Michele Hansen 0:00
Hey, Colleen

Colleen Schnettler 0:00
good morning, Michelle,

Michele Hansen 0:01
how's it going?

Colleen Schnettler 0:03
I'm really good. How are you? Yeah, yeah,

Michele Hansen 0:06
I'm good. I'm good. So tell me, what's what's up in refined world this week.

Colleen Schnettler 0:13
So, we have been doing a lot of work. What's really kind of a funny story I have to tell you. So I'm speaking at the rail SAS conference in October, and my most popular so I've done a lot of conference talks much like you have, and my most, my most popular conference talk is called how to learn to code when you have no time and no money. It's from like, 2018. It was a code land, it has like 800,000 views on YouTube. So it really Whoa, I know, I'm like YouTube famous. No one knows this. I didn't even know this till someone told me.

Michele Hansen 0:45
This explains why I remember like six months ago, you were like, Oh, I like randomly got a bunch of new followers on Twitter, and all of these random people DMing me and some of them were kind of weird. And ended, like turned out your YouTube video had resurfaced. And I was like, okay, cool. And like, didn't know what you were referencing. But that is this topic on this talk code with no money, no time, no resources, you have nothing.

Colleen Schnettler 1:06
So what I have found over the years of doing conference talks, is talks that have kind of an emotional hook tend to be more interesting to people, right? Like I anyone can read a blog on the internet about how to do something technical. People want to be inspired or excited. They want to you want to make people feel something when you give a talk. So this is my funny story. So I'm speaking at rail, SAS and Andrew, who is the organizer of real Sass, also a very close personal friend. So I have this idea for this talk for real SAS. And he's like, okay, so what are you going to talk about? And I'm like, Okay, I have this great plan, it's going to be called building a life. And it's going to be about how I've met so many founders, including myself, who tend to get their priorities out of order, or they forget, during the crazy, manic building a business challenge period, the importance of the whole reason you're building a business is to change your life. So you're building a business in order to serve your life, not in order to destroy your life. So I give Andrew this pitch, and he's like, that sounds great. But you should definitely not do that. As well, he made the very good. I mean, I was really proud of this idea. But he was like, No, you shouldn't do that. He made the very good point that he was like, Look, this is going to be professionally recorded. It's going to be like bullet train customers and rails people you should do, you should take your 45 minutes, and you should do the best refined demo you've ever done in your life. And even if it is not as maybe engaging as the other talk, it's your opportunity to create this wonderful content for all the people to the conference. And for you know, to have like content to have to show refine, and conference. I forget what the third hand was, there was another good reason to Anyway, point was the whole his his argument was oh, and no one else is doing any live coding, or to other people out of like his 12 speakers, most people are not going to be doing live coding, most people are doing more like storytelling talks. So he's like, it'd be cool to do a demo to do some live coding, because most people aren't doing that. So that was kind of funny. But it also got me thinking about really making a cool, refined demo. And that's so this week, my goal this week from a roof, refine perspective is just brainstorming something that would be really cool. Like, I don't want to do like another CRM or another sales pipeline, or I'm trying to find something that is engaging, interesting that people can relate to. And what's cool about this, go ahead.

Michele Hansen 3:57
Oh, so this is it. How are you feeling about doing a live coding talk when your last live coding slash workshop in a hotel ballroom, so it can't be worse than Wi Fi issues?

Colleen Schnettler 4:12
Dude, if I can get through that I can get through whatever, like it can't go worse than that one. I feel quite confident that it's not going to be worse than that, like this will definitely been better.

Michele Hansen 4:24
I mean, so maybe you don't know this at this point. But like if this is a piece of content that is not only for this, the audience is partly you know that the audience at the conference, but it's more so you know if this is going to be on YouTube and whatnot, this is a piece of content to you know, have for the future and you know, sort of like you know, hold on to it and run with it like you know, yeah, a piece of content you have and to hold for a long time. Do you have a sense for a little bit of like what the most painful use cases are that people are using refined for Like I know you mentioned, do you have like a real estate customer? Like, is it like, could you basically do you know, a demo in one of those customer types that for them feels like a Wow.

