Hey guys ladle out some secret sauce for successfully marketing and selling to software developers. Also discussed is their Facebook ad boycott, why you should never call a developer, Coke vs. Pepsi, and leveraging Princess Bride to weed out sales emails.Links:Art of Product Podcast websiteBen Orenstein on Twitter CloudForcast websiteNathan Barry on TwitterBrennan Dunn on TwitterRailskits websiteRuby Weekly websitePeter Cooper on TwitterRob Walling on TwitterTraction website (not an affiliate)Transistor.FM websiteFull Transcript:Starr:              00:00          That was really good. I didn't know you could recite poetry.Ben:                00:02          And having perhaps the better claim, because it was grassy and wanted wear. Though as for that, the passing there had warned them really about the same.Josh:               00:10          Yeah, I honestly, I read that poem right before each Crossfit session to kind of pump myself up.Announcer:          00:18          You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Time to start a fire, crack open a can of Tab, and settle in for FounderQuest.Ben:                00:31          So the Office Max near my house is closing, and so they had to have this closing sale, like everything's 90% off and stuff.Starr:              00:40          Yeah?Ben:                00:41          And we needed some printer paper so I'm like, there's probably nothing left there, but I'll go and just, you know ... So there's gotta be paper. I mean, who buys all the paper, right? There was no paper.Starr:              00:50          Yeah?Ben:                00:51          There were some pastels. Like if I wanted pink paper, then I would have been fine. There was plenty of that, but it was bare. Pickings were slim. It was amazing. And it's like post-apocalyptic zombie attack kind of scenario where you're like, "Wow. This place just looks-"Starr:              01:07          And the zombies eat paper, in this scenario.Ben:                01:10          Apparently.Josh:               01:11          Yeah.Starr:              01:11          Can I show you guys something? Talking about big box stores.Ben:                01:14          Yes, please.Starr:              01:14          So I ordered some socks on Amazon. Let me show you, they're very nice socks. They're stripey socks-Josh:               01:22          Fancy.Starr:              01:23          I had one pair and I liked them so much, I ordered a variety pack of stripey socks. I'm pretty happy with how they look and everything, but then I looked at the actual box they came in, and look what it has written on it.Josh:               01:40          What?Starr:              01:42          It says designed by PetSmart.Ben:                01:44          Nice.Starr:              01:45          And I don't know what to think now. Because-Starr:              01:47          Really? Were they really designed by the PetSmart?Josh:               01:49          Maybe PetSmart is just like the moniker of the designer.Starr:              01:53          Maybe. Maybe this is someone in another country who doesn't realize that-Josh:               01:58          No.Starr:              01:58          PetSmart's already taken-Josh:               01:58          It might be like an internet handle or something, @PetSmart. He's PetSmart on IRC, like on Freenode or something.Ben:                02:07          Now, Starr, aren't you concerned that the horizontal stripes will make your ankles look fat?Starr:              02:13          Well, you know, Ben, I have very skinny ankles, so, actually, it's the opposite.Starr:              02:19          Oh, man. So how do you guys want to do this thing? Is this an actual reader question, or listener question?Ben:                02:25          It is an actual-Starr:              02:26          Wow.Ben:                02:26          listener question.Josh:               02:27          And I think we've got a couple of these lined up, too, so ...Ben:                02:30          Well, you know, I should qualify that. I don't know that he was an actual listener, listener, because he just sent me an email. He was a listener to The Art of Product podcast-Starr:              02:38          Oh, okay.Josh:               02:39          Oh, that you were on a while-Ben:                02:40          Yeah.Josh:               02:40          Like two weeks ago. Yeah.Ben:                02:41          Right, right, and so in my interview with Ben, he asked some questions, and so this individual emailed me...

The guys discuss gorilla conference marketing and how they promoted Honeybadger back when they could barely afford to attend the conference, let alone a sponsorship. Also discussed is turning Honeybadger's unprofessionalism into a marketing strength, dealing with swag logistics, and why you should never wear a blazer to a dev conference.Full transcription:Josh:               00:01          Tatum's favorite programming language right now is Haskell, but I suspect it's because there's a big blue elephant on the cover of the book and elephant is her favorite animal. Yeah. I'm guessing it's not the functional purity that she loves it for.Announcer:          00:23          Hands off that dial. Business is about to get a whole lot nerdier. You're tuned into FounderQuest.Starr:              00:31          Yeah. Ida's just been getting really into scientific visualization type stuff. She's doing R a lot lately. I don't really think it's a very good programming language just for general purpose stuff, but she does seem to like it.Josh:               00:44          Nice.Ben:                00:44          When the Honeybadger founders compete on their kid's language learning. My kid's just doing basic. They suck.Josh:               00:52          Yeah.Ben:                00:53          You should get Tatum a PHP book. She would love that.Josh:               00:55          Or Postgres.Ben:                00:56          That's true.Josh:               00:58          Any elephant ... Why are there so many elephants in programming by the way?Ben:                01:02          That's a good question.Starr:              01:03          I don't know.Starr:              01:05          Programming books-Josh:               01:06          Is it because of the memory?Ben:                01:08          For Postgres I think that's the case, yeah.Josh:               01:10          They either have a long-Starr:              01:11          Yeah. Like they're supposed to be smart or something.Josh:               01:14          Yeah.Starr:              01:15          I don't know I've never met an elephant that struck me as that smart.Josh:               01:19          Like an elephant never forgets, right?Starr:              01:21          Right.Josh:               01:22          Maybe that means, I don't know.Starr:              01:24          That doesn't mean they remember.Ben:                01:25          As opposed to Mongo I guess their logo should be what?Josh:               01:27          That's true.Ben:                01:27          A fruit fly.Starr:              01:28          Oh burn.Ben:                01:29          Oh burn. Sick burn.Starr:              01:30          Ouch. Yeah, because it dies after 12 hours.Ben:                01:36          Exactly and forgets everything.Josh:               01:39          Ben's on fire today.Starr:              01:40          Oh man. Poor Mongo.Ben:                01:41          I know.Starr:              01:44          They've been around, it's been like a decade since-Ben:                01:46          Wow.Starr:              01:47          ... we've had bad experiences with Mongo.Ben:                01:48          That's true.Starr:              01:49          We still have to say bad things about them.Josh:               01:54          Yeah.Starr:              01:55          Okay. We should probably talk about marketing gentlemen.Ben:                02:00          Sure.Josh:               02:01          Yeah. That sounds good.Ben:                02:02          Yeah. Love marketing.Starr:              02:03          You love marketing?Ben:                02:04          I do love marketing. How else-Josh:               02:05          I do too.Ben:                02:06          How else are you going to get people to know about who you are and give you money, right?Josh:               02:11          I also hate marketing, but that's another podcast.Starr:              02:14          You could commit a crime.Ben:                02:17          Okay, but will that convince people to give you money?Starr:              02:20          They give you money in the end.Josh:               02:21          Yeah.Ben:                02:...

