Communication, Empathy, and Flexibility
Michele and Colleen discuss some lessons for bootstrapped entrepreneurs from Morgan Housel's Psychology of Money. Plus, a numbers update on how Colleen's new SaaS is doing.
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Michele Hansen 0:00
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So you remember a couple of weeks ago how I was reading the Jobs to Be Done Playbook?
Colleen Schnettler 0:59
Yes, I sure do.
Michele Hansen 1:01
I'mstill reading that book. But I'm also reading another book. And I want to talk about that other book.
Colleen Schnettler 1:07
Okay.
Psychology of Money
Michele Hansen 1:09
So I finally started reading the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.
Colleen Schnettler 1:15
Okay.
Michele Hansen 1:16
Which has been on my to-read pile for about, I don't know, about six months or so now, since it came out early last fall. And it's such a good book, like I mean, even if you're not a finance person are particularly interested in personal finance, like, it's a book about money that's not about money. And it's and it's so good. So but there's just one quote and that reminded me of stuff that we talk a lot about together. So I'm just gonna read it to you.
"In a world where intelligence is hyper competitive, and many previous technical skills have become automated, competitive advantages tilt toward nuanced and soft skills, like communication, empathy, and perhaps most of all, flexibility."
Colleen Schnettler 2:08
Hmm, interesting.
Michele Hansen 2:10
And this reminded me a lot of what we talk about, because it's kind of like we've been talking about as it relates to your business. The one of the like, the biggest challenges for you is not the engineering side, it's like, knowing when you should, you know, change directions, or be flexible with with like, what your image of what the business and what the product is. And also like communicating with people about what it does and what it is and pulling that information out of them. And then and then how do we use empathy to figure all of those things out, which is, which is a really big focus for me, and I read this and, like, grabbed the nearest writing utensil near me, which normally I only write in pencils in books, like I will underline things, but I only had a pen, and I was like, This is so amazing, I'm gonna underline it and pen because I'm not gonna regret that, like. That just really stuck with me.
Colleen Schnettler 3:09
Interesting. Why was that in your psychology of money book?
Michele Hansen 3:13
Oh, I mean, so I don't know if you've ever read Morgan's writing.
Colleen Schnettler 3:16
No.
Michele Hansen 3:16
He writes a lot about the sort of psychology of business. He's a very different business writer. And I used to work with him so I've sort of been been around a lot of his thinking for a while. And I'm really sort of grateful for that, because he has a very unique perspective on things. And you know, it's not very often that you read in a best selling business book that the key is empathy. Right?
Colleen Schnettler 3:42
Yeah.
Michele Hansen 3:42
Running a good business. Right.
And it reminds me a lot of something that I have been working on lately, too. So you know, we've talked about like getting people to reply, when you are trying to talk to them about the reasons why they use your product, which can be difficult.
Colleen Schnettler 4:02
Yeah.
Michele Hansen 4:03
And I think I mentioned a couple weeks ago, how we like so on our NPS survey like that, that pops up, I think, you know, relatively soon after someone uses the product, but not the first time and it's, you know, just rank us one to 10. And normally, we just look at this just to make sure we're getting mostly nines and 10s. But then it also has a question that asks as a follow up, and that survey and the question have a really high response rate. And we were previously asking, 'what can we do to improve?' And I changed this question. First of all, we were you know, we're getting a lot of like, boosts out of it. Like people were saying, like, no, you're awesome, and like, that makes us feel great. And like as -- you know, it feels nice. But also, we were kind of like asking people to do our work for us by telling us what we should improve. And so I changed it instead to 'What did you use before you used Geocodio?' And this is just reminding me about how we, you know, you know, competitors, at first blush, they seem like other companies, but in so many scenarios, and I think this applies to your business a lot too, competitors are people figuring something out for themselves or like some, like manual process where they're patching things together. And it is so fascinating to see the variety of responses I get from people. And how many of them say 'nothing' like that they used no tool and that they were like, hunting and pecking, or they had something internal, or they were like stringing together different solutions. I mean, our approach to competitors is so much more like relaxed than this, I think for, like, the traditional kind of business approach is like, you know, you should know everything that your competitors are doing and like, you know, know exactly when they have new features and like, be copying their features and everything. And I'm like, Nah, dude, like, I'm going to talk to my customers, because my competitors are all the time that they spend doing it themselves.
Colleen Schnettler 5:59
It's this, it kind of the same thing with my business where a lot of people in the beginning, they were just weren't really doing it, or they weren't, you know, they were just, they were just putting, like piecemealing kind of half a half usable open source solutions with with, with other things. So So to your point, like your competitors, really not the other people offering the same service, but what the user was doing before.
Michele Hansen 6:26
Yeah, I mean, there's so much space in software to have products that do things that are similar to somebody else's product, because so many people are just doing things themselves.
Colleen Schnettler 6:40
So one of the things from that quote, you read from the book that I thought was interesting was flexibility. And what do you think that means in a business context? Does that mean pivot? Does that mean, let go of your idea that you're super passionate about because it's not working?
Michele Hansen 6:55
I think it means both of those things. I mean, if you remember, a couple of weeks ago, when we were talking about the Adam Grant book, I was reading Think Again. And there was a quote, I read from that in that episode, which is talking about the values of taking an experimental approach and how entrepreneurs who were open to experimenting with their idea and like they, they had higher revenue in the period of that study that was done. And I don't think it necessarily means like forcing yourself to walk away from something when you're really passionate about it. But being passionate about the problem that you're solving, or the people you're solving that problem for, and less. So your like, specific implementation idea of that problem, because I think like we, I feel like ideas for products have these kind of two parts to them. There's like the problem you're going to solve. And then there's the way you're going to solve that problem. And I think, so often those things are sandwiched together. But if you pull them apart, and then you just really focus on like, what is like, why am I trying to solve this? What is that I'm trying to solve? And then there's probably 10 different ways to solve that. And so you know, you go out and talk to people and figure out what that is, and then not being so anchored to that one specific idea that, you know, came floating down on the cloud from the gods. I think that's kind of what I pull from that about flexibility.
Colleen Schnettler 8:27
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I think something too, is I've, I've tried to change kind of the content I consume from less blog posts, not that blog posts aren't helpful. But we've talked about how there's also quite a lot that, that, you know, paint unrealistic expectations to more actual books. And something I've noticed about reading these actual books, is the timeline is longer usually, then I would have originally guessed, like when I first started learning about like bootstrapping, and indie hacking, when people talk about pivoting, for some reason, I thought that was like, like, you do it after two weeks. And then I'm reading the lean startup and some other books, and they just talk about like, you can't, you should probably shouldn't make big decisions based on 10 customers, and you know, being in business for two weeks, like they talk about these longer term, kind of like looking at data over a longer term, as opposed to a shorter timeframe.
