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Colleen Schnettler  0:00  So for those who are just joining us, I am in the process of building my first software business. It is a small software widget that I am trying to sell. And so right now it's invitation only in the Heroku marketplace. So I was sharing this idea I have, and it's a product, with a friend of mine. And he brought up an interesting point. And I don't think of what I'm building as a commodity, right? We all want to feel special. But at the end of the day, I am repackaging cloud storage and selling cloud storage. So we were discussing, moving to a low a more low cost storage provider. And the storage providers claimed to have S3 compatible API's, of course, like it didn't, it wasn't really compatible. So I'm trying to determine if it's worth my time to sort it out. I mean, these guys are so much cheaper than AWS. And there's two big players in this space right now, in the file management space, they can't move to a low a lower cost storage provider, right? They're like entrenched, but if I do it now, then I can just be cheaper than everyone else.Michele Hansen  1:13  That can be an advantage.Colleen Schnettler Right? Michele HansenEspecially in a commodity space.Colleen Schnettler  1:17  Right? So I again, like I don't like to think I'm a commodity, but really, it's like cloud storage with a bow on it. Right? Like, I'm like -- Michele HansenIt's okay to be a commodity. We're a commodity.Colleen Schnettler  1:23  it doesn't feel special. I guess you are.Michele Hansen  1:28  There's some businesses that are commodities. And I think it's just knowing what you are, and then knowing how to compete in that space, right. And in a commodity business, if you have an operational cost advantage over the competitors, even if those competitors are huge companies, then that can be an advantage that you can build on.Colleen Schnettler  1:52  Yeah, and I think like these, these low-cost storage providers, they just released these S3 compatible API's, like last year. So I feel like this is kind of a untapped opportunity is that no one is really, as far as I can tell, no one's wrapping them up and reselling them yet. And they're much cheaper. So AWS, you're looking at point, you're looking at two cents a gig on AWS on this other provider, you're looking at .005 cents a gig, Michele HansenWow.Colleen SchnettlerA lot cheaper. Of course, you know, when you don't have a lot of storage, like I don't right now. It's like, Oh, it's like $5 versus $3. But if I want to really be a storage provider, like this could be a cool opportunity. And I was thinking about the solutions that are already out there are very, very image heavy. And I had been thinking that way, because I approach this problem as an image problem is well, but there seems to be a hole in the market for other file types.Michele Hansen  2:47  Like PDFs, CSVs, and stuff? Colleen Schnettler  2:50  Yeah, there's doesn't seem to be anyone kind of like helping or optimizing for -- Yeah, I mean, someone, the person I was on a call with wants to host static webpages on it, custom 404 pages. So there seems like there might be an interesting hole in this space to handle non image files. And to handle image files at a cheaper price point. I've been kind of thinking is like, I'm like the Southwest of image management, the airline, like bare bones, I don't resize your images for you. I don't give you user crapping on the front end, but I deliver a simple service with no frills. And it's easy to implement.Michele Hansen  3:27  I think that's a good place to start. And you're kind of reminding me of where we started with Geocodio -- even when you said Southwest, you know, my first thought was not airlines. But you know, deserts and our branding from the beginning was Geocodio, rhymes with rodeo and we had all of this Southwest style branding. If you can find a way to be cheaper than everybody else, and be easier than everybody else like that worked really, really well for us and then differentiating into other adjacent categories that are neglected by major providers. And the way someone described this to me once, you know, I was like, "Well, what if you know, one of the big companies add that adds this and then we're out of business?" If you're doing a business, that's $500,000 a year, a million dollars a year, that's not a big enough opportunity for the big companies to go after it. And if there are people in that space who have something they need, and they're not satisfied by the option, the current options, and you can build a business that makes a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. That is a great income for a one person company and not really big enough to be a threat to any larger company so that they might go into your space, it can be a good spot to be in.Colleen Schnettler  4:49  Yeah, that would be an amazing spot to be in. So the only thing I have a little bit of a psychological block here because I have worked on the technical side of this for quite a while now. And now I have to potentially learn a new API to integrate with these third party storage providers. And I'm just like, I started doing it yesterday. And I was just like, I don't want to, like I'm tired. So convince me that it's worth it. It's worth it to do now. Right? Like I should do it.Michele Hansen  5:16  Well, let's talk about the downsides too.Colleen SchnettlerYeah. Michele HansenSounds like your brain is in downsides mode. So one of the risks here is a vendor lock in risk, right? Colleen SchnettlerYeah.Michele HansenLike, if you switch vendors. Colleen SchnettlerYes. Michele HansenBecause they're six times cheaper, if they raise their prices by six times, that creates a lot of risk for you that one of these vendors, raising their prices, or changing their policies, like you are dependent on another company to make your company happen. Now, there's a lot of people who build their companies off of another company's platform. But you're, you're creating substantial risk there.Colleen Schnettler  6:03  But I have the same risk if I stay on AWS, and I feel like AWS is way more likely to raise their prices, because everyone is locked. Not everyone. But they have such a lock on people, right? Because they feel more reliable. I was actually looking at the stats. So my first thought was, maybe these other cloud storage providers aren't, don't have the same kind of uptime AWS does, but they do! People act like AWS has 100% uptime. And they don't always so they just have this reputation because they're the biggest player in this space. But either way, I've got a lock in, right, like I can't, I mean, I can't, I'm going to do a probably a mirror service. So I'll use two storage providers to help but ultimately, my primary storage provider is going to be locked in. I think one of the concerns, though, is these companies. I mean, they've been around for a while, like they're not materializing out of thin air. But as I mentioned, they've only had these S3 compatible API's for like a year. So I'm putting a lot of trust in a company that doesn't have the AWS level reputation.Michele Hansen  7:02  And that's another risk too. Like, we get this question, sometimes from customers too, right, because they're like, why would we go with you over a big company? Like, how do we know you're not just going to shut down tomorrow? Colleen SchnettlerYeah. Michele HansenAnd when I dive deeper into that question, oftentimes something that's driving that fear is, they have integrated a critical vendor,...

