Bootstrapped Web

It's bootstrapped web. We are back. We've got a lot to talk about today. Jordan, what's up, buddy?

Hey, Brian. Hey. Hey. We wanna start off this podcast by dedicating this episode to Ian Landsman.

Yes. Ian, this is for you.

He's fighting for the rights of people who aren't worth $80,000,000 to express themselves on Twitter.

Ian's fighting the good fight over there.

Oh my god. So we're trying to control our laughter here going into this episode. We're gonna do our best. This is why we have an editor. Brian and I are talking about Hey and all the comedy around it.

It's a good amount of comedy.

It taken over the the Twitterverse this week for sure. It's not like anything else is happening in the world right now.

Yes. Well, could focus on that or we could focus on Hey. There are some interesting topics around it. It is comical in a way and very serious in other ways. It can be seen as like extremely wealthy people complaining.

That's that's part of the comedy. But also, it can be seen as someone who really doesn't give a shit and has the ability to express frustration where other people are very scared to express it. That's very useful.

Basically it's a controversy that has really erupted this week between Hey, the base camp company versus Apple and the way that they demand like in app purchases for certain types of apps and we'll we'll get into it. I think everybody has been fascinated with just the launch of Hey, even before all this erupted. I was totally tuned in. Like I'm fascinated by the way the Basecamp guys, Jason Fried and DHH and and their whole team like execute the building and launching of a brand new product from one of the most well known software companies out there. I thought that the way that they've been executing and rolling out the launch has been really, really good, I guess up until this iOS app fiasco but like, and some would argue that has helped as well but

can argue that was also part of the plan which some people are suggesting. I don't look at it that way. I'm assume good intent.

Yeah. And you know as a product designer, I think you and I have both tried out Hay at this point and I also have some thoughts on the product itself. Like I watched some demos of it before I started using Hay and I was convinced that I would become a paying customer. And then after about a day of playing with it and testing it out, I uncovered a few things that to me I think are just deal breakers. I can't

And are they missing features or are they the point of view on the product itself?

I think a little bit of both. And what fascinates me about this is trying to think about it from the perspective of a customer because I deal with trying to convert customers on process kit every single day. I'm reminded that there's always this gap no matter how good you are at talking to customers. And I love talking to customers and doing the demo calls and everything and like I'm hungry for customer research and I think I get a lot of good customer research but there's always a gap between what the customer is even able to tell you or demonstrate to you versus what actually truly matters to them once they're in the product. And and there are always things that they don't even know themselves until they're in it.

And and I experienced that myself with hey, I was like, I'm sold. I'm I see all these features, how they were you know, pre launching them and stuff like that and and I was like, wow. Awesome. Like they solve a lot of problems for me from Gmail. And once I got in there, I can get into it, but in practice for me, it was like, I I can't use this every day.

Yeah. It's it's interesting to see a mature software company launch a new product because at least I associate the maturity of a software product with the trade offs of it's not that you're unaware of what users want. It's just that you can't satisfy all of them. So there are just going to be gaps no matter what. We get things every day.

Hey, this would make sense if you could add this. And we look at it and we say, yes, that would make sense. Are we going to add it? No. Right?

So that's like the trade off, But new products, it's a different thing. It's like, what did you decide to put in versus leave out? Like, what's your priority list and does it match up with what my needs are? And I think that's the gap you're talking to and it'll be interesting to see how much they behave like a, let's call it traditional software company that listens to their users and adds features based on that versus their very opinionated selves of very happily repelling people away if it's not right for them. They have a very large list, right?

I think it's about a 100,000 that have requested. I saw a tweet this morning from DHH saying we sent another 10,000. The problem is we have another 70,000 waiting. So I'm going to assume somewhere around a 100,000. This is a pretty unique case in that you have a software company that has built up a tremendous amount of goodwill, like a preposterous amount of goodwill through their content and leadership and ideas and everything.

But they didn't launch a new product for a while. So it was okay. A lot of people knew them and some people ended up using their product and most didn't, but the combination of the two still created a gigantic customer base. And now it's now it's a new product. So potentially new customer base.

I mean, I if I had to guess off the bat, I would say that, hey, it's going to become a wildly successful $100,000,000 a year plus product that I don't use. A a lot like Basecamp.

I think I could agree with that. The iOS thing is a big deal and but I I just wanted to mention because I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts on this. I I tweeted about this too, but the just about the product itself. Like, I was sold on on these aspects of it that the thoughtful UI and UX, like generally I'm always a fan of of the way that they what I'm talking about is the user experience. I'm not such a fan of like the styling and I think it's a little bit too heavy handed on the colors and and that kind of stuff.

A little cartoony for for an everyday email app, I need it to be as clean and simple as possible and it's not quite that. But the experience and the functionality in the UI makes a lot of sense, I think. The screening in, I was sold on this idea. I love the idea of not completely relying on on machine learning like the way that like Google does. Just making it like user defined screening in, know?

So Do

you use priority inbox?

I don't.

You you don't?

Okay. I don't and I don't use tabs.

Okay. So I don't use tabs either. Use priority inbox and I'm relying on that machine learning and it has been failing me repeatedly over the past few months. People that I have emailed within the past and their important emails don't go to priority inbox and emails that I don't care about and I've never responded to and are clearly cold emails with unsubscribe links get into my priority inbox. It's it's it sucks.