Michele Hansen 9:25
So I think context really matters there. And I'm reminded of another point that Morgan Housel makes in his book is that you need to define the game that you are playing, and then only take advice from people who are playing the same game. And I think what that means in this context is that the thing about a lot of business advice is that it's not necessarily written for bootstrappers in mind, right?
Colleen Schnettler 9:55
That's a good point
Michele Hansen 9:55
Like this is basically kind of what's leading me to like write my own newsletter about customer research right now because I have all these resources that I send people, but I'm like, but you know, caveat, like this book assumes that you have a multimillion dollar research budget, and you can write consultants for it.
Colleen Schnettler 10:09
Right.
Michele Hansen 10:09
And so I feel like, like, like lean startup is such a, I think there's a lot of things I like about that book and like concepts. And if you're, you know, a 25 ,50, 500 person company that is thinking about pivoting a product, that is what all of your employees are relying on for their salaries, then yeah, you're not going to make any decisions about pivoting that product with like, major decisions without six months, or, you know, a significant pile of data, right, like,
Colleen Schnettler 10:45
right
Michele Hansen 10:46
that, you know, that would be unwise to just change it on a dime, and not having evidence for the change. By contrast, if you've only launched something two weeks ago, or if it's a relatively small or like, insignificant feature, or if it's just you, and you're just trying to figure it out, I think there's there's more wiggle room for changing based on feedback, especially if you have really strong signs that there's something wrong and like what you should do instead. But I think, you know, I think some of those, like those business books are good, like, conceptually, but like,
Colleen Schnettler 11:20
yeah,
Michele Hansen 11:20
But on the ground, as it relates to the to not only the specific situation of being a bootstrapper, but also the incentives at play. Like that's like something that's so different between being a company of people versus a one person. I mean, that's the thing we loved about it in the beginning was like, we could just
Colleen Schnettler 11:38
do stuff
Michele Hansen 11:39
Try stuff, like, throw pasta at the wall and see what stuck, like, and there was no, you know, there were no real consequences of that.
Colleen Schnettler 11:46
Yeah, I think I think my context is, so I've had this has been live for about a month that I had, I had like 13 paying customers, and about three or four of those churned out. And one of the people who actually emailed me back, thank you, thank you, person just said it was too expensive for what he was doing. And so then like, this is like feedback from one person, I only have 13 paying customers. Then I started, I was like, hey, maybe it has too expensive could I could I do a new tier that's cheaper? Should I do that? And I kind of tried to stop myself, because I was like, okay, practically speaking, I don't have the time to set that all up right now, as we've talked about right now is a busy time. And I've literally only been in business for a month. So maybe I should just pause and you know, get more than 12 playing customers and see, you know, what the churn rates are then.
Michele Hansen 12:40
Yeah, and I think something critical that he said was, it's too expensive for what he is doing.
Colleen Schnettler 12:47
Yes. And he did say that it was a small budget ecommerce thing or something.
Michele Hansen 12:51
Yeah. Did he tell you more about what he is doing?
Colleen Schnettler 12:54
He did not. Unfortunately, I should have asked.
Michele Hansen 12:57
Did he tell you about what he is going to do instead?
Colleen Schnettler 13:00
No, that's a fascinating piece of information. That would be really nice to find out, I should ask him.
Michele Hansen 13:07
Because the thing I find with, like interviews like that, like, I mean, you've learned something valuable from that, which is that unless so that he as a person and more that he as someone with this type of use case is not your customer,
Colleen Schnettler 13:23
Right
Michele Hansen 13:23
That it's to get like compared to alternatives. You are too expensive for whatever those alternatives are. So what are those alternatives? And then how I usually take from that is okay, like, more so than less so how do we change our product to make it so he would have stayed and more so how do we change our marketing, to make sure that we're not speaking to his use case? And we instead are, like, if we can get our happy customers to talk to us? What are their use cases? And how can we speak to their use cases more so that we attract more of the would be happy people and attract fewer of the would be churning people? Just based on their use cases.
Colleen Schnettler 14:03
Yeah. And I think you would ask me last week, if I was getting a lot of Gmail addresses, or a lot of company addresses, and it's been pretty much a mix, but you know, obviously, my ideal customer is a small business, not a person because my price is expensive for a side project, you know.
Michele Hansen 14:22
Yeah, I mean, something without any budget is -- paying for anything is always.
Colleen Schnettler 14:28
right.
Numbers Update
Michele Hansen 14:28
And if we can just check in here since everybody always loves numbers, what are the numbers right now?
Colleen Schnettler 14:36
So they're exactly the same as they were last week. I had two people churn out and two people sign up. So it's like MRR is like $340.
Michele Hansen 14:48
But you also didn't you get your first like, check from Heroku this week?
Colleen Schnettler 14:52
Oh, yeah, that was so fun. Okay. It was so fun because I put this like you get a notification from Heroku when your app is available for sale, and then you set up plans, and you know you, you decide how much they're going to cost. And then people were signing up and I was super excited. But you have no indication outside of the fact that people are signing up that like, you're actually going to get paid. So, I mean, I knew I was supposed to get paid, but I kept being like, did I did I forget, I set up the plan wrong, and it's really $0. And I'm not gonna find out till the end of the month. Like, it was very exciting to get my first check from Heroku. Because I knew that people were actually paying for it. And plus, with Heroku, as I've said, unlike stripe that pays you up front, like I get paid at the end of the month. So someone signs up March 1, I don't get paid till the end of March for that particular person. So yeah, that was really exciting.
Michele Hansen 15:49
So how much was the check again?
Colleen Schnettler 15:51
It was like $250. Well, okay. It was like 250 bucks, but they take 30%. So it was like 140 bucks. And then it costs me like 100 bucks just to host it, and then maybe 20 bucks in storage. So I'm net $20. And then I bought a $20 bagel. That's my whole month. That's what I did.
Michele Hansen 16:16
I think that's awesome. Um, I'm really curious by how you said that there's no like way to, like track the revenue within Heroku or like to see that things are actually working.
Colleen Schnettler 16:28
it's just not like real time. Like, okay, I could see that things were working. But they have. So basically, if you go into your add on, they have a revenue graph, they'll show you, but it's zero for that whole first month. So I would check my revenue graph, and it would be zero. And then I would check my signups and I was like, someone signed up, it shouldn't be zero. And it's just the way they do their accounting. It's not like stripe that gives you that like real time feedback, Heroku gives you feedback once a month. And at the end of the month, so it's not like all exciting where you get to see Oh, real time signups. It's like, wow, I hope. I hope they're tracking this properly.
Michele Hansen 17:07
So I wanted to dive in a little bit on those numbers, because you, you said that you had about $100 a month to host it. And so you, you basically netted $20? Is that right?
Colleen Schnettler 17:23
Yeah, something like that was like 20 or 30 bucks.
Michele Hansen 17:26
Okay,
Colleen Schnettler 17:26
yeah.
Michele Hansen 17:27
So that tells me that you're that? Well, I guess my first question before I decide what that means. Is that cost going that hosting cost, is it going to increase as you get more customers? Or is it going to decrease as you get more customers.