The gents look back with some hindsight on the debates around private equity, VC vs. bootstrapping Honeybadger, and how funding decisions may have affected recent layoffs at NPM and Travis CI. Our recent Twitter ad performance for FounderQuest is also discussed as well as Nintendo graphics and food trucks. Join us!Full Transcript:Josh:               We did it. We forgot to send him headphones, Starr.Starr:              He said he had headphones. I asked him, Josh. I asked him.Josh:               We're trying to get Ben to part with his AirPods, and it's like pulling teeth, man.Announcer:          It's like Steve Jobs and The Dude had triplets and they built an app. This is FounderQuest.Starr:              Can you hear us?Ben:                Kinda.Starr:              Yeah? Well, the AirPods might give you a little bit of a delay. I could imagine that would be ... this KVM, the video part worked even though the keyboard and mouse didn't work, but I totally forgot that this monitor can't do 60 hertz over HDMI. Does that makes sense?Josh:               What was the refresh rate on the original, the NES games and stuff?Starr:              Oh, it's super good.Josh:               Right?Starr:              Because it's a CRT.Josh:               Yeah.Starr:              It's just whatever the refresh rate is for your TV. Right? That's baked into the NSTC. It's for standard, which by the way, is frickin' complicated. Video output onto old school NTSC ... for CRT stuff is incredibly complicated, and I tried to understand it, and I pretty much just failed.Ben:                Is his PAL any simpler?Starr:              I mean, I don't think so because you're, because it's all analog, right? You're controlling the signal that goes, this analog signal that goes out and directs this electron beam and ...Ben:                Yeah.Starr:              It's just not this world of pixels. So TV's don't, they have phosphors but they don't really have pixels. Like computers have. There's no pixel at 1010 so, but fortunately some, some people who are smarter than I have when I was doing my emulator, they all basically they had mapped out the different cycles of the PPU, which is the NES' GPU, basically. The different clock cycles of the GPU each correlate to a specific pixel on your screen. So I didn't have to actually, you know what? To do an emulator, you don't actually need to know the details of how TVs work and stuff and refresh rate and all that.Josh:               So the results for the my Twitter experiment yesterday got a little better over time. So it seems that Twitter's ad algorithm is a self, it's a self learning algorithm. So it starts out, you tell it kinda who the type of people you want it to target are, but then it optimizes itself over time as it actually starts to get clicks.Starr:              Really?Josh:               If someone clicks then it, I assume, it picks people that are more similar to them or that it thinks are more similar to them and yeah, so it started out when I had first run it for a few hours, I had a, it was, it spent 10 bucks and got 13 clicks and but that's really bad. It was 86 cents a click by the end ...Starr:              What's a click though? What's a click?Josh:               No. It was a link.Starr:              Okay, yeah.Josh:               Whatever they call it. a link promotion campaign.Starr:              Okay.Josh:               There was one link in the tweet and the call to action was, or the result was to click that link.Starr:              I thought you were talking about your pun.Josh:               Oh, no. No, that did terribly. That was a follower campaign. I think I learned a lot about follower campaigns too. I just was using the wrong campaign too.Starr:              Okay.Josh:               Also, people don't really probably care about puns in their advertised Twitter feed, but it was a fun afternoon and I stand by it. But yeah, by the end of this fall, by the end of the second experiment, which was more of a real experiment, I had brought the click down or the cost per click down to 46 cents. So we got about 113 click throughs to FounderQuest.Starr:              Oh, nice. Nice.Josh:               To the episode and yeah.Starr:              Very cool.Josh:               At least now we know and I don't know, I think I got the targeting pretty good, but I, it was my first try, so I'm sure we could optimize that a little bit. Maybe the content too. So if we want to buy clicks, we now know that they probably cost somewhere between 25 and 50 cents.Starr:              Awesome. I wonder how many of those people subscribed or downloaded something.Josh:               I don't know. I think that's one reason I wasn't quite convinced that it was the best idea to link to the, I linked to an actual episode page 'cause I wanted to talk about the episode is like the reason you want, you get interested.Starr:              Yeah.Josh:               But I think if I did this again, I want to try a dedicated landing page that's made for the campaign that has an actual, a real call to action like subscribe.Ben:                Yeah. Like an intro or something.Josh:               Right. Yeah. Not just the transcript, which is basically what we have.Ben:                Right.Josh:               Yeah, yeah.Starr:              You know what would be awesome is if we could somehow get people, if we could send Apple users to just subscribe in Apple Podcasts.Josh:               Yeah.Starr:              Or I guess people use different, Podcatcher, so it may not work.Josh:               Yeah, that's the problem.Starr:              Yeah.Josh:               Yeah. I did target only people on mobile though. I was smart enough to do that. 'Cause I think people, for a podcast...