Colleen Schnettler 5:10
Yes. So I'm considering real estate. So what's cool about this is one of my colleagues is building a charting library that tightly coupled with bullet train. So he and I are brainstorming ways where we can use refine as a filter that automatically updates a whole set of charts. And I'm really excited about this, because people love visuals. So I feel like people love charts, people love charts. And so we were, we were bouncing ideas around Monday, we're gonna meet again tomorrow. But he's got this charting library, I have a filtering library. So together, what we hope to build is basically you'd come to a page and like, you'd have your filters and you change your filters, and it would update your charts in real time. Wow, yeah, it's gonna be cool. I'm super excited. So I think we are trying to come up with like, a really like kind of juicy domain model, like something we might do real estate, real estate has a lot of opportunities for charting and email sequences. But the biggest things, obviously filtering, but I think, as we talked about last time, filtering is not quite exciting enough. And I think it's really

Michele Hansen 6:17
just the filtering itself, it's the speed at which you can implement filtering is the exciting thing that you're bringing to the table. Right. Make sense?

Colleen Schnettler 6:25
That's true. But also, I think, this thing like bringing in charts, email sequences, background jobs, to send emails, everything, every time, something changes, like to do list management, like Aaron had it set up in his last company, where the filters managed your to do list. So you would have like a new to do come in, it would meet, it would meet a filter, and then it will get sent to the agent, their property, they were a property tax management company, the agent couldn't close the to do, they just had to like finish the task. And then it would drop off the list because it no longer met the filter criteria. Whoa, I know. And so that's kind of a lot of words. And it's hard to explain to someone the power of that. So the demo I've been doing now with new customers, is very much like filtering on your index view. And to your point, like, you can set it up really quickly, I can have you totally set up in 30 minutes. And some people, that's enough. But I feel like the pain what we're hearing is like that is painful for a very small number of people. But it doesn't feel enticing enough. And so I think the move is to build out some kind of demo, and I don't have a lot of time. So this is going to be really a challenge that showcases all these other things you can do. So it's fun. Okay, so this is the important part of the story. The important part of this story is I'm super excited about it. That's important. Yeah, well, I think, you know, working, I've been working for the client for a year and a half now. And as I've said, they're wonderful, and I love working for them. But when you're in the same light, like there's no real creativity, like you don't really, I don't know, it can kind of it feels like a job. And there's nothing wrong with jobs, jobs are good, but I didn't. I wasn't really feeling like the creative spark with refined. And so talking to my friend about this and like brainstorming ideas of what we could build. It was just fun. Like, it just reminds you why you get into software, because you can build anything. And it's fun and exciting. And you can be creative in your own software space. And so I'm really pumped about that.

Michele Hansen 8:28
I think I need a little bit of that in my life right now. I think you do too. Yeah, I was actually I was saying to Mateus yesterday that like, God lately is feeling more like a job to me. Then, you know, a calling or or whatever. But that might just be like, summer European parenting talking where like, summer camps aren't as much of a thing. So it's

Colleen Schnettler 8:53
Wait, what is summer European parenting? What does that mean? You guys

Michele Hansen 8:56
know it just like there's not a there's not as much like, like summer camps and stuff. Because it's like the expectation that the parents just take four to six weeks of vacation all summer while the kids are out of school. Oh, I see. And so it's basically in a weird kind of way. It's like pandemic parenting, except you can go outside, but like, it's basically that your whole work. Like you've still got just like this pile of work to do after bedtime. I see. Yeah. So it's that whole thing of like trying to grab an hour here and there whenever you can, and then like three or four hours at night, and that gets kind of tiring. And that's probably why I'm feeling that sort of job like feeling and also haven't, of course can't schedule like customer calls or anything when you know, the daily schedule is so fluid and has other things going on. Yeah, that makes sense. But it's like it's important to have those little fun side projects once in a while just like yeah, just to feel that like joy of building software. Like I remember we actually we speaking of like pandemic we built one early pandemic that would help people get purpose I pick up slots at grocery stores that would like send you an alert when? I don't know if you remember, like there was a big like, struggle for curbside. I do remember pickup slots. Yeah. And so like we were having like trouble finding one. And Matias then like spilt some script that would like ping him whenever Wegmans had one available rather than having to like sit there refreshing. And then we're like, oh, wait a minute, like actually like our friends. Like, they want to use this too, because they have the same problem. And then we like built this little app. And it was just like, it was like, such a fun little distraction for a couple of days. It's like, oh, yeah, like, this is why I work in software. Like, this is why I do this. This is like, really fun when you build something that people need, and it helps them even if it's just some, like a small thing, right? Like you're not changing the world. But you're just Yeah, feeling that joy of helping somebody in our own way. Like, I think it's important to have those little projects here and there. Even if they're not, you know, they're not things that are going to make money or anything long term, right?