Michele Hansen  0:00  Hey, welcome back to Software Social. I'm Michele Hansen.Colleen Schnettler  0:04  And I'm Colleen Schnettler. Michelle PenczakAnd I'm Michelle Penczak, the CEO of Squared Away.Michele Hansen  0:09  We are so excited to have Michele with us our guest, another Michelle. She. So she said she's the founder of Squared Away, which is a company that employs mostly military spouses to be virtual assistants. And they have over 130 remote virtual assistants working for them. So Colleen and I are super pumped to have us joining our virtual table today to learn more about her business and what they're working on.Michelle Penczak  0:47  Thank you guys for having me. I'm excited to chat with y'all.Colleen Schnettler  0:52  So Michelle, I have just so many questions about how you started this business and grew this business. And I would love to like kind of hear a little bit about the beginning of your story, I read some of your Medium articles about how you were a virtual assistant and you got laid off. So most people, when they get laid off, you know, they try to find another job, or they just don't find another job, but you decided to start an empire. So can you tell us a little bit about that.Michelle Penczak  1:18  I wish it started and found that cool. But um, I it kind of sounds like a really bad country song getting started. Um, I was a virtual assistant for zirtual in 2015. And this is where the sad country song part comes in. My husband had deployed two weeks before I was three months pregnant with my first little boy. And I was actually on a family vacation when it happened,Michele Hansen  1:51  Oh my gosh.Michelle Penczak  1:52  So literally woke up one morning, five years ago, and couldn't login to my email. And that's when I found out along with 399 other people that we did not have a job.Michele Hansen  2:05  Oh my gosh.Michelle Penczak  2:07  I still am like, Oh my god, I can't believe that happened. even five years later, it's kind of crazy. But, um, I called one of my clients who was to be honest, my favorite client at that point, and I kind of had a mini meltdown on the phone with him. And he was like, "You know what, it's going to be okay, because we're going to get you more clients, and I'm going to keep working with you." And he told me that and I was like, You know what, yes, I'm going to kick ass regardless of what's happening right now. And I'm going to do my thing. And I did that and started my own independent contractor business as a VA. And I worked literally, my husband will tell you, I worked up until the moment I got my epidural, with my four year -- now-four-year-old, but I was literally like, putting my out of office email up when I was going into labor. And I took a grand total of two weeks off. And because it was just me, at that point, supporting my clients, and worked with them with a newborn and that whole thing and becoming a new mom and all the craziness that goes into that. And in true military fashion, Colleen, I'm sure you are familiar with the military fun, um, my husband came home one day and was like, hey, guess what, we have orders to Hawaii. And I was like, shut the front door. Get outta here. I cannot even entertain this idea right now. And, um, I can't, you know, working with my clients. Um, I told them when we were getting ready to move to Hawaii that I was taking a week off to move. And I took a week off, we moved to Hawaii, and I started working with them like normal. I just started getting up at 3am to work Eastern standard time hours with them. And still had, you know, a nine month old at that point. And I told my husband was like, I am either insane, or I have way too much of a coffee addiction to stop this. And he was like, you know what it's working. And I did that for about six months before Squared Away was kind of implanted in my brain.Colleen SchnettlerWow.Michele Hansen  4:31  Can you talk to us about how you're, you're in this state where you are waking up at 3am every day with a newborn, navigating everything that comes with having a baby and attempting to work and then you decide to create a company and -- talk to us about that. So I like I'm so excited to hear this, I have to say cuz like we started Geocodio when our daughter was four months old. And people always think we're crazy. And I don't think I've come across anyone else who started a company with a baby. And so I'm really excited to hear from you about how that came about.Michelle Penczak  5:26  I, so my co founder, Shane, he was one of my clients, and his company was doing really well. And he had always told people about, you know, the glory of having a virtual assistant as a resource on your team. And he was like, you know, what, I need you to scale. I need you to clone yourself. And I was like, Huh, this is as good as you get like, you get me. And he told me, he was like, you know, we need more of you. How can we do that? And I said, I told him, I was like, let me think about it. And I called him a couple days later, I said, I figured it out. We're good. We can do it with military spouses. Because I had always heard, you know, in my journey, as an assistant, how can you work? How can you have a baby and work? How can you still be able to do this as a military spouse? And you know, I would tell people, hey, I work as a virtual assistant. And they would say, Well, how will How can I do that? How can I get into this, and I didn't really have a good path for them I, at that point, I just kind of fallen into it with my circumstances. And this was a really clear cut path for me to say, this is what I did. This is how I provided help provide for my family. And this is how we can make a path forward for other military spouses as well. So yeah, it all kind of happened by circumstance. But um, my when the idea came about, I'd been in Hawaii for about six months. And my son was thriving, he was going to preschool. And I was like, You know what, because I don't get enough sleep as it is, let's take this journey. Squared Away started, was officially formed in March of 2017. And I brought on my very first assistant, who is now my director of operations, in July of 2017.Michele Hansen  7:26  That's amazing. And I think I think maybe, almost with both of you, it's probably worth diving in a little bit more on just what it's like to be a military spouse and how hard it is for military spouses to work. Because I think, you know, being sort of like non military, myself and not coming from a military family, like, this isn't something that that you really come across. And like the unique challenges there.Michelle Penczak  8:00  Yeah. And I, I can speak to the pilot side of the house, I know calling you said your husband's a Navy pilot, as well. So their schedules are so unpredictable. Like sometimes they're flying in the mornings, sometimes they're flying in the afternoon, sometimes they're flying at night, and they're just kind of all over the place. And when you have to be that constant for your family and for your kids saying, Okay, well, I'll pick you up from school, I'll do bedtime routine, and all that good stuff. That's something that's very fluid with every single day. And it's not predictable, and the following week, and being able to say I have this job or career that I'm working towards during the day and being able to support your family is huge for a military spouse, because a lot of times it's so reactive to the military members schedule that, you know, you can't typically work a regular nine to fi...

Michele Hansen  0:00  Welcome back to Software Social. I'm Michele Hansen.Colleen Schnettler  0:03  And I'm Colleen Schnettler.Michele Hansen  0:06  Hey, Colleen!Colleen Schnettler  0:07  Hey, Michele, how are you doing?Michele Hansen  0:10  I'm good. I'm good. I had a pretty productive day today. Little ADD in the morning, but it was good.Colleen Schnettler  0:16  What does that mean? Michele Hansen  0:19  Well, so I was diagnosed with ADD as a kid when I was 10. And so it's always been something that I have to work with, you know, working against it is not going to happen. And you know, recognizing the procrastination of it is really just me being a perfectionist in a lot of ways. Um, you know, it can also make for a fun morning, though, I made some good memes, I think. Colleen SchnettlerNice. Michele HansenNo, actually, I actually, I got a lot of stuff done. You know, a couple weeks ago, when you asked me what I was working on, I mentioned landing pages. And then, and then I was kind of like, Ah, that actually wasn't what I was planning to talk about. And, and I feel like you were kind of disappointed. But I actually did a ton of work on landing pages this week. So we can talk about that if you want. Colleen Schnettler  1:11  Oh, yay! Yes, I do.Michele Hansen  1:13  Yeah, so this is a huge thing for us. Because we don't do any paid marketing. We don't do any outbound sales. We just do SEO. And a couple weeks ago, we were talking to Alex Hillman. And something that really stuck out to me from his book, Tiny MBA was, you know, when done well, marketing and teaching are almost indistinguishable. And I think that's so true. Because a lot of what we do when I'm writing a like landing page, is just explaining how our service works, and how to do something, or, or how to do something in general, that happens to relate to our product.Colleen Schnettler  1:59  Okay, so can we take several steps back here and talk about landing pages? Michele HansenSure!Colleen SchnettlerBecause people talk about landing pages, like they're these things, they just throw up real quick. And so I kind of want to talk about strategy. And like, practically speaking, do you have? Do you always use the same template? Do you try to, you know, like, when you're marketing towards a specific group, like how do you tailor your landing page for that group?Michele Hansen  2:25  There's a lot of different types of landing pages. So what I'm doing is generally very product focused. There's a whole huge segment of landing pages that is sales landing pages and writing conversion copy, which is --Colleen Schnettler  2:46  Conversion means I convert, I buy something from you? Michele HansenExactly. Colleen SchnettlerYes.Michele Hansen  2:50  The idea is, you know, basically, you run some ads for people who are looking at a specific search term, or you or you have, you know, SEO targeted to that search term. And then you bring them into a sales page. And there's tons and tons and tons and tons of copy. And there's a story and like all of these sorts of things. And there's there's like these calls to action that are building up to it, right, like, and then they want you to convert and buy immediately from that page. That that is a whole school on its own. And not really something that we do, because we don't really need to do a lot of convincing for people since we have a free tier and people can just try it and figure it out if they need it or not, before they even buy it. So when I'm talking about landing pages, it's generally very product focused copy that is sort