FounderQuest
The Honeybadger Crew
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Developers building a software business on our own terms.
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3 days ago
’Tis The Season For Tangents!
Kevin joins Josh and Ben again this week as the trio discusses Honeybadger's hack week, processes for making bold UI/UX changes, what to do/not do if your customers hate said UI/UX changes, plus the latest trends in Crocs fashion!
Links
Crocs
Joel on Software - Things you should never do
DHH Business of Software
Everyday Information Architecture
Meet the badgers
Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby
ClickHouse - hosted by DoubleCloud
FounderQuest
Mastodon - @FounderQuest@honeybadger.social
Twitter - @honeybadgerapp
Honeybadger
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Dec 1, 2023
Moar badgers! Kevin Webster has entered the chat.
It's a trifecta of badgers this week as Honeybadger's own Kevin Webster takes us on a deep dive into the genesis of his baby/our new product, Insights. There is also a discussion around the challenges of dealing with burnout plus the Holy Hand Grenade!
Links
Meet the badgers
ClickHouse - hosted by DoubleCloud
FounderQuest
Mastodon - @FounderQuest@honeybadger.social
Twitter - @honeybadgerapp
Honeybadger
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Nov 17, 2023
Insights Into Insights and Viva Las Vegas!
This week Josh and Ben give further insights into Insights and discuss challenges around shoehorning a new product into an existing one. They also talk about marketing strategies, a Las Vegas trip, and disaster recovery! All this and more in this week's episode!
Links
Ahoy
Heya
ClickHouse - hosted by DoubleCloud
Michele Hansen - "When done well, marketing and teaching are nearly indistinguishable from one another."
FounderQuest
Mastodon - @FounderQuest@honeybadger.social
Twitter - @honeybadgerapp
Website
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Nov 10, 2023
FounderQuest Has Returned! Episode 100!
FounderQuest is back for episode 100! Learn why FounderQuest is down to two hosts. Listen to tales of hosting lavish RailsConf parties. Plus, don't miss the details of the secret upcoming product release that has been a year in the making!
Links:
Mastodon - @FounderQuest@honeybadger.social
Twitter - @honeybadgerapp
Website
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Oct 29, 2021
Talking SaaS With Garrett Dimon
Show notes:
Links:
Garrett Dimon
Minitest Heat
Heat Map Reporter for Minitest
Review
Starting & Sustaining
Sifter App
Automated transcript (only about 70% accurate)
Ben
Welcome to FounderQuest, this has been Today, I'm interviewing Garrett Diamond Star and josh are taking the day off and I get a chat with Garrett, who's a longtime friend of mine and fantastic entrepreneur and all around great person in the world, so I'm excited to have you here. Gary, Thanks,
Garrett
thanks for having me.
Ben
It's always fun catching up with you. I think the last time we chatted was business of software a few years ago, wasn't it?
Garrett
Yeah, not frequently enough,
Ben
so that was, yeah, definitely not frequent enough. One thing I most remember about that business of software was that was when the hurricane was coming through and so I was standing out there in boston with all the wind and the
Garrett
right, having grown
Ben
up in the south, that was kind of ironic that I was there in the northeast and getting a hurricane. Mhm. So have you been
Garrett
three, so just uh probably about the same as everybody else man, you know, just kinda one day at a time and keeping it going um and yeah, I just kind of dabbling and exploring and for once the last year just kind of let myself be undirected and just kind of followed what was interesting and pulled on threads and uh a little unnerving but also kind of nice and refreshing, I don't know, you know, so kind of bouncing around like a ping pong ball.
Ben
Well, that's, that sounds pretty cool. Well, let's talk about that in a minute. I want to catch people up so I'm sure most people know you, but just for those who don't. So Garrett again, it's been a long time entrepreneur I think. I think I first bumped into you with doing sifter, your, your, your app from a few years ago, you built that from scratch solo entrepreneur and then you sold that. Then you're, you're at post uh, postmark for awhile for that. Right.
Garrett
Well, wild bit at large, but primarily on postmark. Yeah.
Ben
Okay. Right. Right. So you're a while, but for a while and then I guess it was a couple of years ago now that you've left wild.
Garrett
Yeah, it's been about . years, I guess. No. Okay.
Ben
Yeah. And so I guess also during that time you kind of did the starting and sustaining books slash video series slash thing. That was cool.
Garrett
Yeah, I've been dabbling in all that, trying to share my battle wounds so that other people can maybe avoid them or less than them.
Ben
Yeah, that's awesome. I remember, I remember buying that. It's good, good stuff. So also linked in the show notes. Maybe we'll get a sailor to uh, you spoke, you spoke at Microsoft a few times or at least once that I can remember
Garrett
I can't even keep track now. Microsoft spoke once attended a couple of times. Yeah.
Ben
And so now you're doing some, some interesting stuff. So I remember, remember when you left a wild bit, you were, you're really interested in getting started on helping amputees have a community and so you started adapted, right? So, we're gonna talk about that for a second, and then we can talk about, you know, how that plan kind of changed for you with the passage?
Garrett
Um, I mean, so I'm a left below knee amputee. And when I was trying to make that decision, I couldn't find any information on what life is really like as an amputee, um, let alone specific information about, can I play basketball still, if so, how does that work? Or what other activities can I do? And there's just not a lot of detailed information, and with disability, even just within amputees, the range is incredible, like above me and bologna makes a complete difference in how you function and your body mechanics, and so I just couldn't find this information out there. And so that kind of planted the seed that obviously it's not out there and, you know, it's woefully under informed, which at first was kind of scary, it's like, oh, I guess nobody does any of this stuff
Garrett
and for me, the whole, ironically, the whole point of amputating was so that I could get back to doing things because of my ankle fusion was horrible and all that, it's just hurt and was miserable and through the whole thing, I was blogging about it, and what would happen is people would email me because they'd go on google and search for amputation, ankle fusion, that kind of thing, and then they'd ask me like, I'm, because I was the only person that came up and I would get these emails, you know, it kind of varies and go ebbs and flows, you know, to a month, once a week, you know, so frequently enough. Um, and uh, one uh, young woman that reached out to me, she actually amputated and then just won a couple of gold medals in the paralympics and like,
Garrett
it just blew my mind is like, how do you find the answers to this stuff? And uh, after being an amputee now about five years and trying stuff and just kind of figuring it out. Uh, my hope was originally, I was like, well, I'm a software developer, I'll build a platform so people can share that information, um, you know, and I figured I was really optimistic about that specifically, because, well I built sifter and rails has gotten way better and I learned a ton from sifters, it'll be way easier this time around, but I didn't really account for was now I've got a family and I'm years older, uh and so it's been more challenging at the end of the day, I'm just tapped on software because I'm doing that all day and my brain is fried.
Garrett
Um, but I've been doing videos kind of explaining this stuff to people about how legs work and the logistics of like how they change your body mechanics and um, how to do things like go to the beach and deal with sand in your foot and that kind of stuff. Uh, and I did that more is like an exploratory whimsical thing because that was the kind of content I hope people would create and put on the platform. So then you could filter and say, here's my disability, here's the activity I want to do. Give me all the information about that specific thing. Um, but I did it and it just kind of left it for a year, but it just kept going and then more people have been contacting me and so now what I'm doing is kind of
Garrett
stepping back from the software side of it and I'm just gonna keep recording videos for the next short term, um, and having them produced and that kind of stuff and hopefully increasing the quality and the depth and then doing interviews with other amputees and really kind of getting into more stuff, um, and then eventually circling back to building a platform to help people find the right things that meet their needs and that kind of thing. Um, so, you know, it's, it's, it's been tough. I think the toughest thing is realizing that nonprofit side projects are the hardest thing to make time for, um because it's never going to offset my income or anything. And so like
Garrett
now I've kind of been thinking, I guess I need to build a business again. So I've got more ironically more free time um, just because Sassen recurring revenue all that's so great that it would give me the flexibility to do that and to spend more time helping people and building um software and all that. So kind of just juggling things and figuring it out. And that's kind of where a lot of the exploration has come in. I haven't really prescribed where I'm taking things and uh um spending a lot of time dabbling and ruby and getting kind of deeper into it than I ever have previously. And uh exploring video and trying to help people with that stuff. So just kind of playing around and tinkering and trying to make ends meet at the same time and I'll figure it out, I guess
Ben
that's cool. There's a whole lot to unpack in there. So let's, let's talk about some of that. So, Some of the, some of the themes, well, at first, I guess I should say I can totally relate to you with the whole, you know, years later and now…
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Oct 22, 2021
Tales From The Good/Bad Old Days Of Freelance Gigs
Show notes:
Links:
Sweaty Startup
Hook Relay
Spider season
Write for Honeybadger
Automated transcript (only about 75% accurate)
Ben
So I've been, I've been using Hook Relay over the past week and I got to say, there's nothing as useful as using your own product to make you see places where the product can be improved. So I've, I've opened a couple of issues. Yeah, yeah. And uh, I mean, they're not, they're not major things, but it's like, oh, it would be nice if this was different, would be nice if that was, you know, different. And it's been, it's been good. So I'm, I'm looking forward to having those things done making the product better. And we, uh, you know, we talked about spending some more time, uh, development time on really the other couple next coming weeks and months because I've had some, some customer requests coming in. So
Ben
it's always a good feeling like when people are actually using it and saying, oh yeah, I like it, but couldn't do this like, Oh yeah, I could do that. It's fun. I love it. I love being developer and just building stuff. So much fun. Yeah.
Josh
Yeah. Looking at our, our dashboard, we've got uh, got a few New year's is coming in. Got some a little bit more revenue than last time I looked at this, so that's cool.
Starr
Yeah, that's good stuff. You know, it's the season for it. The, the pacific Northwest summer is long gone and we're just into the dark, wet now. We've gone through a spider season. Yeah, I mean, right, you've got um, yeah, you've got the summer, you've got spider season, you've got dark with it.
Josh
Is that from that like list of pacific Northwest Seasons or whatever, that's like .
Starr
You can, you can call me out on that. I was hoping to um, I was hoping to plagiarize.