The guys dish about their experiences at MicroConf. Ben talks about entrepreneurial ADD, Josh explains why the "good old days" at Honeybadger are now, and Starr challenges younger developers to a coding battle royale. There is also a preview of Badgercon (pending wildlife insurance procurement).Full Transcription:Ben:                ... and now Ikea, they're coming out with a blind that's going to be home kit enabled, so we can be like, Hey, Siri, open the blinds.Josh:               So you can have the Vegas experience at home.Ben:                That's right.Starr:               Oh my god guys, I can't believe you've been holding back on me. Maybe I would have gone to more MicroConfs if I would have known there would have been some James Bond automatic blind situation happening.Announcer:          They've been in business for seven years, and they still don't know what they're doing. I guess a podcast seemed natural. Here's FounderQuest.Starr:               I really enjoyed going the MicroConfs with you guys. It was a lot of fun getting to see everybody, getting to be there with Ben Findley and stuff. It was pretty intense in terms of conferences. I feel like everybody there is way more extroverted than I am, but I got my little connections and networking in.Ben:                I guess it's probably overall more extroverted than your typical developer conference because a lot of people there are interested in running their own business, and they're already down with the idea of doing marketing and sales. They are more out there than your typical developer might be.Starr:               Yeah. So, there's two additions right? The starter edition, and the growth edition. The growth edition happens first, which is where you mostly have people like us who already have small businesses, and are reasonably successful. The starter edition comes after that, that's people who are looking to start something up from scratch, and maybe haven't done it before. I wonder if the starter edition captures most of the introverts.Ben:                That could be.Starr:               Okay. Let's talk a little about the conference itself. MicroConf is a business conference that focuses on term, micro-size businesses. That means anything from zero employees, you're just starting out as a one person developer. It is a very developer heavy conference. Lots of people there are devs. It could be from zero employees, up to, the large people there maybe have 50 to 100 employees, but that's getting up there. Us, as a five person company, I would say we are pretty normal there. Right?Ben:                Yeah, I think we fall on the bigger size.Starr:               Oh really?Ben:                Yeah, I think most people there are probably a company of one or two.Starr:               Wow. I'm not used to being the big dog.Ben:                Yeah it's kind of crazy.Starr:               How long have you guys been doing this? Ben you've been doing this for decades at this point?Josh:               He's going to be there soon.Ben:                Yeah, I think I started in 2011. I was there at the first one. Its been a lot of fun. The first one was kind of neat because you know the lean methodology right? Where you go out and you find the customers first, and then you build whatever they want. Rather than making the product first. The lean methodology was really hot in 2011. So, when they first started MicroConf they were like, do you know what, we don't even know if anybody is going to want to do this, and we don't know if anybody is going to show up. They totally advertised the conference before it even existed, just to see if there was interest. When people we signing up, it was like oh, we should probably put on this conference. So, Rob and Mike gathered everything together and it was a lot of fun. It was at the Rio, or the Hot Rock I can't remember which one.Starr:               Yeah. This one was in Vegas.Ben:                Yeah, it was in Vegas. It's been going on since 2011. They actually added European ones as well. I haven't been to any of those. Every six months there is a MicroConf, either in Europe or in Vegas.Starr:               When it started out it was this kind of revelation. It was this scrappy little thing. People were figuring out, okay well we have this new world we are living in, where you have Ruby, you have Rails, you have Heroku. All these things that allow people to make a software business with very few people, as long as you know how to make software. People were sort of figuring this out and it felt very exciting. Well I didn't go to the first one, but I was sort of in the scene, I was around. And this one was good, but you could tell it's been around for a while. It is a little bit more stable. Most of the people who we met there, and who we hung out with, we've met there and hung out with at other MicroConfs. It's not bad, but how do you guys think it has changed over the years? You've been to more than I have.Josh:               I was going to mention that, as Ben said, it started out kind of small and grew. Up until recently it was just a single track. I guess it's always been a single track conference, and it still it, but we mentioned they recently split it into two separate events. There's the growth and the starter. We are in the growth now. I have a suspicion that the starter would feel more familiar to us because that's where we spent more of our time in the beginning of MicroConf.Starr:               Okay, that's a good point. Maybe the people in the starter are getting that new conference experience, like this is all new and exciting for themJosh:               I would assume that a lot of the people at growth have been there for a while if they have a successful business. Or at least in our case, that's the case.Starr:               I can see why they split the conference into two because after you've been going to the equivalent of the starter edition for a while, it's all similar stuff. You're like, okay that's great you're telling me how to validate market, but I've already validated my market, I've got customers, I just need to figure out how to get more of them. That's good.Starr:               Let's not just spend all of our time playing the grumpy old man talking about how things were better when you're younger. Before we were so jaded by reality but hard business, facts, and life. What did you guys really like about MicroConf this year?Ben:                I think the best part of MicroConf is the people that are there. Hanging out with my tribe, really.Starr:               Yeah?Ben:  &nb...