of either describing features of the product, or is like a step by step how to do something with the product, or is somehow just better describing what we do. Very often that comes out of conversations that we have with customers in Intercom where, you know, if we get the same question more than two or three times, we usually take that as a sign that either we need some more copy on that or, you know, maybe we need to fix something in the product to make something more discoverable (that is, easier for people to find it). Or add affordances, which is the ability for them to do something. That's generally where we focus when it when I talk about landing pages.Colleen Schnettler  4:34  Okay, so do you have specific rules like in your head, like from a design like should it only should it fit on a visible window? Should they not have to scroll? Do you even think about these things? Are they not important at all?Michele Hansen  4:47  Yeah, I don't really think about that, actually.Colleen Schnettler  4:50  Okay, I don't know. Like, that's why I'm wondering like, I've never I'm telling you for me. Like I feel like I could write a whole back end system API to do whatever but you asked me to make like marketing page and oh, my gosh!Michele Hansen 5:02 It's scary, right? Like I blank page is very intimidating.Colleen Schnettler  5:07  And it's like, the whole thing, where do I put the images? What do I say? Michele Hansen  5:15  Like, yeah, how far it's a lot, I have so many hang ups around this because I'm so afraid of coming off as spammy or, like too heavy handed of a sale that when I'm trying to write copy, it sounds so boring. Like, it's just so so dry. And what really helped me was thinking about marketing as education. Colleen SchnettlerYeah. Michele HansenAnd thinking about it, okay, maybe this is just, this can just be a step by step how to do something, you know, for example, how to add metropolitan statistical areas to a list of addresses, which is something that, for example, somebody who works in sales might do because they need to know which of their customers live in and around Boston, and in and around Chicago, because they're planning a trip during normal times when you go on trips... For example, and so it's just like a step by step list and and then there's, you know, the SEO tactics, bringing into that, like, you know, all of the, the list items need to be headers and saying, first, organize your spreadsheet of addresses that you want to add the Metropolitan Statistical Areas to, like, the next step, upload the list of addresses that you want the Metropolitan Statistical Areas for to Geocodio, it's like using the same words over and over and over again, so that, you know, Google or search engine will pick up on that using those terms in the URL is a really basic one. That is easy to overlook. I actually I realized this morning, that we had someone reach out to us asking about features of our unlimited plan. And I realized, like, Oh, my gosh, I typed like the same reply multiple times a week. And we don't actually have a page on our site that is just devoted to this plan that I can send someone and the same way. We also don't have any page, specifically devoted to free geocoding or our pay as you go tier. And so now, almost seven years into doing this, we finally have a URL that is geocod.io/free-geocoding, which is the number one search term that brings people to us and it like never occurred to me until this morning, that we should have a page with the you know, h1 and URL of free geocoding. Like sometimes it's just so, so obvious.Colleen Schnettler...

Michele Hansen  0:00  Welcome back to Software Social. I'm Michele Hansen.Colleen Schnettler  0:03  And I'm Colleen Schnettler. Michele HansenHey, Colleen. Colleen SchnettlerHey, Michele!Michele HansenHow's it going? Colleen SchnettlerI'm doing well. I'm excited to hear what you have to share with us this week since we didn't get to share last week since we did my little video intro. So what has been going on with you and your business?Michele Hansen  0:22  Honestly, not a whole lot.<laughter>Colleen Schnettler  Okay, fair enough!Michele Hansen  0:28  You know, I was thinking about this. And, and I think that's kind of one of the things when you get to the stage that you have weeks when you're just kind of doing, like, normal work, you know, dealing with invoices, and cleaning up stuff from the past and responding when customers, you know, report an issue or bug with something and answering questions. And, and, and not a whole lot happens. And that's kind of what's going on.Colleen Schnettler  1:03  I still think that's good for people to hear. Because I think when you, like me, as we've discussed, read a lot of like, these really exciting startup stories, it makes it sound like it's so exciting all the time. And ultimately, it's still a job, like you're still doing kind of mundane, but important work.Michele Hansen  1:19  Yeah, I mean, it's the big project, if you can call it that, that I was working on this week was a lot of things dealing with invoicing. And, you know, we've been migrating customers over from QuickBooks to Stripe, which is just as thrilling as it sounds, let me tell you, but it's also super necessary. And it's the kind of thing that you write really have to do when you've got a business that's going and it's working. And so for, for a long time, we had it set up so that if customers paid us with a credit card, they paid via Stripe, but if they paid us any other way, you know, a ACH, paper check, carrier pigeon, like that was all through QuickBooks. And I don't know why we did that. I think it's because we weren't using invoices for Stripe for a long time. And but that's created all sorts of accounting issues where when we actually want to make our financial statements in QuickBooks, which, you know, things like insurance companies and whatnot want... It always made such a mess in QuickBooks, because there was like, some payments would be counted twice. And then like we didn't really have one true source of revenue numbers. And I was always like manually patching it together with spreadsheets. And so that just you know, involved a lot of thing of, you know, setting up new subscriptions and checking once and twice and three times that everything is set up. And, you know, like, it's interesting, you do a lot of things early on that don't scale. And you do that intentionally because you don't know if you're going to be successful. And then when things do start working out, you you kind of have to, you know, basically bat your own cleanup. Colleen SchnettlerMm hmm. Michele HansenAnd I did a lot of that actually, in my in my first job. And I think that was such a valuable thing, because I think it's something every business goes through, especially as they grow.Colleen Schnettler  3:14  Yeah, I absolutely know what you mean, because I'm right in that very beginning stages where I don't know if this is going to work. And so I have absolutely made decisions that might be hard to change later if I have, if it is successful. And I can see that now. But I can see it now. But it doesn't seem like it's worth the time to put this really impressive architecture in place for you know, my three customers. So I can but I could definitely see you know where to work out down the line, I'd be like, "Alright, we got to really beef up, you know, change some of the things we made."Michele Hansen  3:48  Exactly, I think we're, we're looking at doing something like that pretty soon with how we handle failed payments. So I mentioned you we have most of our customers are paying us via credit card. And when those payments fail, like usually the process right now is we just go through manually and follow up with them. Like they get emails from Stripe, they get emails from Intercom. Sometimes I have to, you know, oftentimes email them personally, like from my own email, but I've had to go as far as like calling the front office and asking for the accounting department, DMing them on Twitter, like finding any random contact information, finding people on LinkedIn. Colleen SchnettleWow.Michele HansenAnd yeah, and it's always so satisfying when you finally get it paid. And you're like, wow, but I spent what, like six hours chasing that down for $150 like, was that really the best of my time? And so we've been kind of thinking through like, how we might, how we might like automate some of that and any, you know, introduce kinds of things like you know, Your Account isn't paid. Like, you can't do anything until you've paid up or, like, actually, as of right now, even if you have an outstanding balance, people have to contact us in order to pay, like, there isn't a way to do it in the dashboard. Like all of those small things, I think if you're using a product, you don't realize that like, every single one of those is a feature, there's no like real, you know, there's no just sort of out of the box that comes with every single feature that you might need, like deleting an account and changing your email address and updating your credit card and paying a past invoice. Like, every single one of those is a feature and you're prioritizing that against something that's going to get new customers or have existing customers, you know, pay you more add more features for them, right. Like there's like boring business improvements, versus things like new features, and, you know, marketing related initiatives that are shinier objects.Colleen Schnettler  6:01  Yeah, that's actually kind of interesting that you guys are this far along, and you're still handling all of that manually. I also think there's a way and we've talked about this quite a lot, like what do you need to ship. And there's always this, this temptation, I think, is a good word, to put everything in place before you put anything out there. So it's encouraging to me, I guess, is the right word to hear that, like you guys are still handling some of that manually, like those are things that you have been able to handle manually for quite a while.Michele Hansen  6:32  We didn't even have billing code when we launched! Colleen Schnettler That's amazing, by the way.Michele HansenLike we had integrated amazing Stripe, like we literally didn't expect anyone to pay us. And then you know, and we had that sort of like monthly payment cycle. And the first of the month came a couple of weeks later, and we're like, oh, we have to charge people today. Oh, we forgot to write the ability to charge people.Colleen Schnettler  6:59  It's amazing.Michele Hansen  7:01  Yeah, I mean, all of those things are just, you know, gradual, like, like, for a long time, actually, I think in Stripe, we were the way we were creating the payments was literally as individual payments, they weren't as invoices. And so if a payment failed, we had to manually go through and recreate the payment and retry it. Colleen SchnettlerOh wowMichele HansenAnd it was like that for like, three or four years. Colleen SchnettlerWow. Michele HansenSo every month, I would go through and recreate all of t...