Colleen Schnettler 17:42
it shouldn't change. I mean, when I set it up, I set it up.
Michele Hansen 17:45
Ok.
Colleen Schnettler 17:45
So it's pretty robust. So I've already paid for like the workers and stuff to do all the image posting to AWS. And so that should be pretty flat. I mean, I'd have to get like a million customers for that to be a problem.
Michele Hansen 17:58
So your margins should get better from here, then.
Colleen Schnettler 18:00
correct, my costs should not my storage costs will go up a little bit, but generally speaking, my costs will not go up significantly.
Michele Hansen 18:08
So from a sort of, a, I don't know how to describe this, a sort of structural perspective of the business, that is a very good sign, when costs do not increase with the amount of customers you serve, like, that is really good. And that's a very unique situation is one of the reasons why software is so awesome.
Colleen Schnettler 18:36
Right?
Michele Hansen 18:37
But like, you know, think like, um, you know, think about like, at like a store, right? Like, they can only sell as much inventory as they have already purchased. And if they have 100 customers come in, like they need to have stuff to serve 100 customers, like they have to buy that right, like they have rolled out an inventory, or if it's a one to one relationship, like those will all proportionally increase. Now, you can have great businesses that that just by virtue of you know, the prices they charge and the volume they have, like, the cost do increase like so I'm not saying those aren't necessarily good businesses. But it's really amazing when you have a business that can serve a lot of customers and keep the the cost of the goods sold. Like that flat like that is very interesting.
Colleen Schnettler 19:30
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I do have storage costs. So it's not a you know, a zero sum game. But yes, unlike having physical goods. It's definitely a better margin then than that. Signups have it feels like signups have slowed down a little bit. Well, it's interesting. So paid signups have slowed down. A lot of people have started entering their email address to do the free trial and then they're bouncing when they see that they need to enter a credit card. So that's just an interesting data point. Like I said, I'm not going to change anything this month. But I have noticed that more people are hitting the site and more people are putting in their email addresses. But not converting. Well, converting isn't the right word, but not putting in their credit card.
Michele Hansen 20:13
Hmm.
Colleen Schnettler 20:14
But I think you're right. Like, I really need to figure out who my ideal customer is. And I need to figure out how to reach them. Right. It's like the number one problem everyone has in SaaS.
Michele Hansen 20:26
I think that, you know, people talk about having the ideal customer. And I think that almost like starting out, that kind of puts pressure on ourselves to find the ideal customer. And when you're starting out, if you can just find a customer that will reliably pay you every month..
Colleen Schnettler 20:44
That's pretty good.
Michele Hansen 20:45
They're like, we don't have to find like the, you know, the perfect customer, you know, they going back to what you're talking about, like the business books and stuff about customer research, right? Like, there's so many great books that go through all of these ways to diagram, you know, who like, who is the customer? And who are the other stakeholders involved? Like, what is the whole, you know, process they go through to like, accomplish a job and like, all of like, it's so great. It's so robust, but like, when you're a one person company, you're like, Yeah, that's great. But like, that's not like, like, Yeah, I don't I don't have no, no, I don't have six months to just do a research project about this. Like, I need stuff now. And I need people paying me now. And so I think using whatever insights you can get from people, and and I -- like the guy you said who churned did he was that over email? Or did you get a chance to actually talk to him?
Colleen Schnettler 21:37
That was over email?
Michele Hansen 21:39
Okay. Do you think maybe you could see if you could get him to talk to you?
Colleen Schnettler 21:45
I will, I think, you know, as we've discussed before, and I believe you addressed in your newsletter, finding people is hard, like getting people when you I mean, again, I have what 12 paying customers. So getting people to talk to me is hard. Now, when I had the free plan, I had 120 customers, and I had a much better success rate. But the thing about the people I spoke with that were on the free plan, is they were people who would never pay for the service anyway. So you know, I don't want to reintroduce the free plan just to get more people. But yeah, I am I am struggling getting people like willing to take that time.
Michele Hansen 22:27
So with people who have churned, I find that offering an incentive is critical, in the same way with with people who aren't a user yet, like I remember when you did, you had your
Colleen Schnettler 22:41
Yes, the Amazon gift cards.
Michele Hansen 22:42
Your child care idea, you gave people gift cards. And I think like that is absolutely critical. When you're trying to talk to someone who's churned it's like, because like, you know, they signed up for your product, hoping it would do something and then it didn't do that, or it wasn't fit for them. And so like there's an amount of disappointment there that is difficult to overcome. And this I mean, this is kind of what I tend to say that churned or like former customer interviews or like expert level of interviews, because there's so much more negative emotion there than there would be with someone who's just signed up or someone who has never even used your product. But I think if you offer them like $25 Amazon gift card, and you're like, hey, like I know, it didn't work out, like I understand. And I would just love to hear more about like, just like what it is you're doing in general. And just just so I can just understand that better. And then kind of like framing it from a perspective of so that we can make sure that nobody else has the experience that you had.
Colleen Schnettler 23:42
Yeah.
Michele Hansen 23:44
It's still like it's delicate. And a lot of people will say no, but I find if you frame it from that perspective of like, here's a way for you to help somebody else not go through this. And here's $25 to Amazon, like yeah, you know, you combine altruism with with straight up self interest, like, yeah, that is the highest likelihood to get through. But like, they can just be really delicate. But I think that would be valuable to figure out like, okay, like this, this kind of use case is not my customer.
Colleen Schnettler 24:17
Yes, that's a great idea. Yeah, I'll do that. Because I do I do need to know why, you know why those people signed up added files and then bounced, like, that would definitely be helpful.
Michele Hansen 24:29
Yeah. And it may not be something anything about your product or the functionality of it.
Colleen Schnettler 24:34
Right.
Michele Hansen 24:35
It may be that you know, your marketing somehow grabbed them, and maybe you need to tweak it so that you don't grab more people like them.
Colleen Schnettler 24:42
Right, right. I can target the marketing.
100 Days of Marketing
Michele Hansen 24:45
Speaking of marketing, how's your 100 days of marketing going?
Colleen Schnettler 24:48
Terrible.
Michele Hansen 24:50
Really? Is it still going?
Colleen Schnettler 24:52
Well, no, I'm not I'm gonna still do it if it takes me a whole year but I mean, I had I had thought that I could organize my day in such a way where I could do an hour of marketing a day. And I have found that to be really challenging when I'm working on deeply technical projects, because it's like a context switch, like I've been trying to start my day with the marketing hour. But then like, you're almost done. But then you stopped to go work on your other project, I'd almost rather I'm thinking I might try and reorganize my time. So I'm doing one full day on simple file, upload marketing stuff, and then can just do my other work the other days. And I think we talked about last week, but just like some of the stuff that shouldn't be so hard, like the terms and conditions in the privacy policy and the GDPR policy, you're just like, jeez, this is a lot of stuff.