We originally sat down to discuss distractions and Yak Shaving. What emerged was more like group therapy for a team struggling to cope with a spate of JS dependency upgrades. We also discuss purchasing an ice cream truck. Buckle up!Full Transcription:Starr:              So, I learned something amazing. Just before coming on here I learned something amazing. Okay, Beto O'Rourke, the presidential candidate, used to be a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow, hacking group. In, yeah the 90's.Josh:               Wow.Ben:                Awesome.Starr:              I know!Josh:        Sold.Announcer:          Three developers. One mission. Build a business to nurture personal fulfillment. It's not stupid, it's Founder Quest.Ben:                It might have to go look for his byline, what the frack?Starr:              I know, I know, right? I used to read their reports from Def Con and all the conferences and stuff. I used to be like, man these guys are so cool, they're so much more mature than I am. I don't know how they got all the money and go to Las Vegas and do things when I'm 17 and have no job.Josh:               That's kinda how you feel about the guy who's running for president now probably.Starr:              Yeah, probably.Josh:               So, I guess not much has changed.Starr:              Oh, speaking of Yaks and blockers and all this stuff, we finally have our pod cast artwork as you saw.Josh:               Yeah.Starr:              So we can now actually... This is episode number 6 of Founder Quest.Josh:               Is it? Wow.Starr:              And, yeah nobody's heard it, but me. Really.Josh:               I kinda like it like this, there's no pressure.Starr:              Yeah. Should we just keep saving them to drop box.Josh:               Yeah.Josh:               And that's it? I mean like... yeah that's cool with me.Josh:               Yeah.Starr:              That's fine they can release them after we're like dead and famous.Josh:               Right, yeah.Starr:              It's like I didn't want to set up the web site because I don't know what colors the art work has in it and you have to have ... you know, you want to have them matched colors and stuff so.Josh:               Yeah, but know we can get the first one out?Starr:              Yeah, now we can start rolling em out. See what people think of em. In slack we've been talking all morning yesterday about all these blockers we have right, because when you're doing development on any sort of bigger project, you have this idea of the real work you want get to, like the feature work, and then you have the things that are preventing you from doing the real work. Sometimes you call that yak shaving because in order to, you want a sweater, but you know you need yarn to make the sweater, then you need wool to make the yarn and you eventually end up shaving a yak. I think that's what IStarr:              Yeah that sounds about right. Is this a false distinction you guys, you think there is a such thing as the real work?Josh:               You mean like does the real work exist, or is it all just yak shaving.Starr:              Yeah, does the real work exist?Josh:               I think you could make a case that it is yak shaving to an extent like anything you would do, would be blocking something else at least.Starr:              The reason I ask is I had this bit of an epiphany when I was struggling through some random webpacked stuff where I was like man what if this is all there really is, like what if this is it guys?Josh:               Kind of like an existential crisis.Starr:              Yeah, kind of, kind of. And it was fine like I was having a good time you know, just doing my webpack updates and everything, but this idea that we have some sort of mythical real work to do.Josh:               Well web development has become, feels like to me its become a lot more complex over the years, like I don't know, that could be an illusion too you know, computers have always been hard. But it feels like the amount of things that you have to do just to do web development in the first place, has increased. I don't know, what you, how you guys feel but that's how it feels to me.Ben:                Yeah, I can definitely agree with that, I mean it's not as simple as just drawing some HTML up on the webs you now, and having people see it, right?Josh:               Yeah.Ben:                So, yeah I think when you're building on anything, right, you have to deal with all the things you're building on top of.Josh:               Kind of like when we used to write HTML and then we had to write some PHP in our HTML.Starr:              So the three of us kind of, I don't know, came of age but we really enjoyed the rise of rails, and I wonder if that was maybe some sort of golden moment in which things became simple enough you could build an entire website, state-of-the-art website, with the skills of sort of one person, right? I remember working on rails projects and feeling like, man I've got this rail stuff down, it's like I can go over here write my ruby I just gotta make a few little views in HTML got some CSS, done, like I am a ninja at this stuff. But now it feels, you know, different. It's like okay, I can work on a feature in ruby for a while, and then I'm going to have to go and redo my JavaScript tooling to make JavaScript compile, because you know something happened and there's all this context switching that maybe there didn't used to be.Josh:               Yeah, and the pace of change again, especially I think with JavaScript tooling is sped up so much and everything's changing so rapidly that I think we have to go back and re-evaluate our tooling and that stuff more often.Starr:              Yeah you're working on something right now aren't you Josh, you're re-doing some of our code on our point library for JavaScript?Josh:               Yeah, I'm working on our Honeybadger.js or our Honeybadgerjs library for a big 1.0 release finally we've been pre 1.0 all this time, but-Starr:&n...