See Colleen's product! Video at https://youtu.be/vdO7uFT63dwTRANSCRIPTMichele Hansen  0:00  We're doing something a little bit different. Colleen's product is ready to have a little walkthrough of it. So this will be the first time I'm seeing it. So we're doing something different. This week's episode is going to be a podcast as normal, but it is also going to be a video. So you can see what Colleen's product looks like. So hopefully this is just as enjoyable as whether you're listening to the podcast, or you're watching the video, we'll put a link to the YouTube video in the shownotes. Definitely let us know what you think of the format. And hopefully, it's interesting. Colleen Schnettler  0:49  Okay, this is great. I'm super pumped to show you this. Michele, I'm going to share my screen with you so you can see it. Alright, can you see my screen? Yes. All right. So let's start from what the very beginning kind of what I'm trying to accomplish here. So this window right here that says new listing details, let's say this is your existing user interface. So your user is adding listings for I don't know, an event or a real estate site or something like that. So what you a typical kind of quick, easy implementation is just your typical HTML file tag, which is what you have right here. Now, I have found this to be like, really ugly, and I just don't care for it the way it looks. And plus, even if you're importing a file, this way, you still are responsible for setting up your cloud storage account, as we've talked about ad infinitum I know, but basically, you still have to get all the other back end stuff set up. So what you do is you would go to Heroku, you'd provision my application, and then you'd sign on to my application. And I would give you this script, like so basically, and I have not finished or like really worked out the documentation yet. But basically, I'm going to have a site, like once you've signed up for my application that says, Put this script in the head of your file of your website. So then you add this script to your site, save it, I'm running this locally, so we could see the changes kind of as they're happening. And now you get something like this. So Oh, thanks.Michele Hansen  2:29  Well, there's a drop file.Colleen Schnettler  2:31  Now there's a drop file, boxyMichele Hansen  2:33  way of having, right.Colleen Schnettler  2:35  So and I think one of the things that's really important here is I think, Heroku, I could be wrong, but like, it's mostly like Node and Rails developers. So there's people that are more focused on the back end. So anything I can do to make the UI less painful for you, is what I want to do. So So I worked for an events company at one time, so we had to deal with tons of images. And we implemented a drop zone like this, but we had so many problems with users trying to drop files that were too big files of the incorrect, you know, format, things like that. So what this does for you is if I wanted to drop some images, so if I try to drop a file, right now, I want to say I have a two Meg limit. And I'm probably going to change that I haven't worked out that detail yet. Let's say I have a two Meg limit. So if you try to drop a file that's bigger than two Meg's you're going to get this exe. And it's going to tell you the files too big. And then it's going to remove the file from the drop zone. So your user can drop a new file.Michele Hansen  3:36  Ah.Colleen Schnettler  3:38  okay. So I mean, even that I have a lot of like thoughts about like, right now you drop it, you and it's a timeout, like, I don't know if I should wait and let the user exit out. Or, you know howUnknown Speaker  3:51  littleMichele Hansen  3:52  quick I didn't get to fully read read it the text until the second time. You did it, because youColleen Schnettler  3:59  need to look for it the second time. Yeah, IMichele Hansen  4:02  didn't really know what was going to happen. But I knew there was some errors. So yeah, I would probably try to upload it twice just to see what that error was.Colleen Schnettler  4:13  Okay, that's good feedback. And again, I can slow it down. I mean, maybe I should slow it down a little bit.Michele Hansen  4:20  I also wonder about accessibility for that.Colleen Schnettler  4:24  Right. That is an excellent point. I will look into that, because that's definitely something I need to address. That's a really good point. So that's kind of what I have now. And those are two good comments for a bad file. But what I really have gone back and forth, and left and right about is what about a good file. So let's drop a good file in here. And so there's all kinds of things I can do here and I'm probably just overthinking it, but like how opinion Am I going to be like that little green checkmark? Should that stay? Should I go? Should I keep the reason I kept I went back and forth on keeping this dashed blue line. And the reason I kept it was to show you if you change your mind, you can just drop a new file in there, right? You can,Michele Hansen  5:18  yeah. And I guess, to me, a dashed line around the image implies that it's in a draft state and that they need to do something else in order for that to be saved.Colleen Schnettler  5:29  Okay, that is what you think. Okay. Yeah, cuz I went back and forth on that. Like, should I read, because what I had originally, is I actually removed the drop zone and just put the image on the page. But when I removed the job zone, I then had to add a button so that they could bring the drop zone back up. So it started to get more complicated.Michele Hansen  5:53  And I noticed that it shows the file size, even when the file size is an acceptable size. Yes, you walk me through why that is?Colleen Schnettler  6:03  I think that's partially like, you know, when I started this, I was just trying to kind of keep track. So I would know immediately, like, Oh, this one is one fits, this one doesn't fit. But I, you know, have no strong opinions about whether that's helpful or whether the user even cares, which probably they don't care, right. They just want to know if it's successful or not.Michele Hansen  6:28  Yeah, I, I would be curious to I mean, maybe there are people who get value out of that, maybe I won't discount that.Colleen Schnettler  6:36  So I was showing this to a friend of mine. And he has a few apps on Heroku. And he suggested accepting other file types. Because his point was, if you have a really image heavy site, you're probably already using one of the big players in the image, site market. But there's a huge problem with like, if you want to email someone a PDF, or, you know, you're collecting resumes, or all the other kinds of file types that people might want to upload. So that kind of gets interesting, because then I was thinking, Okay, let's say we want I have a PDF here for my children's school, welcome newsletter. So if I try to drop a PDF, that works, but I don't ever have any kind of preview image. So you think that I mean, should I just leave it like that? You have thoughts on that?Michele Hansen  7:24  Is there some sort of icon you can use for the image or file type like,Colleen Schnettler  7:30  like a PDF icon? Yeah, that's a good idea. pdf. And maybe like, same thing for like a Word document or something like that....