Michele Hansen 25:45
I mean, it kind of makes sense that you would like it takes it you know, the context switching like that is hard. And then you sort of like, I feel like I can hear that you sort of like you have to like work yourself up to, to work on this. Like it's not something you're looking forward to. And then you finally get into it. And then you're almost done with something and then it's time to switch. That's exactly what really frustrating
Colleen Schnettler 26:07
is that's exactly what it's like, because you're right. I don't I mean, who loves reading privacy policies? No one. So maybe you do love reading, practicing?
Michele Hansen 26:17
No. Privacy lawyers might write like, users definitely do.
Colleen Schnettler 26:23
So I think that you're absolutely right. That's what it's like, like, I love the idea of committing a little bit of time each day to it. And that keeps it Top of Mind, which is great and lets it not fall on the backburner. But you're absolutely right. Because it's like, I try to do my hour. And then I'm like, 80% done. And then I got to switch to do like, my consulting work. And then the next and so it just feels like I can never quite get it, whatever I'm working on over the finish line. So yeah, I think maybe baby, hopefully this week, at least I can organize my week in such a way that I get a whole day to work on it. And then I can just knock out all this stuff I've been wanting to do because I've wanted wanting to do you know that terms and conditions and all that get that up. And I want to do an FAQ because I love FA Q's. And there's some questions I keep getting asked that clearly, I'm not communicating effectively enough. So, you know, I want to get stuff like that done.
Michele Hansen 27:17
Do you as a user, you like FAQ's?
Colleen Schnettler 27:20
Yes. I love FA Q's. That's like my first thing. As a developer, that's like the first thing I do. I usually go there before I read your docs. Love them.
Michele Hansen 27:28
Oh, that's fascinating.
Colleen Schnettler 27:30
Is that weird?
Yeah. Because that's fascinating. That's because I want to see where the problems are gonna arise before I even jump into your thing.
Michele Hansen 27:40
Oh, that makes sense.
Colleen Schnettler 27:44
Yeah, it's like my favorite thing. So I want to put it on my website.
Michele Hansen 27:49
So I wonder like, are you sounds like you. Like, this is a new skill for you. And it's just more mentally tiring to do new skills.
Colleen Schnettler 27:58
Yeah.
Michele Hansen 27:58
Than it is things we're familiar with. And I wonder if having a whole day, like, knowing that you have a whole day of it, like, could could also, like feed into that dread of it a little bit? If you know, you have to spend a whole day on it. And I like I almost wonder if you're saying like, an hour is not enough, if you do like, are Pomodoros are like, are they 45 minutes or 90 minutes? I forget.
Colleen Schnettler 28:24
I mean, you can do them however you want.
Michele Hansen 28:25
Yeah, but like me, I mean, maybe just trying with like, ninety minutes and see like, because if you if you like, you know, say, okay, Fridays are marketing day, and then you spend the whole week being like, Oh, my God, I have to spend like Friday doing marketing. Ah, I could see that like not like, you know,
Colleen Schnettler 28:42
I see what you're saying, Yeah, I got to experiment with it, I have found that an hour is too short. That's what I have discovered. So I need to find kind of that optimal period of time where I can feel like, you know, like many people, I like to finish something. So the optimal period of time where I can finish these tasks. But yeah, you don't want it. I mean, I don't dread it. But it is a new skill set. And it's it's kind of nebulous, and you don't really know what's going to work. And so I have a list of all these ideas of things. I would do give an infinite time, but obviously, I can't do them all. So yeah, I like I like the 90 minute maybe try 90 minutes and see if that's more effective.
Michele Hansen 29:22
Because I think it It helps to time block it.
Colleen Schnettler 29:26
It does, because then you know.
Michele Hansen 29:27
You're only signing yourself for an hour or 90 minutes of this struggle.
Michele's Customer Research Guides Newsletter
Colleen Schnettler 29:32
Yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah, I like that idea. So tell me about your newsletter. I love getting your newsletter I think I've gotten two now.
Michele Hansen 29:44
Um, so I, I launched it last week.
Colleen Schnettler 29:48
Yeah, it's brand new,
Michele Hansen 29:50
um, and I'm actually just writing it for myself. Which seems kind of funny, but so I find you know, I talked to people who are starting, or running businesses pretty often. And I find myself giving the same advice over and over again. And also saying the same things about the resources I send people like, as we mentioned earlier, being like, this book is really great, but like bear in mind, like x, y, and z, and like, this isn't going to apply and like, but the concepts here are good and like, and then there's this blog post. And then I really liked this podcast, like, no, here's the thing over here, and it's like, it feels very disjointed. But I also hear myself saying the same things over and over again. And so I'm basically writing it to sort of have this like virtual library for myself, and just kind of get everything out of my head and onto you know, quote, unquote, paper. Just just so that I have this one like consolidated place to send people.
Colleen Schnettler 30:51
Very cool. I like it.
Michele Hansen 30:54
It's been really fun.
Colleen Schnettler 30:55
Good.
Michele Hansen 30:57
It's definitely like productive procrastination for me.
Colleen Schnettler 31:01
Productive procrastination, I love that.
Michele Hansen 31:05
Like, when I should be doing my SEO work, I'm like, let me just just read this article really fast. Like, no, but it's, it's been so fun. And and, you know, I so I was, like, I was having a call with an entrepreneur a couple of weeks ago, and I was, you know, thinking about, like, there's all this stuff that I say every time and I don't have, like, I don't have one book, I can, like send people that is relevant to the bootstrap experience,
Colleen Schnettler 31:34
right
Michele Hansen 31:36
Of trying to understand your customers. And I was like, I was like, should I write a book, like, and I was like, Oh, my God, like, I think everybody I know, who has ever written a book is, like, Don't, um, or, you know, has says, you know, you had to had some warnings there. And, and so I was, like, you know, I think signing up for kind of, you know, worrying about like, signing up for a whole day of marketing feels a little bit daunting, like,
Colleen Schnettler 32:03
Yeah
Michele Hansen 32:04
The idea of signing myself to write a whole book, and like doing so kind of on my own for, you know, six months, or whatever that is, that feels like, very daunting, and not fun to me. But this is just, this is just been fun. And, yeah, I think there's like five issues out now. And kind of the idea is like pulling together, a lot of the scripts we talked about, so like talking to someone who's a happy customer versus somebody who has just started using your product and trying to figure out why they are using it, versus people who have turned versus kind of like keywords and phrases and stuff and sort of also kind of writing that for the like, I find that a lot of UX books, like don't go into super nitty gritty detail on what you actually say in an interview. And so, you know, kind of writing it from the perspective of someone who might find this difficult or daunting. To give them everything they need to get started.
Maybe that's a good point to end on this week. Um, you can get actually just go to my Twitter, and then there's a link to it there. But yeah, the newsletter is free. And it comes out whenever I want to publish it, which I think it's been like three times this week. I have two things scheduled already for next week.
