This week Josh, Ben, and Starr look back at all of the things that Honeybadger shipped in the last 12 months. They also give Apple some free management advice and provide their thoughts on MicroConf's latest announcement. Lastly, will Honeybadger move away from error monitoring and bet its future on textbox applications? Tune in and find out!Links:Exponent PodcastJohny IveMicroConfHiring Process FounderQuest episodeFireside Chat FounderQuest episodeDundie AwardsFull Transcript:Ben:                I was just thinking. Hey, Tim. Let's give you tips on how to organize Apple.Starr:              That should be a show that we do. Yeah, we should do a special show where we just do something extremely full of hubris.Ben:                Every week we could pick a large multinational enterprise and give them tips on how to improve their business.Starr:              Yeah.Ben:                How to Honeybadger-ize it.Josh:               I think that's what the Exponent podcast does, which is-Ben:                Beat us to the punch.Josh:               Yeah. Is it Ben Thompson?Ben:                Uh-huh (affirmative).Josh:               Yeah. But I mean, he sounds like he's qualified to talk about that stuff.Ben:                He actually knows what he's talking about.Josh:               Yeah, but I have heard buzz just following... Because I've been having issues with some Apple services, and it seems like they are having some, like they have some growing issues, or they have had growing issues. There has been buzz about they might need to create some sort of clearer division or something. Because it's totally different, running services. Totally different from having a hardware, software company.Starr:              Well, if they're having problems scaling maybe they should move to AWS.Josh:               That is... yeah.Ben:                Pretty sure they have quite a big AWS spend as it is.Starr:              The whole Apple photos thing, I hear it's just run off a couple of Mac Minis in some guy's closet.Josh:               It's just running on a disc. It's running in Tim's closet.Ben:                Although, they have created Mac Pros now. They just released that. They don't have a rack mount yet for them.Josh:               Oh, yeah. And you can get eight terabytes in the MacBook Pros now, so they could finally extend their iCloud storage.Starr:              Yeah, do y'all think they actually run their services on Macs as servers?Ben:                No. I don't think so. I mean, maybe some old, old services are still running on some of those Xserves, but no. I think-Josh:               I'd be surprised.Starr:              Yeah, that would take some dedication.Ben:                I'm sure they're well invested in the public cloud.Starr:              If Steve Jobs was still around, they would be, I think.Josh:               Wait, you don't think-Starr:              That just seems like the kind of line he'd draw in the sand.Josh:               Did Jony Ive not design all their rack mounts?Starr:              See, the problem with Apple computers, with Apple servers in the data center, is it just is insane to manage all the dongles.Josh:               Just dongles between it.Starr:              Yeah, they don't have ethernet jacks. You got to have a dongle that goes into your USB 3.Josh:               Have you seen the fiber dongle, to connect the fiver to the Thunderbolt?Starr:              I know. It's crazy. It's crazy. What are we talking about today? We're talking about lessons learned in 2019. It's 2019, isn't it, guys?Ben:                Still, yes it is.Starr:              Okay. That's great. Yeah, so lessons learned in 2019 at Honeybadger. It might be applicable to your huge multinational corporation that manufactures software and hardware. It's been a pretty big year today... Today. It's been a pretty big year. I've had days that feel like that. It's been a pretty big year this year. We have grown the team to five people, and we've just gotten a whole bunch done. I guess maybe we should start by... What do you think we should do? Should with start at the beginning or should we start by talking about big 10000 foot view of lessons and then sort of get into the details? How do y'all want to do it?Ben:                I was thinking of this episode as the things we did this year episode, the recap, as opposed to things we learned.Starr:              Oh, I'm sorry.Ben:                I don't know.Josh:               Well, there might be things we learned that we'll share along the way.Ben:                Will come out of the things that we did. Hopefully, we learned some things along the way.Starr:              Okay, that's cool. Things we did. That's a little bit more cut and dry too.Josh:               I forgot we did a lot of this stuff, so I kind of learned what we did this year, today.Ben:                Yeah, it's good to reflect and celebrate your successes, right?Josh:               Yeah.Starr:              So what we did this morning, or what, I guess, Josh did is asked Ben Findley to compile a list of all the things that we did. So we didn't have to... We're getting the hang of this enforcing thing, I think.Josh:               I was like, "Hey, Ben Findley. What did we do this year, again?" And then he created a nice list in Notion, and here we are.Ben:                I jumped i...