I've just never trusted priority inbox or tabs or any of that. And I don't know that I will. And so that's what that's what I liked about their approach to screening in. The other thing I was intrigued by was the reply later workflow. They they get it that like everybody is like just marking an email as unread, but you're shoehorning this feature that doesn't, not supposed to work that way.

And then the feed, this isn't talked about enough, but I like their idea of putting stuff into the feed like newsletters and just, you know, things that don't require action that you just want to read. I'm sure I'm not alone here. I subscribe to a lot of things and I want to remain subscribed to them. But after receiving them for years, I start to naturally tune them out, which means I habitually ignore them and I don't read this stuff anymore. And treating all that stuff as an actual feed, like a Twitter feed, think makes a lot of sense because it would actually get me to read at least, at least a little bit more of those emails than I instead of like completely not opening them for you

Right or skim or just not have them on the same plane as your actionable emails that you need to deal with.

Yeah. So here's here's what happened after I signed up. The screening is the big one. Number one, I wasn't thrilled that I can't import my old archives to Hey. So I have ten year old archives archives in my Gmail that I search all the time.

And I'm talking about my business G suite, which I pay for. So if I were to switch to Hey, I would still need to pay for G suite just to keep the searchable archives and I would have to have a separate app just to search old stuff and like from before this date and like

I could see them adding that as a business feature. Right? They haven't launched the business version yet. And I could see bringing over archives as a business feature.

Yeah. I don't know. But the the other one was the real deal deal breaker and that's the way that the screening in actually works.

How does it work? You you describe it? I I have not set up forwarding. I haven't committed that

Yeah. So it's pretty simple the way that it works now. It it just it's just based on who the email is from, the the from email address.

So every single email that comes into your inbox, you have to make a decision of whether this is an email you wanna see versus don't? Is that is that straightforward that way?

If I email you once for the very first time in in your Hey account, you'll screen me in once. Hopefully you'll screen me in. And then anytime I email you after that then I don't hit your screener, I go straight into your IMM call.

Okay and what happens if I say, no thanks, no Brian Castle for me.

Then I can send you a thousand cold emails in the future, you won't see them.

Where do they go?

I think they do go somewhere like you can

Yeah like the feed or something.

Or yeah, some other thing that you don't see but later you could decide to unscreen me and then you will have access to that. But here's where it breaks down is I get a lot of messages via other apps. So a big one for me is Help Scout. Like I get customer support. I'm currently doing process, get customer support through Help Scout, but then those come to my personal work email that I would have used with Hey.

And Help Scout, like many other apps, those emails come from a Help Scout email address, not from the user's email address. And they put like a conversation ID in the email address. So even if like the same customer sends me 10 different emails through help scout, those are going to hit the screener every single time cause they have unique conversation IDs.

Oh, you can't just do it at the domain level or something?

Can't do it at the domain level, but even if, but then even if I did it at the domain level, I do get some spam or some, some crap through help scout that I don't want to see that I would normally screen out. So in that case, like maybe if they, if they could like screen in based on the reply to email instead of the, the from email, that could be good. Or have rules like if the email address contains a string, then screen it in like, you know, these get, these get into the things that maybe they'll, they'll add later, but, you know, helps got like Trello messages, messages from process kit. When we're commenting with the team, those, those come from a process, from a process kit email, but, but they, but they reply to the person's email and like, so things like that. I would have to finally like move all of my process kit emailing out to its own.

I have brianprocesskit.com but I'm not actively using it yet. It's still going to my main work email. So I would have to have like yet another inbox. Anyways, so that's sort of the deal breaker for me.

For me on the product, I haven't dug into it the same way I haven't started forwarding. It's just that they spoke to the problem, the problems that I experienced really well. Just the loss of control over my own inbox and it turning into a source of stress and guilt. That's what I associate my inbox right now.

If the screening in could actually work as intended, like for my use case, it would eliminate cold email spam that I don't ever wanna see.

And it would eliminate right now what I see as a giant burden of just it's on me to unsubscribe to everything. And I've tried all those unsubscription apps and I hate all of them with a passion because they all have these tricky business models and make you share with friends and it's like, I will just pay you to help me unsubscribe from these things and I can't I can't find something that just does that in a straightforward way.

Yeah. But I could see the screener. I think Ian has been making this point a lot that like, I think it will become a chore still. Like we'll still all receive cold email from people and then our screener inbox is never gonna be inbox zero and that's

Right and that's what I rely on priority inbox to do for me. It just has been you know, not as good as it has in the past. Now look, we're talking about the product, that's all nice, but I wanna talk about the con come on, come

Let's let's talk about the juicy stuff.

Right. So so what happens? Basecamp, very inexperienced software company, doesn't really understand the rules of the app store.

This is their first first go at this. She's

walking down the block instantly whistling. Walks into the Apple store, gets clubbed in the knee. Right? That's effectively what happened is they went to launch. It sounds like they actually got one version of the app in without any issues and then when they went to update it, right, that's what happened, then someone found it and identified it as a non business app.

Do I have that right?

See I'm really on the fence on like, I feel like both sides are a little bit at blame here for lack of a better word. So Apple's stance is that they mistakenly initially approved the app. Right. That it should have never been approved in the first place.

It should have been upfront, this type of app has to pay us 30% because

Yes. And then a day into their launch, I don't know what day it was this week, like Tuesday or something.

Right, they went to update it with fixes.