Josh
We should, we should put that in the show notes if we can find it though. That's a pretty good one.
Starr
Yeah, that's a good one.
Josh
I don't remember them all, but
Ben
I'm definitely, definitely more productive in the winter time because like, I'm not outside playing, I'm inside hunkering down from the rain, the cold, so I'm like, I might as well do some code.
Josh
Yeah,
Starr
I mean, personally, I kind of um like I kind of stopped going on my morning walks in the summer because there's too many amateurs out. Yeah. And I started again once the fall comes, once it starts getting dark and drizzly and those are my favorite morning walks.
Josh
Nice even in the rain.
Starr
Yeah, especially in the rain, get out. Yeah, that's why you have a nice like Gortex raincoats and my scoots. Yeah, it's all about the gear. Yeah, it's uh, I don't know, this is very pleasant. I like it. The, yeah, the summer here, like it's nice, but after a while, the sun just, just starts getting to me. It's just like, I can't escape it. It's just boring into my eyeballs.
Ben
It is truly a thing around here when the sun has been out too long has been to many is people do get a little so crazy. Like I need some wet and so the first rainy day comes, you can just feel the relief. It's just, it's just, I don't know how to describe it. It's just a sense of community, like relieved that things are back to normal. There's, there's precipitation again.
Starr
Yeah, I came up with a theory and I have no idea how valid the series, so I'm just going to throw it out there because it's unfounded and I'm wondering, so like I realize this, this winter, this, yeah, this fall as I'm going out. It's like, okay, like the reason I, like this is because like everything is more muted, right? And I get over stimulated very easily. So, you know, noise and late and all that just kind of does it to me.
Starr
And but when it's like dark and gray, like for like, I don't know, this may just be my, my perception, but like the water vapor like mutes the sound a little bit or something. It's not quite everything. Like all the edges are more round and pleasant, nothing is quite as sharp and stab. E And so yeah, and Seattle Seattle is like the pacific northwest in general. It's just like, it draws in like all the computer nerds, all the, all the people who just like it here and like that kind of environment. So it's like, oh do we all just, you know, we all have like sensory issues. I don't know.
Josh
That's why all the tech companies are in Seattle. Yeah, probably. I think I need to get an office still because I think like, I think, I think Ben's right, like I I also would be more productive in the winter, but like working from home in the winter with with uh like Kindergartners is a a different experience than working at home in the dark by yourself. It's a bit of a challenge. So yeah,
Starr
when you turn on the lights while you're working, you don't just leave them off.
Josh
Yeah, sometimes I leave them off. Oh yeah,
Starr
that's because you're a real hacker, I've been doing more marketing stuff lately. So I turn the lights on. I use light mode.
Josh
I mean you probably forgot how to touch type, you know, and use them with you shut up,
Starr
shut up. Shut up, you shut up. I get to say that. Not you.
Josh
So you have to have the lights on. I'm sorry.
Starr
Yeah, I don't have one of those keyboard with a blank key caps.
Josh
Like truth be told. I've been um doing a lot less programming than I used to as well. And it's, it started to bother me a little bit lately. So I've been trying to find ways to get back into it because I'm like, if I'm gonna like forget how to build a rails app if I don't, if I don't like, you know, do some do some work.
Ben
We do have like items in our backlog for Honey badgers. It's true. She can find something to do. Yeah.
Josh
I don't know, it's just weird like having like a legacy rails out for so long um Like even when you are working, like even when you do work in it, it's still like, I don't know, like your, it's, you know, I'm like not utilizing a lot of the knowledge that I built up like, like we we all built up working on client projects, like where you're constantly solving new problems and like building things out. Like a lot of those decisions are already have long been made in a honey badger app. So it's like, yeah, it's, it's weird. It's a little bit different.
Ben
That's been nice about having the side project because like starting a new rails app and making new decisions and trying the new things and new toys like hotwire and you know, stimulus reflex, all kind of stuff. Like it's, it's been, it's been fun. But hey, you know, maybe uh you know, talking about client work like, hey, take on some client work, right? It could uh do something completely different and take on
Josh
an option for sure. Yeah, I thought that could be fun.
Ben
Good old days
Josh
build a green field, a green field ap Yeah,
Josh
this I mean, I think we're talking about like the problem of like what to do with your time when you're, you're like app is like nine years old and stable and, and you have all this time on your hands and you know, want to still build new things, right?
Starr
Yeah, I've got a question like for, I mean, y'all probably don't know because you haven't been freelancing for a while. But to all the freelancers out there, do do people still um do people still higher developers to build like, you know, facebook for x. Like it's like, I just remember working on so many like facebook for so and so um facebook for um nurses, facebook for, you know, whoever and it turned out the facebook for all those groups with facebook,
Josh
right? Was that before facebook groups.
Starr
I think so. Yeah. Yeah I think so it was. Yeah. It's just weird
Josh
because it's like I was our era I mean like for sure like our era freelancing was the facebook for ex Yeah
Starr
because like the social media like the social network had just come out that movie about facebook and so I really wanted to be the next facebook by copying facebook for some vertical.
Ben
I was just I was thinking back to the are kind of projects…
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Oct 15, 2021
Hook Relay Launched! Was it Fireworks or Crickets?
Show notes:
Links:
Hook Relay
SSL Server Test
Second brand marketing tips Twitter thread
Xhtmlchop
Hook Relay Twitter announcement
Hook Relay blog announcement
Derrick Reimer & Corey Haines Product Hunt launch
Startup Director List
Indie Hackers launch repeatedly
Not very accurate auto-generated transcript:
Ben
-
you know, last week I recorded a quick little message talking about why we weren't recording our podcast. That was in the middle of the let's encrypt ssl certificate fiasco that swept across the internet and you know, at the time it really didn't feel like a huge problem. Uh like from our perspective there wasn't much of an impact, but there was some impact, but then later on that day and the next day I was reading some articles and like apparently it was a pretty big deal for a lot of people. So uh yeah, wasn't wasn't just us, it's one
Josh
-
of those things like I could just kept seeing it more and more like just pop up in random places though to like, not, not necessarily in our world, but it was just like affected all kinds of different things.
Ben
-
Yeah, yeah, so shout out to ssL labs for their ssl testing tool to put a link to that in the show notes. Whenever you have a question about your ssl you should check that first because it does tell you when, when things are bad.
Josh
-
Yeah, I hadn't used that tool before and it was very very helpful on customer support. Especially like sending to people and we needed to like prove that we were, we were not at fault like you know, it gave us like a smoking gun that we could. Yeah. Yeah. Really great.
Starr
-
That's always a weird thing to do in customer services and it's like um it's like no, actually like I found the line in the library you mentioned. That's actually the problem. It does everything to do with this. Yeah. Yeah. And then um and then facebook goes down so I'm thinking I'm thinking we are like, like spooky Tober is starting up like things are starting to get witchy.
Josh
-
I kind of like I I was like checked out the day facebook went down so I like missed most of like the fun on whatever online and I guess on what the other social networks that didn't go down, twitter mostly. But yeah, that's kind of wild. The story that I at least what I picked up. Yeah, I'm not on facebook. So
Starr
-
my favorite part is how they house since everything was tied together, they couldn't get access to the building. They have the servers to do the like you know, manual physical reset then you had to do
Josh
-
because of that security.
Starr
-
Yeah. Like that's like I don't know that. It seems like it's out of some sort of movie or something. Yeah. It's just like a comedy.
Josh
-
They like accidentally deleted their private keys to the building or something.
Starr
-
Yeah. Or maybe like in oceans type movie where um like they like the crew does that like the cruise like well if we mess with their DNS records and they'll be locked out of the hotel for six hours, let's give us time to like airlift the loot out.
Josh
-
Yeah. Or what about like just like mission impossible. But with nerds. Uh huh. You know like trying to break into the building.
Starr
-
I mean that's what we are here at found requests aren't right. Mission impossible with.
Starr
-
Okay. Um So in addition to all that um just terrible stuff happening, there was um some good stuff happened. We had our, you know we have the hook relay, we did a little launch to our user base or honey badger user base. Um Do you wanna talk about that a little bit?
Ben
-
Yeah that was that was the day before the ssl problem. So
Josh
-
that was it. Yeah that's maybe that's why I was like the details. I was like trying to like remember what I did last week or whatever and I was like I could and then I remembered I'm like how did I forget about the hook really launch. But yeah, maybe that's I spent the next day, like on support.
Ben
-
Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, who really was impacted by the ssl thing. And so like, the day after our launch day, we had to deal with the on fire kind of situation. But you know, props to kevin very quickly finding that issue and fixing it. And uh, it's nice to have, you know, the service, uh, deployment that we have, pushing it out was quick. That was that was nice. But yeah, we, we were able
Josh
-
to help some people on twitter because we, uh, we did some crowd sourced troubleshooting and yeah, we're able to share our fix with a few friends. So that was heroes. Hopefully we
Starr
-
were, hopefully we think people like you for everyone.
Ben
-
Yeah, but I think think the launch went well. We had an email out to our, to leveling up mailing list and got a pretty good response right on that. We had put a banner up and on the, on the website and put a banner up on the app. And those had some pretty good click throughs as well. I'm just looking at the stats from Fathom this morning and yeah, it's a good good share of traffic from those sources. So it's nice to see that people care enough to click through and zero working on that was pretty cool.
Josh
-
Yeah, because I think, I think like the, uh, it was, I felt pretty encouraged by just the, you know, the level of engagement that we got from, from everything, like it seems like, I mean the worst that could happen is like you put out the, you know, you put out everything that's just crickets, like, you know, and so yeah, I mean people signed up, we got some sign ups and we started, I mean like we've our support and feature request throughput has increased for sure on like from almost zero to something. So, you know, we got, we got some feature requests coming in, that's that's all good.
Starr
-
Alright. I suppose we should mention what hook really is and why people should be interested in it. Um since, yeah, that's some people might want to know,
Ben
-
are you gonna tell the star what it is? Oh, I, I mean, I'm trying to find out
Starr
-
your, well, uh, I'm on the edge of my
Ben
-
seat over here.