This week on FounderQuest Josh, Starr, and Ben talk about the quandary of not knowing how to build something until after you’ve already built it. Therefore, once it's built it can be hard to fight the urge to tear it down and build it again taking into account all of lessons that were learned along the way. The Badgers also imagine a rewrite of Honeybadger using the latest in 90s technology. Trigger warning for Perl developers! Links:Peanuts Christmas specialGarfield Christmas specialKonMariLiving Computer MuseumRewrite! by David Heinemeier Hanson (DHH) Jeff FoxworthyXennialsGeneration JonesELIZA Animated Star TrekFull Transcript:Ben:                Oh wow. That's so amazing. Cause I love like the Christmas specials from like Garfield and Peanuts, you know? And so I'm just thinking of a Honeybadger animated Christmas special. That would be so awesome.Starr:              Oh, that'd be fun, wouldn't it?Josh:               That would be the best Christmas special.Ben:                I don't know. The FounderQuest Christmas special might end up like the animated Star Trek series. Right? It might be a total bomb.Josh:               We're all in character, but it's like bad cosplay. What were the moral of the Honeybadger Christmas specialty? Would it be that it's not about the errors you fix, it's about the friends you make along the way?Josh:               Could be.Ben:                I like that. Yeah.Starr:              Okay. Well that's good. Speaking of cosplay, so I got a random package delivered to me to my name from Amazon and I order a lot of stuff from Amazon, so I assumed I just forgotten that I ordered something, so I checked and that's not it. And I opened it up and it's like, the name on the bag inside is like such and such cosplay and so, like, this is going in a very bad direction. I'm not sure I want to open this, but I think somebody had, like, one of, I don't know, one of our relatives or some family member had maybe sent a costume for my daughter or something and just, it's a time of year. The packages just randomly show up. And you're like, "Oh, I don't know who this is from, but it's got some kids' stuff in it."Ben:                We had that same package problem, that Amazon thing because we do a lot of Amazon ordering and so you know, packages around this time of year starts showing up and you're like, "Oh well I guess that was the present I shouldn't have opened. Sorry."Starr:              Yeah.Josh:               You opened the Amazon presents that aren't addressed to you, Ben?Ben:                No, not all the time, just every now and then.Josh:               Just on Christmas, true. One year?Ben:                Just on Christmas time.Josh:               Just on Christmas.Starr:              One year, we did Christmas in my in-laws and so we shipped everybody's packages there and we put their name on it cause it's where they live and everything. But I guess there was some miscommunication because my father-in-law was just starting to start opening everything and he assumed that it was all presents for him. He was, like, thanking us and it's like, "No, actually that's for my brother, that's not for you."Josh:               I could totally see that happening.Ben:                One of the benefits though of being in charge of the Honeybadger official post office box is that I get to also use that for my Christmas deliveries , so all my Amazon shopping shows up there. Yeah.Josh:               That's sneaky.Ben:                Yes.Starr:              Oh my goodness. So what are we talking about today?Ben:                Talking about a big rewrite.Starr:              The big rewrite. I guess we should explain what a big rewrite is, unless, like, programmers know this, right? There's this idea that you build something. You build a product, an application and like you don't really know how to build it until you've already built it. Right? Until then you're just kind of learning along the way, like, what the best approach is to take on things and so then, once you get it done, you actually know how to build it. There's always this really big temptation. It's like, "Oh, I just want to like build it for real now. I'm learning all the lessons," you know, taking into account all the lessons I already learned. And so, yeah, I mean that's my take on the big rig. Right. What does a big rewrite mean to you all?Ben:                Well, you know, that actually made me think of, you know, there's actually a development approach called, you know, you build one to throw it away where people, you know, in the early stages we'll build just a prototype, right? And we are with the intent that we're going to throw it away. But that's not the same as a big rewrite. I think the big rewrite happens when you know you've built this thing over time and it works and it's been working and it's making money but now you look back you're like, ah, I really wish we could redo that whole thing.Josh:               Yeah. You start noticing all the things that you could have done better or you could go back, you make decisions throughout the process of writing it that lock you into certain things or past decisions lock you into things now and pretty soon you find yourself basically architecting for this legacy system where, like, that happened to me this week when I was working on this feature. And I probably would have built it a different way if I could, if I was starting from scratch, but I had to basically bolt it on to what we already had, so the past decisions were influencing how I have to build stuff now, which makes you want to go and throw it all out.Starr:              That's an interesting take on it too, because yeah, you're right. Like, when you find yourself building something and sort of having to do it in a less than optimal manner because he has to sort of, you have to shoehorn it into an existing product. That can be be super frustrating.Josh:    &n...

The guys throw the show notes out the window and kick it freestyle on this special Thanksgiving episode. All of today’s hard-hitting questions are answered: Dark meat or light meat? Turkey or duck? The warm glow of a fireplace or the warm glow of a database upgrade progress bar? Plus, the guys talk about when to start holiday feature freezes and what Honeybadger is working on/not working on this December. Links:Build Your SaaS podcast capitalism episode Transcript:Ben: For some reason that reminded me of the presence method that I use from time to time with our Ruby and Rails work.Josh: Ruby? Yeah.Ben: I didn't really actually know about that until like, I don't know a year ago. I never paid attention because I always use the present a and then do something or something else.Josh: Yeah.Ben: But that presence method, that is pretty dang slick. I love that. That's one of the reasons I always love Ruby, do stuff like that.Josh: It's a very nice ... yeah, I like how it works.Starr: I don't think I've used that one. So what does that do again?Ben: So if you have a string that might be nil-Starr: Okay.Ben: So you have a variable that contains a string, it could be nil and you want to display something other than blank if it happens to be nil. So like username, right? You want to, you want to spit that out into a template. What you can say "username.presence" or whatever text you want as a fallback.Ben: Then what it'll do is if the string is present, if it's not nil, not blank, it will display the user name. But if it is now, then it'll display the alternative. Whatever your fallback is. So you don't have to use a ternary operator to like say, "Oh, if it's new, then do this or that," you know?Starr: Oh, that's nice.Ben: Yeah.Starr: That's pretty handy.Ben: Yeah, it's fun. One of those little things that make Ruby such a delight to use.Starr: Yeah. I think this week's podcast is going to be freestyle. Okay. No, it's going to be a little bit looser because we're coming up on the holidays. So this is our special holiday episode, I guess where we talk about like what are we doing in December? Last year we did a hackathon. Are we going to do a hackathon this year? What are we doing about time off?Starr: I would just like to know about some of this stuff because ...Ben: I think, I think the first we have to talk about what are we having for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow.Starr: Oh that's right. Okay, so this is going to come out like a week after Thanksgiving there, right?Ben: Oh right.Josh: Yeah.Josh: Well that's okay.Starr: What good did we have for Thanksgiving? Looking back on that, I just have fond memories of it.Josh: We're getting on a dangerous it's a slippery slope here because then the next week we're going to have to pretend like it's the week after the week after Thanksgiving-Starr: We have to keep up for the rest of our lives.Josh: We're going to keep up this charade for the entirety of this podcast.Starr: I don't know Josh, I just got such a great deal on a flat screen TV on Black Friday that I just can't not talk about it.Josh: This is going to be like podcast inception.Ben: Well the the Curtis household always has traditional Thanksgiving dinner. We have turkey, we have a green bean casserole, we have some mashed potatoes and of course the sweet potato casserole. You cannot have Thanksgiving without the sweet potato casserole.Josh: Oh yeah.Ben: Yeah.Josh: Do you guys do like the marshmallows on top?Ben: No. Man, that's evil.Starr: That's the best part.Josh: Strong opinions on Founder Quest.Ben: Cannot abide the marshmallows, no.Starr: that's all right. What's a food that you have a strong opinion about Josh?Josh: Turkey, I like my turkey.Starr: Oh really?Josh: Well, I'm very adamant that you have to ... turkey has to be included. There are elements within our family that believe otherwise. So that's one of our disputes. Yeah.Starr: Well I'm having duck this year. I hate to break it to you so don't come to my house because there's not going to be that many of us, so why? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know why I should make a turkey for that. That many people.Josh: Well, ducks ... at least it's not like a fish or something like that.Starr: Oh my God. Who would do that?Josh: Some people. I won't name names. I want to, I want to enjoy my Thanksgiving this year.Starr: Oh, I love Thanksgiving because it's all about cooking and large, extravagant cooking projects. Which is like my favorite thing to do. I posted the picture in Slack. I made some cultured butter, which started by you buy some cream and you mix it with some bacteria and you let it sit out for a couple of days. Then-Ben: I thought you just took it to an art gallery. Now you're cultured butter.Starr: Oh yeah. That would probably be quicker.Starr: Let's see, we got the duck in the fridge. It's sort of air drying because you have to wait until the skin is like parchment, which is what they say. Then what else? I made a panna cotta with the leftover buttermilk for tonight and ... Oh yeah. For the sauce I'm making duck l'orange, which I'd never or duck Allah, Laura, I don't know French. I've never made this before. What I had to do is I had to buy five pounds of chicken wings because I can't afford five pounds of duck wings. Five pounds of chicken wings. You make stock out of them. You make about two quarts of stock or two liters of stock. Then you boil it down until it's like a cup of liquid and then that's the base for your sauce.Ben: Wow.Starr: Yeah, so we're not messing around.Ben: That's hardcore.Josh: Seriously.Ben: Nice. Now I'm hungry.Starr: Well, too late. Because you got to you got to finish this podcast.Starr: Got to.Starr: Too bad.Ben: Let's get on it. I'm going to come crash your Thanksgiving Starr. That sounds pretty good actually.Starr: Yeah, you should. You should. I mean there's like food for four people.Josh: We have like, we've got a 25 pound turkey in the fridge. That's what we're doing. We've got like our big family get together at my brother's house that we're going to.Ben: Nice.Josh: We're doing the turkey. We usually do that every year. Well, if Katelyn has a really good turkey recipe that she does. It's like an orange citrus brine that we do.Starr: It's like a turkey l'orange.Josh: Yeah, kind of. I'm not as a learned as you are Starr in the cooking department. I'll leave that to you.Starr: I just, I looked up the recipe.Josh: You have the internet. I guess I also have the internet I'm just too lazy to use it.Starr: Yeah.Josh: But we also have two 15 pound turkeys in the freezer for later. That's how much I like turkey.Starr: Those are backup turkeys?Josh: Yeah. Yep.Ben: Wow.Starr: Oh, I didn't know anybody actually like turkey to be honest. I thought it was just this thing that we all had to pretend to like for one day a year.Josh: I like turkey.Starr: Oh.Ben: Yeah, me too.Josh: I mean, I like the full dinner.Ben: Yeah.Josh: I mean, I'll get tired of it but I also eat a lot of lean meat for the protein factor so that's good for that.Ben: So when it comes to Turkey, I have to know what is your preference? Light meat or dark meat?Josh: Probably, I mean like, dark. Everyone likes dark meat, right?...

This week on FounderQuest, the guys talk about their decision to offer a free plan alongside the paid plans for Honeybadger and how it impacted the overall business. Josh is also back shares the hottest of takes from his recent trip to Nashville to attend RubyConf. As usual, the show goes off the rails and talks about flying, Ben’s Eye of Sauron approach to fiscal management and an acquisition strategy based around companies named after honey badgers.Full Transcript:Josh:               Oh yeah, I got first-class back from RubyConf. I forget what it cost, but it was like too cheap to pass up, so I splurged a little bit.Ben:                Yeah, I love me first-class, especially on the way back.Josh:               It was nice. Yeah.Ben:                Yeah. You're wiped out. You're tired. You just need to crash.Josh:               Yeah. I was hungry and they had food. It wasn't a lot of food granted, but it was better than no food.Ben:                So I've read on travel blogs that the guideline is, if it's less than a dollar per minute of flight time, then it's worth it to spend the extra. So you get a deal like that.Starr:              That's interesting.Ben:                Go for it.Josh:               Yeah. I need to start making that calculation more and make sure I'm getting the most out of my Honeybadger expense card for real.Starr:              Whoa.Josh:               That the handbook-Ben:                Yes.Josh:               ...grants me.Starr:              Wait, what's this? I must have glossed over that part of our new company handbook that Ben wrote?Ben:                Yeah, our handbook says that every employee in the US gets a company issued credit card and you can use it at your discretion.Starr:              Oh my goodness. Cha ching.Ben:                Yeah, totally.Starr:              That's what that is. I wondered what that thing in my wallet was.Ben:                Of course-Josh:               Well, it doesn't have to be burning a hole anymore.Ben:                Of course, you also have to deal with the part of our code of conduct policy that talks about how we do financial reviews of all of our credit card statements, or in other words, Ben, looks at every line item of every credit card statement like, "Hey, did you really need to spend it?"Josh:               I already know that Ben is like, I already assumed that Ben is watching, like, actively watching the credit card statement in real time. Don't you get notifications or something Ben?Ben:                I have, yes, I have Amex configured to alert me whenever a purchase happens that's over $500.Starr:              Oh my goodness. You know who you are, Ben?Ben:                What?Starr:              You're probably not going to like this. I've been reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time, finally. It's like the Eye of Sauron, right. But for credit card, for financial-Josh:               The eye of Amex.Ben:                Do you think Sauron was a micro manager or did he delegate?Starr:              He was definitely a micro manager. He was directly controlling everybody in the army.Josh:               Right, yeah.Starr:              As soon as he died or whatever, like his armies just dissipated.Ben:                Right.Starr:              So yeah, I also have got the first-class upgrades a couple of times. I'm sorry Ben. I hope I didn't hurt your feelings. I don't really think you're like Sauron. I just thought it was too funny to not say.Ben:                I don't know. Being compared to Sauron, that's actually kind of cool.Josh:               Bad ass.Starr:              I mean he's very, very capable manager that person.Ben:                That's true. He didn't do a lot of management.Josh:               Yeah, very successful right up until the end.Ben:                Up until the end yeah.Starr:              Yeah. He just took on too much VC cash.Starr:              So how was the actual conference, Josh? You went to RubyConf. You decided to go old school and you took a bunch of tee shirts with you, I think, right?Josh:               Yeah, it was good. I took a duffle bag of tee shirts this time. Not something I had to check. It was carry on. It was kind of fun. We'd moved to just like taking virtual, you know, we take our business cards that have little links to get tee shirts on them most of the time, but it's fun to have the actual swag at the conference and hand them out and stuff. Yeah, it felt like old times.Starr:              How'd you feel like the conference was in terms of attendance and the talks and all that?Josh:               It was great. It was, obviously it was sold out. Lots of people there. The talks that I saw were good. Honestly, I did mostly the hallway track while I was there. I think I probably only attended six talks or so, maybe five or six, but I got to catch up-Ben:                How was the game night?Josh:               Game night was great. I forget how many people actually showed up, but it was a full room. I think they had like eight to 10 tables or something and they were all filled at one point. So yeah, full house. We had a little swag table, so I got to put my shirts out with the other sponsors. Ruby Together and BackerKit were both sponsors.Starr:              Oh, so we sponsored the game night?Josh:               And Sidekiq yeah, we did.Starr:              Was that an official conference thing or is that a side thing?Josh:               It was official this time. Normally it's, I think we did it at RailsConf I think earlier this year.Ben:              &nbs...