Michele Hansen  Welcome back to software social. I'm Michele Hansen.Colleen Schnettler  And I'm Colleen Schnettler. So Michele, what's been on your mind this week?Michele Hansen  So after our conversation with Alex last week, which, by the way was so fun, I feel like we got to talk to him about like, a 10th of the things I wanted to talk about. I have been thinking a lot about what I got out of my own MBA, because his book, The Tiny MBA, and we talked about this a little bit about the differences between between that and and it's just made me reflect on some of the things I got out of mine. And one of those things is negotiation skills. Colleen Schnettler  Okay. Michele Hansen  I really learned in that program just how much of a wuss I was at negotiations. <laughter>I got to do this trip to India and the UAE and we were visiting factories and and whatnot and part of it, you know, being an India, was going to the markets. And our professor was very keen that we learn how to negotiate and I remember we would, you know, go out and buy things and our graduate assistant student in the program was from India and we would always go to him and be like, hey, like, you know, I got this scarf and you know, I got them down from from this price to this price. And he would always like, shake his head and be like, you could have done so much better than that, like you just got totally ripped off. And I remember feeling like oh my god, like and, and I realized that experience -- getting my ass kicked by India -- made me realize how little I knew about negotiation. And, and so I ended up taking a class on it.Colleen Schnettler  Oh, when you were getting your MBA, you took a class specifically on negotiation?Michele Hansen  Yeah.Colleen Schnettler  Oh, that's awesome. Michele HansenYeah, it was awesome. And we got to do exercises, simulating negotiations and learning about different styles of negotiation, and different tactics to use. And the really, the big thing I got out of that was that you don't have to be a hard negotiator, you don't have to be mean, in order to be a good negotiator. And, and I feel like this is something that we don't have a lot of cultural exposure to negotiation, right. You know, unlike my, you know, fellow student who grew up in India and buying groceries or buying anything involved, negotiation and haggling. I didn't really observe a lot of negotiation as a child or as a teenager, right? Like, Can you recall observing that very much?Colleen Schnettler  No, the price is what it is and you pay for it or you don't.Michele Hansen  Yeah, exactly. So, um, and so I think my understanding of negotiation was very much guided by pop culture figures who are known for being you know, hard charging and you know, screwing the other side basically right like, and so I just kind of I always shied away from negotiation. But negotiation is really, really important in running a business, especially once you start dealing with enterprise customers who pretty much always want to negotiate. They're not going to, you know, just sign up for a plan on the site and then just pay for that, especially on an annual basis and then things like that. And, and so I learned that you can be a good negotiator and get what you need out of an agreement. But you don't have to be mean and you don't have to, like bend over to them, either.Colleen Schnettler  Okay, so let's dive into this cuz... Michele Hansen  Yes!Colleen Schnettler  I think negotiation is a fascinating topic, especially for women. I have negotiated salaries and I remember like the first time I negotiated a salary, it was like, you should always negotiate But to your earlier point, like I have no experience in negotiating. So you just kind of pick a number. You're like, Oh, this is my number. Like, let's talk a little bit more about some of these tactics and like, how does one negotiate without being a jerk?Michele Hansen  Yeah, so one of the most important things to remember in negotiation is knowing your BATNA.Colleen Schnettler  What's a BATNA?Michele Hansen  Your BATNA is a best alternative to a negotiated agreement.Colleen Schnettler  Did you make that up?Michele Hansen  I did not make that up. This is actually a term that like is in every piece of negotiation literature. Basically, you know, some people think of this as leverage or as your power or but it's basically your alternative, right? Like if you don't negotiate this, like if you walk away from that job, what is your alternative? And, but you always have to think about your BATNA and then your counterparty's BATNA, and maybe way to think about this is it has The word bat in it, right? Your BATNA is what allows you to fly away.Colleen Schnettler  Okay, so let's use your example. I like concrete examples when I'm trying to understand this. Are you comfortable? Like you can make up numbers? But let's say you're negotiating with an enterprise client. So when you say BATNA, you mean that is your number you won't go lower than.Michele Hansen  That's a reservation price.Colleen Schnettler  That's different reservation price. Okay?Michele Hansen  So um, so your BATNA is basically your alternatives. So, for example, let's say that you...Okay, here, here's an example. Let's say you run a customer support platform. So these things out there like intercom and whatnot. So your customers, your customers' BATNA, right, so their alternative is are there they can use one of your competitors. But maybe they don't have all of your features like maybe, let's say, you do chat and email and knowledge management. They can use one of your competitors, but they don't have one of those features. So that's their best alternative. Or they can use three different services that will cost them a lot more money than using your one service. So that's probably the simplest example is that their alternative to using your service requires them to use three other services that end up being more time and hassle for them. By knowing what their BATNA is, or what their alternative is, you have a stronger negotiating position. You don't have to give up as much. And also you can remind them Yes, for example, let's say $5,000 a year sounds like a lot of money. But if you were to not use this service, and use x, y and z instead you would be paying $15,000 a year. So you have actually just created a net positive for them of $10,000 and you haven't moved on your price at all. Another thing that is really important in a negotiation and part of not being mean another way to put it, it's actually a book that Alex recommended last week that really piqued my interest called Just Listen. And he had mentioned how this is a book used by hostage hostage negotiators. And that really got me interested because they are some of the best negotiators out there. And one of the concepts of it is you just listen for what is important to the other side. So for example, in your salary example, what may be important to you is the number but there may be other benefits that are really important to you, that are ancillary to the salary itself, that actually aren't very difficult for the employer to give you. So for example, let's say that you're negotiating on a salary of $100,000, and they're only willing to give you $...