Starr
-
There you go. I don't know. Hook relay is an enterprise level Blockchain analysis tool. It's not love it, look really uh, lets you have um, web hooks that are, you know, as high quality of stripes. Web looks like very high quality, very fully featured and just like a couple of minutes without much code or work. And um yeah, and honey badger. We have a lot of, you know, web hooks that go out and stuff and we use that for all of ours, I think right now for some of them at least. And yeah, so so that's what it is.
Ben
-
Yeah, great for debugging and in the past week I've been doing a little side project that has inbound web books and so uh since I don't have it's launched yet, it's been handling my inbound web books for me and just storing them so I can go back and you play the we play the payloads against my uh my test instance. And uh there's a there's a button in hickory. They that I think I think kevin added, which I'm totally in love with now it's the copy as curl button. And so I can just click that button and dropping my terminal and boom, now I have a curl payload that I can send to my my dove, you know, server great.
Starr
-
So you can be so so the the thing you're working on the like you can just like go do other things and will collect your inbound web hooks like just like your Jeffrey Bezos or something like you could be on the beach um doing whatever you want and then just um yeah, then just copy the curl
Ben
-
you got it. Yeah. And then and then even better once I do launch, I would just add my production U. R. L. As the hook relay in point and then we'll actually start delivering them. So I want to change anything with that web provider that's sitting in the stuff right?
Josh
-
Doesn't have as replay to right, Like if you if you have a bunch, can we do we do that add or? Yeah there
Ben
-
is a re send button so you can okay you can send it again.
Josh
-
So like for local development you could also like po…
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Oct 8, 2021
The Internet Broke; Why There's No Episode This Week
Show notes:
Links:
Umm...here's a picture of a Honeybadger sleeping on our 404 page. He's definitely sleeping.
Transcription:
*Note, transcription is paraphrased with 1.3% accuracy
Ben "Expired certificates, yada yada yada, internet broke...no episode. Bada-boom-bada-bing, have a good weekend."
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Oct 1, 2021
Everyone Says It’s a Bad Idea; Should You Do It Anyway?
Show notes:
Links:
Felix Livni
Schedulista
Transcript:
*This is an unedited, automated transcript, with only about 80% accuracy*
Ben
All right, so, uh welcome the founder quest today, you have me, Ben, because Star and josh are taking the day off and we have Felix of me who is with us or with me chatting about uh founder related stuff. It's just one of our uh, intermittent founder interview kind of episodes where we're just going to have a great chat, talk about some stuff, so welcome Felix. Thanks. So, Felix was telling you tell me right before we got started about the differences of having an actual conversation versus a podcast conversation and you had a great great tip about email. So, if you don't mind, could you like, hit me with that again? Because I thought that's pretty cool.
Felix
Yeah, what I've noticed is if I write an email knowing that a lot of people are going to read this email, maybe it's an onboarding email that's going to be sent out to uh you know, many, many people, I don't seem to be able to write it in the same way as the emails I write to just that one person and I often feel that if I could just if I was just trying to sell to one person, I could probably do a pretty good job and I think the better attitude for me has always been to then trying to do that and then try and automate that and it turns out very differently than when I'm trying to to do the thing that is going to be automated right away.
Ben
So yeah, I like that, I've had the same kind of experience where it's like, well you spend a lot of time crafting, crafting, crafting and then it feels crafted right? It doesn't, it doesn't feel like a real email. So do you like uh Try to like email individuals for like times times first and before you get the final copy that you want to send everybody?
Felix
Yeah, exactly. And I think really not thinking about tools at all is really the right way to go about it um where all you try and do is think what is the best thing for this one customer and you do that for a couple of different customers and then you look for patterns and I would say when you do it a lot and this is the advantage you have with podcast is once you do it a lot, you kind of see some patterns as well, some sort of meta patterns of like how, how do the things that sound unnatural look versus the things that sound natural and I'll just tell you one that I've noticed, I don't know if this is something you've noticed, but when I write an email to a single person, it usually has one sentence in it, maybe two.
Felix
Uh but when I write something that I think is, let's say, an onboarding email of some sort uh it's not gonna be that short. Uh so that's definitely a pattern I've noticed. I think we we noticed that as consumers or business owners, when we see inbound email, we automatically filter emails that have just one sentence very differently than we filter ones that are multiple paragraphs.
Ben
Yeah, I never really noticed that. That's true. Yeah, because most of my personal emails are just like a couple of sentences, man, I was thinking back to the initial like set of onboarding or just stock emails that we had for honey badger, like, you know, you're building has failed or thanks for being a subscriber or whatever. And I was thinking back and like I wrote them and they're all like one or two sentences. I'm like, yeah, that's that's true. It's like versus this big long book, right? Yeah,
Felix
yeah. In general, I think I'm a big fan of looking at software, automating things that people already do. I think sometimes that's the best software and as opposed to sort of rethinking everything, because I think a lot of the time when you rethink everything, most things people can do just less maybe less quickly than it would be if it were automated. And so I think when you rethink everything a lot of the time, it doesn't fit as well as it seems like it might have back in the lab.
Ben
Yeah, true, we'll get back to that. I want to talk more about that, but I want to uh introduce you more fully since everyone might be thinking, hey we just dropped to the middle of conversations like yeah, you did just kind of jump in both conversation because Felix and I are old friends, we've been uh we've been hanging out and chatting about business for years now uh and Felix is an entrepreneur who is running a business called Schedule Ista, So Felix want to give us a quick rundown of what schedule list is.
Felix
Yeah, well before Schedule East it was scheduled to, it was sort of an idea of, hey I want to start a company that is a B two B sas company. And one of the very first conversations I had about that Was with Ben, I don't know if you remember, I was looking back through my email
Ben
yeah,
Felix
our mutual friend paul introduced us and the topic of conversation was marketing and BtB Sas um something admittedly I still struggle with, I kind of had it on in my mind is oh this is something I'm going to be bad at and I don't know how to get customers. Um maybe maybe I need to reach out and figure out how that happens. Um and I don't, I don't know if this is okay to bring up here, but I'm curious to know, I mean, tell me if my characterization of our conversation is correct, but that conversation way back then I think you were pretty pessimistic and or at least I think as a friend you were looking or as a new friend, you were looking out for me and you were saying kind of don't do this crazy thing. Um
Felix
Was that the advice you gave me and then if you were to meet someone like me today, would you, would you give different advice?
Ben
Yeah, my my memory of that conversation was not that I wanted you to not do it, but it was like, I I saw some concerns, some red flags and I wanted to save you some pain just in case you hadn't, you know, like considered like, because as I recall trying to, you know, rewind back to years ago, what that conversation was like, you're sitting across table from me and you're saying I want to build this business that's gonna require a lot of sales effort because I'm gonna be selling to some people that, you know, I can't really reach well online and here I was thinking, okay, so Felix is going to be like walking down the street, knocking on doors, trying to get people to buy his says and I'm like,
Ben
okay, sure, but are you sure you want to sign up for that? That's kind of but I remember is that is that kind of
Felix
remember, I think that's accurate and that's basically exactly what I did. And we even did some, some things like send out postcards. I might have mentioned that as an idea that I've had, I said, you know, I think uh well used to do that kind of thing and then it fell out of fashion, maybe there's maybe there's some wisdom there and I think um you realized how crazy I really was and how little I knew and there was nothing but love I felt coming from you, which made it even like harder to hear, I think.
Felix
Um so I believed you and the irony too is I think I would probably, so I don't you didn't tell me yet how your answer would change, but I would I tell people, I meet people all the time who say they want to start a bootstrapped company and my first inclination sort of out of love is to say, you know, that can be tough, it can be uh you know, I've seen lots of them fail. And is this are you sure this is something that you want to do? Yeah,
Ben
I'm totally with you on that. And uh funny, the funny thing is like, the postcard thing is stuck with me for years, like I still want to do a postcard mailing thing myself and I just never got around to doing it.
Felix
So we we did it um and it worked. It worked and then we never did it again. Uh I would say there's a pattern, everything that we have done has sparked actually just not that well. And I actually, this is one of the ways that I think about marketing is uh in a sense, it's stochastic or at least one way to view it is stochastic. So if you make a cold…
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Sep 24, 2021
Our Outbound Sales Autopsy
Show notes:
Links:
Saasler
Koombea
Hook Relay
Transcript:
*note - this is an unedited, automatically generated, transcript with only about 80% accuracy*
Ben
So I say we we just had a new customer signed up just like minutes ago and said that the reason they signed up was our podcast. So awesome. Good stuff. Good stuff. So pro tip for you says operators out there, put a little box and your on boarding, asking people how they heard about you or whatever. It's very, very informative.
Starr
Yeah, it does. And then do a podcast and wait episodes.
Ben
Those steps are optional. I really do like they're having like those, those uh onboarding introductions is what we call them. We have a channel in slack for them and having those show up periodically is like a little little endorphin rush. Like I love seeing those show up in our slack channel and you know, we also have a cancellations channel has the same thing with cancellation messages and that's not quite as fun. But thankfully we see if you are those messages that we do the onboarding messages, but I just, I really like having those things in slack. It's nice to see that throughout the day.
Starr
Yeah, definitely. So imagine this is gonna be a little bit of a shorter one because we just recorded um last week's podcast, like on monday in today's thursday. So I don't know if there's, there's not as much time that's passed to let um I don't know to let the hot takes regenerate themselves. Mhm
Ben
Right, well, I have a hot date for you and it's the grape, I guess most hot takes are great
Josh
what we're best at.
Ben
Uh so I'm working on an update to the Roku integration. So, you know, we haven't a clue add on and Uh we started to add on like, I don't know, back early, early days, it must have been like , or so. A long time ago. Well in , apparently Hiroki released an updated version of their API for partners like us and uh it has a new provisioning thing and you can actually call back to their API and get some information about like supervision to add on and stuff like that. Which is great. Uh We haven't ever really gotten around to changing our particular add on because it works just fine. So why bother?