Yeah, we'll talk to you next week. This has been Software Social, and you can find us at @softwaresocpod and we absolutely love it when you tweet at us with what you thought of an episode. So thanks so much for doing that.
Michele Hansen 0:00
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So you remember a couple of weeks ago how I was reading the Jobs to Be Done Playbook?
Colleen Schnettler 0:59
Yes, I sure do.
Michele Hansen 1:01
I'mstill reading that book. But I'm also reading another book. And I want to talk about that other book.
Colleen Schnettler 1:07
Okay.
Psychology of Money
Michele Hansen 1:09
So I finally started reading the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.
Colleen Schnettler 1:15
Okay.
Michele Hansen 1:16
Which has been on my to-read pile for about, I don't know, about six months or so now, since it came out early last fall. And it's such a good book, like I mean, even if you're not a finance person are particularly interested in personal finance, like, it's a book about money that's not about money. And it's and it's so good. So but there's just one quote and that reminded me of stuff that we talk a lot about together. So I'm just gonna read it to you.
"In a world where intelligence is hyper competitive, and many previous technical skills have become automated, competitive advantages tilt toward nuanced and soft skills, like communication, empathy, and perhaps most of all, flexibility."
Colleen Schnettler 2:08
Hmm, interesting.
Michele Hansen 2:10
And this reminded me a lot of what we talk about, because it's kind of like we've been talking about as it relates to your business. The one of the like, the biggest challenges for you is not the engineering side, it's like, knowing when you should, you know, change directions, or be flexible with with like, what your image of what the business and what the product is. And also like communicating with people about what it does and what it is and pulling that information out of them. And then and then how do we use empathy to figure all of those things out, which is, which is a really big focus for me, and I read this and, like, grabbed the nearest writing utensil near me, which normally I only write in pencils in books, like I will underline things, but I only had a pen, and I was like, This is so amazing, I'm gonna underline it and pen because I'm not gonna regret that, like. That just really stuck with me.
Colleen Schnettler 3:09
Interesting. Why was that in your psychology of money book?
Michele Hansen 3:13
Oh, I mean, so I don't know if you've ever read Morgan's writing.
Colleen Schnettler 3:16
No.
Michele Hansen 3:16
He writes a lot about the sort of psychology of business. He's a very different business writer. And I used to work with him so I've sort of been been around a lot of his thinking for a while. And I'm really sort of grateful for that, because he has a very unique perspective on things. And you know, it's not very often that you read in a best selling business book that the key is empathy. Right?
Colleen Schnettler 3:42
Yeah.
Michele Hansen 3:42
Running a good business. Right.
And it reminds me a lot of something that I have been working on lately, too. So you know, we've talked about like getting people to reply, when you are trying to talk to them about the reasons why they use your product, which can be difficult.
Colleen Schnettler 4:02
Yeah.
Michele Hansen 4:03
And I think I mentioned a couple weeks ago, how we like so on our NPS survey like that, that pops up, I think, you know, relatively soon after someone uses the product, but not the first time and it's, you know, just rank us one to 10. And normally, we just look at this just to make sure we're getting mostly nines and 10s. But then it also has a question that asks as a follow up, and that survey and the question have a really high response rate. And we were previously asking, 'what can we do to improve?' And I changed this question. First of all, we were you know, we're getting a lot of like, boosts out of it. Like people were saying, like, no, you're awesome, and like, that makes us feel great. And like as -- you know, it feels nice. But also, we were kind of like asking people to do our work for us by telling us what we should improve. And so I changed it instead to 'What did you use before you used Geocodio?' And this is just reminding me about how we, you know, you know, competitors, at first blush, they seem like other companies, but in so many scenarios, and I think this applies to your business a lot too, competitors are people figuring something out for themselves or like some, like manual process where they're patching things together. And it is so fascinating to see the variety of responses I get from people. And how many of them say 'nothing' like that they used no tool and that they were like, hunting and pecking, or they had something internal, or they were like stringing together different solutions. I mean, our approach to competitors is so much more like relaxed than this, I think for, like, the traditional kind of business approach is like, you know, you should know everything that your competitors are doing and like, you know, know exactly when they have new features and like, be copying their features and everything. And I'm like, Nah, dude, like, I'm going to talk to my customers, because my competitors are all the time that they spend doing it themselves.
Colleen Schnettler 5:59
It's this, it kind of the same thing with my business where a lot of people in the beginning, they were just weren't really doing it, or they weren't, you know, they were just, they were just putting, like piecemealing kind of half a half usable open source solutions with with, with other things. So So to your point, like your competitors, really not the other people offering the same service, but what the user was doing before.
Michele Hansen 6:26
Yeah, I mean, there's so much space in software to have products that do things that are similar to somebody else's product, because so many people are just doing things themselves.
Colleen Schnettler 6:40
So one of the things from that quote, you read from the book that I thought was interesting was flexibility. And what do you think that means in a business context? Does that mean pivot? Does that mean, let go of your idea that you're super passionate about because it's not working?
Michele Hansen 6:55
I think it means both of those things. I mean, if you remember, a couple of weeks ago, when we were talking about the Adam Grant book, I was reading Think Again. And there was a quote, I read from that in that episode, which is talking about the values of taking an experimental approach and how entrepreneurs who were open to experimenting with their idea and like they, they had higher revenue in the period of that study that was done. And I don't think it necessarily means like forcing yourself to walk away from something when you're really passionate about it. But being passionate about the problem that you're solving, or the people you're solving that problem for, and less. So your like, specific implementation idea of that problem, because I think like we, I feel like ideas for products have these kind of two parts to them. There's like the problem you're going to solve. And then there's the way you're going to solve that problem. And I think, so often those things are sandwiched together. But if you pull them apart, and then you just really focus on like, what is like, why am I trying to solve this? What is that I'm trying to solve? And then there's probably 10 different ways to solve that. And so you know, you go out and talk to people and figure out what that is, and then not being so anchored to that one specific idea that, you know, came floating down on the cloud from the gods. I think that's kind of what I pull from that about flexibility.
Colleen Schnettler 8:27
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I think something too, is I've, I've tried to change kind of the content I consume from less blog posts, not that blog posts aren't helpful. But we've talked about how there's also quite a lot that, that, you know, paint unrealistic expectations to more actual books. And something I've noticed about reading these actual books, is the timeline is longer usually, then I would have originally guessed, like when I first started learning about like bootstrapping, and indie hacking, when people talk about pivoting, for some reason, I thought that was like, like, you do it after two weeks. And then I'm reading the lean startup and some other books, and they just talk about like, you can't, you should probably shouldn't make big decisions based on 10 customers, and you know, being in business for two weeks, like they talk about these longer term, kind of like looking at data over a longer term, as opposed to a shorter timeframe.
Michele Hansen 9:25
So I think context really matters there. And I'm reminded of another point that Morgan Housel makes in his book is that you need to define the game that you are playing, and then only take advice from people who are playing the same game. And I think what that means in this context is that the thing about a lot of business advice is that it's not necessarily written for bootstrappers in mind, right?