Yeah. Quick fixes. And then on that they, they got denied. And the reason that Apple is saying is that an app like, an email app, they don't call it an email client because it's like its own email service. I think the problem on Apple's end according to their terms is that there's no free version of Hey.

So every user who goes through the iOS app store and discovers Hey and downloads it, Hey does not do anything. It has no functionality for them unless they go into their web browser and go to hay.com and then subscribe and become a paying subscriber there. And what Apple is saying is like you, they have to offer a way to in app purchase that subscription and Apple takes 30% of that. My understanding now, I just learned this today that it's 30% of the first year and then 15%.

Yeah. After going forward. And and that's when our our boy DHH just lost his Danish mind. He just, he went nuclear and the whole internet started pointing at it like, look, look at what's happening here. And the details started to become fuzzier and what came to the front was Apple is abusing its power and taking money away that it shouldn't take away from a company like, hey, that feels like they don't have a choice but to list in the app store, but doesn't wanna pay, you know, bribe or tax as it's being positioned.

Now what's the argument?

Well, I first of all, I think the general argument is that just just in general, it's it's just way too high for Apple to take 30%. I mean ridiculous, right? But that that's something that all app developers are are aware of and a lot of them don't like it but a lot of people say that they're smaller players so they don't wanna complain too publicly about it.

Yes. Everyone's scared and DHH has the luxury or the guts or whatever combination of things to be able to just blast away.

Yeah and I mean they do have a point that like Apple is so big at this point that this would be a business product killer. It's not like they could just decide like, we're just not gonna have an iOS app. Like for this type of for an email tool

can't go to the browser all day. No way. No. You lose your mind. Yeah.

It's whenever I am too sick of Twitter and addicted, I just go to the web version and that will make you never go there. The app is so good. I assume it would be the same thing with an email client. So now the tricky thing is that like 30% might make sense for a game. Like the only your whole business is based on distribution in the app store and Apple wants their cut.

Okay, fine. But this is separate. This is a business that has really nothing to do with Apple.

Yeah. It's like customers can go to Hay and pay 99 a year or if they just happened to have subscribed through Apple, then they're paying

Right. So so that that's it. I think that's like one of the most important parts of the whole conversation is if you go to hey.com and sign up and pay and then go to the iOS app store and download it, Apple's not getting a cut from that at all. That right? Yes.

They're only going to pay 30% for people who discover it through Apple and then make the in app purchase from there as opposed

to wherever they discovered it. They they maybe they did hear about it through through base camps, other marketing, but like, if they end up subscribing through the in app purchase, they're paying 30% of that is going to Apple.

I think that's the weakest part of Basecamp's argument. If if Apple said and I could not help but watch this debate without thinking about the Shopify app store, obviously, because my my life is dependent on the platform also just like other people's apps are dependent on other platforms. So I was looking at it with that lens for sure. I think if a platform is saying we don't care where you get your customers, if you work with us, if you have an integration with us and an app in our app store, we're taking a revenue share from every one of our platform customers. That's much more heavy handed than if they discover it through us, then we will, we deserve a cut.

Yeah. My understanding is that it's not, it's not based on like whether they discovered it. It's just whether, whether they chose to click the purchase button from within the iPhone app or, or if they just like entered their login and they're Yeah, locked like logged in, like that's what Basecamp is arguing. It's like, just let our users log in with their existing login that they created over on our website because here's what I learned about this this week. I'm still sort of trying to figure out these terms.

Look, Basecamp has an iOS app and many other business see, they make this distinction, Apple does, business apps versus consumer apps. And the part that doesn't make a lot of sense, John Gruber had a really good blog post about this this week, is that there are too many apps and this is a perfect example of one that is in both worlds. Like a prosumer app, Right? And I guess Apple's terms are, if they classify it as a business app, then you don't have to do their in app purchase. Then you're allowed to have an app in the app store that essentially does nothing if you download it and then you just log in with your account information.

So for example, Basecamp's iPhone app that they've had for years, people don't subscribe to that through the app store.

And Basecamp therefore doesn't give a share.

Basecamp hasn't paid Apple a dollar for that for years.

What a trip.

And so they're sort of arguing that like that, but Apple is classifying an email app more like a Gmail, which they consider to be a consumer app. And the difference between Gmail and Hey is that Gmail is free. Of course they have ads and everything, but it's free. And so if you download Gmail through the app store, then it's still functional. You could still do something with it.

I agree. 30% is ridiculous. I saw Jason Fried's tweet that said, it was one of the only things that I heard him weigh in on about this.

I I do wonder about what's happening between the two of them. If they're happy with each other right now or if they've gone too far or not.

Well, Jason made a good point. He was like, just don't include us in the search in iOS. Like make us not discoverable at

all. Right. We're fine.

We're fine with just discovered. We're Just just make it available. Like, we'll give our users a special link and they'll get to it.

So I think Apple's, where their argument falls apart is in the arbitrariness of the application of the rules. Right? So so some get this and some get that and there are a million different cases of people being treated differently than others and I sympathize with that tremendously. There are always inside deals with any platform, Some of it nefarious and some of it understandable like

They're talking about Netflix as the as the example of like, I don't believe Netflix is paying. I don't know how it works actually through the network through the Netflix app, but they're they're saying like, that's a good example of like, oh, they gave Netflix a special deal.

Right. They're always special deals. And some of it is understandable. If a platform is brand new, and it's dying for a feature, then it might need to convince the company to come on board and give them, you know, a ten year deal that's much better than others because they really need that feature for their customers.