Ben
But I've been looking at synchronizing the Heroku pricing with our current pricing because we've done a number of pricing variations since we launched the Heroku. And so now the two sets of pricing are pretty out of sync. So as I started to get into that I was like well you know well I'm here, how about I just you know update the A. P. I write classic classic rabbit hole. Right? And and and so I spent some time doing that and found you know some interesting quirks and so on about our integration and anyway it's all good like I got the work done and I did a pr and and josh and kevin like giving the thumbs up and I'm ready to deploy except
Ben
I have two questions for the Heroku people about about the migration because the migration you gotta be careful right? Because like the V one A P. I. Is not compatible with the V three Api And so you have to store different sets of data and the I. D. S in particular are different like they used to pass what they call a ready and now they pass an add on I. D. And you gotta you know handle the transition carefully or else someone you know maybe they can't add on the thing. Maybe they can't start being customer, maybe they can't remove the adult which would be a problem because you know or maybe they can't log in that would also again yeah prop trading right?
Josh
And so because they still get the emails
Ben
so so my questions for harajuku around this migration revolve around this idea and like handling sso and making sure that we can still provisions and provisions properly anyway. So I put two questions to them and support two days ago and that's my gripe because that's the holdup. That's the holdup I can't deploy it because I can't get answers to these questions apparently. So I'm just like oh okay I understand like people are busy and stuff but uh I would like an answer some time you know and there's no like there's no auto responder there's no we'll get back to you in X. Amount of time. No it's just like off into the void and I'm just waiting
Starr
did you maybe did you maybe use the legacy um support page Instead of the current ?
Ben
No no use the current one. Okay good question though. Good like that
Josh
this is just another example of like coding being the easy part. Uh huh.
Ben
Yeah and also a good example of like rd party integrations causing you know uh technical maintenance burden like like um oh for example like clubhouse that recently renamed themselves the shortcut. Right? And so we had to, you know, do a little bit of work there and renamed stuff inside of our app wasn't a whole lot of work but it was some work but you you add, you multiply that kind of work by the number of integrations you support and all of a sudden like this is ongoing maintenance work that doesn't, it's just you're just treading water trying to keep up with what everybody else in the world is doing. Right?
Josh
Yeah. And as new as new integration, you know, his new apps come onto the market and everyone wants to integrate with them, you just gradually expand until you, I mean you still have to support the old ones. Yeah, I think we're definitely getting to the point where every new little thing we add is like yeah, yeah, we're starting to feel it, we are starting to feel it. Yeah. And like the the depth of the integration is also I've noticed is like a big, big thing because like there's a few integrations that we like go a lot deeper with like get hub, you know, heroic. Who obviously is like a good example of that. We have a lot of issues with vera I've I've seen but who doesn't
Ben
um
Josh
but it does seem like the like I don't know, the more standardized something can be. Um and yeah, just I don't know when you're like integrating with a lots and lots of custom API's and stuff like that. They're going to switch it out on you at some point.
Josh
Yeah. Support. It
Ben
would be, it would be nice if there was like a happier plus plus, like a next level happier right? Where uh it just, it just abstracts away all these differences and you can just, you know, it's like a universal kind of thing and it's like, yeah, possibly be impossible. But
Josh
are almost like the pitch I get to the pitch there being almost like an LTs, like like an LTs contract for for integration API is like, you gotta, you gotta contract. This API isn't going to change for like years. Um and they'll just, you know, they'll do the and we'll do the internal migrations to keep the ap the same for you.
Ben
Yeah, there you go. That's that's an interesting idea. I wonder how that kind of service would cost.
Josh
I don't know, I know there's been a few um someone a micro, someone, a Microsoft had like a service that built like manage the integration side for you. Um was that Jonathan? Um Yeah, yeah, I don't know if that was like similar. I know it wasn't quite, that wasn't quite the idea, but like it was the idea that like, you know, they like give you integrations, you know, for free or whatever, like much easier to integrate with them.
Ben
Yeah, you just plug in and all of a sudden you
Josh
have immigration.
Ben
Yeah. Yeah. But the link in the show notes or see if it still exists. I haven't, I haven't
Josh
talked to Jon tester. I can't
Ben
yeah, sounds familiar.
Josh
I don't know. I remember like having their like sticker in front of me at the table microscopes.
Ben
Yeah. I haven't uh you know, having, having not gone a micro comp or business software or anything else for a couple of years now it's like it's going to keep track of what people are doing and because usually that's where I see Jonathan,
Josh
you know, there was a Microsoft Microsoft local happened in Portland yesterday. I was kind of, I was kind of, I didn't go but in hindsight I kind of…
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Sep 17, 2021
There Ain't No Business Like No Business
Show notes:
Links:
Bold Badgers NFT
Mantis scooter
Ridwell
Write for Honeybadger
Transcript:
*note - this is an unedited automatically generated transcript with about 80% accuracy*
Josh: So we really are we doing this, uh, super quick. Do we need to like speed up our voices? Artificially
Ben: The chipmonk episode.
Starr: There you go. No, we should just, we should slow them down. So it'll um, we can just record a minute episode and then we'll take minutes to listen to it.
Josh: Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's what we've been doing all along. That's our life hack is it takes us minutes to record these episodes and you listened to them in minutes.
Starr: Yeah. So that's the, um, so I'll fill in our listeners. We, um, we miss our normal recording day on Friday, and so we're making it up on a Monday, which means like we're jam packed in with a bunch of other stuff. Um, so this may be a little shorter than usual and I'm sorry. I know you just have to have all of us all the time and w…
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Sep 10, 2021
Hook Relay Is Livin' That FULL Duplex Lyfe!
Show notes
Links:
Hey Dumpster Fire
Goatse.cx
Full transcript:
*This is an unedited automated transcript which is only about 80% accurate*
Starr
Yeah, well, sad news. Um I did not see my printing press last weekend because I I came down with a cold, it wasn't it wasn't covid, so don't worry, it's okay. Um But we're waiting for the test to come back. So you know the difference between now and the before times is now when you get a cold life shuts down and you can't really do anything until your results come back.
Josh
Well and you know the other thing about like during the pandemic, everyone's home like just the printing press market is just going wild right now, so like, there's going to be gone, I'm sure it'll be gone long gone by the time you're feeling better.
Starr
Exactly, everybody's going to print their manifestos,
Josh
right? Yeah,
Ben
well, you know, since my kid is able to take care of his own school needs and I didn't have to like sideline myself for that, like,…
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Sep 3, 2021
Our Ops Are Smooth Like A Jar Of Skippy
Show Notes:
Links:
Micromort
Noblesse oblige
Josh's dotfiles
GitHub Code Spaces
Full Transcript:
Ben:
Yeah. I've been holding out for the new MacBook Pros. The M1 is pretty tempting, but I want whatever comes next. I want the 16-inch new hotness that's apparently supposed to be launching in November, but I've been waiting for it so patiently for so long now.
Josh:
Will they have the M2?
Ben:
Yeah, either or that or M1X. People are kind of unsure what the odds are.
Starr:
Why do they do that? Why did they make an M1 if they can't make an M2? Why do they have to keep... You just started, people. You can just have a normal naming scheme that just increments. Why not?
Josh:
M1.1?
Ben:
That would be awesome.
Starr:
Oh, Lord.
Josh:
Yeah, it would.
Ben:
M1A, Beachfront Avenue.
Starr:
So last week we did an Ask Me Anything on Indie Hackers, and that was a lot of fun.
Josh:
It was a lot of fun.
Starr:
I don't know. One of the most interesting questions on there was some guy was just…
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Aug 27, 2021
Live From The Indie Hackers' Backstage
Show notes:
Links:
Snohomish Centennial trail
Indie Hackers AMA
Intro CRM
Full transcript:
Starr:
All right. Welcome back. Welcome back, everybody. So we took a little break. We're going to have her hot vax summer, but that-
Josh:
Hot vax summer.
Starr:
It turns out that was the mirage. It turns out that was a mirage.
Josh:
Well, it did reach 112 degrees in Portland. So it was hot.
Starr:
There you go. Yeah. The summer never existed. It was just an illusion caused by our overwhelming thirst for lots of things.
Josh:
Mirage.
Ben:
Well, there were a couple of weeks there that I thought, "Yeah. This is going to work out. And then Delta.
Starr:
Yeah. It was a couple of nice weeks, wouldn't it?
Ben:
Yeah. It was. It was.
Starr:
Except for the panic about, "Oh, crap. I need to learn how to deal with people again."
Josh:
Wouldn't it be wonderful when we can just look back on those two weeks and just remember those last good two weeks?
Ben:
Yeah. Went 112 in Portland. That's pretty…
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Jun 11, 2021
FounderQuest Summer Break Annoucement
Show notes:
Seriously, this is just an announcement to let ya'll know we are taking a summer break. We'll be back, pinky swear!
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Jun 4, 2021
Does Thinking Still Count As Working?
Show notes:
Links:
Write for us
Maybe
Josh Pigford
Flu data
Full transcript:
Ben:
And today we don't have Starr, because Starr is on vacation this week, fireside chat.
Josh:
I will be on vacation next week, and the week after.
Ben:
Nice.
Josh:
I don't know if you saw, I extended my vacation.
Ben:
I didn't see this.
Josh:
Yeah. So, surprise!
Ben:
Two weeks back to back. That's a record.
Josh:
Yeah. I decided I'm feeling it and I don't think a week is going to be enough. So just thought I'd go for it.
Ben:
Yeah, I get that. I get that. It's funny, I was looking... We started this vacation calendar, recently, since we are looking at transitioning away from Basecamp, where our vacation calendar was, we are now putting a vacation calendar in Google calendar, because we use G Suite for all of our stuff. And I set up this vacation calendar, and I noticed that Starr put one on there, and then Josh put on a vacation and then Kevin put on a vacation. And then, Ben Findley, just week aft…
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May 28, 2021
Will Working Together Ruin Our Anarchist Workflow?
Show notes:
Links:
Twist
Hook Relay
Ben Orenstein
Tuple
Write for Honeybadger
Full transcript:
Starr:
So Ben is joining us today from his car. It's bringing back fun memories. I recorded, I think the voiceover for our very first demo video in my car.