Colleen Schnettler 10:59
Yeah, it feels good. I'm excited about it. Like I said, it will be a fair amount of work, but I think it will be super net positive. And it's just it feels really fun. So that's cool.

Michele Hansen 11:10
What about this? The talk you pitched though, because it sounds like you're also passionate about that. I feel like that would be a perfect talk for like, micro conference.

Colleen Schnettler 11:18
Someone take my other talk, it's going to be so good. Maybe once I make some real money, though,

Michele Hansen 11:24
I think it's okay to pitch yourself to them now. Like, I mean, I felt for such a long time that I was like, I wasn't remotely successful enough to like, go right. And then it turned out oh, wait, there's people who don't even have any business here. Oh, like, I Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 11:39
Michelle, you should you were making a million dollars a year and you didn't feel like you were successful enough to go.

Michele Hansen 11:46
It goes back to like, theme of this podcast where you're like, Michelle, you're really successful. And your life is amazing. And I'm like, Well,

Colleen Schnettler 11:57
I do make a copy. But I feel like this is this is why brought I was brought into your life, to bring you over the head until you realize that like you're good man. But you should be high theory got to be happy. You got it? No, that's, that's definitely a talk. I will write. I have shopped. And I will give eventually, I just You should totally budget. Why not? Yeah, I mean, but giving talks isn't really like it has to be value added for me. And so, you know, I much like you mostly turn stuff down these days. Because when you asked me to speak at your Meetup, conference, whatever, like, it has to be value added for me. And some conferences are and some conferences are no longer value added. So I don't have a lot of time. So I just have to be ruthlessly efficient. I don't know if that's the right discerning ruthlessly discerning when I decide where I'm going to speak.

Michele Hansen 12:48
It's very much in fitting with the theme of the talk as well, right? Like, yeah, and he's, you know, it does occur to me that we do have a podcast, and you could basically do a test run of that talk on the podcast, and then, you know, kind of use that as an opportunity to workshop it and see what kind of feedback you get from it.

Colleen Schnettler 13:08
Right. But But that's why I'm saying that talk isn't really value added for me. Yeah, but you're passionate about it. That's value add. Yeah, but takes like 40 takes a tremendous amount of time to build a talk. So maybe someday, if I find the right opportunity or the right conference. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, this week has been really good. Like, I have tons to do. Almost an overwhelming amount of work to do, but I'm feeling really good about it. I think part of that, though, is we had a big event last week that we hosted. And it was great. But it was like, I mean, like a big event, like a mini like personal personal life. Right? Yeah. And so I had all these people in my small house, and I couldn't work. And so I love all of these people. But when they left and I had Monday to just like, work, I was so happy. Like, it was just funny. Like, it made me so happy. I was like, no one is gonna bother me all day. It's just me and my computer. This is what? So I don't know what that says about me. But it is what it is.

Michele Hansen 14:04
I mean, you're saying how you're really busy, but you're feeling good about it reminds me of something that Aaron, your co founder tweeted the other day about how he is in the what did he call it, like the maximum output phase of his list some other way of saying it of his life where he's like he is he is, you know, pedal to the floor and like ready to push right now, like in this phase of his life. And it sounds like you're Yeah, you're kind of there too.

Colleen Schnettler 14:32
Yeah, we it's funny. I was talking to my husband about this just last night because the way our careers have kind of gone is I'm in the phase right now that he was in 10 years ago, where he like the first 10 years of his career. He was grinding it out. And now we've switched and now I'm the one who's kind of like to Aaron's point, like maximum effort, like grinding it out. And I totally think that's true. Like I think there are seasons of high work and then seasons The rest. Yeah. And we're, you know, Aaron and I are in a season of a lot of work.