Yeah. But it's something about like, like they classify it as like a reader. I don't know.

Right. But, but there, there are fairness issues and there are power issues.

So here's another question for me is like, all right, well first of all, people are like accusing Basecamp of intentionally making this controversy happen, which I think is a little ridiculous.

Yeah, I

don't think so. That didn't happen. But I sort of question like, how did they not see this coming? You know, like

Maybe because they have an existing app and they're not paying and they're gonna say, we're just gonna do things the exact same way.

Because I mean

That would be a reasonable assumption.

Having the iOS app is so important for this business to work. I would make sure that every question about the terms is buttoned up well before launch and they were accepted before launch, but I read today in in in tech crunch, Phil Schiller at at Apple weighed in on it, he was like, We're not changing any terms. It is what it is. That that's that. Maybe I read this wrong, but he said in that article that, Hey also tried to submit a Mac app to the Mac app store and that was rejected months ago.

For a desktop app.

Yeah. For the same reason, the in app purchase reason. Oh.

Plot tickets.

And I I could be wrong with that, but that's what I read in in the in the article about him today and and it said, and so then then I'm like, well, if if that happened, then it's like, it's it's a risky move, you know?

It is risky, but but their risk is different. We have to acknowledge that. It doesn't matter whether they want to be treated like everyone else and not be punished for being successful. Their risk is different. Their calculations are very different.

So I could see a situation where they went into this and said, there's a chance that it will have a problem, but we can look at our Basecamp app and that doesn't have a problem we don't have to share. So we should launch with the assumption it'll be treated the same way as Basecamp. And at worst, if it gets treated differently, then we can use that for PR. That I think would be a reasonable way to think about it and something that's likely to have happened. The likeliness of them just never considering it and never talking about it at all when it's 30% and everyone knows it.

That doesn't seem right.

Yeah. Yeah. That's true. I'm a little bit more fuzzy on this part, but like there are things that they could do on the app to make them. And I think in that Phil Schiller article, he was like, these are the things that you could do.

Like they could add like IMAP support so that it could read other email stuff. Then it becomes classified as like a reader that they don't have to pay for. And then I was thinking like they could just offer a freemium plan for, Hey, like super limited, make it like not even usable, but just basically usable so that users can download it for free through the app store and then that's fine. And then, but if you want all the real features, go subscribe it, hey. Yeah, or upgrade or something.

Maybe it's not that simple, but like

Yeah, it's it's an interesting conversation. I'm always up for a platform conversation. They're they're great in some ways and you know, Apple specifically has their their gatekeepers to an unbelievable amount of value.

Yeah. And it is interesting to me though, cause like it, like I could certainly see a time in the near, somewhat near future that I do an iPhone app for process kit. Customers ask about it all the time and we have a mobile optimized web version, which you know, I saved to the home screen and everything and it, and it works pretty well. But it's not an iPhone app.

It's different. Yeah. Yeah. We thought about building a reporting app just so people can look at their numbers and see conversion rate and see how things are going and get notifications. We would build that without even considering paying Apple 30%.

That wouldn't make any sense to us.

Yeah. I I think that yours and my apps would be considered. Well they would be considered business apps.

Right now. Okay, cool. Business apps don't pay anything. Great. How about next year they come out and say, you know what business apps now pay us 10 Now

you do. Yes. And I don't have a free plan either. So, so it runs into the same issue as hey, so it's like. Yes.

Again, if it is only a portion of the revenue generated by people who discovered it and signed up through the App Store, it's much harder to argue.

Yeah, if they had a way but that they don't really have a way to track that attribution. You know, it's tricky. Well,

it'll be cool to see it unfold. It does doesn't affect us financially, but it will be interesting if it ends up affecting us in a business sense because you can see how Apple will catch the eye of regulators. I mean, they're obviously already in the eyes of regulators just because of the sheer size and power that they have. But Europe is more litigious on that front. Microsoft has already gone through their issues.

And you can see how Apple could be targeted. And you can also see how a few years from now regulators come down and restrict their ability to do this sort of thing and that does affect us and a lot of other people.

Well, there must be some public numbers on this about how significant the app store revenue is for Apple in terms of like their revenue share of apps compared to like like among all their products. I mean, I know that they must make the most from their hardware, but like services are are is like Apple's huge push in general. Like you keep hearing Tim Cook talk about like services. We're we're going big on services now. Apple music and with Apple TV and stuff and like with them taking 30% of of, app store stuff like that's that's significant for them.

But then I wonder like how small is this controversy to Apple really right now? Cause it must be like as big as It's base

a big It's a big deal.

Yeah. I like and and it's becoming a a big deal. Like, base camp is a big deal in at least in in our world, but it but beyond that as well. Yeah. For sure.

But is is this like a blip for Apple or is this like they're they're taking like The revenue

the revenue generated or lost on Basecamp or Hay is insignificant, but how it affects the I'm price talking about the PR. And pricing power ecosystem regulation that that's huge. So Apple made $260,000,000,000 in revenue in 2019 of which $11,500,000,000 came from the app store. That's my very quick Googling. Excuse me if I'm wrong, but generally speaking, can see how that's it's a relatively small percentage of the revenue.

But if you look out toward the future, it's very significant, right? Look over the next ten years, it's over a $100,000,000,000 in revenue and their ability to charge 30% compared to a regulator coming in and say, think 8% is fair. That's the big deal.