Ben:
Oh yeah? Nice. So as you may recall, I have a two story building that I lease one of the rooms, and the downstairs is a wine tasting room. Well with the pandemic, the company that had the wine tasting room, they closed shop. They stopped leasing, because who's going to go to a wine tasting room during a pandemic, right? Well they're leasing the space to a new tenant that's going to take that space. Apparently hey, we're getting back, things are reopening, let's taste wine again, but the new tenant wants to have a new door put in. So I got to the office today and they're like, "Yeah, we're putting in a new door." And then I'm like, "Cool." Didn't even think much of it. But then a few minutes later, there's all this drilling going…
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May 21, 2021
Understanding Bitcoin From a Developer's Perspective
Show notes:
Links:
Mike Mondragon
CRDT
Ship of Theseus
Exceptional Creatures
Shiba Inu
Full Transcript:
Ben:
I'm just gonna dive on in there. I'm so eager. I'm so excited. It's actually weird because Starr is the one that typically starts us off.
Josh:
Yeah. I thought we were just going to start with our just general banter, and then not introduce the guest until 30 minutes later.
Ben:
By the way.
Josh:
It is also our tradition.
Ben:
Yeah. Well we're getting better at this thing.
Josh:
Where we say, "Oh, by the way, if Starr doesn't sound like Starr..."
Ben:
Right, yes. Today Starr doesn't sound like Starr because today's star is Mike Mondragon instead. Welcome Mike.
Josh:
Hey Mike.
Mike:
Hey.
Ben:
Mike is a long time friend of the show, and friend of the founders. Actually, Mike, how long have we known each other? It's been at least 10, maybe 15 years?
Mike:
Probably 2007 Seattle RB.
Ben:
Okay.
Josh:
Yeah. I was going to say you two have known each other much longer than…
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May 14, 2021
Kicking The Tires On Basecamp Alternatives
Show notes:
Links:
Threads.com
Bluey
Vogmask
Twist
It’s a Southern Thing
If I had a front porch
Full transcript:
Josh:
How y'all doing?
Ben:
I'm doing.
Starr:
Yeah, about the same.
Ben:
I've been riding my scooter to work all week.
Starr:
Oh, how's that?
Ben:
It's a lot of fun. Got a little electric kick scooter and top speed about 25 miles per hour. I was concerned about it being able to get up the hill that I have to go back up on my way home. It does drag a bit on that hill. I only got a single motor. Guess I should have gone with the dual motor. Otherwise it's fun. It's nice to be out in nature, I guess, air quotes, because you're still on the road and you're still a victim of cars and stuff. Being able to see the sun coming up over the hills and down to the valley and while you're just feeling the wind on your face, it's all good.
Josh:
It sounds nice.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, sounds awesome. I don't know. It seems terrifying to me, but I'm sure it's a lot of fun.…
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May 7, 2021
Rails Goes Off The Rails!
Show notes:
Links:
Write for Honeybadger
Fluffy Arnold Schwarzenegger impression
Changes at Basecamp
Coinbase is a mission focused company
Faker
Full transcript:
I've been like texting with Zoomer person. And their emoji game is so deep and subtle that I just don't even know how to respond to these. I'm just like a thumbs up and they're just like emoji of falling leaves. How do I interpret that?
Josh:
Is that the difference between us and them? Is that they actually use all the emojis?
Starr:
I think so.
Josh:
We use six.
Starr:
I was just like, I can't just reply this with heart. So I just went and I was just like, emoji of panda bear. That seemed to be like an appropriate reaction to falling leaves. But I really don't know. I could have just completely been a jerk without realizing it.
Ben:
Yeah, I hadn't thought about it Josh but yeah, I think I can list the emojis that I actually use. There's thumbs up, there's troll face, there's pile of poop. Smiley face, heart. Yeah, th…
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Apr 23, 2021
SaaS Life Isn't All Sunshine And Rainbows
Show notes:
Links:
Lego space shuttle
Challenger disaster
Challenger: The Final Flight
Roam
xkcd
Footage of Josh two weeks after final Pfizer shot
The Final Countdown
The Beach Boys
Full transcript:
Starr:
All right. So now you're going to joke about how, since I've been vaccinated...
Josh:
Are you saying you are vacc'ed?
Starr:
In vacc'ed. I'm chipped. I like to say I'm chipped.
Josh:
Got your injection.
Starr:
People always act like being chipped is a bad thing, but now if I wander off, people will be able to return me to my family.
Josh:
Yeah. And I don't know what the big deal is, everyone loves new technology. I don't know anyone who's been bummed out that some new tech came out.
Starr:
That's true.
Josh:
I don't know what the... Yeah.
Starr:
I can't tell you the number of times I've been watching WWC and just being like, "why can't you just inject this into my vein?"
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
And now they are, and everybody's mad about it. Make up your minds, people.
Ben:
L…
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Apr 16, 2021
How To Improve Survey Response Rates With Extortion
Show notes:
Links:
Tailscale
Ubiquity hack
Front
Write for Honeybadger
Full transcript:
Ben:
The struggle is real when it comes to WiFi here. Because until two weeks ago you could've said, "Yeah, use Ubiquiti, it's all great." Now, there's this big disruption that they're having this attack that they didn't want to admit to.
Josh:
Yeah. I didn't hear about this.
Ben:
Yeah. So the thing that was terrible was that they said, "Oh, there was a leak at our third-party vendor." Well, the third party vendor is Amazon Web Services. If you're going to pin the blame on AWS for your lack in security, that's pretty ridiculous. So there was some whistleblower that came out and say, "No, they're really idiots. They're not logging access to the databases."
Ben:
Their press release was like, "Well, we don't have any evidence of access to your data." The whistleblower was like, "Well, they don't have any evidence of access to your data because they don't do any logging to their database." So they h…
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Apr 9, 2021
Are We Starting A Text Editor Holy War?
Show notes:
Links:
Exceptional Creatures
TradingView
Duke Cannon - Thick Beer
Ruben Gamez
MicroConf
AppSumo Community Marketplace
Full transcript:
Ben:
You know, today is April second, as we record this. And I am so excited because I survived April Fools' Day without falling for anything online. All the dumb stuff that happens on April Fools' Day.
Josh:
I'm a little worried, because I didn't notice any April Fools' lies. Now, granted, I kind of checked out yesterday and I went for a super long walk in Portland, just because it was sunny and I wanted to get outside, so-
Starr:
That sounds really nice.
Josh:
It was awesome. So I'm hoping that that's the reason I don't... Because otherwise, I've been duped left and right, and my whole world is false at this point.
Starr:
I mean, last year there was that whole thing where people were just like, "April Fools' is canceled. No April Fools'." And so, maybe that just came up-
Josh:
We skipped a year.
Starr:
I don't know. Maybe people are…
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Apr 2, 2021
Monetizing Free Users And Recapping MicroConf
Show Notes
Links:
Gather
Roblox Vs. Second Life
Docsketch
Ruben Gamez
AppSumo
Intro CRM
Full Transcript:
Ben:
Yeah, the party doesn't start until you show up, Josh.
Josh:
I'm a party animal.
Starr:
Yeah, that's true. How's everybody doing?
Josh:
Good.
Ben:
I had a good last week. How are you, Starr?
Starr:
I'm doing pretty good. I got to dive a little bit into our sort of usage data for free users, and that's always fun when I get to do that. I got to use JupyterLab a little bit, brushing up on my Python skills, and yeah. So, I had been... whenever I do my sort of deep dives in the numbers and stuff, I would always just make a bunch of Ruby scripts, and use Ruby scripts to kind of process the data and make it understandable to me. But, it turns out there's a whole fricking ecosystem around this this and Python, and it's... yeah.
Starr:
There's a system called JupyterLabs. You can get it as part of this bigger distribution that's basically... it's called Conda, which is a Pytho…
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Mar 26, 2021
Tracking The Elusive SaaS Sales Funnel
Show notes:
Links:
Intro CRM
Ahoy
Andrew Kane
Full transcript:
Ben:
So I am feeling great this morning.
Starr:
Oh Good. Why are you feeling great?
Ben:
So over the past couple weeks, I've been working on cleaning up the low level noise, errors that are happening, that aren't really severe and that get corrected because of retries and things like that. So stuff, that's not broken, broken, it's just annoying. And so I just, yesterday I think, finished off the last of those things. So, we had a few big things over the past several months, we had the account billing migration. We've had the Elasticsearch migration. We've had the payload storage migration. And now as of yesterday, we have no lingering, low level errors happening. It's just clean. The logs are quiet, everything is happy.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
That's amazing. Good job.
Ben:
Thanks.
Starr:
Would you say it's like butter?
Josh:
Thought it was kind of quiet around here.
Ben:
It's like butter.
Starr:
It's like butter.
Ben…
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Mar 12, 2021
Do Developers Actually Pay Money For Things?
Show notes:
Links:
Sidekiq-cron
TextExpander
Alfred
Sondors Metacycle
Full transcript:
Ben:
So, you may not be surprised to hear this, but I've been doing a lot of shopping for electric vehicles this past week.
Starr:
Oh yeah?
Josh:
Oh.
Ben:
And there are some new electric motorcycles and scooters coming out that are very, very tempting. There's one in particular, the Sondors model, which is going to be first released near the end of the year and it's only $5000 and it had a top of speed of 80 miles per hour. The battery is not really rated for doing 80 miles per hour very long. You're not going to commute for 20 miles at that speed, but it's nice to have that in case you just need to hop on the freeway to get someplace really quick.
Starr:
Wow. That's only like $60 per mile per hour.
Ben:
But I really got my eye on it. And my wife's not a big fan of the whole motorcycle idea, but it's been there in the back of my mind for years and this year might be the year that I actually get…
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Mar 5, 2021
Is It Better To Be At Amazon's Mercy Or Your Own?
Show notes:
Links:
Loom
Telestream
Recut
Lovesac
Comfy Sacks
Flipper
Full transcript:
Ben:
You know how we had that recent episode with John Nunemaker about Flipper and feature flags and that sort of thing.