Colleen Schnettler 9:55
That's a good point
Michele Hansen 9:55
Like this is basically kind of what's leading me to like write my own newsletter about customer research right now because I have all these resources that I send people, but I'm like, but you know, caveat, like this book assumes that you have a multimillion dollar research budget, and you can write consultants for it.
Colleen Schnettler 10:09
Right.
Michele Hansen 10:09
And so I feel like, like, like lean startup is such a, I think there's a lot of things I like about that book and like concepts. And if you're, you know, a 25 ,50, 500 person company that is thinking about pivoting a product, that is what all of your employees are relying on for their salaries, then yeah, you're not going to make any decisions about pivoting that product with like, major decisions without six months, or, you know, a significant pile of data, right, like,
Colleen Schnettler 10:45
right
Michele Hansen 10:46
that, you know, that would be unwise to just change it on a dime, and not having evidence for the change. By contrast, if you've only launched something two weeks ago, or if it's a relatively small or like, insignificant feature, or if it's just you, and you're just trying to figure it out, I think there's there's more wiggle room for changing based on feedback, especially if you have really strong signs that there's something wrong and like what you should do instead. But I think, you know, I think some of those, like those business books are good, like, conceptually, but like,
Colleen Schnettler 11:20
yeah,
Michele Hansen 11:20
But on the ground, as it relates to the to not only the specific situation of being a bootstrapper, but also the incentives at play. Like that's like something that's so different between being a company of people versus a one person. I mean, that's the thing we loved about it in the beginning was like, we could just
Colleen Schnettler 11:38
do stuff
Michele Hansen 11:39
Try stuff, like, throw pasta at the wall and see what stuck, like, and there was no, you know, there were no real consequences of that.
Colleen Schnettler 11:46
Yeah, I think I think my context is, so I've had this has been live for about a month that I had, I had like 13 paying customers, and about three or four of those churned out. And one of the people who actually emailed me back, thank you, thank you, person just said it was too expensive for what he was doing. And so then like, this is like feedback from one person, I only have 13 paying customers. Then I started, I was like, hey, maybe it has too expensive could I could I do a new tier that's cheaper? Should I do that? And I kind of tried to stop myself, because I was like, okay, practically speaking, I don't have the time to set that all up right now, as we've talked about right now is a busy time. And I've literally only been in business for a month. So maybe I should just pause and you know, get more than 12 playing customers and see, you know, what the churn rates are then.
Michele Hansen 12:40
Yeah, and I think something critical that he said was, it's too expensive for what he is doing.
Colleen Schnettler 12:47
Yes. And he did say that it was a small budget ecommerce thing or something.
Michele Hansen 12:51
Yeah. Did he tell you more about what he is doing?
Colleen Schnettler 12:54
He did not. Unfortunately, I should have asked.
Michele Hansen 12:57
Did he tell you about what he is going to do instead?
Colleen Schnettler 13:00
No, that's a fascinating piece of information. That would be really nice to find out, I should ask him.
Michele Hansen 13:07
Because the thing I find with, like interviews like that, like, I mean, you've learned something valuable from that, which is that unless so that he as a person and more that he as someone with this type of use case is not your customer,
Colleen Schnettler 13:23
Right
Michele Hansen 13:23
That it's to get like compared to alternatives. You are too expensive for whatever those alternatives are. So what are those alternatives? And then how I usually take from that is okay, like, more so than less so how do we change our product to make it so he would have stayed and more so how do we change our marketing, to make sure that we're not speaking to his use case? And we instead are, like, if we can get our happy customers to talk to us? What are their use cases? And how can we speak to their use cases more so that we attract more of the would be happy people and attract fewer of the would be churning people? Just based on their use cases.
Colleen Schnettler 14:03
Yeah. And I think you would ask me last week, if I was getting a lot of Gmail addresses, or a lot of company addresses, and it's been pretty much a mix, but you know, obviously, my ideal customer is a small business, not a person because my price is expensive for a side project, you know.
Michele Hansen 14:22
Yeah, I mean, something without any budget is -- paying for anything is always.
Colleen Schnettler 14:28
right.
Numbers Update
Michele Hansen 14:28
And if we can just check in here since everybody always loves numbers, what are the numbers right now?
Colleen Schnettler 14:36
So they're exactly the same as they were last week. I had two people churn out and two people sign up. So it's like MRR is like $340.
Michele Hansen 14:48
But you also didn't you get your first like, check from Heroku this week?
Colleen Schnettler 14:52
Oh, yeah, that was so fun. Okay. It was so fun because I put this like you get a notification from Heroku when your app is available for sale, and then you set up plans, and you know you, you decide how much they're going to cost. And then people were signing up and I was super excited. But you have no indication outside of the fact that people are signing up that like, you're actually going to get paid. So, I mean, I knew I was supposed to get paid, but I kept being like, did I did I forget, I set up the plan wrong, and it's really $0. And I'm not gonna find out till the end of the month. Like, it was very exciting to get my first check from Heroku. Because I knew that people were actually paying for it. And plus, with Heroku, as I've said, unlike stripe that pays you up front, like I get paid at the end of the month. So someone signs up March 1, I don't get paid till the end of March for that particular person. So yeah, that was really exciting.
Michele Hansen 15:49
So how much was the check again?
Colleen Schnettler 15:51
It was like $250. Well, okay. It was like 250 bucks, but they take 30%. So it was like 140 bucks. And then it costs me like 100 bucks just to host it, and then maybe 20 bucks in storage. So I'm net $20. And then I bought a $20 bagel. That's my whole month. That's what I did.
Michele Hansen 16:16
I think that's awesome. Um, I'm really curious by how you said that there's no like way to, like track the revenue within Heroku or like to see that things are actually working.
Colleen Schnettler 16:28
it's just not like real time. Like, okay, I could see that things were working. But they have. So basically, if you go into your add on, they have a revenue graph, they'll show you, but it's zero for that whole first month. So I would check my revenue graph, and it would be zero. And then I would check my signups and I was like, someone signed up, it shouldn't be zero. And it's just the way they do their accounting. It's not like stripe that gives you that like real time feedback, Heroku gives you feedback once a month. And at the end of the month, so it's not like all exciting where you get to see Oh, real time signups. It's like, wow, I hope. I hope they're tracking this properly.
Michele Hansen 17:07
So I wanted to dive in a little bit on those numbers, because you, you said that you had about $100 a month to host it. And so you, you basically netted $20? Is that right?
Colleen Schnettler 17:23
Yeah, something like that was like 20 or 30 bucks.
Michele Hansen 17:26
Okay,
Colleen Schnettler 17:26
yeah.
Michele Hansen 17:27
So that tells me that you're that? Well, I guess my first question before I decide what that means. Is that cost going that hosting cost, is it going to increase as you get more customers? Or is it going to decrease as you get more customers.
Colleen Schnettler 17:42
it shouldn't change. I mean, when I set it up, I set it up.