Michele Hansen  Welcome to the Software Social podcast. I'm Michele Hansen.Colleen SchnettlerAnd I'm Colleen Schnettler. Alex HillmanAnd I'm Alex Hillman.Michele Hansen  And we have a special guest with us today, which is very exciting. Alex has recently released a book called The Tiny MBA. Colleen and I have both read it and we are super excited to talk to you today, Alex.Alex HillmanUm, thank you for having me. I've been enjoying listening to this show. And I feel like I got invited to the the cool kids lunch table to hang out and and talk business. So um, thank you.Michele Hansen  Yeah, so let's dive in. So so the book, I really like how you structured it with a bunch of sort of a bunch of nuggets of wisdom, many of which you get the sense that those were hard won on your behalf.Alex HillmanYeah, the hard won is a good way to describe it. And I think talking to folks have since read it, a lot of folks find themselves nodding along nodding long and going, "Oof, ouch. Yeah, I've been there for that one. I wish I had heard that one sooner." And so I think for folks that haven't encountered it yet, there's maybe some warning signs. And then on the other side, it's it's stuff that I think people do know, including myself, but don't necessarily hear or hear often. And sometimes they just need a reminder or to hear it in a new way. So one of my favorite ways I've heard this book described so far was from a friend of mine, who is a pretty storied entrepreneur and has spent time in sort of all different categories. He's done the big venture back thing. He's done small bootstrap stuff. He's done publishing, he's done software. And he really, really enjoyed he's even been involved in reading books with entrepreneurs, so he's sort of seen behind the scenes. And he, he's like, this book is so different from other business books and there's sort of three kinds of lessons: There's one third is stuff that maybe you've heard before, but it's in kind of a new way. You know, the constraints of these, you know, everything about a thing is kind of on one page. And you don't even have the whole page in really any case, it's really a couple of sentences. There's another third, that is what he called next level thinking. And I'm not super comfortable calling it that, but what he was really describing was more, you know, a different way of seeing a thing that people have a sort of a commonly held perspective. And this was an alternative that is maybe equally true, but less commonly heard. And the third part was a kick in the ass, and something that he's heard before but needed to hear or needed to hear in a different way and to challenge himself and go, why am I doing this the hard way? And, yeah, I mean, it's, I think there are books out there that do each of those things, but it's been really nice to hear from folks that are at lots of different stages of their business, that it can do one or all of those things kind of in one sitting.Colleen SchnettlerSo Alex, you talk a lot about psychology in the book. One of the quotes is the most valuable books aren't business books. They're books about human psychology. So, you know, my background is engineering and development. And I know a lot of your audience I believe, as well. And I, I was just like, man, now I gotta learn about humans? That sounds really hard.Alex HillmanYeah, I'm curious, like, Why? Why does that seem hard to you? Because I hear that and I feel that and look, people are frickin weird. So I get it. But like, from your perspective...Michele Hansen  I love how weird they are!Alex HillmanI do too. I do too. From from you, like when you say? Like, what's, how does that read for you? Like, what it what actually makes it feel hard to you?Colleen SchnettlerWell, I already feel like I'm better with humans and most developers, but still like they're just humans are tough. I mean, they're just irrational. And you know, they don't make logical decisions. And so trying to get in someone's head and find out like, like, what I took away from the book is I really need to figure out how I'm providing value to my customers. And you know, you really just want to make them happy, which is something I've talked about with Michele before too, like you, you want them to feel like they're winning. But then I just, I just really struggle with like understanding human psychology when you get people who really aren't logical thinkers.Alex Hillman  Yeah, yeah. Well, I think there to your point, there's, there's the rational behavior and the irrational behavior, and which one someone's gonna be deploying at any given moment is not always consistent. One of my favorite ways to think about psychology is -- because I come from a software development background as well. I didn't explain, I kind of said that in the book, I guess. But one of the reasons I find psychology fascinating is it's kind of like having a debugger for people because people break in wildly unpredictable ways, but they do it at wildly predictable times. Or sometimes it's the other way around, they break in unpredictable times, but in relatively predictable ways. Or no, I say break. It's not always bad things, they respond positively, consistently, just not always in the exact same way. So, you know, for, for me programming kind of clicked when I realized, "Oh, this is about patterns, right patterns and, and systems." And if you start thinking about people as patterns and systems also, I don't, I mean, I think you can get pretty far into the weeds with psychology and things that are useful, but maybe not instantly deployable. If you really just think about what are people's behaviors as patterns, like it's not just what do they do. And it's, it's also why do they do it? And then is there any consistency to why they do things or is there inconsistent consistency? And if there's inconsistency is there consistency within the consistency, so you can start to see how when you sort of pull apart the layers, it really does start feel like debugging a person. And, you know, I think one of the other pieces is sometimes you're debugging yourself. It's like, "Am I making a decision or not doing a thing because of my own psychology?" I think that in some cases is even harder. However, I also think, you know, one of my favorite books and it's recommended in in the Tiny MBA is a book called Just Listen by an author named Mark Goulston. And Mark is a clinical psychologist. But the reason he's famous for -- famous enough to write a book that I would be recommending in a business book -- is he's a lead hostage negotiator, trainer for the FBI. And in the book, he talks about sort of the neuroscience of why we, why it's hard to listen and and why it's hard to get other people to listen to us in a really, really systematic way. And he teaches you some really specific techniques for, and he uses, he teaches these techniques to hostage negotiators. And he also uses them in his private practice with, you know, husbands and partners and wives and families who aren't talking to each other. It's all the same basics, you know, brain science, but he does this, this interesting thing where, you know, it's not a good idea to teach somebody a psychology tool, and then have them go use it on their friends and family. Bad things are likely to happen. But instead he teaches you how to use these tools on yourself. And by practicing them on yourself, you start recognizing your own internal voice, your own internal conflict when you're not listening to yourself. And you get to sort of practice t...

Michele Hansen  Welcome back to Software Social. I'm Michele Hansen.Colleen Schnettler  And I'm Colleen Schnettler.Michele Hansen  So what's going on, Colleen?Colleen Schnettler  I have so many things I want to share today. Yeah. I, yes, yes, I am super excited. Because I have finally finished my image management widget. I need a better name. By the way. Image management widget is like the worst name. I need something snappy, like cool image uploader. Anyway, I'll work on that.Michele Hansen  Naming is one of the hardest parts honestly, like, naming and pricing.Colleen Schnettler  So I have finally finished what I ended up doing was, I think I was listening to a bootstrapper podcast years ago, and I remember the host said something about how he was like, Well, you know, sometimes you need to just go to a hotel for four days and finish something. And that's entirely impractical for people, you know, who are responsible for spouses and children and other things like that. So I wasn't actually able to do that, but I did manage to block out like three solid days, and I got it done. Michele Hansen  Nice!Colleen Schnettler  So I'm super pumped about that. Yeah, I'm super pumped. So that's exciting. So my next steps are, you know, kind of, not kind of my next steps. My next step is getting it deployed. And I've already deployed an app in the Heroku Store before so I know the process. So hopefully that will not be too painful.Michele Hansen  So when you say it's done, is it the product itself is done? Or is also like the commercialization of it done in terms of making it something people can pay for and have accounts for and stuff like that?Colleen Schnettler  What do you think, Michelle?Michele Hansen  I'm just asking!Colleen Schnettler  if it was funny, you say that because I was literally thinking as I was finishing up, I was like, Alright, so now the real work starts. This was like the fun work. Now I actually have to do the real work and my plan is to deploy it in the Heroku App Store. So there is some glue, I have to work with the Heroku API, and things like that to make it available to customers. So my plan is to start using it for my own projects and my client projects immediately. And, you know, maybe after I've been using it... I think the way that Heroku App Store works as you'd have to put something in the App Store, and then you know, you have to it has to be free. And you have to get like a lot of users, I forget how many, but you're just in this alpha stage. So that's, that's kind of my plan to kind of get it out there. But like, really, the hard work behind this now is documenting how to use it and figuring out how to use it for different use cases and all of that kind of stuff. Which yeah, like I said, that's probably the real hard work, right? Michele Hansen  I mean, that's the work that never ends right? Like so much of marketing is here is how you use this and here's when you would use it and...Colleen Schnettler  I just -- and I could be wrong, but I feel like I am uniquely equipped to handle that because I think a lot of developers who do things specific like this, especially something is technically, you know, unique, I guess, they don't really do a good job of making it easy to use. They're like, Oh, here's this thing, but you also have to go get an AWS account and set up your own IAM account. And you have to, you know, put it behind a CDN, and you have to do with all this other stuff. So, so I hope and I think that one thing I am good at is I'm really good at taking complicated processes