Starr:
Oh, a podcast episode.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah.
Starr:
I thought you meant a dramatic episode.
Josh:
It's just another episode with John.
Starr:
Oh my God. That guy.
Josh:
That was awesome. Yeah. That was a good conversation.
Ben:
We talked in that conversation about using Flipper at Honeybadger, because we've been using Rollout for our feature flags, which, if you didn't listen to that episode, you don't know what a feature flag is. It's a branch in your code that conditionally runs some feature. You can limit it when you deploy it to people and you don't have to deploy a new thing to all your customers at the same time. You can test it live.
Josh:
I'm not sure if we actually explained it in that episode.
Ben:
Maybe we did, maybe we didn't.
Josh:
This will be good backgro…
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Mar 3, 2021
When Is The Convenience Of Outsourcing Not Worth The Price?
Show notes:
Links:
Printfection
Swag.com
Full transcript:
Josh:
How's it going?
Ben:
I'm working on this Printfection migration and I've been thinking about what to do here. So we got this outreach from Printfection about our pricing going up, in our case, dramatically. We decided we just don't want to pay that much for what we're getting. So I'm going through all of our inventory looking at our Printfection items that we have, shirts and stickers and so on, and thinking, where... So I've got to send it somewhere. Well, I guess I have to send it to myself. I'm like, do I really want to get a box of 800 shirts? It's like, no, I really don't but I don't see there's much of a choice.
Josh:
Well, we could just pay Printfection.
Ben:
Well, I guess. Yeah, that is the other option.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah, personally I'm on the fence about it because yes, it is a dramatic price increase but the value that they provide us is fairly dramatic from my perspective. So I'm not quite sure wha…
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Feb 26, 2021
Talking Startups And Pricing Strategies With John Nunemaker
Show Notes:
Links:
John Nunemaker Website
John Nunemaker Twitter
Flipper Cloud
Speaker Deck
Scientist
Full Transcript:
Ben:
So today we have a special episode of FounderQuest. We have John Nunemaker with us, instead of Starr. Starr was taking a break today. And Josh and I are going to be chatting with John, and talking about the fun things that John's doing. John, I got to start off by saying that I'm a huge fan. I've been following your work since the Harmony days, back at Ordered List, I guess that was ... I don't know when that was, 2000 and something.
John:
'07, 8, yep.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. So I think I got introduced to you through the Rails community, being back in the early group. So I don't remember how exactly we bumped into each other back then. But I remember Harmony was pretty cool, and the other stuff you did with Ordered List.
Josh:
Yeah.
Josh:
I was newer to the Rails world back then. So both of you are Ruby celebrities to me. So yeah, it's cool. It's cool to have you h…
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Feb 19, 2021
All Your Contractors Are Belong To Us!
Show Notes:
Links:
The Boys in The Boat
Founding Sales
All your base are belong to us
Write for us
Full Transcript:
Starr:
I loved Beavis and Butthead so much in the 90s.
Ben:
Yeah, it was awesome.
Starr:
I was prepared not to like it because all I heard was everybody talking about how stupid it was. And then I watched it. I was like, this is amazing. This is just my brand. I was the target demographic. I was, I don't know, 16 17.
Josh:
Yep.
Ben:
Yep. That's a great show.
Starr:
Yeah, so.
Ben:
There was some picture. I don't remember who it was. It was Josh Hawley and I can't remember who the person was. But they had them as Beavis and Butthead. They did a montage, had them in a picture together and it was pretty funny.
Starr:
I feel like the children and their deep fried memes are the spiritual successor to the spiritual child of Beavis and Butthead.
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
Could be Yeah.
Ben:
No doubt.
Starr:
Because Beavis and Butthead were pretty deep fried. So…
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Feb 12, 2021
What Is The Lowest Maintenance Website Imaginable?
Show Notes:
Links:
Heya
Ben Curtis’ Mad Money DreamHost Affiliate Link
Write for us
Full Transcript:
Ben:
Thanks to Starr, we are now linked on the Honeybadger site.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
Oh, yeah. It only took two years to do that.
Josh:
I saw that on the "about" page.
Ben:
What made me think about it, I'm just, I don't know, surfing the site for something. I'm like, "You know what? We should probably link to the podcast from our site."
Starr:
Yeah, thanks for opening that issue.
Josh:
I thought we had it in the footer or something. Was it not even in the footer?
Ben:
No.
Josh:
Oh, man. We're good at marketing.
Ben:
We are so good at marketing.
Starr:
Totally.
Ben:
That was a good thing, so thank you.
Starr:
No problem. It was good. It's nice to have a tiny, concrete task that I know I can do that doesn't fractally expand into just caverns of uncertainty.
Ben:
For reals.
Ben:
Well, speaking of caverns of uncertainty, I was helping a friend with their website, which is a…
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Feb 5, 2021
Is Our Business Model A Hedge On The Internet?
Show Notes:
Links:
Amy Hoy - Wall Street Bets
Bloomberg - How Will the GameStop Game Stop
Clayton Christensen - Theory of Disruptive Innovation
Art of The Product Podcast - Does Tuple Ever Crash?
Jobs@honeybadger.io
Write for Honeybadger
Full Transcript:
Ben:
Did y'all buy any GameStop this week?
Josh:
I thought about it yesterday while Robinhood was not allowing buy orders or whatever, because my brokerage, I mean, doesn't shut you out. And I mean, it probably would have been a pretty safe bet given the stock today. But I don't do that kind of shit.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. I'm in the same boat. I want to, just for funsies, but at the same time, it's like, "Ah, that's really not a productive use of my time or money."
Josh:
Yeah. I deleted the Robinhood app after. Because I tried it out just because you got to see what the kids are up to these days. And the last straw with it was when they added this crypto trading interface that looked like a Tron ... Like some kind of arcade game. I was…
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Jan 29, 2021
The Bootstrapper's Guide to the Ninja Launch
Show Notes:
Links:
Cobol On Cogs
Square Hole TikTok Video
Hook Relay
Universal Honeybadger.js
FounderQuest Accounts Episode
Write for Honeybadger's Blog
Full Transcript:
Ben:
Did you see that tweet I posted in the channel, the TikTok video about the shape sorter?
Josh:
It was so good.
Starr:
So good.
Josh:
Laughed really hard.
Ben:
So good. I just loved the voice of the person doing the shapes.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
"And where do you think this one goes?"
Starr:
So it's a shape sorting thing. And they've got all different color blocks, like a kid's toy and you're supposed to match the shape to the hole in the top of the bucket, but it turns out all of the shapes just fit inside the square hole. And so-
Josh:
That's why there's a hole in there.
Starr:
Yeah, so it's a reaction video. This woman's watching it and she's just getting more and more dismayed as he just puts everything. She's like, "No, put it in the triangle hole," and he's like, "No, this one goes in the square hole." S…
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Jan 22, 2021
Bitcoin And Honeybadger's Bold Product Roadmap
Show Notes:
Links:
Dithering
Stratechery
Promised Land
Shape Up
National Treasure
Full Transcript:
Ben:
I was looking through our accounts this morning and just doing some database checking and looking at some accounts that had been in our database for like seven years. Like, "Oh yeah. I remember them." And they're like old friends basically. It's like, "Oh, the memories."
Josh:
Memories.
Starr:
Yeah. That's funny. Last week I remember, it just hit me in the middle of the week, I was making jokes about our customers and like squeezing blood from turnips. And I just feel like I should point out that those were jokes, specifically because it's kind of absurd that we would do that because we treat our customers maybe too well, I don't know. But I realized not everybody might know me personally and realize I'm joking.
Josh:
There are those who will too, yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, yeah. And they go on to run private equity firms.
Josh:
Right? My thoughts exactly.
Ben:
Oh dear.
Josh:
We won'…
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Jan 15, 2021
We Survived 2020 But What About Our Growth Rate?
Show Notes:
Links:
How Cheap a Product Can You Have And Still Have Salespeople?
Profitwell Retain
New Relic
Full Transcript:
Starr:
Okay, so you are listening to FounderQuest. We're a bunch of founders, we're on a quest. Thank you for listening, we are back after a rather long absence. Basically, people were gone different days during the holidays, and it was just a weird scheduling situation, so we just decided to take, I guess, two months off? A month and a half?
Ben:
Something like that.
Starr:
Something like that, yeah.
Josh:
A little more than we normally do at Christmas.
Starr:
Yeah, a little bit more, but I've got to say, I feel a little bit refreshed, I'm ready to talk into a microphone again, I missed talking to y'all.
Ben:
Likewise.
Josh:
Yeah, same. I also missed the routine of just having this call every week.
Ben:
Yeah, and our listeners missed us. I had people reaching out to me saying, "Hey, is the podcast coming back?"
Josh:
Nice, well that's a good sign.
Be…
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Oct 16, 2020
What, Me Worry? Fearing Your Company's Permanence
Show notes:
Links:
Rollerblade Chair Wheels
Kung Fu Panda
The Emperor’s New Groove
Justin Jackson
"The Fear" - Build Your SaaS podcast
Write For Honeybadger
FounderQuest Twitter
Full transcript:
Ben:
So, I just moved back into my office after being away for six months, because COVID.
Starr:
I see that.
Ben:
And in the meantime, though, I had all my stuff at home. So I had my podcast setup, I had my monitor, my chair, everything. And while I was at home, I bought these new roller wheels for my chair, you know the ones that look like a roller blade wheels?
Starr:
The ball bearing ones.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And at home I have a normal carpet. It's not shag, it's just standard carpet. But here I have those plastic things you put down so you can roll easier.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
And so at home I didn't really notice much difference on those wheels on my carpet, but here it's really slippery, so now I'm sliding back, and forth, and all around. It's kind of fun.
Josh:
Nice.