And as, as small as, as this one Hey app is to them right now, I mean DHH going on CNBC to talk about this or the New York times or whatever is like, that must not be insignificant. I mean, Phil Schiller is taking interviews about it. Like it's going to the top, right?

It's going to the top because it's going to Congress, right? DHH has testified in Congress before around these types of platform and monopoly issues. It's there. If it's popular with the public and if there's lobbying behind it, then congressmen can can get on their high horse. That has results.

That has real world implications. Right now it seems to be more entertainment because you're looking at a company with infinity money and a company with, you know, Scrooge McDuck money. And they're arguing, but it does have repercussions and there's fairness. Infinity money. Jesus.

Yeah. Hey. Hey.

Ian, you keep it up brother.

Keep It's you buddy.

So Brian, what's going on in our businesses? You know, bring it back down to earth here.

Just trying to submit an app to the App Store and like, no. Oh yeah. I got a couple things. What do you got?

The big thing is hiring and I talked about hiring over the past few weeks. But the way I put it to my team was that it's time to put our bets down. So when the crisis hit, we went careful. We didn't expand expenses. We cut unnecessary expenses and we just sat tight and we played it conservative.

I don't know what else would make sense but overall the COVID e commerce boom helped us. And so we've grown and we just kept expenses in check for a few months. And we've just been really careful and now it's time to make investments. And so that's that's what we're doing on the hiring front. We we're not hiring one or two.

We're hiring like eight. Right? So so we hired two people recently. We hired a support engineer in Los Angeles, first fully remote hire, at least in the past year. And we hired a backend engineer in Austria.

So going through the process of those two really showed us how much work it takes to recruit and hire properly. And now that we're done with that part, one is joining on Monday, the other one joins on August 1 and now we're about to experience what onboarding a new employee looks like. And so the two people responsible for those hires, I spoke with both of them and I just checked in and said, look, what did that do to your workload? And they both said completely obliterated two weeks because putting it out there, writing the job ad, dealing with 200 applicants, giving them a good experience, being polite about responding to people who aren't a good fit, all that is, it is a lot of work. So then we look at eight more roles and there's no way we can do that internally.

So then we start to weigh our options around recruiting and traditional recruiting doesn't feel like it makes that much sense in our situation because we don't need that much help finding candidates.

Yeah, you said this on the last episode where it's like finding them is not the issue. It's just managing the funnel.

Yes. So when you're paying a traditional recruiter 15 to 20% of an annual salary, which is significant, It's 10 to 20 ks. A lot of the service, lot of the value isn't them going on finding amazing people. This is more like you have to filter to find the amazing people. So we've been looking at our options on what to do about that.

But one thing that we come to the conclusion of is taking a 15 to 20% recruiter, multiplying that by eight, that doesn't really make a lot of sense because that's now starting to get into the 75 to 100 ks range for recruiting. And then we still don't have any help on helping them onboard. So I'm starting to get into a place where it might make sense to hire a people ops person and that person can ideally help with the recruiting process of filtering through and working with the individual team leads for that particular area in helping filter through. But then you start to see where the real value is, is how we're going to give eight people at the same time a great onboarding experience? How do we keep the team from feeling isolated?

There's a large portion of the company right now that know each other. We've eaten lunch together. We've gone out together. We know each other's families. We talk about what we're cooking on the weekends.

We we have relationships. Now we have eight completely new people coming in we've never met. We probably won't see in person for like a year. How do we give them a good experience? How do we make sure they don't feel isolated?

How do we keep these cultural parts of the company moving forward and developing?

Yeah, not just the cultural onboarding, but the on the training, right?

Training first thirty days first week. Yeah. Like, there's a lot that goes into it, man. We just hired someone in LA, There's a lot of time like I'm on Amazon and I'm figuring out what equipment to send them and then we're talking to them and saying what mouse do you want? Just there's a lot.

Multiply that by eight, it becomes a lot of work. And then you start to look at the first sixty days, ninety days, first year and then you start to look at our existing company and it really starts to make sense. Let's take that recruiting budget and move it over to a people ops. Right? Someone who's going to be thinking about that.

I think it does make sense especially if you're hiring that many people and you still need to hire the people ops person and get them onboarding like we were just talking about. And I think it's even more of an onboarding for them because they have to learn all the different parts of the company that they will be onboarding other people into. So it's a whole process in itself just to get that person on. So then the question is like, how urgent is it to get the eight people on?

So yeah, I mean you're on the money, What we have to do is look at that and say, cool story on the people ops person, we need these two people immediately. Yeah. And so for that we are working with not Ian Landsman, but Ian from tropical MBA and in his company called dynamite jobs.

Oh, very cool. I was just listening to them today for the I haven't been tuning in much this year, but they did their twenty twenty goals episode and talking about dynamite jobs. It was good one.

Yes. So so we are working with dynamite jobs because they were able to accommodate our version of recruiting needs, which is about the filtering in the process and taking it down from 200 applications and getting it down to the top three or four engineers. So we're moving forward with them with the first two roles immediately and then starting to look for a people ops person in the meantime.

That's an interesting that they're offering that service with

It's Dynamite pretty cool. We talked about this being a potential product I service. I was very happy to find them. I think he reached out over Twitter after seeing a tweet I wrote about this topic. So I'll report back on how that goes and it might be that we do both.