This week Ben and Starr talk about Honeybadger's efforts using marketplaces to get new business and whether it's worth the development time needed to set them up. They also discuss Honeybadger's participation in the GitHub Student Developer Pack, creating a code of conduct that still allows for free swag, and tease out a special announcement for RailsConf 2020!Links:GitHub Student Developer PackSeth GodenAWS MarketplaceHeroku MarketplaceGitHub MarketplaceMicroconfRailsConfHoneybadger BlogFull Transcription:Ben: Speaking of Macs and stuff, software kind of being weird, my son, my younger son over this week has been playing with Raspberry Pi again.Starr: Oh, that's cool.Ben: Yeah, he wanted to do some funky USB stuff, and he's like, "I think I'll try it with the Pi." And so he's getting all into that, and then he's coming to me with questions like, "okay, how do I start up something on system boot?" And I'm like, "Oh, well let me introduce you to System D."Starr: Oh my goodness, Ben. You've been waiting for this day, haven't you?Ben: Yes, it's pretty awesome.Starr: Oh, that's so great. That's so great. I'm so glad. Starr: Did you buy your kayak yet? You said you were buying a kayak.Ben: No, I didn't buy the kayak yet. I almost bought the kayak, but I decided against it because we had the expenses for working on the house and sending Addison off to college and so on. So yeah, hesitated. I'm going to wait. Maybe this summer. Maybe in the summer I'll get that kayak finally.Starr: Yeah, that's the reason I was thinking about it. I was thinking about... I was like, "Oh, has Ben got his kayak yet?" And then I was like, "It's really cold to be kayaking." Do people kayak in this weather? I mean, probably, because it's Seattle and people are crazy, but-Ben: Yeah. Well, just this week some dude crashed his plane in a lake nearby and a kayaker rescued him. So yes, kayakers apparently do paddle out this time of year.Starr: Oh, well thank goodness for these kayakers who want to be freezing, I guess.Ben: I know.Starr: They saved that guy's bacon. All right. Today I think... Well, our astute listeners will know that Josh is not with us. He's had a bad cold and yeah, we just haven't been able to... He hasn't gotten well in time to make this happen. So we're having another one of our Honeybadger fireside chats, which is our branded marketing effort for when one of us is gone. And so it's just two of us kind of chatting, and-Ben: It's like everything is better when it's a branded marketing effort. You know?Starr: Exactly. Exactly. That little trademark, like that little TM sign. That's like the salt. The salt in your cooking, you know?Ben: That's when you know you're getting a high-quality podcast.Starr: Exactly. We looked up the Unicode character for that and everything.Ben: Nice.Starr: Today we're going to be talking about a number of things. They're all sort of loosely related. First we're going to be talking about GitHub Student Developer Pack, which is this sort of marketing effort that I don't really know about, and so I'm going to use this as a chance to sort of ask Ben lots of probing questions and figure out what's going on. And since that's kind of like a referral marketing-type effort, I don't really know what the official type name is for it. We're maybe going to talk about other things that we've done in the past. What is the GitHub Student Developer Pack, and why have we done that?Ben: Yeah. So GitHub started this a while back where they offer a variety of products and services to students as part of a outreach thing. And we just recently started being involved in that, because I think it's a good idea to get students familiar with our product. It's the Microsoft strategy that they did way, way back in the day. Well, even Apple before them, right?Starr: Oh yeah.Ben: You get students using your product, and then as they grow up, they eventually buy your products. Right? I think Apple has been very successful in that in the education market. And then Microsoft came and did the same thing, and then Google did that too with Chromebooks now. Anywho, yeah, the GitHub Student Developer Pack is all about helping students get access to a variety of services and products to help them in their development. So GitHub's like, "You know what? We should make students better at developing stuff and give them tools to help them do so." And so you can go to their website and get all kinds of goodies if you happen to be a student.Starr: I study the Blade. Does that count?Ben: Hmm. Well, maybe, but only if you happen to have an email that will certify you as an actual student.Starr: Okay. An email. Really?Ben: Yeah, yeah. If you have a .edu.Starr: Oh, an email address. Okay.Ben: Yes, yes.Starr: I'm sorry. I was like, so they think... Anybody who can use GitHub can forge an email. Like, come on.Ben: No, they actually do some verification to make sure you're a legit student, but once you can verify that you are... And if you don't have the .edu kind of email address, if your school isn't cool enough for that, then you can upload your student ID, and presumably some human somewhere will look at that and say, "Oh, yep, this is an actual student," and then flip the bit on your account that says this person is a student.Starr: Awesome. We've done various things like this in the past, and I think our thinking about these have changed a little bit. And this was maybe prompted by that Seth Goden course that you and Josh did. In the beginning, we were really looking for... I don't know. We were just kind of tracking these efforts very seriously and being like, "Oh, okay. How many people are signing up as a direct result of this versus like..." But then, yeah, at some point we were like, "Oh, this is just kind of like... These are students. These are seeds we're planting for years to come, and there's literally no way we can tell." There's no real direct way to track that, right? Is there? I mean-Ben: Well, yeah. Like you said, we in the early days were really interested in being able to track all the conversions and having measurable results of all the efforts. And over time, we've gotten more comfortable with the idea of brand and marketing, and doing things that will pay off in the future. In this case, I think it's a bit of both, because we do want our brand out there. We do want developers to be exposed to us early in their careers, but also we can track it pretty well, because we are of course signing them up with identifiers saying, "Oh, this person came from GitHub Student." We know of the however many signups we have in a given week, how many of those are coming in through that offer. And over time, we'll be able to find out just how well that converts. Now of course in this case, the time horizon is a bit longer than our usual, because our particular offer for that pack is one year of free service. We'll have to wait a little bit to find out if they convert at all, but we'll see.Starr: We'll see. Siri, remind me to chec...