Faced with a punishing week of distractions, the crew discusses their own techniques for remaining personally productive.Full Transcript:Starr:              I'm sick of being discriminated against because of my name. It's like they have a better for a name but-Josh:               At least I have to pay 60 bucks for just a domain.Ben:                Change your name.Announcer:          So do those guys really named their App after a meme, huh? Buckle up fellow kids, it's time for founder quest.Josh:               I think mine was like ... for what it's worth star, my name was like $180.Starr:              Do y'all think that Dev domains are going to be like pogs?Josh:               Maybe.Starr:              Like beanie babies?Josh:               Like garbage pail kids.Starr:              Oh No. Garbage pail kids or a classic.Josh:               Yeah.Starr:              I just mean like when we started Honeybadger we did an io domain and back then those were pretty hip and so in 10 years our dev domain, it's going to be kind of ... right now people are like, oh an io domain, wow. Our dev domain is going to be like that in 10 years? I don't know.Ben:                Maybe the app domains, you know the.app.Starr:              That app, I kind of think dev is ... well, I mean it's going to be used for a lot of things, but I think one thing that it'll be popular for us, like get hub projects and that sort of thing. Like I said, like faker.dev would be cool to like forward to you're a faker project.Ben:                Would be cool. I'm just not going to pay 115 bucks for it.Starr:              Right? Yeah. Who bought honeybadger.dev? I'm like dying to know this cause I thought it was one of you guys because I was going to do it and I forgot. I think someone's messing with us.Ben:                We'll find out some day.Starr:              So I thought like this week we could talk about just productivity. Some people are really surprised when they hear that we're ... because I was going to say we're a three person company. We just hired another developer and we hired a marketing person a few months back. But we're still a very small company, so people are interested sort of like how do we do it? I mean, we must be super productive. We must all be super productive, including me despite the evidence, despite the soul crushing evidence. So what's our secret?Ben:                I think the secret to our success is that I wake up naturally at 4:00 AM every morning.Josh:               That's it. Yeah.Starr:              I do too. But I fight it. I fight it. Ben so much.Ben:                I don't think we have a secret of success. We're just standing up just regular folk doing some regular stuff.Josh:               I do have to say like I've been a lot less productive I felt since having kids, especially the second kid.Starr:              Yeah, well my secret, a reason for choosing this topic actually was at this week and the previous week I've been incredibly unproductive and so I'm really just trying to get my groove back on.Ben:                Just looking for tips.Starr:              I'm looking for tips guys.Josh:               Yeah. I had the same thought actually when you suggested and I was thinking about it last night and I was like, I'm actually looking forward to like talking about this because maybe I'll refresh. Get a refresher on it.Ben:                Yeah. So the past couple weeks have been rough for me too but the snow, really threw me off. School was shut down for like two weeks or whatever it was. I couldn't get to my office because driveway was buried in snow and that's on a hill. And so I was at home. At home, which is not usual for me and with kids at home, which is not usual for me. And so I ended up playing a lot of sports here and stuff. So I had to get back on the focus train and actually work on it. And so one thing that I did was the tomato technique, you know the 25 minute thing.Starr:              Pomodoro.Ben:                Yeah, Pomodoro. So I'm like, yeah because I always sit down and I would pick but get some work done and I would open up the laptop and be like, ha, I don't feel like doing anything. There's like 5,000 things I could do and I don't feel like doing any of them. And so when it came down to you, I was like, all right, you know what? I can't wait to feel like it. I just got to do it. And so I said, boom, set the timer for 25 minutes, I'm going to work on something and then I can be done and give myself a break, you know? And then of course, the 25 minutes ago that I'm heads down, I'm focused and so there's no way of taking a break right now. It's like keep working on for a couple hours. Right. So that helped me like get over the hurdle of I really don't like doing a thing.Josh:               I tried doing the Pomodoro technique for awhile, like long time ago and I liked it. Yeah. Maybe I'll give it a try again sometime here.Starr:              I like it too. It only works from you for certain things. Like, Pomodoro is really nice for me for things where I've got like a list of things and I'm going to sort of cycle through really quickly and sort of churn through. Is not so great for things that are more sort of loosey Goosey, kind of like writing and stuff. I don't really like having a timer going when I'm writing because I just feel so sort of constrained by it and like I've got this deadline looming over me and that's like-Josh:               "Be creative come up with something interesting in 10 Minutes.Starr:              And under the gun.Josh:               How do you guys typically start your days? How do you think about like what you're going to going to do first or what you're going to do during the day?Starr:              I've recently, after we came back from Christmas break, I changed up my routine and I've really liked it. So let me tell you a little bit about that. Previously, I just kind of started the day without like a plan or anything, like coming to work, check my mail, check Slack, figure out what my main task was, just start going heads down on it and not really think about it much. And that's fine when it works. But a lot of the times it left me feeling like I was ... while I was making progress on my main task, I was kind of losing sight of the big picture or m...

This week Josh, Ben and Starr talk technical debt and how to cope with it. They also discuss "suits" vs "hackers" is a trope as old as tech itself. Suits want to make money and cut costs. Hackers want to build cool things the right way. Full Transcript:Ben:                If I start selling my kidneys, I'll let you know.Starr:              Okay, that's cool. Do I get a friends and family discount?Announcer:          You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Time to start a fire. Crack open a can of Tab, and settle in for Founder Quest.Starr:              I thought originally that this podcast would be called something like Hard Technical Decisions, which sounds pretty hitting to me. Like, I like that, cause I think of myself as a dyed in the wool realist.Josh:               Mm-hmm (affirmative)-Starr:              Who's unafraid to face hard facts, you know? But, then we were talking about it in Slack and it turns out that some of the things I was originally going to highlight, as tough Hard Technical Decisions, were mistakes. Rather, were actually forms of technical debt that we kind of took on on purpose, that we knew what we were getting into. Maybe not exactly to what depth we were getting into them,. But, we knew that something was happening.Starr:              And, so, this week's topic has kind of blossomed into something a little bit more interesting I think. So, yeah, personally, running a business and being an engineer means there's this sort of constant struggle between the engineer in me and the business man in me. But, what I mean by that is that there's this constant desire to want to do things right, the engineering way. But, then, you always have to trade that off between, what is the return on investment?Starr:              Like, what are my business outcomes that I'm trying to achieve by doing this engineering.Josh:               The engineering in you wants to achieve technical perfection but the business person in you wants to make money.Starr:              Yeah. Exactly. So, I guess maybe we should go into like, what is technical debt. Let's talk a little bit about technical debt and stuff like this in general and then maybe we can go onto some specifics about ourBen:                When I think of technical debt, the first phrase that comes to my mind is: "it seemed like a good idea at the time."Ben:                Right? I think it's those