and distilling them down into simple explanations. So that's really my goal. SoMichele Hansen  if people wanted to use this to add images to their project, would they only need to use your image management service for this? Would they also need their own AWS account or because you'd mentioned a couple weeks ago that it would just be under your AWS account?Colleen Schnettler  Yes. So it's one service. I thought about doing it as to services. It would have actually been easier on me to do it as to services, but I don't think that's what the customer ultimately wants. Especially as we talked about is if I put this into even less developer, you know, friendly terrain and start to try to use it in a no code tool or something like that. You've got to extract that away, because like the AWS console is a bear, especially if you don't know what you're doing. So yeah, so it's just one service right now.Michele Hansen  And so you said that for the time being in the Heroku marketplace, it'll be an alpha that can only be free.Colleen Schnettler  There's yeah, I actually don't all the details yet. Because I wanted to finish it, but it's something like that, like you put it in and it has to be free for a while. And you have to have -- I think it's a lot I forget, there's a certain number of people you have to get trying it. So I'm going to beg all of my friends who ever used a Heroku. Michele Hansen  Listeners...Colleen Schnettler  Yeah, if you use Heroku, please, please, please send me an email or a tweet or I will let you know when this is in the App Store. Please download it!Michele Hansen  But hold on. So is there a free tier from AWS for what you are effectively reselling?Colleen Schnettler  Yeah, so that's that's the rub. Um, there's not really. Michele Hansen  Oh no. Colleen Schnettler  So it's not it sounds bad, but like, it's not that bad because I can rate limit everything. And so what I did was I got a new AWS account. And with new AWS accounts you get -- I forget how much -- but you get a certain amount of free stuff that first year. So under my new URL, like URL, email and stuff, I got the new account, so I get X amount free. But so this is like a really interesting, this will be a really interesting kind of pain point, right is because yes, if it's required to be free, Cloud Storage generally isn't free. I don't really know how it's all gonna play out. But really, I don't actually expect to get a whole bunch of people that it's going to become a problem yet. So I was reading this blog post by Amy Hoy, the Fine Art of Flintstoning. I don't know if you've ever heard of it or read it. And she talks about -- like so sometimes you just she talks about how it took her six years to ship something, which by the way makes me feel way better. And she also talks about how there's a point where you just you just have to ship something, right. So she uses this term "flint stoning." And she uses it to mean some stuff you're going to do manually. So she was talking about when they first launched Freckle, like, if you wanted your email reset, like you, they had to do that manually. And so there were the certain steps she had to do manually TO ACTUALLY SHIP her product. And that's kind of where I am right now. Like, there's a lot I want to do on the AWS side to monitor this and, and, you know, watch the billing, but I started to get like lost and all of that. And so at least for the first couple months, like I'm just gonna have a simple script that runs independent of the app, or I'll just look at it with my own eyeballs to kind of keep track of where I am.Michele Hansen  Yeah, I think that kind of custom monitoring and all of that. We were doing that all manually for quite a long time. Time I want I want to say like three plus years.Colleen Schnettler  Really?Michele Hansen  We had various services that we used, you know, for,...

Michele Hansen  Welcome to the Software Social podcast. I'm Michele Hansen.Colleen Schnettler  And I'm Colleen Schnettler .Michele Hansen  So Colleen, tell me what's going on this week.Colleen Schnettler  So I unfortunately have not had a whole lot of time to work on my side project this week, because life has been crazy. I've been swamped with client work and family stuff. So I didn't really do anything. Michele Hansen  That happens! Right? Especially during COVID times.Colleen Schnettler  Yes!Michele Hansen  How much free time does anyone really have right now, especially if you have kids?Colleen Schnettler  Yes. Balancing the kids and the clients and the work and the side project work has definitely been quite a lot.Michele Hansen  You've basically got two sets of clients because the kids themselves are, you know...Colleen Schnettler  Yeah!Michele Hansen  ...Pop in every 15 minutes and need things.Colleen Schnettler  Yes. And I'll work for three hours. And then they'll be like, Mommy, why aren't you spending any time with us? I'm like, only worked for three hours. It's because you're here all day. You're not at school where you're supposed to be! Anyway, anyway.Michele Hansen  So the small amount of time you didn't get to spend on your side project.Colleen Schnettler  So the small amount of time I did get to spend on my side project, I was chatting with a friend of mine about some of the technical challenges I'm having. And I'm having this really one specific problem where uploading multiple images is not working the way I want it to. And he suggested I ditch that -- he thought that having a multiple image upload was beyond the purview of an MVP. And I should just get it working with one image just to get something out there. Right just to get my foot in the door. Michele Hansen  Hmm. Colleen Schnettler  What do you think about that advice? Michele Hansen  I was gonna ask you what you thought of it first.Colleen Schnettler  I think it's good advice. Because one of the things I've one of the problems I always have is taking that first step and getting something out there because I just continually -- as I've been going through this, I continually want to add features, I got totally distracted with my lambda API gateway stuff last week. And that stuff is really cool, but totally beyond the initial scope of what I was trying to build. And I think for me, like I kind of got to get in the game, like, I've just got to get something out there to keep me motivated, and to get people using it and see if people want multiple image support.Michele Hansen  And also to get you using it right, because you've mentioned that you would use this with your clients and your time is at a premium. And so if you can start using it, that will be a form of feedback on on the product.Colleen Schnettler  Right? Like I am going to be hopefully my own best user of my own product, because I will get to use it and see like where the errors are. I know I want multiple image support. But what I can put out now is still better than what they're using. And I can still use it, you know, adding one image at a time, if I want, or I could use my part for the single images and use something else, a custom solution, for multiple images. I just feel like this is something that is taking me forever. And it's not really taking forever, but it's just something I need to get out there. And I was reading this article about like, what makes a good MVP and it wasn't about having a ton of features it was but it was also not about having a crappy product, like you need a tight product, you need a really good product with the minimal amount of features to make it viable.Michele Hansen  It's a tough concept, right? Because there there's this graphic that I I'm gonna have to share it because I'm gonna totally butcher it. But basically it's you know, the MVP of a car is not, you know, four wheels with a platform. The MVP of a car is a scooter because it still gets you from A to B like that's the the job of the product is to transport you from one place to another. But it's a very simple version of it, you know, it doesn't have features like a roof or, you know, multiple seating support, right? But it still gets you there. But there's very often when you see MVPs built, it's, you know, something that is a shell of what the product was supposed to be and isn't actually useful. Colleen Schnettler  Right! So that's my goal. Michele Hansen  So I think there definitely, there is that temptation, though, to sit on it until you've built you know, a Tesla, right? And you need to get it out there sooner than that and get feedback and I think there's also a certain pressure to not put things out there until it's perfect because I think we get afraid that it's gonna, it's gonna be criticized and people aren't gonna like it and they're gonna tell you how it's incomplete in ways that you already know. And I think it's really easy to build up a lot of fear around that, I mean. I'll tell you that like, features that people told us were boilerplate when we launched, we still haven't launched them, and we may never launch them. So...Colleen Schnettler  Oh, wow.Michele Hansen  Yeah. Like we don't have global support. And it has not been a problem for us. But that was something that people asked for on day one. And if we had waited until we had global support, we never would have launched. Colleen Schnettler  Right.Michele Hansen  We launched with just what we needed, which was coverage for the US, and honestly was not that great when we launched it either. But we launched with that, which was very simple. It was what we needed. And then we took it from there. But we didn't wait until it was totally perfect mirror image of major competitor products out there.Colleen Schnettler  Yeah, so I think for me, what I have now for these guys is single file, upload one at a time, and so I can build it as a single file upload one at a time. And I can utilize it on my existing application. And it could still be useful for people. And then I could, I mean, I could get that version out there. And then I could work on the multiple file support. And some of the other things if I decide that I need it.Michele Hansen  Yeah, and if there's demand for it, and, you know, of course, there's always the complication of when you build something, it's not always easy to build other things on top of it that it wasn't built for. And so, you know, something to keep in mind that you know, at some point, you're going to want batch support, and so making architectural decisions that won't inhibit that, but also not committing yourself to that and the architecture at the same time is a tricky thing to do.Colleen Schnettler  Yeah, I think I can do it with this, with this setup that I have now. So I think that'll work. So I think that's my new plan is just to finish it. Just to finish. So that's my short but sweet update for this week. So what have you been doing?Michele Hansen  So I've been thinking a lot about customer research which, you know...Colleen Schnettler  This is my favorite topic.Michele Hansen  This is MY favorite topic![laughter]So we are going to be launching a new version of our dashboard. So our dashboard is wh...

