to me that really seemed to resonate and jump out at a lot of our listeners. And that was that you aspire to have a business that is in the position that our business is in, but that you don't want our lifestyle.Colleen Schnettler  0:23  Yeah, so I felt a little bit like a jerk when I was editing the podcast. And I heard myself say that, and I almost cut it out. But it's true. And I'd love to discuss some of that with you. Because kind of my vision is what I want as a solo founder is pretty specific. And you guys seem to be in a whole different place than what I envision my success looking like.Michele Hansen  0:49  Yeah, and I would love to talk about that. And I'm so glad you didn't cut it out, because it was echoing in my head all weekend. And I really appreciated your honesty about that.Colleen Schnettler  1:02  Okay, if you say so. Still feel mean!Michele Hansen  1:06  I appreciated it. And it really seems to resonate with a lot of people listening to that. The fit of founder and business and lifestyle is so important. And I think you this is something that is worth diving into, because it's not just about the founder and the business fit, having the expertise and the sort of know how and you know, environmental knowledge and whatnot to make a business happen. It's also about having a business that fits the kind of lifestyle that you have, or that you want. And you know, Lord knows I hate the term lifestyle business. Right. But that is one of the things about this is you basically get to choose in a way, what kind of life you're going to have. And I think that applies even if you have a corporate job, right? Like, do you want a lifestyle where you are flying to a client site four days a week and barely see your kids? Like, that's a lifestyle, that's a lifestyle choice. Do you want a business where you're home, but you are maybe managing email over dinner, which you may do as a solo founder, or you may do working in a corporate job somewhere. I think this is really worth diving into and the fact that like my business, and then the way we run our business may not be something that you want. And in an environment where we're conditioned to look at other people. And there's this expectation that if people are successful, everyone wants to emulate what they do. That's not always the case. And we need to leave way more space as a culture and as a group of people that one person's success is not somebody else's success, and may even from a certain perspective look like failure because of compromises they're making in order to get to that success.Colleen Schnettler  3:20  Sure. So my first question for you is, I feel like Geocodio kind of built up around your family. And it seems like, you know, you guys got on a trajectory where things moved pretty quickly. After you got a foothold in the market. What do YOU want? Like if you could go back and and think about how you would design your business that fit into your life that provided you the opportunities you you want, like, what would that look like for you?Michele Hansen  3:53  That's a really interesting question. I've never thought about that. I think partly because, you know, I wonder if we had changed something, maybe things wouldn't have worked out as they did. Like, there's certainly things along the way that were difficult. But I don't know if, if I would choose to not do those things or do things differently. I will say that we -- Yeah, we it has grown up around our family. You know, we launched the business when our daughter was four months old. A big reason why we even got started launching our side projects in the first place is because we had the bejesus scared out of us looking at the cost of daycare. I mean, it's more expensive than college in a majority of states. And you know, being pregnant and realizing that got us us supposed to be like, we can't be spending our weekends watching Game of Thrones anymore like we got to start launching stuff because...ColleenYeahMichele Hansen  4:45  this is this is you know, we're gonna be pretty close to paycheck to paycheck without something else happening, you know, and, and I remember just like us talking to each other and being like, we can kill it at work, but we're Still not going to get the kind of raises we would need in order to comfortably afford, you know, $20-25,000 a year in daycare alone, plus all the other expenses that go with having a child. Like, it's like we knew it would be expensive, but what can we just, you know, until we started researching it, like, we just didn't have a concept for how bad it would be. And, and you know, that first year, like, I don't even know how much we made, but I think it was barely enough so that we didn't get charged a maintenance fee on our business bank account. So not very much. So we see we wasn't at the point where we're really making that, you know, quote, unquote, like, daycare level amount of money for a while. Um, yeah, our family absolutely grew up around it. And I think I probably would have given myself more permission to not feel like things had to be handled immediately. In terms of like customer support, things like that were happening at night or dinnertime. But at the same time, for every time that there was something blowing up on Intercom that we need to deal with during dinner, there was something blowing up on Slack at our regular day jobs that was also getting in the way of family life. I don't think our business has gotten in the way of family life more than a, quote unquote, full time job would in fact, I think it's much more flexible, because it means we can take time off or you know, snow days aren't as much of a big deal, of course, I mean, lockdown was just awful for everyone. I mean, I guess now we sort of stare it down again. But I feel like I'm rambling.Colleen Schnettler  6:45  So try this on for size. So you've done that. And now you're in this position where you have said to me privately and on this podcast, like growth is not really a primary motivator, you don't want to be acquired, you don't really care how quickly you're growing. So what do you want now? So you kind of done the hard like trenches work to get you in a comfortable position? Like, are you are you happy with the status quo? Like, do you have ambitions to if it's not to grow to work less? Or what are you thinking now.Michele Hansen  7:20  So we do have goals, they're just not other people's goals that you would normally hear about, I guess. So I set some goals last year after doing my sort of semi-annual customer analysis from from a high level of our data. So basically, I, I look at all of our customers like a portfolio. And then I evaluate that based on industry and company size. And some other factors, just basically just like an investor would a stock portfolio, and try to see how it's balanced, you know, making sure that we're not getting too much of our revenue from one individual customer, or even from the top 90%, or the top 80% of customers. And so trying to manage for different risks that way, is more how I think about goals. We will have goals based around industry. So for example, this time last year, maybe like last summer, looking at our portfolio of customers, I realized, like 20% of our customers were in real estate. And I felt like that was too much. And so, no, it wasn't purposely going to try to get rid of those customers or anything like that. But instead, I was like, you know, I would like to focus on some industries that are maybe more stable than real estate and try to focus my marketing efforts and sales efforts on industries that are more stable than real estate. So we made a co...