It might be that we work with them for all of the roles and bring in a people ops person because I now see the value in that independent of the recruiting. Maybe the ideal is they're all bundled but even if they're not all bundled, if we can work with Dynamite Jobs that doesn't do the 15 to 20% of annual salary, it's more reasonable than that. And we can get a people ops person then then I'm starting to see, okay, this is what the next few months is going to look like. Here's how we'll find people. Here's how we'll make sure that it doesn't annihilate individual team members' time in order to find those people and bring them on.

And then starting to see what it would look like to actually give people the feeling of an organized company.

Right. Right. Yes. I could see the people ops person also well, yeah. Then it's of like a question of like, do you do you fully break out the recruiting, the like the marketing of of Cardhook jobs from the internal people ops of onboarding and dealing with, you know, companies who really invest in hiring a lot of people over, over all the time.

Like they have people who just go out to conferences and they're recruiting and they're marketing for talent. Right?

Yes. I we're not in that position yet. Right? I could see a situation where we hire these people over the next three months and then we don't hire other people for, you know, for six months until after q four. Right.

Q four is the big one for us. We get ramped up for that and then the holidays go through and then January, we pick our heads back up and start thinking about the future again. So we could hire and then from September to January, not hire anyone. I'm excited about it. It'll be interesting to see that we have some stress around putting that big bet of a bet down.

Right, right, right.

But but I'm I'm trying to train myself in this environment to be more comfortable making decisions with less information. That's that's kind of how I put it to my team. My team knows I like pretend to be cowboy, but I'm pretty conservative on risk. What that really means is you don't make these big bets without a lot of information and feeling very confident about it. And now it feels like I have to dial that back and be able to make these decisions with less information.

It's just kind of the the environment that we're in.

I mean, that's what that's what it's all about is making decisions with with little or incomplete information.

Right. If you wait to have 100% right, that never happens. You wait for 90 or 80, it just feels like that but we get it to like 60 and then just pull the trigger.

Yep. That's that's how it works. Well, speak of that, I think that's a good segue because the thing, okay, maybe nothing I say on this podcast ever makes sense.

It makes sense and that's what matters. Thanks everybody.

But I think that this one is really more of like a mental game question and an issue with bootstrapping a business, right? And it's also around being a solo founder and being a solo maker founder. I'm learning this week. I've learned this a 100 times in the past. It's sort of a thing that I keep having to relearn I think is that the question on my mind this week was, do I build this next very big feature in process kit or do I do what I thought I was planning on doing, which is diving headfirst into marketing for process kit.

And now I've done some marketing activities like created the free course, a lot of content. I've been tweeting, I've been promoting to my audience and things like that. But all of that stuff is a little bit more like groundwork stuff. Like not really like building out marketing funnels and ramping up spending on marketing activities and doing things like ads and whatever else. Like there's a lot more that I want to do when it comes to marketing.

And my plan was, since now I'm wrapping up a lot of my work on the onboarding work on ProcessKit, I talked about that last time, I'm feeling more and more ready to put this thing to the test, right? Like the trial to paid conversion rate has been slowly improving. It's not quite where I would like it to be, but it's been inching up over the last few months. And I think that these onboarding changes are helping with that. I think they will help more with that.

And I feel like I've brought it as far as I could with my audience. I need to really get exposure from cold traffic, you know? And we get some cold traffic from like organic searches starting to come in and things like that. And we convert some of them, but then some of them we don't. And, and, and, and I have this hypothesis that some of my trial to paid conversion rate is being depressed due to the audience factor.

Some people may be just kicking the tires and they're not actually ready to commit. There's this other big feature that has been sitting on the GitHub board for many months now. And it's been in the plans and essentially it's forms. We have some various forms features already in ProcessSkip but what customers ask a lot about is can I put forms on individual tasks or individual steps in a process?

Forms as in this task requires me to collect this information and let me build a form so that it's easy for me or my employees to input that information for this stage of the process.

Exactly. Inputting things into a step in a process. Like a step currently is just a checkbox and a lot of information about it.

Okay. How is it done now? They're the information somewhere else and then identifying that that task has been done?

Yeah. We have things like like custom form fields on the project level but not on the individual task level. We also have custom form fields on clients, we call them client attributes and those are attached to projects as well. So there's all these like little pieces of data that can come in over there but on the individual tasks, which is where the work is happening, like I'm up to the fourth step in our new hire onboarding process.

That's the only thing you care about right now.

And so on that step, they wanna have input fields. Like let me put, let me input this, this candidate's email address or, or, this candidate is from Europe, not United States. So let's check that box and not the, not The United States box. And by doing that on the task level, now we can now step five in the process can automate. It can have conditional logic based on, Oh, for European candidates, these next three steps are relevant, but these steps are not.

Like we, so we have conditional logic already in process kit, which can work off of a bunch of criteria, but intake forms or inputting data into the individual steps is something that people ask a lot about.

So now you're being faced with the the actual the hard decision on do I build that thing or do I start marketing?

Yeah. Now I have a developer that I that that has been working with me and we've really gotten to a real I'm so psyched about this that we have this super fast shipping workflow. We are shipping features like crazy. Just this week we shipped like propagation of tasks, like all this cool stuff. And we can go super fast when it's a feature that he can build on top of existing UI.

So like if we've already built other functionality in the app that uses the same button style, the same menu style, you just have to add a new button to it and then some functionality underneath it. I can I can spend one hour of my time specking it and then he does the rest of it? But when it's a feature like this forms feature, which will require some newly designed UI stuff built into the, into the app. Then that means I'm, I'm going to need to spend more of my time. But this is where it gets into the mental thing as a solo maker founder, because this feels like a really big feature and compared to all of our other features, we've already shipped some really big features.