Michele Hansen  Welcome to the Software Social podcast where we invite you to join our weekly conversation about what's going on in our businesses. I'm Michele Hansen. Colleen Schnettler  And I'm Colleen Schnettler. Michele HansenHow's it going, Colleen?Colleen Schnettler  I'm doing well. It's been a pretty exciting week for me on a tech front. So I haven't had as much time this week. I'm really trying to commit to talking to more people. I mentioned that. Michele HansenYeah!Colleen Schnettler  And it's kind of funny, because I've been talking to more people and they don't really care about my image management solution. Michele HansenOh :(Colleen Schnettler  Well, it's okay. This this kind of interesting thing has happened, where they care at there. They don't care about that, but they're really excited about the work I'm doing with AWS and Arc. I'm, I'm moving my tech over to go from kind of a monolithic Rails app to like AWS, Lambda serverless functions and everyone is really interested in that? Michele HansenReally? Colleen Schnettler  Yeah, it's kind of been a funny thing where I've wanted to talk to people about image management. And they want to talk to me about how I'm using lambda functions to do manipulations on images. Michele HansenReally...Colleen Schnettler  And so, yeah, and so I there's a few things I'm trying to be wary of here. One is, I feel like it's not a good idea to use new tech on a new idea. Because you're, it's like a double uphill battle. You have to both build something, ship it and learn some new tech. But this AWS stuff is really cool. I love learning it and the architecture with it really is better. It just feels cleaner. I'm I'm not a huge microservices person, but this particular, what I'm building really lends itself well to these lambda functions. So that's been really fun. But it has been an interesting thing to find out that people are more interested in that. So as you know,  one of the things I struggle with is jumping too quickly from idea to idea. But I'm seeing this opportunity where everyone wants to learn how to write lambda functions in the cloud with Ruby. And I'm like, Oh! Well, that's interesting.Michele Hansen  Did you course business at one point? I forget.Colleen Schnettler  I thought about it. I know that would be, that would be no, I thought about it. And I started doing video courses. I think I did like three or four. And it just got, I mean, it's kind of a slog to do that kind of thing, especially if it's not, it was I was building something that was more geared towards beginners. And so it was pretty boring for me to actually make them because you have to really go back and I felt like there was a lot of beginner course content out there already. So I never I never really gave that a good shot. But this is an interesting thing, because I am really when you hear these people who are successful, they're like, Oh, I was interested in this thing. And I blogged about it everyday for a year. And then boom, I'm the expert in this thing. And I have a product and this thing. I don't know, it's just I don't want to be jumping, right? This is I need to really focus, which is one of the things I struggle with. But I'm really tempted, I'm really tempted to like, get more into this AWS in the cloud serverless functions stuff. That seems to be more interesting to my developer friends.Michele Hansen  Maybe it's not jumping if you just hang out on a particular stepping stone for a little bit. Maybe there's like a mini course here or something or even if it's just a blog post and people get excited about that. But maybe there's, you know, a little a little stop along the way here.Colleen Schnettler  So I'd really like to get the image thing done. Because I think as we've been talking every week, I feel like I'm just so close.Michele Hansen  And you need it. Like for your sanity. On the projects you work on.Colleen Schnettler  Yes, I need it, I'm going to use it on my clients. And I just want to finish something like I just want to finish a side project. That's just where I am. It's like graveyard of abandoned side projects. So I want to finish it, and I'll use it. And I think it'll make my life easier. So that's great. But I wonder this is something I'm kind of like putting in the back of my mind and kind of tabling as people are interested in this, they want to learn more, they want to learn, you know, how you can use it. And the other thing, there's, I feel like serverless is huge, and there's so much opportunity for growth. And I don't know if there is like, I know, AWS has a marketplace, but I don't know anything about it. But so for example, this one serverless function I have all you do is if your images in my bucket, you can just send query parameters for the size you want of the image and it returns the image already resized and optimized and things like that. Wouldn't it be cool if you could have like a suite of little serverless functions that you could somehow bundle together? Like a whole bunch, I don't know, you'd have like, I don't know what it would look like you'd have like five different API endpoints you as my customer could hit that would handle all of your different image manipulation, like, or I could have one for video and one for images. I don't know. I feel like there might be something there. And I don't know what that looks like. But it's definitely like tucked away in the back of my mind, like what I'm working on. Now. I want to finish first. That's important. And it's so close. But I think after that might be a good time to start blogging about all this stuff I have learned in the AWS ecosystem. And once I don't forget it, but also, you know, to see if people are interested in that kind of information as well. Michele Hansen  It sounds like they are and like, I can't tell you how many projects and products come out of setting out to do something else. Like just earlier this week, Adam Wathan did a huge thread on the development of Tailwind. I don't know if you saw it. And he mentioned how they were working on another side project, but like the CSS was driving him nuts. And so they just he just made that. And then he open sourced it. And people were super psyched about it. And they were really surprised by that. And then it like led to this whole thing that is Tailwind. I mean, that happened with Geocodio too. To to like we set out to make an app that told you grocery store and coffee shop opening hours and ran into problems with geocoding. And you know, we got some good, good traction and some excited users on the grocery store app. But man, when you find a problem that developers have, and you solve it for them, people get really, really excited about that.Colleen Schnettler  Yeah. So when you guys launched Geocodio did you do that through some kind of existing marketplace, or were you just out in the free world?Michele Hansen  Hacker News. That was the place to launch in January 2014. Product Hunt like wasn't even a thing. Yeah. And we did a ton of, you know, posting on like StackOverflow and Reddit.Colleen Schnettler  And how did you know when you were ready to put it out there for other people? Had you guys been using it for your grocery store app for a while?Michele Hansen  Yeah, I think at least six months or so.Colleen Schnettler  That's quite a while.Michele Hansen  Yeah. And it took a good friend of ours to be like, hey, like, you should just slap a paywall in front of this and see if other people will pay f...