Michele Hansen 15:04
I've been thinking about that a lot lately, too, as we were talking about last week, it is currently the harvest here. Which

Colleen Schnettler 15:13
OMG I still cannot believe that that was like, I wish like we had that on video because it's so funny. Like, I was like, Who says harvest?

Michele Hansen 15:21
Generally like, Oh, yes, the harvest going on right now? No, I mean, I can literally like I'm looking out the window, I can see like a giant dust cloud from a con mine going by. But you know, this is my third time actually observing the harvest here. And, you know, I'm not a farmer myself, of course, but we, I mean, we are literally surrounded by fields and farming wherever we go. And so it's something that we can't help observe. And I've kind of been thinking about it in like context of business, right? Like, maybe there are, you know, there's seasons of business, like, there are seasons of agriculture, right. And I feel like you and Aaron are very much in that, like, planting phase, which, you know, depending on the crop has different times of the year, but like, you know, might be, you know, say, October right to, to get everything in the ground. And, you know, it's a very intense period of work that even a casual observer, like myself can see, right, there's plowing and harrowing and, you know, we've got to turn up all the ground, and I feel like that's kind of like research and figuring out, okay, what is here? What, what, like, what is here that we can use and work with, and then actually getting the seeds in the ground? And it's, I mean, you see, you see the farmers out, you know, at all hours of the day because they've got to get it in, like there's a there's, there's a rush, and there's an urgency and there's timing is important. And, and then there's, you know, seasons when you're letting things grow, right, of course, you know, they're always busy, right? There's a popular Danish kid song that basically goes, you know, the farmer is always busy on his farm, okay, it sounds veteran, Danish. And Danish, it actually like has a nice little, like, rhyme to it. But you know, to it, to an observer, nothing is happening, right. But of course, there there are things happening and things are growing. But then there's also, later on, there's a harvest season, which is also very intense. And that's, you know, right now, when we're seeing things have to be harvested at a specific time. And, again, even anybody going by, you know, you see the combines in the fields, you see the lines at the grain coops, and you see sugar beets all over the road. It's a very intense period of work, after everything has grown. And even soon, there's still uncertainty about whether it's actually going to work and how much money you're going to make, right. But I feel like there's these different seasons. And I feel like you guys are kind of in that planting phase. And I think we're definitely in I guess, it goes back and forth. But kind of in that that harvesting, period that is intense in its own way. But it's more like sort of a scaling thing of like, you already know it's working. It's already grown. Right. But there's more work to be done.

Colleen Schnettler 18:02
Yeah, I think that's accurate. And I think the thing that I'm really focusing on right now is, it's important to remember I'm gonna switch metaphors on you

Michele Hansen 18:11
so many metaphors.

Colleen Schnettler 18:14
I don't know what the because I don't know anything about farming.

Michele Hansen 18:19
beautiful island in California, you aren't surrounded by cornfields.

Colleen Schnettler 18:22
They're no cornfields. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Yeah, but but there will be times where you have to put in an extremely high level of effort. So what I'm trying to really focus on right now, I think Aaron and I are both feeling a little frustrated that things aren't moving more quickly. And things aren't moving more quickly, because we have families and we have jobs, and we can't work 15 hours every single day. And I think it's also important to like appreciate the stage that you're in. And what I mean by that is like, instead of wishing it away, like Oh, I wish we'd already figured this part out or I wish we had already done this or I wish, like, this is kind of a fun time. What we're doing. I mean, it's a hard time. We're working a lot. And we're talking to a lot of people, but it's also anything is possible. Right. Like in the beginning. It's like anything is possible. And I just think it's important for us to really appreciate where we are appreciate that this is part of the process. I mean, I think we talked about this last week, but we're very much in a talk to everybody stage right now. Figure out what the main problem is figure out how to solve the problem. What's the I mean, there's so many little things right? What's the best way to integrate it? What did the people care about the most? How do we entice people? And so I just think it's important for us to, to recognize where we are, and that this is part of the process and things will move at the pace, they will we can move the map.