On this week's episode of FounderQuest Josh, Ben, and Starr talk about their Soc 2 and GDPR compliance efforts. They go over the different strategies to handle compliance, the potential costs involved, and discuss if it's worth the time and money.When embarking on their compliance research, the guys also stumbled across some surprising claims companies are using to stretch the truth on actually being compliant. Learn a few of the 50 shades of compliance* that they found.Links: KolideSoc 2GDPRElasticsearchRedisSlackBitDefenderSaul GoodmanArthur AndersenHoneybadger - Write For UsFull Transcript:Starr:              Did y'all go trick or treating?Josh:               Yeah, we did. We went to a neighborhood with some friends of ours and it was a good suburban trick or treating neighborhood. Most of the houses were all participating. The kids had a blast.Starr:              Oh, great.Josh:               We were a family of bats.Starr:              Oh, cool.Josh:               Yeah, I wasn't the Batman. I was just ...Starr:              You were just a bat.Josh:               Just a bat.Starr:              That's okay. There's nothing wrong with just a bat.Josh:               Yeah.Starr:              Yeah, we did the neighborhood thing too. This was Ida's first year of really understanding what was going on and not being just terrified of strangers. So she was just all over this. She was like, "We're going to go get more candy. Mom and dad, you stay right here. You leave me alone and let me do this myself. I'm going to go knock on their door and say trick or treat. She's not even four yet, so it was super cute.Josh:               Nice.Starr:              Yeah. I can't even imagine when she gets to be like 13, she's just going to be like, "You stand over here dad, you park a mile away from school and I'll walk."Josh:               Yeah, she's going to be choosing colleges across the country or something or ...Starr:              Yeah, she likes us nearby, but she just wanted to do it herself. She's very big on that.Josh:               It makes sense. Yeah, Tatum was doing ... she was going up to doors by herself too. I'm pretty sure I saw her hit houses multiple times. Like I should go up, come back to the street and then I think I saw her go back up at the same house.Starr:              That's so funny.Josh:               Yeah.Starr:              Yeah. I ate so much candy last night that this morning I literally feel like hung over or something. My brain isn't working, I'm just exhausted. That's how you know you're getting old, I guess.Josh:               Yeah, we did the same thing.Starr:              Yeah. Today, we're going to be discussing ... what are we going to be discussing? We're going to be compliance GDPR, SOC 2, all those big things.Ben:                Yeah. All that fun stuff.Starr:              Where should we get started on? Is anybody want to give us sort of an intro? This isn't really my forte.Ben:                In talking about compliance, we're a small company, and I think a lot of times people in our position, entrepreneurs in our position ignore the whole compliance issue because they're just too small to handle that, and like, "Oh, I don't have a compliance department because it's just me." I think we spent most of our existence in the same boat, like, we'll just ignore that and we'll just whistle and move along our way, but really came to a head with GDPR because we had customers who are international and who themselves had to deal with it. So, we had to deal with it because they had to deal with it. So I think that's the reason why we really felt like we had to get up to speed on what all this compliance stuff means and couldn't just ignore it, put our head in the sand.Starr:              What do we mean when we say compliance? What are we talking about?Ben:                Yeah, really, all the compliance regimes are about, generally speaking, like security. A good security practice is making sure that you are operating your business in a way that protects the data, which you're entrusted. GDPR was very much about personal data and making sure that companies treat that responsibly, that is not going out to everybody and their brother, that you're not doing things with it, that your customers wouldn't agree with you doing. For them, it was about, you want to be sure that you're not sharing this information willingly and unwillingly. Either through marketing partnerships or through breaches, that would be basically a breach of trust with your customer, or your employee, like they have a special case for HR data.Ben:                If you're employed by a company, they have your social security number and they might have other information about you and your address, your, maybe some health insurance information, whatever. You don't necessarily want that information going out to everybody and their brother. Basically, GDPR came about, and compliance, more generally, is all about doing what you're supposed to do, being ethical with the data that you have in your possession.Starr:              A lot of the companies are sort of ... If you're a company in the European Union or you're selling to people in the EU, you are sort of legally required to follow a GDPR, this sort of list of rules. Right?Ben:                Right. If you're a company in the EU and you have to comply with this regulation, you also need to make sure that your suppliers comply with this regulation. That's where it involves us because we're not in the EU, but we have customers there.Starr:              Yeah. The other sort of compliance regimes, what is it? SOC 2. I don't know, there's, I think HIPAA is sort of in that same boat. All these are, either there's a law somewhere that says that certain people have to follow these or big companies have in their policy that they only do business with people who follow these. They're like viral, rig...