Be…
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Oct 2, 2020
How To Build Solid Multi-tenant Account Systems For SaaS
Show notes:
Links:
Cameo
Sarah Cooper
StiumulusReflex Video
Jumpstart
Whirly Board
Full Transcript:
Ben:
So we had a bit of an interesting COVID related thing in our household, so we have this grocery store that we love near us, it's called Haggen, it's a Northwest brand. So a lot of our listeners won't be familiar with it, but we love this place, it's a great little grocery store. My wife, who typically does the grocery shopping, hasn't been there in forever, because like, "I can just get stuff from Amazon Fresh." So we've been doing that, but finally, Amazon Fresh started running out of some of the things that we really want. So I think today was the first time in weeks, many, many weeks, that we've actually ventured out to the grocery store.
Josh:
Exciting.
Starr:
You went inside the grocery store?
Ben:
Inside the grocery store, yeah.
Starr:
Oh, my gosh.
Ben:
Just like the good old days.
Starr:
So you just love taking life in your own hands like that.
Josh:
I never took you…
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Sep 25, 2020
Should You Interview Job Candidates Via Slack Or TikTok?
Show notes:
Links:
The B-52's - Roam
The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham
Roam Research
TiddlyWiki
Art of The Product Podcast - Networking Thoughts
Scrivener
Josh's Blog
Write for Honeybadger
Full transcript:
Ben:
So I had the first session of a conference that's happening online next week. It's the Business of Software conference.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
And it's happening Monday through Wednesday. But on Wednesday this week, they had the replacement for the meet and greet, the night before kind of thing where you just go and socialize, and meet other people that are at the conference. And it was of course, it's all online this time, it's not in Boston where it has been in past years.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
And so, the meet and greet was done on Zoom. And I was skeptical this was going to work out very well because big Zoom meetings, they're just not good. No one ever talks because everyone's afraid to talk over somebody else. But…
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Sep 18, 2020
Reading Rainbow, FounderQuest Style!
Show notes:
Links:
San Francisco Looking Like Blade Runner
The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States
Major Problems in the Era of the American Revolution, 1760-1791
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
A People's History of the United States
Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris
The Dispossessed
I, Robot
The Murderbot Diaries
Foundation
The Unicorn Project
Open Yale Courses - The American Revolution
My Brilliant Friend
Bona Fide Masks
Full transcription:
Starr:
I got to tell you guys, this was just... I don't know. This makes up for the rest of 2020 for me personally but when I took all this equipment that I had bought for the fiber optic link between my house and the new office, and I hooked it up to the cable that had been buried by electricians who didn't really know what they were doing. Regarding fiber. And I hooked everything up. It just all worked the first time.
Josh:
Wow.
Ben:
Wow.
Starr:
That was the most... This is the most amazing thing. I think that…
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Sep 11, 2020
Just Breathe! Staying Mindful While Working
Show Notes:
Links:
Horrorstör
Tiny MBA
Great Nuts
AntiRSI
MotivAider
Pomodoro Technique
Full Transcript:
Starr:
So, I've got to say, this is kind of a brag. It's completely off topic but I've got to tell somebody. I'm very proud of myself. You know how in any... I don't know. Whenever you watch movies or TV about prison, or weird situations, there's always somebody who's a genius at making booze, right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Oh, yeah. Like the trash bag or whatever?
Starr:
Yeah. You take whatever's in your environment and you somehow make booze out of it. Well, I think I'm kind of like that with ice cream. I think I'm the same with ice cream.
Josh:
Some garbage bag ice cream?
Starr:
No, not garbage bag ice cream. But I was just like... Yesterday, I was like-
Josh:
Some bathtub ice cream?
Starr:
Yesterday I was like, "I really want ice cream but I don't have any cream."
Josh:
Gotcha. Okay.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. So, I was like, "Okay. I need my fat sourc…
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Sep 4, 2020
In Search Of The Perfect To-Do Manager
Show Notes:
Links:
Notion
Basecamp
Amanuensis
Neuralink
Full Transcript:
Starr:
Well, what's up in y'alls worlds?
Ben:
Went out kayaking yesterday, that was nice.
Starr:
Oh, nice.
Josh:
Cool.
Starr:
Did you get that foldable one you were talking about?
Ben:
I did order, but it is back-ordered, so I have not yet received it.
Starr:
Damn.
Josh:
It's like this was a bad time for everyone to wait to purchase these things they were putting off for their recreation time.
Ben:
Exactly.
Josh:
Till they have forced time on their hands.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, totally. We went canoeing on our little vacation a couple of weeks ago, and it was really nice. It was one of those things where I was kind of dreading it because we had Ida with us. But it actually turned out being really calm and peaceful, and all that. It was just very nice.
Josh:
Where did you go, Ben?
Ben:
Out on the Sammamish River, which is right near me.
Ben:
Yeah. We went from Redmond towards Lake Sammamish but ther…
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Aug 28, 2020
How Do You Sell A SaaS Swiss Army Knife?
Show Notes:
Links:
Snow Crash
Microsoft Flight Simulator glitch
Google deprecation article by Steve Yegge
Swiss Army
Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra
Heroku
Full Transcript:
Josh:
This is just why I know. I know that whatever happens in November, it's just going to get... It's going to get crazier. No matter what.
Starr:
I do feel like... More and more I feel like I'm inside of a cyber punk novel. Not really a William Gibson, Chiba City, going to get your bioware implanted or whatever but more of a Neil Stevenson Snow Crash type of situation where you have to... Everybody lives in gated communities, and the gated communities are owned by the different franchises. So, you live in the KFC gated community, and you worship the Colonel and all that.
Josh:
Or you live in a super PAC community.
Starr:
Yeah, exactly.
Josh:
Where they have your videos playing on billboards for everyone who drives by.
Starr:
Exactly. And the hero of the story is just this girl trying to deliver…
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Aug 21, 2020
Learn How We Run Our SaaS Content Marketing Machine
Show Notes
Links:
_why
Ruby's Exceptional Creatures
Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method
Audience Ops
Peter Cooper
Docsketch
ProofHub
Scribendi
DeltaWalker
Notion
Honeybadger Developer Blog
Full Transcript:
Starr:
I wonder if any of our listeners are too young to know what SOAP is, like SOAP?
Josh:
I'm guessing so.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
SOAP is what we have before REST APIs and JSON. It was interesting.
Ben:
It was hell.
Starr:
Yeah. I dipped my toes in that water a little bit and just gave up.
Ben:
Every time I hear SOAP I think of DHHs slide at that one RailsConf early on where he had the WS-Death Star. It was great.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Because all the... I guess I should explain that. It's all of the, I guess, it was schema domain or the name space, everything started with WS, and so they started referring to the different... Because there was, I don't know, 10 or 20 or whatever, there were a lot of them, and so they called them WS-Star, to represent all of his schemas…
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Aug 14, 2020
What The Heck Is Penetration Testing And How Does It Work?
Show Notes:
Links:
Whirly Board
OWASP Top Ten
Detectify
Kolide
WWIV
Trade Wars
Security Researcher Hall of Fame
Full Transcript:
Josh:
Yeah. It's called a Whirly Board and it's a local... Well, not local. It's a US small business apparently that makes them. I forget where they're located. Not in Washington. It's like a skateboard. There's I've seen other balance boards that are made for standing desks, but none of them have the... This has also side... You can balance on the edges of it as well so you can rock back and forth between the outer edges and balance.
Starr:
Oh, that's really cool.
Josh:
Apparently you can do a tricks. You can 360.
Starr:
Of course you can.
Josh:
And... Yeah. You can ollie.
Starr:
So I was imagining literally a skateboard on top of an exercise ball where if you lost your balance it would just fly out from underneath you.
Josh:
Yeah. This is not... One of the big exercise balls?
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. One of the big ones.
Josh:
No.
Starr:
You pr…
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Aug 7, 2020
What Sparked Our Fascination With Computers?
Show notes:
Links:
Kathy Sierra
Seinfield – Vandalay Industries
Minnesota Fats
Lemonade Stand
Phrack
Honeybadger Developer Blog
Full Transcript:
Starr:
We are on uncharted ground. We usually record on Fridays, but I was out on Friday, so we're recording on a Monday now. We just had our all hands meeting. I had a meeting before that, which means this is my third Zoom call of the day. I've got another Zoom call after this one.
Josh:
Wow, that's a lot of meetings.
Ben:
That's impressive.
Starr:
I figure if I have enough meetings on Zoom, I'll become a Zoomer and I'll like have found the fountain of youth.
Josh:
Is that how that works?
Starr:
That's how it works.
Josh:
Cool, okay.
Starr:
That was a terrible joke I'm sorry.
Josh:
We're all Zoomers now.
Starr:
I apologize to our listeners.
Josh:
I think no, the joke proves that we're Zoomers, I think. They're funny, right?
Starr:
It's fine. I'm going to learn Snapchat this evening. I have an hour booked into my schedule.
J…
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Jul 31, 2020
Schrems VII, The Return of Safe Harbor
Show Notes:
Links:
TechCrunch Schrems II
Full Transcript:
Ben:
Speaking of town meetings though, we had a streamed event from our local school district last night in which they revealed that our school district will not be having school in person for the first semester of the year. They're going to do a wait and see approach and see if they can have school opening and the next semester, in I guess January, but for now, the kids are going to be at home.
Starr:
So how do you feel about that?
Ben:
I think that's the right decision and in the state of Washington and in King County, in which we live, the coronavirus cases are going higher than they were in the initial, back in March. So I don't see how it's a good idea to have a bunch of kids in an enclosed space for an extended period of time in those kind of conditions.
Starr:
The difference this time is that it's over.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
It's-
Starr:
The hurricane's past us.
Josh:
It's a good thing that it fizzled out. You know, th…
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Jul 24, 2020
Apps and Websites Sharing Domains. Is It a Highlander Situation?
Show Notes:
Links:
Ghost
Octopress
Squarespace
Tailwind
Tyler Tringas
Full Transcript:
Josh:
You're looking chipper, Ben.
Ben:
I'm feeling chipper, Josh.
Josh:
I'm glad.
Starr:
Yeah, there's kind of like ... you have kind of like a glow. Is this the new product glow?
Ben:
I think it is the new product glow, yes, yes.