Michele Hansen 19:47
I think that's something that gets to the core of being an entrepreneur, which is that things are always going to be hard and they're always going to be challenging, but if you're enjoying that it's challenging. And you know to what you You said like working for your client was feeling like a job and you don't like that. Like, if you would rather be figuring out, okay, who is our customer? How do we sell this, like if if those, those are hard challenges, but if you enjoy working on those challenges, then entrepreneurship is the right career for you, right? Like, if you are getting satisfaction out of that, even if you're tired, or, you know, not really sure what to do, like, if you if you find it gratifying to work on those challenges, then then, you know, it's the right career for you. And I mean, I find myself reminded of that lately, as we're, you know, trying to figure out how to do this as a three person team trying to not get too corporate as Matias chided me the other day when I started talking about like, a weekly GitHub check in email of what everybody's working on. And he's like, No, absolutely not. I'm gonna write a script that tells you what I did the previous week, like, I'm not doing that. And I was like, okay. But like, we're, I mean, we're, you know, we're doing sock two this fall, and I've got to figure out how to implement sales taxes, and like, I've never done either of those things. Both of them are, I don't know, if beyond my competence is the right way of framing it. But like, they're beyond my previous scope of concepts that I have tackled before, right, if that makes sense. Like, you know, in previous jobs or projects, whatever, I had tackled, you know, selling to a big company, or, you know, negotiating things like I, you know, like I had some mobile experience with those. But like, I actually have no experience with these. And I don't feel like I have a roadmap for them. But that's, that's the job is figuring out the new challenge. And if you like that, and are energized by that, right, then it's the right job. Neither one of us is sitting here wishing that someone would just give us a checklist of the things we have to do. And then that's it and don't have to make the decisions. But instead we get that autonomy, we get that power to decide, you know, what we do and how and why. And that comes with the responsibility of figuring out but that's the fun part.

Colleen Schnettler 22:01
Yeah. Oh, and also, we sold another license sight unseen. Oh, I mean, like someone we don't know, that just bought it. Stranger money. Yeah, you were the one who were like, some people will just buy it. And I was like, man, some people have just bought it. So that's

Michele Hansen 22:15
nice. Yeah, I noticed early, you said customers plural. And I was like,

Colleen Schnettler 22:20
yeah, man, like, it's, it's cool. We're, we're moving. I mean, like I said, we're moving slowly, but we're moving.

Michele Hansen 22:26
How many have you sold this month?

Colleen Schnettler 22:28
I don't know. Not a lot. One or two. What month is this? August? We're on 11 days into August. So just the one, just the one in August? That's something tell me how is how has it been moving from a company of two for six, eight years to a company of three?

Michele Hansen 22:45
I mean, it's actually it's, you know, I mentioned the whole thing about like summer parenting here, it's been kind of a weird time to be onboarding someone, and probably not, I don't know, not a great time to be on boarded, either, because we're not super available. And like, right, you know, like, there are days when I'm only answering my email, right. So like, I think once we get back to working on a regular schedule, which is next week, thankfully, it'll be a little bit easier to sort things out. And hopefully we can find more time for overlaps. And, you know, we've been having conversations about, okay, like, which day like, do you get to work late? And by late we mean, like, you know, until six o'clock, let's say so the other one is the one making dinner and just like having a schedule of like, who is doing what, which day? So we both know which days like we're getting us overlap, if we need to have you know, for I need to have calls with customers or sell stuff or if he just needs to be working something out with our employee or whatever, or, you know, both of us do so. I think it's probably too early to tell, because it's just been such a weird schedule. Yeah. Because you've only had him on for a couple of months. Right? You just hired him recently since July 1. Okay. Yeah, so yeah. And his first two and a half weeks we were on vacation in the US so Right. Like, that's, I mean, maybe I don't know maybe that's a good time because then it's kind of chill right. So yeah, I'm I don't know. We have a check in scheduled

Colleen Schnettler 24:10
so did you already have all of like, the logistical stuff in place or did you have to figure out how to make a W two employee and give him health insurance and all that stuff?