Michele Hansen 17:45
Ok.
Colleen Schnettler 17:45
So it's pretty robust. So I've already paid for like the workers and stuff to do all the image posting to AWS. And so that should be pretty flat. I mean, I'd have to get like a million customers for that to be a problem.
Michele Hansen 17:58
So your margins should get better from here, then.
Colleen Schnettler 18:00
correct, my costs should not my storage costs will go up a little bit, but generally speaking, my costs will not go up significantly.
Michele Hansen 18:08
So from a sort of, a, I don't know how to describe this, a sort of structural perspective of the business, that is a very good sign, when costs do not increase with the amount of customers you serve, like, that is really good. And that's a very unique situation is one of the reasons why software is so awesome.
Colleen Schnettler 18:36
Right?
Michele Hansen 18:37
But like, you know, think like, um, you know, think about like, at like a store, right? Like, they can only sell as much inventory as they have already purchased. And if they have 100 customers come in, like they need to have stuff to serve 100 customers, like they have to buy that right, like they have rolled out an inventory, or if it's a one to one relationship, like those will all proportionally increase. Now, you can have great businesses that that just by virtue of you know, the prices they charge and the volume they have, like, the cost do increase like so I'm not saying those aren't necessarily good businesses. But it's really amazing when you have a business that can serve a lot of customers and keep the the cost of the goods sold. Like that flat like that is very interesting.
Colleen Schnettler 19:30
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I do have storage costs. So it's not a you know, a zero sum game. But yes, unlike having physical goods. It's definitely a better margin then than that. Signups have it feels like signups have slowed down a little bit. Well, it's interesting. So paid signups have slowed down. A lot of people have started entering their email address to do the free trial and then they're bouncing when they see that they need to enter a credit card. So that's just an interesting data point. Like I said, I'm not going to change anything this month. But I have noticed that more people are hitting the site and more people are putting in their email addresses. But not converting. Well, converting isn't the right word, but not putting in their credit card.
Michele Hansen 20:13
Hmm.
Colleen Schnettler 20:14
But I think you're right. Like, I really need to figure out who my ideal customer is. And I need to figure out how to reach them. Right. It's like the number one problem everyone has in SaaS.
Michele Hansen 20:26
I think that, you know, people talk about having the ideal customer. And I think that almost like starting out, that kind of puts pressure on ourselves to find the ideal customer. And when you're starting out, if you can just find a customer that will reliably pay you every month..
Colleen Schnettler 20:44
That's pretty good.
Michele Hansen 20:45
They're like, we don't have to find like the, you know, the perfect customer, you know, they going back to what you're talking about, like the business books and stuff about customer research, right? Like, there's so many great books that go through all of these ways to diagram, you know, who like, who is the customer? And who are the other stakeholders involved? Like, what is the whole, you know, process they go through to like, accomplish a job and like, all of like, it's so great. It's so robust, but like, when you're a one person company, you're like, Yeah, that's great. But like, that's not like, like, Yeah, I don't I don't have no, no, I don't have six months to just do a research project about this. Like, I need stuff now. And I need people paying me now. And so I think using whatever insights you can get from people, and and I -- like the guy you said who churned did he was that over email? Or did you get a chance to actually talk to him?
Colleen Schnettler 21:37
That was over email?
Michele Hansen 21:39
Okay. Do you think maybe you could see if you could get him to talk to you?
Colleen Schnettler 21:45
I will, I think, you know, as we've discussed before, and I believe you addressed in your newsletter, finding people is hard, like getting people when you I mean, again, I have what 12 paying customers. So getting people to talk to me is hard. Now, when I had the free plan, I had 120 customers, and I had a much better success rate. But the thing about the people I spoke with that were on the free plan, is they were people who would never pay for the service anyway. So you know, I don't want to reintroduce the free plan just to get more people. But yeah, I am I am struggling getting people like willing to take that time.
Michele Hansen 22:27
So with people who have churned, I find that offering an incentive is critical, in the same way with with people who aren't a user yet, like I remember when you did, you had your
Colleen Schnettler 22:41
Yes, the Amazon gift cards.
Michele Hansen 22:42
Your child care idea, you gave people gift cards. And I think like that is absolutely critical. When you're trying to talk to someone who's churned it's like, because like, you know, they signed up for your product, hoping it would do something and then it didn't do that, or it wasn't fit for them. And so like there's an amount of disappointment there that is difficult to overcome. And this I mean, this is kind of what I tend to say that churned or like former customer interviews or like expert level of interviews, because there's so much more negative emotion there than there would be with someone who's just signed up or someone who has never even used your product. But I think if you offer them like $25 Amazon gift card, and you're like, hey, like I know, it didn't work out, like I understand. And I would just love to hear more about like, just like what it is you're doing in general. And just just so I can just understand that better. And then kind of like framing it from a perspective of so that we can make sure that nobody else has the experience that you had.
Colleen Schnettler 23:42
Yeah.
Michele Hansen 23:44
It's still like it's delicate. And a lot of people will say no, but I find if you frame it from that perspective of like, here's a way for you to help somebody else not go through this. And here's $25 to Amazon, like yeah, you know, you combine altruism with with straight up self interest, like, yeah, that is the highest likelihood to get through. But like, they can just be really delicate. But I think that would be valuable to figure out like, okay, like this, this kind of use case is not my customer.
Colleen Schnettler 24:17
Yes, that's a great idea. Yeah, I'll do that. Because I do I do need to know why, you know why those people signed up added files and then bounced, like, that would definitely be helpful.
Michele Hansen 24:29
Yeah. And it may not be something anything about your product or the functionality of it.
Colleen Schnettler 24:34
Right.
Michele Hansen 24:35
It may be that you know, your marketing somehow grabbed them, and maybe you need to tweak it so that you don't grab more people like them.
Colleen Schnettler 24:42
Right, right. I can target the marketing.
100 Days of Marketing
Michele Hansen 24:45
Speaking of marketing, how's your 100 days of marketing going?
Colleen Schnettler 24:48
Terrible.
Michele Hansen 24:50
Really? Is it still going?
Colleen Schnettler 24:52
Well, no, I'm not I'm gonna still do it if it takes me a whole year but I mean, I had I had thought that I could organize my day in such a way where I could do an hour of marketing a day. And I have found that to be really challenging when I'm working on deeply technical projects, because it's like a context switch, like I've been trying to start my day with the marketing hour. But then like, you're almost done. But then you stopped to go work on your other project, I'd almost rather I'm thinking I might try and reorganize my time. So I'm doing one full day on simple file, upload marketing stuff, and then can just do my other work the other days. And I think we talked about last week, but just like some of the stuff that shouldn't be so hard, like the terms and conditions in the privacy policy and the GDPR policy, you're just like, jeez, this is a lot of stuff.