things that you do with good intentions that just over time, didn't continue to scale, which is just a normal outgrowth of scaling. Or, over time became an obviously bad decision based on new information. So, you just have to change your mind and go back and fix it.Josh:               Yeah. I tend to also throw maintenance costs in there. There's extra things that you have to do that come with the technical decisions that you have to make. And so, like, things like putting off, deferring some things like maintenance costs. For instance, like on Rails, like a Rails upgrade for instance.Josh:               I know you can kind of get behind on those, or like push them down the road, and those can build up like a large overhead that you have to think about all at once, which to me is technical debt. And, there's all kinds of maintenance costs, I think, associated with software or infrastructure.Starr:              That's interesting because my take on technical debt is maybe a little more specific? I've always considered technical debt as a way to bide time with shitty code. Right?Starr:              When we first launched Honeybadger, I felt that the market was super rife for a competitor in the space. So, I felt like we really needed to ship something out very fast. And, as a result we made some decisions that made us able to get to market much more quickly than we would have otherwise. But then maybe, a year or two later, we came to regret those decisions. Maybe we didn't really regret them. Maybe we just had to come back and clean them up a little bit.Starr:              So, one thing that we did, that I think falls definitely into the category of technical debt is that when we started ... Well, our service for people who don't know, is an exception monitoring service, right? We have a little snippet ... well, it's not a snippet, it's a library, that goes into your application. And, it sends us information whenever errors happen.Starr:              And, what we did when we first started out, is that we actually kind of you know used the library of the main competitor, which was totally legal. Because, it was MIT licensed. And, we always knew we were going to replace this with our own library. And, we got a little bit of flack for it.Starr:              But, in the end, I think it was sort of the right decision. What do you guys think about that decision?Josh:               I think it definitely bought us some time of not having to like figure out or reinvent that wheel, basically, because it was a pretty well-established pattern. And, if you look at those same libraries, today, of everyone who does this, basically, they're pretty much all doing ... they're all basically copies of each other. They're all basically doing the exact same thing. It's a pretty well-established pattern of code.Josh:               So, it definitely helped us get to market quicker. And, as you said, it's MIT licensed. SO, we included attribution and all that stuff.Starr:              I suppose we should say it was MIT licensed before we did that.Josh:               Yeah.Starr:              And, then they changed the license. Which I don't really blame them for. But, it took a while. Josh, you were the one who was in charge of version 2 of the [gem] that was 100% developed by you. How long did that take? That took a while, didn't it?Josh:               It took a number of months. It was a not a small project. I know by the time we got to that point obviously there were a number of reasons we wanted to re-write that code, or re-implement it. We wanted to kind of custom-tailor some things to our particular service. By that time, we had made enough decisions with the service, where we knew where we wanted to go and we could bring that to the client side and it made sense to re-do it. And, it also gave us the opportunity to re-think some of the decisions that we didn't get to make as a result of using that code from someone else up front.Josh:               So, that probably added a little time to the project. But, I think, overall, it was useful to us.Starr:              Yeah. So, it saved us several months maybe coming out of the gate.Josh:               I think it would have been ... I mean we, obviously, wouldn't have started with probably ...

Looking at the major events in our lives, we can often trace them back to turning points -- decisions big and small that had outsized effects. In this episode the dudes reflect on some of their major decisions, good and bad. Full Transcript:Starr:              So I was like, "Okay, we've got no heat now. We're just going to have to slaughter the horses and crawl inside of them or-Josh:               You guys have horses in Seattle?Starr:              Slaughter the neighbor's horses.Josh:               I thought all the horses were in Kirkland.Announcer:          It's like Steve Jobs and the dude had triplets and they built an app. This is Founder Quest.Starr:              I got back the work from the Barney guy. The Barney guy is going to do our intros and it's all pretty great.Ben:                Cool.Starr:              It is excruciatingly difficult for me to listen to it though. I don't know why but.Josh:               Let's just clarify. He doesn't actually sound like Barney. I assume like he is [crosstalk] voices right?Starr:              No, he like sounds like announcer dude. Yeah. He sounds like sort of cheesy announcer dude but it's excruciating. I was listening to these introductions that this guy recorded for us and I'm like, "I have to listen to this so I can spot errors and stuff" but I'm just clenching my fists. I'm kind of in a fetal position because it's so painful to listen to this professional man who has been the voice of Barney amongst many other roles, reading out the really stupid shit I ask him to read. So anyway, I'm sure I'm making you guys feel great about the future direction of this podcast.Josh:               I'm sure it's going to be awesome and I mean by the time people are actually hearing this, they're going to have already heard the announcer. So I guess they'll know whether it's shit or not.Starr:              Oh yeah, that's right. Maybe.Josh:               I mean they can tell us. I guess.Starr:              One thing that I get asked a lot and I'm sure you guys get asked a lot too is how do we do it right? The three of us have this pretty cool little software company. We build things we like. We do it on our own terms. How did we do it? Because a lot of people are interested in doing similar things. So I thought it would be fun to have a show where we talk a little bit about that. So what would you guys think about that?Josh:               Yeah. Sounds good. I mean I think it's just pure blind luck obviously. I don't know about you but.Starr:              Oh 100%.Josh:               I don't know how I the hell I do it.Starr:              Show is over.Josh:               Show is over.Ben:                There may have been a little bit of work involved.Starr:              I guess I should start out and explain a little bit about what we have right? So the three of us started Honeybadger about like, how long ago was it?Ben:                Yeah, we started in 2012.Josh:               2012.Ben:                Yeah. So it would be seven years old in the summer.Starr:              Oh Man. What grade is that like second grade?Ben:                Yep.Josh:               I just don't. I don't want to see Honeybadger when it's a teenager. I don't know. I thought that's going to be pretty scary.Starr:              Yeah. So seven years ago we set out to build this app to monitor our web apps for errors. We were using an old service that does a similar thing called Hoptoad. Eventually turned into a thing called Airbrake and it just wasn't doing it for us. It had a lot of problems. It had a lot of service degradations and we eventually just kind of got fed up and decided to build our own thing and fortunately for us, a lot of other people were thinking the same thing. So we had a lot of early customers out the gate who were Airbrake customers originally and looking around for a more stable replacement that was being actively developed instead of just kind of milked like a cash cow.Josh:               I think one of the things that we did, I mean that kind of just came naturally is that we were solving our own problem or I guess they say scratching your own itch, but it was something that we really wanted ourselves and that was a big in doing it in the first place. I mean we did want to build a product and sell it but we also really had this need that we wanted to solve for ourselves and we kind of did that. That was the initial motivation, how we chose what