Michele Hansen 24:19
We had to figure that out. And we talked to some people and we ended up going with deal so they're basically what's called a PEO which professional and I think it's a professional and employer organization, which is basically that they he technically works for DL and then we pay DL to contract him to us. Okay, so I like it was really important to us that he got health insurance and a 401 K and like, you know, all that kind of stuff. So going through a PEO such as DL I think Justworks is also a PEO there's there's also a bunch of sort of more legacy ones as well. But DL and just one bricks are like the cool hip tech friendly ones. Okay, that sometimes comes with some of the challenges that come with working with a young company. Yeah. But yeah, that made it so much easier because there was no way that we were going to, you know, go and set up a company in Maryland and buy health insurance on our own. I mean, I've like, I had to do that in my first job. And it was just the amount of overhead was nuts. And I did it for us in Virginia. So it was it was kind of a no brainer to use a PEO for us.

Colleen Schnettler 25:27
So have you thought about how you're going to manage him? Like are you going to do I mean, there's only three of us. So I guess it can be pretty casual. But like I was thinking, Matias is joke like, and I know, you saw you like making performance reviews, like 3060 90 days?

Michele Hansen 25:39
I don't know. I mean, that's something we're going to talk about. Yeah. With him, I guess. I mean, if he wants that, we can do that. But I you know, I think people talk about their their first hires is important that it's somebody you know, and now I really get why. Now, granted, I understand that, that comes with some problems, like especially for, you know, if you grow it into a much larger company, and the inner circle of people is like, all of the buddies of the CEO like that can lead to a lot of cultural problems. Yeah. inclusion issues and all sorts of stuff, right? We're not planning to, to, you know, grow our headcount. Certainly not to, like, you know, 1000s of people or whatever, right. Like, that's just not the path we want to be on. So I think it's been really good that we, especially Matias knew him beforehand. Yes. Because that just makes a lot of things easier. Yes. So we'll see. I almost feel like it's almost not not my place to, like, talk about that, because it's his perspective is just as important on that.

Colleen Schnettler 26:40
Yeah. No, I think that totally makes sense. Yeah, obviously, that's a conversation you have. It's been interesting for me, because we have a couple contractors, and we're looking to hire another one. And obviously not the same at all. But also, it's really hard. Like, it's really hard. How do you get someone like how do you vet someone, like should use someone from your network? Should you not because that's unfair, like just stuff like that,

Michele Hansen 27:04
dude. So like, January of this year, I decided I wanted to hire some people to write content for us. Yeah. And recruited from our customer base. Yeah. And so I wanted people to write tutorials about how to use your KODI on various cases, like how to use do Codea. With Tableau, for example, just by the way, I'm still looking for someone who can do that. And anyway, so I found like, almost 10 people, okay, who said they wanted to write one and I was, I think we paid them like, I don't know, $500 each or something like that, which I ended up sharing this with somebody who does like content, professionally, and they were like, that is an extremely high rate. For what you're asking for. Yeah, I signed contracts with people saying, okay, like, you're gonna write this article for us, we're gonna pay you this amount per article, like, here's what has to be in it. And you know, and then the expectation is, is you'll turn around a rough draft and like six weeks, or 446 weeks, or something of those 10 people that I literally signed contracts with and said that we would pay them a generous rate for these tutorials. Yeah, only one person actually turned one around. Wow. Like, people just flaked. Weird.

Colleen Schnettler 28:17
Yeah. It's fascinating to me.

Michele Hansen 28:19
Yeah. And we didn't I didn't follow up with them. Because it's like, okay, if they've forgotten about it, like, this is clearly not going to work. Wow. Yeah. Hiring people is hard. Yeah. It's very interesting. Yeah. Cuz you're trying to get someone to basically replace you with a client, right? So that you don't have to do.

Colleen Schnettler 28:35
I mean, ideally, the problem I have is that everyone I know is super busy. So to find someone with 10 hours a week availability is really hard. And what we're building is, so we really need, you know, a product minded developer. And those people are really hard to find. So I mean, we're not married to the idea of doing it, but it would be cool if we could find the right person hiring men. Yeah, it's hard.