This week on FounderQuest the guys weigh in on a recent debate sparked by Jason Fried at Basecamp around the value of backlogs. In short, Fried proports that backlogs cause unnecessary stress and that if an idea will be forgotten about if it isn’t written down, then it probably isn’t important in the first place. Honeybadger does have a pretty significant backlog and some on the team find it more useful than others. Each of the guys discusses how they deal with the backlog, whether they ignore it, stress out about it, embrace it as a useful part of the business, or actively plot to burn it down and rebuild Honeybadger V2 from the ashes.Links:Justin JacksonIntercomHelp ScoutTrelloClubhouseJiraGitHub Jason Fried Local Editor VS CodeSublimeFull Transcript:Starr:              So how was your trip, Ben?Ben:                My trip was good. Yeah. I went down to Mobile, visited my parents for a few days, and I actually went over to Louisiana as well and saw my brother and sister. So, good time. Got a lot of reading in. It's a kind of a long trip and so I got some books done. You know Kindle, makes everything wonderful.Ben:                So yeah. Had a good relaxing few days. Nice little vacation.Starr:              Good. Did you eat some crawfish?Ben:                No, but I did have some fried catfish.Starr:              Okay. That counts.Ben:                Yeah, that counts.Josh:               I love fried catfish.Starr:              Yeah. It's the only way to eat catfish.Ben:                It's been a long time since I had some.Josh:               That is true.Josh:               Do people eat catfish any other way?Ben:                Oh, of course.Starr:              Really?Ben:                It's kind of like Forrest Gump. Boiled shrimp, fried shrimp.Josh:               Oh, yeah, yeah. Boiled catfish, though. I don't know. I think I'll stick with fried.Ben:                Yeah. It's the best way. For sure.Starr:              Yeah. So today we're going to be talking about backlogs. We're kind of late to the party. This was on Twitter a long time ago, and then we all went on vacation.Josh:               A long time ago.Starr:              And then I think we're trying to hit the sort of rebound cycle where everything old becomes new again, and people are sort of into vintage tweets. So yeah. So we're going to talk about this. So could somebody explain to me this whole thing about backlogs and why everybody was talking about it?Ben:                Yeah, I think there was... Well the issue of backlogs is when you have a whole bunch of stuff that you've thought about doing at some point. And so you kind of log it, right? We use get GitHub for that. But you can use whatever like Trello or Clubhouse or something. Basically, any idea that you have, people like to throw those in a big bucket and say, yeah, we'll get to that someday. Right? And so you create this big backlog of work that you want to do, or that you think at some point was worth doing. And the conversation on Twitter was, there was some anxiety about this issue, oh I've got this big backlog and I feel like, oh, I've got all this work to do and I'll never get it all done. And woe is me kind of thing.Ben:                And then someone said, "Oh I'll start a service, I will charge you $10,000 and I'll come in and just delete your backlog, and you'll feel so much better." So we've got a request from Justin. He said, "Yeah, the FounderQuest guys should definitely talk about this." Because opinions, and of course we have opinion. So here we are.Josh:               So remind me, did we hire that guy to come in?Ben:                No. And because my opinion is I like backlogs. We can talk about that.Starr:              Well, can I read the quote? There's a quote and it's sweet, and it's from Jason Fried, who seems like a decent guy. I don't know, I'm not going to go into a big tangent about hero worship and the sort of small bootstrap, whatever. But yeah. So he says, "We don't believe in backlogs. Backlogs and make you feel guilty." So I don't like feeling guilty.Ben:                I would say backlogs give you the opportunity to choose to feel guilty. They don't make you feel guilty. Right? But maybe that's splitting semantic care.Starr:              I like it, it's a very stoic quote from you.Josh:               That's what I was going to say. Yeah. It's like I'm-Josh:               Everything is in your perception, right Ben?Ben:                Exactly.Starr:              Well, I mean, yeah, a backlog can't make me feel a certain way. I'm the owner of my emotions.Ben:                Exactly.Starr:              Right? I say that so much. That's my little mantra throughout the day. It's like I'm the owner of my emotions.Josh:               Yeah, say it through my tears.Starr:              Yeah.Ben:                I could see how you might want to say that pretty frequently when you have a three year old in the house.Starr:              Oh yeah. Yeah. Well she is... Ah, I don't know. Maybe I'm the owner of my emotions, but I feel like she's definitely subletting them, to a certain degree. So.Ben:                We could start a new acronym. OME. Owner of My Emotions.Starr:              Oh yeah. And have little yellow wristbands that we sew on.Ben:                There you go.Starr:              Yeah.Starr:              Great idea.Starr:            &n...

The guys talk about creating content for Honeybadger and the difficulties switching back and forth from writing prose to writing code. Starr channels his inner Anna Wintour and describes his latest initiative recruiting developers to write guest posts on the blog. Josh talks about his process for writing evergreen content for the newsletter. Links:Leveling UpThe Devil Wears PradaSeth GodinIndie HackersMastering Ruby Exceptions eBookFull Transcript:Announcer:          Hands off that dial. Business is about to get a whole a nerdier. You're tuned in to FounderQuest.Starr:              I'm blaming a lot on the internet these days, Josh. So one more thing, we'll just throw it on that pile and we'll get a volume discount on that.Josh:               I love it. Yeah.Starr:              Take that to town.Josh:               Internet's pretty much responsible for all the ills in the world. I think.Starr:              Yeah. Yeah. I mean there's a few goods. A few goods. It allows me to ride out the ills in relative comfort, but ...Josh:               Right. You never have to leave your house.Starr:              No, I never have to leave my house. Yeah. So I guess we should explain. So if the astute listeners haven't noticed, Ben is not with us today. And the reason for this is very convoluted. We had originally planned to record this episode on a Friday and we had been ... We had Josh and everybody ready to go and then this truck pulls up outside my house and starts sawing down this gigantic tree, chipping it. And there was just no way that was going to happen. So we canceled. But then Ben has all sorts of travel plans because he's an international Ben of mystery. And so yeah, so it's me and Josh this week.Starr:              So we're going to be talking about something that Ben usually doesn't get involved too much in, which is content creation, like blog posts and email newsletters and all that stuff and ...Josh:               Something that you happen to be actually working on lately.Starr:              I am working on it. Yeah. Right now. I don't know if our readers remember or listeners remember, but a couple of weeks ago I put out a call for writers for people to contribute to our blog. And we actually had a lot of people respond to that. It was very successful. The only issue is now I have to go through all of them and kind of manage that process and chat with them about what they want to write.Starr:              And I think it's all going to turn out really well. But this whole having coordinating things with 15 different people over email and having all of them at a different stage in the process, that's the type of thing that is designed to make my brain just fall apart. It's just something I'm apparently not good at.Josh:               It sounds like you're a kind of like a magazine producer or something now or editor.Starr:              It is, yeah. I'm kind of like an editor in chief. It's pretty cool.Josh:               We could give you a title of editor if you want, business cards or something. Or desk, one of those little desk nameplates.Starr:              That would be nice. I'll take it. I'll take whatever form of recognition I can get.Starr:              So Evie and I watched The Devil Wears Prada a couple of days ago. So I'm all ready, I'm ready for my role as a big time magazine editor. If you haven't seen that ... Have you seen it, Josh?Josh:               I have. Yeah. It's been awhile, but I think, yeah, I saw it a while back.Starr:              Yeah, so it was all about, what is it? A thinly disguise fixing fictionalization of like Anna Wintour's Vogue or something. Anyway, this lady who ran Vogue