Michele Hansen 25:45
I mean, it kind of makes sense that you would like it takes it you know, the context switching like that is hard. And then you sort of like, I feel like I can hear that you sort of like you have to like work yourself up to, to work on this. Like it's not something you're looking forward to. And then you finally get into it. And then you're almost done with something and then it's time to switch. That's exactly what really frustrating
Colleen Schnettler 26:07
is that's exactly what it's like, because you're right. I don't I mean, who loves reading privacy policies? No one. So maybe you do love reading, practicing?
Michele Hansen 26:17
No. Privacy lawyers might write like, users definitely do.
Colleen Schnettler 26:23
So I think that you're absolutely right. That's what it's like, like, I love the idea of committing a little bit of time each day to it. And that keeps it Top of Mind, which is great and lets it not fall on the backburner. But you're absolutely right. Because it's like, I try to do my hour. And then I'm like, 80% done. And then I got to switch to do like, my consulting work. And then the next and so it just feels like I can never quite get it, whatever I'm working on over the finish line. So yeah, I think maybe baby, hopefully this week, at least I can organize my week in such a way that I get a whole day to work on it. And then I can just knock out all this stuff I've been wanting to do because I've wanted wanting to do you know that terms and conditions and all that get that up. And I want to do an FAQ because I love FA Q's. And there's some questions I keep getting asked that clearly, I'm not communicating effectively enough. So, you know, I want to get stuff like that done.
Michele Hansen 27:17
Do you as a user, you like FAQ's?
Colleen Schnettler 27:20
Yes. I love FA Q's. That's like my first thing. As a developer, that's like the first thing I do. I usually go there before I read your docs. Love them.
Michele Hansen 27:28
Oh, that's fascinating.
Colleen Schnettler 27:30
Is that weird?
Yeah. Because that's fascinating. That's because I want to see where the problems are gonna arise before I even jump into your thing.
Michele Hansen 27:40
Oh, that makes sense.
Colleen Schnettler 27:44
Yeah, it's like my favorite thing. So I want to put it on my website.
Michele Hansen 27:49
So I wonder like, are you sounds like you. Like, this is a new skill for you. And it's just more mentally tiring to do new skills.
Colleen Schnettler 27:58
Yeah.
Michele Hansen 27:58
Than it is things we're familiar with. And I wonder if having a whole day, like, knowing that you have a whole day of it, like, could could also, like feed into that dread of it a little bit? If you know, you have to spend a whole day on it. And I like I almost wonder if you're saying like, an hour is not enough, if you do like, are Pomodoros are like, are they 45 minutes or 90 minutes? I forget.
Colleen Schnettler 28:24
I mean, you can do them however you want.
Michele Hansen 28:25
Yeah, but like me, I mean, maybe just trying with like, ninety minutes and see like, because if you if you like, you know, say, okay, Fridays are marketing day, and then you spend the whole week being like, Oh, my God, I have to spend like Friday doing marketing. Ah, I could see that like not like, you know,
Colleen Schnettler 28:42
I see what you're saying, Yeah, I got to experiment with it, I have found that an hour is too short. That's what I have discovered. So I need to find kind of that optimal period of time where I can feel like, you know, like many people, I like to finish something. So the optimal period of time where I can finish these tasks. But yeah, you don't want it. I mean, I don't dread it. But it is a new skill set. And it's it's kind of nebulous, and you don't really know what's going to work. And so I have a list of all these ideas of things. I would do give an infinite time, but obviously, I can't do them all. So yeah, I like I like the 90 minute maybe try 90 minutes and see if that's more effective.
Michele Hansen 29:22
Because I think it It helps to time block it.
Colleen Schnettler 29:26
It does, because then you know.
Michele Hansen 29:27
You're only signing yourself for an hour or 90 minutes of this struggle.
Michele's Customer Research Guides Newsletter
Colleen Schnettler 29:32
Yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah, I like that idea. So tell me about your newsletter. I love getting your newsletter I think I've gotten two now.
Michele Hansen 29:44
Um, so I, I launched it last week.
Colleen Schnettler 29:48
Yeah, it's brand new,
Michele Hansen 29:50
um, and I'm actually just writing it for myself. Which seems kind of funny, but so I find you know, I talked to people who are starting, or running businesses pretty often. And I find myself giving the same advice over and over again. And also saying the same things about the resources I send people like, as we mentioned earlier, being like, this book is really great, but like bear in mind, like x, y, and z, and like, this isn't going to apply and like, but the concepts here are good and like, and then there's this blog post. And then I really liked this podcast, like, no, here's the thing over here, and it's like, it feels very disjointed. But I also hear myself saying the same things over and over again. And so I'm basically writing it to sort of have this like virtual library for myself, and just kind of get everything out of my head and onto you know, quote, unquote, paper. Just just so that I have this one like consolidated place to send people.
Colleen Schnettler 30:51
Very cool. I like it.
Michele Hansen 30:54
It's been really fun.
Colleen Schnettler 30:55
Good.
Michele Hansen 30:57
It's definitely like productive procrastination for me.
Colleen Schnettler 31:01
Productive procrastination, I love that.
Michele Hansen 31:05
Like, when I should be doing my SEO work, I'm like, let me just just read this article really fast. Like, no, but it's, it's been so fun. And and, you know, I so I was, like, I was having a call with an entrepreneur a couple of weeks ago, and I was, you know, thinking about, like, there's all this stuff that I say every time and I don't have, like, I don't have one book, I can, like send people that is relevant to the bootstrap experience,
Colleen Schnettler 31:34
right
Michele Hansen 31:36
Of trying to understand your customers. And I was like, I was like, should I write a book, like, and I was like, Oh, my God, like, I think everybody I know, who has ever written a book is, like, Don't, um, or, you know, has says, you know, you had to had some warnings there. And, and so I was, like, you know, I think signing up for kind of, you know, worrying about like, signing up for a whole day of marketing feels a little bit daunting, like,
Colleen Schnettler 32:03
Yeah
Michele Hansen 32:04
The idea of signing myself to write a whole book, and like doing so kind of on my own for, you know, six months, or whatever that is, that feels like, very daunting, and not fun to me. But this is just, this is just been fun. And, yeah, I think there's like five issues out now. And kind of the idea is like pulling together, a lot of the scripts we talked about, so like talking to someone who's a happy customer versus somebody who has just started using your product and trying to figure out why they are using it, versus people who have turned versus kind of like keywords and phrases and stuff and sort of also kind of writing that for the like, I find that a lot of UX books, like don't go into super nitty gritty detail on what you actually say in an interview. And so, you know, kind of writing it from the perspective of someone who might find this difficult or daunting. To give them everything they need to get started.
Maybe that's a good point to end on this week. Um, you can get actually just go to my Twitter, and then there's a link to it there. But yeah, the newsletter is free. And it comes out whenever I want to publish it, which I think it's been like three times this week. I have two things scheduled already for next week.
Yeah, we'll talk to you next week. This has been Software Social, and you can find us at @softwaresocpod and we absolutely love it when you tweet at us with what you thought of an episode. So thanks so much for doing that.