This is up there. Maybe maybe not the biggest feature but it's it's in the top five of like the biggest hairiest features that we would design and build into the app.

And can you box that into like a timeframe? Is that like a month, a month?

Well I started to analyze that this week, right? When it's just in thought, it actually feels a lot bigger than it is in reality. At least in my

Depends, it can go So either

exactly, I know. Like every everybody always says like, oh, we always underestimate how long it takes, right? But I'm not around here. So those top five big hairy features that we've already shipped in process kit. So for example, Kanban boards.

We've recreated what you can do with like a Trello board inside process kit. That required brand new UI design from me. And then I handed the functionality off to my developer. Reality, very first issue in GitHub for that feature to the day that it shipped live to the app was like under twenty days, You know? Okay.

So big big hairy feature can be relatively limited.

The the biggest features we've shipped took us about twenty to twenty two days. Like, conditional

The biggest features are are six months. Yeah. Things that we've screwed up and had to go back

Conditional logic was like fifteen days from start to finish. The reason why these go so fast is because we're not building a whole new app. We're just adding a significant feature to the app, right? And we have tests, complete test coverage over everything, right? And that also helps with speed now because we don't have to fix a lot of bugs.

But like when I was thinking about it in theory, I was like, this thing feels so big. This custom forms builder like

It's gonna delay marketing even more and then you start to

get Exactly, that's when I start to think about it but like before I analyzed like how long those previous features took, I was thinking like, this is why I've been procrastinating, like not even starting this feature is because this feels like a two month or three month, maybe a four month feature. Cause it feel, it feels that big in my mind, but there has never been a four month feature in process kit, you know? Yep. Not yet. It's just, I know not yet, but it's just me and a developer Good.

We are fast

as you'll ever be.

Yeah. And so I'm starting to realize that in reality, I could just spend next week. Say I give myself all of next week.

Right. Do the UX, do the UI handoffs.

Do UI, start the feature, scope it out, spec it out and hand it off. Then it's just one week of my time. Then he's going to spend about two weeks building it and writing the tests. Then I'm going do some QA on that. We'll have a little bit of back and forth later, but I could get to the marketing two weeks from now after I do the one week of the UI work.

And when I say get to marketing, I mean like probably like fire up some Google ad campaigns. And I said that in one sentence, but we all know that that's like a whole week of work

at That's right. That's right. Every step you take, you realize you need three more tasks to complete that step and then go backward to the other step and readjust

the tracking. Yeah. And then the other thing about marketing is that it's, you got to track it, you got to improve it. It's not going to work right away. You've got to figure it out.

You got to test all those different things.

You And don't have a platform for distribution.

Right. And it's not my strong suit to be honest. Like, like ads is certainly not, you know, I might need to hire a consultant to work with me on that. Like here's why I felt like it was a dilemma this week was that like, I'm constantly wary of that, of that thing that, that we all fall into is like, Oh, I'll get to marketing once I build one more thing. And, and so I wanted to do a gut check on myself on that.

I guess I'm doing it here on the podcast now, but I, but I took it to my mastermind group this week. I do feel like this feature is super important cause it, I don't have like hard quantifiable data, but gut is like, it comes up in 80% of my conversations with customers. And one guy flat out told me, I will convert once you have that feature. I can't convert until you have that feature. I'm talking about one guy this week.

I've, I've heard that from other people as well, but it's unclear exactly. Was that the deal breaker or was there something else?

It's tough.

It comes up a lot. And the other thing is that a couple of competitors have this ability and a large number of the people that I talk to are switching from those competitors and they're like, if I'm gonna switch, I have to have that power.

Okay. So you do have a decent amount of information around its significance and the fact that it'll be used. It's impossible to tell how it'll actually be used and if and how much before, regardless of what people say, you do have a decent amount of information, which I think is where the conversation started. How much information do you need before making the decision? And I know for me, and this is not me lecturing, this is me sympathizing because I have the same issue.

It's the torture internally over the decision that's really the enemy. It's should I do this? Should I feel guilty? But I told myself I would do this and I didn't do marketing. I said by this date I would do it but I didn't and now I don't know what to do.

It's like that is exhausting and just eats energy.

It's the I told myself I would do it by this day and and now I'm changing that plan. Why am I changing that plan? Know? Yes.

Guilt. For me, guilt is the enemy. It clouds things instead of clarifies. It is like walking around viewing everything through a sunk cost fallacy. Everything at all times as opposed to just almost being a little less thoughtful and just saying that makes sense to me, go.

I hope other people can relate to this and sometimes I feel like I'm a little bit, here's the thing, I'm a solo founder, I have no partners and I'm a maker founder. By my nature, I'm going to do the design work on the on the app. Like to me like outsourcing the design of this UI is not an option. Not today, it's not. In the future, of course, we're gonna have team members who do this sort of thing.

Not now, not now.

Not right now. I'm the designer. I'm designing this product. That's my job. My job is also to market this product, you know.

Sometimes when I take this question to people, the response is like, okay, well would money solve this problem? And do you take money and hire somebody to do it so that you could focus on one thing or the other? And look, I have cash. I could hire someone for for for either of these if I wanted to right now. But to me, that's not an option.

Not right now.

To just throw money at it. It's it's not one of those problems. No. Advertising Because might be one of those problems. But Maybe.