and was very mean to her subordinates or something and imperious. That's what I'm working towards.Josh:               And then in the end though, doesn't she have a change of heart in the end or something? I don't want to .... Spoiler alert.Starr:              No, there's no change. It was very confusing.Josh:               Oh, okay. I thought there was. That's too bad.Starr:              Yeah. So at the end, it's like the movie simultaneously celebrated this woman, this young woman who sort of rejected it all and went off to do her own thing, while at the same time sort of glorifying the sort of people who stayed in the magazine and devoted their lives to it even though their lives were falling apart.Starr:              It's like, I have no idea what the moral of this is. Pick one.Josh:               I have faith in you in as the editor of the Honeybadger blog that you will see the light in the end.Starr:              I'm not sure how many divorces I'm willing to have to make the Honeybadger blog a success though.Josh:               Right.Starr:              So, yeah, I was honestly super pleased with the quality of people who applied. Just like some really good writing going on out there. I consider myself a pretty good writer. I'm like, "Oh man, these people might be better than me so I've got to get them on my team."Josh:               Yeah, they must be pretty good. That's cool. I can't wait to read what they come up with. Are you kind of directing the topics or what's your process for kind of figuring out what each person is going to work on?Starr:              Well, like most things I do in life, I'm just kind of making it up as I go along. Basically my plan was to sort of see what people wanted to write about and see if I could make that sort of fit with the theme of our blog. And at least the initial contracts you do with people are probably just going to be stuff that they want to write about, which I think is great because they probably already know about it and are excited. As time goes on, maybe I will jump in there and suggest things. I'm really, really hoping to have a sort of collaborative relationship with these folks. Not just assign them something and then they produce a deliverable and then I sign off on it and then they get a check at the end. I'm kind of hoping it'll be this personal little, I just get to be the den mother of the writer's room and just make everybody cookies and just as long as they keep producing that content.Josh:               We talked about I think doing a series of posts kind of around a central theme or central top...

The guys talk about how they are scaling up their awesome customer service without adding headcount and their journey from email customer support, to chat support, and back to email support. They also discuss how to deal with informational silos and if they should transition Honeybadger to an invite-only luxury brand.Links:IntercomHelp ScoutHoneybadgerFull Transcript:Announcer:          Never forget that you have the tools to build a life on your own terms. Forget the haters. This is Founder Quest. Josh:               So our topic is customer support. Starr:              And how how it was maybe murdering us- Josh:               Eating us alive. Starr:              Eating us alive, devouring our souls. Maybe we might be doing to fix that. Our old system, the system we've had for years and years. We've been using Intercom. And Intercom put this little widget on your website. It looks a lot like a live chat widget, and just encourages people to enter in whatever problems they have and then you reply to them and they can see it right in the website, or they can get an email or whatever. And we really liked this when we set it up. Years ago, we thought it was really cool because we got a ton more interaction with our customers and were really enjoying that and everything. So why are we looking to change this? What was going on? Josh:               The way Intercom works in the in-app widget is it really is a chat system. So it's basically live chat, right? From a user's perspective, you assume that someone's going to reply immediately if they're there. And I think it'll say when people are offline or something then it'll let you email. But really for in our day to day it was kind of like whenever a support request comes in, we're thinking, okay, there's someone sitting there waiting for a response so we need to drop everything and answer it right now. Starr:              Yeah. We would get people just saying, "Hey, what's up?" Josh:               Yeah, "Hi." Starr:              And it's six hours later, "Hello. Hello, customer." Josh:               Yeah, actually, the one offs were kind of ... I might actually miss those a little bit just because someone just says, "Hey." And then I'd often just reply with some emoji waving symbol or, "Yo." In the beginning, like you said, that was really good because it put us ... When we were first figuring out a lot of things, we were first figuring out who our customers are. I think one of the reasons we really liked it was that it put us in much closer contact with people on a real time basis so we could chat back and forth and just be ... Josh:              It was a little bit more informal and we could just talk to people. And I think we talked about that in the past on this show. How that was good for getting customer feedback and getting to know people. But what we found lately as we've grown and scaled is that it's begun to cause a lot of interruptions, and I guess I would say anxiety in our day to day support process. The way our support process works alongside all the other things we do. And that's probably, we're going to go into that. But basically we didn't have a support process really, which doesn't help. Starr:              Yeah, because when you know that somebody thinks your support system just being this live chat thing. Then there's a lot of pressure for you to respond to things super quickly. And that can be good sometimes. Sometimes you get some really awesome wins because you're able to fix somebody's problem right away and all that. But sometimes you get bogged down in these super intense support questions, and it's really distracting to, at any moment you could be pulled into one of these lengthy discussions of a thing. And it may or may not actually be honestly. Our system works pretty well. Right? So it's honestly, a lot of times it's just some mis-configuration or something, but there's something weird going on that's preventing people from just seeing that there's some obvious mis-configuration problem. And so, yeah, so you just ended up going down this rabbit hole for half a day. Josh:               Yeah. And those more of your typical customer support things. That's kind of what customer support is for. Right? But the way we handle support at Honeybadger is again, we're small, small team. We're a technical product, so we like to give high quality support and that usually involves supporting developers. So we are developers on support. We don't have any dedicated support operator or anything like that at Honeybadger, which would normally be able to buffer between some of the more technical questions and the less technical questions. What happens is if you're a developer and you're trying to actually get development done, you're in the middle of whatever your project is, some deep thought or something. And then a support requests comes in, and if everyone's on call for that, you're basically constantly just expecting to be interrupted throughout your day. Starr:              Yeah, it's like one of those psychology experiments where they watch you as you go about your day and then somebody administers random shots to you. Josh:               They zap you, yeah. Starr:              Yeah. And you never know when it's coming. So you just live in this state of expectation. Josh:               Yeah. The customers who are listening, I don't think you guys are like electric shocks. I mean some of you are, but- Starr:              I kind of feel sometimes that when I'm doing support, it's almost like I'm doing some whiteboard interview or something where somebody's like, "Okay, here's the problem. And fix it, go." And you're doing this blindfolded. It's like you're a veterinarian and you're trying to fix some problem with an elephant but you can only see two inches of it at a time. Right? It's like you can look at the elephant through a rubber hose from 10 feet away. And you have to ask the elephant, "Well, move the rubber hose over this way for a little bit, so I can maybe see through here." Josh:               Yeah. You go, "Move it over to Active Record." Starr:              Yeah, yeah. It's can you squeeze your Gemfile file through the rubber hose? Josh:               Check the Postgres adapter. Yeah, obviously we don't have access to our customer's code or applications. We have a history of maybe even over supporting our customers, and that's kind of like, we like to do that. We like to actually sit down...