to actually build in the first place was we used ourselves kind of as guinea pigs.Starr:              Yeah, because we were like freelancers for a long time and we weren't really in the same company, but we worked on similar projects and we all used Airbrake. Actually at the time that we started on Honeybadger Ben and I were working at another company as employees and we used Airbrake then too and it was just not doing it for us.Ben:                Yeah. I think the thing about scratching or itch is you can have a lot of itches, right? And there are some that are more interesting than others and some that are more painful than others. And you've heard that phrase like, "Is your product a vitamin or is it an aspirin?" Right? Is it solving a real pain or is it something that it's kind of nice to have and I think one of the things that made a difference was we felt that Airbrake was a painful experience. We were really pissed off about how the service had degraded and we decided that we had to fix that. So we felt the pain keenly. It wasn't just, "Oh, it'd be nice to have this thing". It was like, "We gotta have this thing".Starr:              Oh yeah, totally. I remember this and this, you might say that one of the things that set me off being interested in Honeybadger was a mistake on my part. I was having trouble with Airbrake. I was having an issue and so I posted a question on their customer service forum which was literally the only way to get customer service. And maybe a day later somebody responded and it was kind of a flip, non-response answer. And that just made me so angry that these people who I'm paying or my boss is paying I guess are writing me off like this and not even giving me a decent customer support answer and it was only a couple of months later when I went back and realized, "Oh man, that was just another customer". They were in the same boat as I was. That wasn't even Airbrake support but I guess if they would've really had support in the first place, that wouldn't have happened. So it's still the...

How we attracted top quality software developer candidates without offering Facebook, Amazon, or Google salary levels. We talk about how to write the job description and reveal the feedback we received from candidates.Full Transcript:Starr:              I was in my car. So there was no-Josh:               There was no, it like it wasn't that creepy.Announcer:          Hands off that dial. Business is about to get a whole lot nerdier. You're tuned in to Founder Quest.Starr:              Yeah I mean ... but also like this is Seattle, so literally everyone here is a quasi-tech celebrity.Josh:               That's true.Starr:              Yeah, it's dime a dozen.Starr:              So this week, we have been not getting much real work done. We've all been super distracted because we've been really focusing on hiring.Josh:               When you say, "we've been working on hiring," I think what you mean is "Ben's been working on hiring."Starr:              What's the point of being in management if you can't take credit for other people's work, right?Josh:               Exactly.Ben:                Exactly. That, and you got the whole royal "we" going for us, so gotta ... Yeah, it's been a bit of a slog, so. But it's been kind of fun too. Like, you know, we decided a few months ago, I guess, that we were about ready to hire and, you know, we've been thinking about this for a while. We've had contractors helping us from time to time. And we just decided it was time to have someone who could be around to the long haul. And so, we started the process of just thinking about who we wanted and what we wanted. And I had just ... it was pretty good timing ... I had just seen this blog post about hiring, and about what job posts should look like versus what they usually look like. You may have seen this on Twitter, but like there was an image where it was like colored red and green, and the red was ... it was mostly red ... and the red were parts about the business, and the green were parts about the candidate.Starr:              No, I didn't see that.Ben:                Oh yeah, yeah, it was really cool. So, like if you're a candidate, like, what do you care about when you look at a job post? What kind of technology are you playing with? Things like that. What kind of benefits are you going to get? And so this person was talking about how most job posts are all about the company and nothing at all about the candidate, right? And so, I had just read that and I thought, oh, that's, that's good to think about. And so, I wrote our job post in a way that was more approachable for a candidate, like, what would a candidate really wanna see? I guess it's like Marketing 101, right? Speak to your audience.Starr:              Exactly.Ben:                I think that was, that was really helpful in getting some great candidates coming in the door.Starr:              I sent the job posting to Evie, my wife, and she was bowled over. She's like, nobody writes job applications like that ... er, I keep calling it an application ... she said, nobody writes job descriptions like this. Some of the responses we got from people were amazing, some people said things like, I can't believe a job like this exists in such an imperfect world.Josh:               Yeah, it seems like we struck a nerve.Ben:                Yeah, yeah. It was fun to write and it was fun to see those kind of responses come back from people. And I think that was critical because our budget was kind of low, and in fact, we even included the budget on the job posting. The trade off there was that even though the budget was kind of low, the benefits were pretty high. Specifically, people were very interested in having a 30 hour work week. That was-Starr:              Oh, yeah. Maybe we should, maybe we should, go through some of the, the things we put in the job posting. Some of the benefits, some of the interesting things about the job that maybe drew people, because I know a lot of people are always wanting to know how you can more easily hire developers.Ben:                That's true, yeah, you hear that a lot. And I think, one thing that makes it easy is you give developers what they want.Starr:              That's ... no, that's too easy. That's too simple.Ben:                We found that there are definitely a group of developers who have experience, because we said, we needed deep Ruby experience, and who are interested in playing with new technologies, because we said, yeah, we're looking at Elixir and playing with that, and who sometimes value their time over money because we basically said, we'll be happy to pay you a little less but we'll give you a lot more time, like you can have a day a week off, or you can work five hour days, or however you want to work that.Starr:              Mm-hmm.Ben:                And I think a lot of people underestimated just how much a developer values that flexibility and having some more time versus just always maximizing the dollar sign.Starr:              It seems like a lot of the developers that we got who applied were a little bit more experience. I know, I know that we were really interested in experience in general, but we got a really good crop of candidates coming in with some real deep experience in Ops, in Ruby development, so forth. And it just surprised me. So it seems like maybe once you've ridden the startup rollercoaster a few times, once you've put in your 80 hour workweeks, you realize that maybe that's not the best way to live your life and start looking for something else. And surprisingly not many other companies are offering that sort of package.Josh:               Yeah, one of the, one thing someone said during this whole process was um, the salary we were offering was actually a small pay cut for them. But based on like, the benefits and the actual, like money for time argument, they're actually getting a raise if they take this job offer. Because rather than like working 60 hour weeks for what they're making now they can work 30 hour weeks for a little less, but it's still a net win.Starr:              And I guess a lot of the times people don't consider that when somebody is working for Facebook making 200 grand total comp that they're not necessarily working a 40 hour week for that. Maybe some of them can pull it off, but I think the whole focus on hours is kind of disingenuous because really when you work an 80 hour a week, you're not at your best for those 80 hours. Like personally, I find that I can get maybe two or three hours of really hard work done, uh, before I'm, I'm just kind of dead and have to move on to easier things.Ben:                Yeah.Josh:  &n...