The decision.

Maybe but but still the advertising is like messaging and positioning and create and and marketing creative and

A lot of it can't be outsourced.

Yeah. Lot is like, so even if I outsource, I need to work with the outsourced person on that stuff. So I get back to this thing where it's like, I'm a solo maker founder so I have to do all these things. I just have to sort of accept that like next week is going to be UI work instead of marketing work. Then the week after that is what is when I'm going to

do marketing. The trade offs hurt more, right? Cause I hear you, you're viewing it as like you're trying to be realistic. I'm the maker and marketer. I I have to do both.

And so the trade off is just going to hurt because you you can't do everything at the same time. I want to bring it down to the level of do we go for product market fit first and be certain that this is exactly what people want. We got it. Then start marketing, right? If you had $3,000,000 in the bank right now, you could see that as like you're not in a rush.

You want to get it right and then you could throw firepower behind it. Right? The other way to do it is to just I don't know. I want to bring it down to that level on the debate on do you have what people want yet?

Well, okay. So that that's a really good question. That's also why I struggle with this question because we I have customers and and growing customers. Yes. We're we're growing again this month.

So I very well could just go with MarketNow. MarketNow, though,

it's healthy to have that as the opposing argument. I I say it to my team a lot.

Well, was that was my plan. Right? My my plan was, like, I know I know the forms feature is sitting on the board. We're gonna get to it sometime later in the year.

But people are paying right now.

But people are paying right now so let's just get more of those people.

Yes, yes, yes.

That was my plan. Yes. But I'm doing more demo calls and this question comes up and 80% of them and some people still do convert but a lot of people don't convert. So I don't know for sure numbers wise exactly how much of a deal breaker this is. All I do know is that having this is that I'm constantly answering the question like, I know you asked about the forms feature.

It's coming. Believe me, it's coming. Look, both need to happen. It's just a it's just a question of when. If it's a question of when it's like, okay, I could look at the forms feature and I see three weeks out of the calendar.

One week of my work, two weeks of his work and I'll input on his work. And I see marketing and that doesn't fit into a three week box. That's gonna be a year long multi year.

That's forever.

That's gonna be a forever effort. So it's like, at some point, I'm gonna need to do this. Know, like, because marketing has to happen all the time but feature development has to happen all the time. So it's like

I mean, you're gonna build the feature, right? And and I'm a big proponent of going with your gut at this stage as opposed to looking at the numbers and trying to decipher the exact number of people that converted versus not and talking to them and I see the value in that and some people go that way. That's not that's not how I do it. So it's up to you, but it sounds a lot like you want to build the feature. I think you go with it.

Then what I would do is I would say to myself, am I going to make a deal with myself? Or am I going to go all the way in? Am I going to say I'm doing this feature and then we're going to do marketing? Or do I make a deal with myself? Do I say I'm going to do this feature, but I'm going to have three calls next week with potential ad agencies.

So I feel like I'm making some progress on the marketing while

doing Right. Yeah. So here's the other thing about that. Like yes, of course it sounds like I want to build the feature instead of do the marketing work. That's probably true on a day to day basis but I would say at an equal level is my frustration at MRR needs to be 10 x what it is today.

It needs to get there sooner.

Look, MRR always needs the 10 x but the question is by when?

Well exactly, so I've had this number in my mind for like the 2020 and it's been growing. MRR has been growing every month but it's not growing at the rate that I want to see it. And so there's this anxious level of like I should be working on ramping up these marketing channels to accelerate that MRR growth. But then part of me is like actually having this feature would also accelerate conversion rates and

There's there's nothing better than the conversion rate being very good because that that just helps. That means you're gonna grow naturally and when you do marketing, it's more effective. Right? We for the first year, I can't even talk about how brutal that was, but we are conversion rates. Well, conversion rate was fine, but our retention rate was horrible.

So it was a matter of it doesn't matter what we're doing. This is not going to work out unless we improve them. So for us it was churn for you, it's conversion. From the outside it looked like we went, we went from 20 ks to 80 ks MRR in a year and I was 100% certain the company was going to die if we stayed on trajectory. So it didn't matter.

We had to improve churn. For you, even if your marketing efforts improve, it's not really gonna work out unless you convert people an

average Yeah. And you know, it's it's weird that I'm even like stressing out over this question because it's like we've been continuously developing features, me and my developer, so that's nothing new. You know, we're shipping stuff literally every single week. The thing that's given me this hangup is that a month ago I told myself that by the end of this month I'm going to start working on marketing and now I'm, now I'm talking about pushing that off like one or two more weeks and that that's like, what am I doing? You know?

But then it's like, what else is, what else is my developer going to work on? He could, he he's been working on some like optimizations, speed optimizations and smaller features that don't take up a lot of my time, but I need him to be productive on big, good features.

Right. Well, we don't have an answer for you, Brian, but hopefully just talking through it forces you to articulate your feelings and I think if nothing else, what's bubbled up from the surface is your desire to take on the feature and now you're wrestling with yourself and how you prioritize and what you committed to.

I think it's pretty clear I've decided I'm going to be building the feature probably starting next week. Then, and then turn to marketing. Then two weeks from now, I'll come on here again and talk about why I'm going to delay marketing another two weeks. It's going to be a forever cycle.

As long as you're growing.

Alright, man.

Well, thanks everybody. Hey, hey out there. Good luck in the platform wars. Thanks for listening. Dave is Brian.