Season Two of FounderQuest is upon you! The guys discuss what they did while on summer break, releasing breadcrumbs on Honeybadger and why they help when debugging, launching the new blog, Amazon RDS, and Airwolf!Links:Write for our blog.Full Transcription:Josh:               We can't all be book-learned like you star.Starr:              Yeah, I'm book smart.Josh:               Yeah.Starr:              You guys are just the street smart ones.Josh:               We just read what's ever on the front page of Amazon.Starr:              No, y'all know how the streets work, you know how to get stuff done, you know, outside of formal channels if you know what I mean?Announcer:          Never forget that you have the tools to build a life on your terms. Forget the haters. This is Founder Quest.Starr:              We were going to talk about I mean we've been gone for a couple of weeks, several weeks, and I think we're just going to talk about what we're going to do. I've decided, we shouldn't say that we had a vacation because that's not the appropriate...Josh:               How I had multiple vacations and I did some work.Starr:              No, hush, hush, hush.Josh:               Okay.Starr:              I think we shouldn't call it a vacation. I think we should say that this is season two of Founder Quest.Josh:               Oh, I see where you're going. Okay, so season two go.Starr:              Yeah, nobody says like serial had a vacation.Josh:               Right.Starr:              There just on, you know, they had a new season.Josh:               So are we going to be a serial podcast now?Starr:              Well, we come serially so yeah sure.Josh:               Okay, cool.Starr:              Yeah, sure, it's just whenever we want to go on vacation we'll just say there's a new season.Josh:               Nice.Starr:              so people have to say tuned.Ben:                I can't wait for season three.Starr:              I hope we don't get canceled. That would suck.Josh:               Yeah.Ben:                So how were your vacations, Josh?Starr:              Yeah. How many vacations did you take?Josh:               I think I took two. The first one was a kind of a, I mean I was planning to take some time off, but it was not as planned as this last one. Yeah, in August I took a couple of weeks off just to kind of recuperate and just connect and stuff. This last week, I just got back from visiting my kids grandparents, my parents in Arizona. That was a fine. It wasn't, I don't know, it was still a lot of work because the kids. Taking two little toddlers on an airplane that was the first time we'd done that. Yeah, it was fine. Got some sun, they have a pool. We spent a lot of time by the pool.Ben:                Nice.Starr:              I see a little bit of a thousand-yardstare in your eyes.Josh:               Yeah, I think.Starr:              The children on the airplane thing.Ben:                Oh, Starr you did that too, right? You just got back?Starr:              Yeah, I got back from also a grandparent vacation, but this time the grandparents, my partner's parents were like, Hey, we've got this timeshare in Mexico in Puerto Vallarta and so you should come down and I've got to tell you, boys. I was skeptical because it seemed like we were doing all the work right because normally like paying for accommodations is not the most daunting part of an international vacation with a three-year-old. I was skeptical, but it turned out to be super nice and relaxing because they have the timeshare they have, it was very nice. It was a sort of like an all-inclusive resort. They had this giant like a four-bedroom suite with balconies and a hot tub on a balcony and like I got to sit during the day for several hours for multiple days in a row and just like read by myself. I haven't gotten to do this unless I just like skip work and do it or something.Josh:               That's what I did by the way.Starr:              It's not the same. Right, because you feel like you need to get back. Yeah, it was just great. I mean it wasn't a cultural trip. I lived in Mexico for a year. I feel like I have a good appreciation of the Mexican people, country and culture already. A little bit of a resort vacation. It was kind of welcome I think.Josh:               I also got to spend some time reading by the pool while the kids were napping and that was very nice. What about you Ben?Ben:                I did not take any vacations with toddlers, but I did drop off my older son at college. He just started college this fall. That was a pretty wild experience. Let me tell ya. And I got some house work done, like had contractors doing work on my house, so I'm flat broke now because between college and, Oh and then my car broke down. I had to replace a bunch of stuff on it.Josh:               Oh man.Ben:                One here actually another, it's been, it's been crazy, but you know, it was a good Summer I got to relax a bit and yeah, I didn't go anywhere. I didn't do anything but read some books and you know, I hit the trail with my bike several times, which is nice. We had a good summer here in Kirkland. So yeah, checking out of work at, at lunch time and going riding is a good thing.Josh:               You're going to take some time off later this year?Ben:                Yeah. And go weeks. I'll be heading to visit. My parents haven't seen him at their house in quite a while, so that'll be fun.Starr:              Yeah, that's great. That's like a big life milestone when you think about it. It's a little bit of a permanent vacation.Ben:                Yeah.Starr:              You know, it's like they're out for good, you know, I mean, until they, you know, decided to become an artist and then come back because you know art, the only pay muc...