Starr:
Okay.
Ben:
I pushed out a new feature this morning.
Josh:
Congratulations.
Ben:
Thank you, thank you. So, yeah, feeling pretty good. Had a good week, got some stuff built and deployed and things are working. I learned some things along the way, so yes, it's good.
Starr:
Awesome.
Josh:
You know, I had a pretty good week too, sleep aside. I even got enough sleep one day.
Starr:
Oh really? That's good.
Josh:
Yeah, yeah, that was a good day.
Starr:
Thank goodness, that's always terrible.
Josh:
I've been making progress on the JavaScript stuff so that's always good.
Starr:
On redoing our node client library?
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, the universal rewrite. S…
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Jul 17, 2020
How Price Sensitive Are B2B Customers?
Show Notes:
Links:
Mighty Cal
Hook Relay
Profitwell Retain
Floor Is Lava
Ben Curtis Twitter
Full Transcript:
Starr:
So what were you all talking about before I jumped on the call?
Ben:
We were talking about Derrick's new startup Mighty Cal.
Starr:
Mighty Cal.
Ben:
Looking pretty nice. I was telling Josh how I like the virality of it. If you're using Mighty Cal and you share those links with someone, then they're going to be like, "Oh, that's cool. I should use that too." And it's just going to help the spread. I really like that kind of... I was reflecting on Honeybadger. It's like, well we just don't really have an opportunity to get the kind of-
Josh:
Wouldn't it be fun to have that aspect of it? They got that with Drip too. That was their big thing with the Drip widget, so I'm sure Derrick, he knows what he's doing.
Starr:
We tried to do that a bit when we did our... When there's an error on your website, Honeybadger can display a form for user feedback.
Josh:
The problem…
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Jul 3, 2020
How To Unlock The Gold Standard of Webhooks
Show Notes:
Links:
Stripe
Hey
Bye
Full Transcript:
Josh:
I'm the co-pilot today, right?
Ben:
Co-pilot. Yeah, yeah. So today we're flying without Star. Star is not feeling well, so today is just the two of us.
Josh:
And I have been on vacation. Well, I am on vacation.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Sticking my head up.
Ben:
We are so into FounderQuest that we even come in on vacation to record an episode.
Josh:
Yeah. I don't know. It's nice to keep the schedule. I don't know. I've been trying to take a lot of vacations, so if we didn't record every time one of us was on vacation, then I feel like we wouldn't have a very consistent schedule.
Ben:
That's true. Yeah. So how is your vacation treating you?
Josh:
Alright. It's really a staycation so far.
Ben:
Right. I think all vacations are staycations for a while.
Josh:
Yeah. I've looked at bookings, to go to places. I don't want to go anywhere. I don't want to deal with any of the stuff that's going on right now.
Ben:
Certainly.
Josh:
Or ta…
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Jun 26, 2020
Spoiler Alert! The Apple Vs Hey Fight Explained and Who’s Right?
Show Notes:
Links:
Hey
Worldwide Developers Conference
David Heinemeier Hansson
Jason Fried
Heroku
Andrey Butov
Configuring Fastmail to act like Hey
Full Transcript:
Starr:
Okay. Now we can talk about how terrible the world is. No.
Ben:
So speaking of Apple. Yeah, it's been interesting. So I've been watching all the hubbub over the past few days about Hey and Apple.
Starr:
So what is Hey?
Ben:
So Hey is this new email service from our friends at Basecamp.
Starr:
I still call them 37signals, because we go back.
Ben:
Way back.
Starr:
They let me do that.
Ben:
And also an app. So of course, their web application comes with an IOS application, which has caused a bit of a kerfuffle in the Apple world over the past few days. Which is funny that the timing is such that it's right before their Worldwide Developers Conference. That's interesting. But I was thinking about it this morning-
Josh:
Yes, it's very interesting. Some would say it's a little more than a coincidence.
Ben:…
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Jun 5, 2020
How Many Hours Does It REALLY Take To Start A Company?
Show Notes:
Links:
Justin Jackson Twitter
12 Monkeys
Kingkiller Chronicles
Full Transcript:
Ben:
As I was getting this morning and reading Twitter and just... Twitter. Something that's come up lately, and Justin Jackson has talked about this, and there's a couple other people who have talked about this. On Twitter this morning, it was being talked about. But that's the idea of staying in your lane.
Ben:
If you're a technologist, and typically your podcast is all about business or whatever. I'm just talking about us, right? Then you should stay in your lane and not talk about current events, whatever. People said that to Justin Jackson as he's been talking about equity and the environment. Some of the things that are concerns to him, and things that he likes to think about and talk about.
Ben:
I was thinking about that this morning, and I was like, "Well, we could talk about current events on our podcast. There's no reason why we couldn't." Then I thought, "Well, except that, you kn…
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May 29, 2020
Updating Our Pricing With Gravy And Special Sauce
Show notes:
Links:
Build Your SaaS by Justin Jackson
Basecamp Hill Charts
Scrooge McDuck
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
Darkpatterns.org
Honeybadger.io
Full Transcription:
Starr:
So, how have you all been doing this week? I've been on vacation.
Ben:
This week has been an interesting week in the Curtis household, we discovered a water leak in our house, in the bathroom.
Starr:
Oh, my gosh. So when you say interesting, you're using it in the sort of like British way?
Ben:
Exactly.
Starr:
You mean like terrible.
Ben:
Exactly.
Josh:
Because, yeah, when you're in the middle of a pandemic-induced lockdown, the thing you really want is a water leak.
Ben:
Exactly. Yes. So, that has turned into quite the adventure, again in the British way. Yeah, plumber came, found the leak. It was a pipe in the wall. So, pro-tip, don't put pipes in your walls. So, yeah. Then, the mitigation crew came and demolished a good chunk of the bathrooms because actually this…
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May 22, 2020
Kickin It With Mike Perham, Author Of Faktory & Sidekiq
Show Notes:
Links:
Mike Perham
Full United Flight
Sidekiq
Faktory
Heya
Patrick McKenzie
Techstars
TinySeed
Roy/SAC
Honeybadger
Full Transcript:
Starr:
What's on your wall behind you? You've got like a autographed jersey like a hockey jersey.
Mike:
Yeah, I'm I'm a soccer fan.
Starr:
Oh, a soccer jersey. I'm sorry.
Mike:
It's the Portland Timbers. Yes.
Josh:
The timbers, yeah.
Mike:
And it's not looking good for us playing in 2020.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It's looking good for anybody?
Mike:
Some people more than others. Yeah.
Josh:
I never... I thought it'd be cool to make it to one of those games I've never been. I've never been to any sporting event in Portland, even though like...
Mike:
Well, I'm a season ticket holder. So Josh, if you ever want to come on down and we can go to a game together, I'm in.
Josh:
That would be awesome.
Starr:
Oh my gosh, this is great. I'm glad we're recording this. This is like networking. This is like stuff happening. This is like deals happenin…
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May 15, 2020
Is GitHub Codespaces Basically Just X Windows?
Show Notes:
Links:
Amethyst
PopClip
Alfred shortcuts
Hacker New Ubuntu 20.04 Thread
Ansible
Josh's dotfiles
Mathias Shell Scripts
UltraFine
Bartender
Transcript:
Starr:
I'm the type of tiling Window manager user that never changes any of their layout, basically. I'm the type of tiling Window manager that like has all applications open full screen except for like my terminals, which I have a vertical split. And so, I've got two of those open on a single screen. I actually don't know any shortcuts to any of the Window managers I've ever used. I have to look them up every single time.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, that's the great thing about Amethyst, it is the one that's based on ... It's has nothing to do with Haskell, but it's based on xmonad. But the key bindings are all like ... There's not really much way to change them, it's all pretty simple. It's a lot simpler to use the key bindings than it is to use the Haskell.
Starr:
I use Magnet for my Windows manager.
Josh:
Yeah, that's what…
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May 8, 2020
Beware The Blinking Folder Of Death
Show Notes:
Links:
Stripe
Spam Nation by Brian Krebs
Bad To The Bone by George Thorogood
Grammarly
Egghead.io
Udemy
Chris Oliver
Jumpstart
Heya
Lamby
StimulusReflex
Andrew Mason
Remote Ruby podcast
Honeybadger
Full Transcript:
Josh:
So I'm sitting in my chair with this laptop and the thing literally crashes in my lap. And when I turn it back on, it gives me that blinking folder. The blinking folder. I don't know if you've ever seen the blinking folder, Ben says he hasn't.
Starr:
I've never seen it.
Josh:
The blinking folder is what you get when there is no hard drive attached to the system.
Starr:
Oh, no. What's there? Is there a hard drive in it?
Josh:
There was. It's not finding it anymore.
Starr:
I mean, is there one physically in there?
Josh:
There is a physical hard drive in the system. Yes.
Starr:
Okay, that's good. That's good.
Josh:
However, the hard drive I suspect has finally croaked. So now I've had to... I've literally had like two laptops die on me in one…
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May 1, 2020
Ruby Is The Animal Crossing Of Programming Languages
Show Notes:
Links:
Voltron
Transformers
Gobots
Thundercats
Animal Crossing
Stardw Valley
Factorio
Dependabot
Gumroad
Shopify
Stripe
Pinky and the Brain
Full Transcript:
Starr:
Did you prefer Voltron over Transformers? Which team were you on?
Ben:
I guess I did, because I don't remember watching much in the way of Transformers, but I did watch a lot of Voltron, so.
Starr:
Oh really? That's a shame. Transformers were great.
Ben:
I'll take your word for...
Josh:
I like the name Voltron better. Voltron's a pretty good name.
Starr:
Well, can we all just agree the Gobots just suck? Let's just all agree to hate the Gobots.
Ben:
But I think perhaps Thundercats were better than both Voltron and...
Starr:
Oh, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. Thundercats for life.
Josh:
Are we the Thundercats of air trackers?
Ben:
Honey badgers go.
Starr:
I don't think a honey badger is technically a cat.
Ben:
I decided to try out Animal Crossing this morning.
Josh:
Oh really?
Starr:…
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