In their first episode, Starr, Josh and Ben talk about the company hack-week where they built a small proof-of-concept product with Elixir and Phoenix. Full Transcript:Josh:               Okay so you guys tell me if this too stupid butStarr:              Well if you have to askBen:                I like how this is starting.Starr:              Sold.Announcer:          They're just three amigos making their way in the crazy old world of software as service. Welcome to Founder Quest.Starr:              Yeah so ah lets talk about the hackathon guys.Josh:               Cool.Ben:                Okay.Starr:              So last week we had our first ever honey badger hackathon and the idea was that we would take a break from working on our from our mundane lives you know working on air tracking, up time tracking stuff like that and work on something completely different to kind of clear out the cobwebs and have a little fun. Yeah we chose to build a product in Elixir and Phoenix because we don't really um use those two often so it's a nice chance to do something different.Starr:              So what do we hope to achieve by doing this? Like what was the goals?Josh:               So I think like just I mean mainly have fun um one of the things I really liked about the hackathon was we also this was the first thing we did coming back from a three week vacation for Christmas over which I think we all worked on an Elixir Udemy course, so it was a chance to practice some of the stuff we learned in the course and get back into the swing of things.Starr:              Yeah that was nice. Are we gonna do that vacation all the time? Is that going to be a regular thing?Josh:               Yeah I think so. Will break it up by hackathons but otherwise I'm good with just being on vacation.Starr:              Okay can we have a hackathon driven company? Is that a thing?Josh:               Yeah I think so.Josh:               Would we be like hip then, would we be popular?Starr:              Probably. What do you think Ben?Ben:                Can we be more popular? I mean you know. There are limits right?Josh:               Yeah Ben always brings humbleness.Starr:              Don't want to fly too close to the sun.Starr:              Let's think back to so we first were talking about the hackathon at one of our conclaves. If you don't know us we work remotely, we do everything in Slack and stuff. We meet up once a quarter for what we call conclaves at an undisclosed location in western Washington.Starr:              So we went through lots of different ideas for the hackathon.Josh:               Who was it that came up with the idea we went with?Starr:              I think it might have been Ben. We're talking about like the model of deploying the applications that we're interested in building and I think we were talking about things that are easy to do onsite or on a single server, they're like a self hosted type thing and that's what kind of led us to talking about Elixir and stuff, but I think it was Ben that came up with theBen:                I think you know we do a lot in our day jobs with high traffic sites. We do a lot of processing and one thing that was really interesting was as far as Elixir is concerned is that the high concurrency that it can support so we're like “oh what can we build that would be interesting that would be in our wheelhouse but still kind of fun” and we did that. Like you said we did Elixir over the Christmas break but we also did the advent of code andStarr:              Oh yeah the, I didn't finish that.Josh:               Yeah.Ben:                I didn't finish it either .Josh:               I did like one tenth of what I expected.Starr:              I did like two.Ben:                But we don't have to talk about that. But we started with the right intentions. I know that for me, I was like doing them first in Ruby and then I would do an Elixir and see how different it was. Having the idea to play with that was a lot of the fun motivation behind the hackathon.Josh:               Yeah so eventually I think Ben was like “lets build a segment replacement”, because we use segment to send various,Starr:              Well Segment is sort of works like a repeater, you send events that happen to your users, you send your user data to Segment and then it sends out to your vast array of third party services that consume that data like Intercom, like I think we use Mix Panel, we use Drip. Maybe Google analytics, I don't know.Ben:                Yeah.Josh:               Yeah. Like it costs a lot of money, right?Starr:              Yeah it costs a lot of money well, a fair amount of money. It dependsJosh:               Yeah right.Starr:              We basically only use it to broadcast, request to other services.Josh:               Right.Starr:              So it seems like it should be pretty cheap but its not pretty cheap.Starr:              Yeah and we've had some trouble. We've been, we've talked about building some sort of internal thing to do this for us, just because we're not fully utilizing its full capability yet either. I think the core of what it is like a centralized customer information database and warehouse really. And then it handles, like you said sending all those events to all the different places like third party software and service tools, even to the point where it can even replay events which I think is a cool feature that we're not using at all.Josh:               So is it actually a database though? Can you go in and query your users straight into Segment?Ben:                Well one of the destinations that you can configure is like a [inaudible] database, which we do, we dump [inaudible] so you can go and query the events. I think one of things that was interesting about using that at the hackathon project was that its very similar to what we do, we take in a bunch of events, and we spit them out to different places like Slack or Github issues, or whatever so we thought...