Michele Hansen 29:02
To sort of, like lost in thought, but I guess I have gotten more comfortable, at least with hiring contractors and whatnot. Like, you know, we're looking for someone to write a library recently. And I think like two years ago, I probably would have been like, oh, that seems complicated to like, figure out how to hire someone for this. I'm just not going to do it. And and now I'm, like, you know, ask our founder friends like, hey, like, Who do you recommend who could do Python stuff and then they send me somebody and I'm like, Great, okay, I'm gonna go on Upwork and I press hire this person and that was very easy. This is like definitely much more comfortable with that than than I used to be.

Colleen Schnettler 29:39
Yeah. So it's funny because I tweeted, I think yesterday that something that okay, I'm going to switch topics on you again a little bit but simple file upload. Heroku does not provide metrics. And it drives me nuts and I've kind of have this like janky MetaBase setup that kind of gives me information, but it does not give me very good information. So I went to sign up for chart mogul, but obviously they don't have a Heroku integration. So they were like, oh, yeah, you can just build your own with our API. Like, I don't have time for that, like, I just literally do not have time. So I tweeted yesterday, I will pay someone to build me a chart mogul integration. And you can keep the IP and sell it to other Heroku add on users. And so I got a few people quite a few. It was a quite a few, but like a few people that were like, Yeah, I can build that for you. So that's kind of like it's a fun little experiment I'm running. And we'll see how that how that works out. I'll report

Michele Hansen 30:32
back you were you were funding somebody else to have their own little indie business on Heroku?

Colleen Schnettler 30:36
I mean, I kind of I've brought this up before, okay, like, I mean, like two years ago, I don't know, like, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna have calls with two other people. That seems really promising. I'm not going to like, when you do something like this, there's no guarantee that anyone else is going to buy it, but it is something I want. So we'll see if it works out. But it'd be kind of fun, because we've been like running a lot of experiments with simple file upload, and without good metrics. I can't tell what's, what works and what doesn't. And in

Michele Hansen 31:05
terms of metrics, you mean, like people uploading and downloading files, or like churning it, I can't even like, okay, like really high level metrics. Okay, like that. Okay. Okay. I thought your engagement metrics,

Colleen Schnettler 31:17
no, no, like, technically, I could figure out, I could build my own dash a week

Michele Hansen 31:22
with Heroku. You can't see churn. So Heroku,

Colleen Schnettler 31:25
this is what I get from Heroku. Okay, once a month, they give me a report. And they're like, We owe you this amount of money. And then they pay me the money. That's it.

Michele Hansen 31:35
That's it. So you don't even do you know, how many active

Colleen Schnettler 31:38
subscribers have you built in MetaBase? using SQL, right, this is not simple. I have built a dashboard and MetaBase that shows me. So obviously, I get like, I get a, you know, a hit to my server every time someone signs up, or signs out or quits or uploads a file. So I have built this dashboard and MetaBase that shows me how many active users I have at any time. And I can see, like, how many people have signed up. But it's like a real, it's a real pain to manage. Because I don't know, it's just a pain to manage. Like, I just want like my stripe metrics. I want someone just to tell me what my churn is because I don't want to constantly be calculating that based on like all these hits to my API. So yeah, anyway.

Michele Hansen 32:21
Wow. I know, that's kind of incredible that they don't provide that. Oh, no.

Colleen Schnettler 32:27
But I think it's such a small IV my theory on this is it's just such a small marketplace. Like it's not like, you know, Shopify, like it's a small marketplace. So maybe the markets just not there for anyone to build it. But like, it's not gonna take that long to build, you just integrate the Heroku API with like a chart mogul API or other API. So anyway, I think that would be fun. We'll see if that works out. That would be

Michele Hansen 32:47
fun. And then you would basically be eventually funding somebody else's little.

Colleen Schnettler 32:51
Yeah, and then they're gonna make more money than I like that.

Michele Hansen 32:55
The the thing you need to build to make the thing happen is the thing. Right? Right. Was that Matt wanting to do that recently, which is so totally true. And I mean, that's totally what happened with us.

Colleen Schnettler 33:07
I know I know your story. That's exactly how you guys came about. But anyway, speaking of hiring that made me think of that

Michele Hansen 33:14
and speaking of other people, should we do our thank yous? Let's do it. Okay, huge thanks to all of our listeners who become software socialites and support our show. You can become a supporter for $10 A month or $100 a year at software social dot dev slash supporters. Chris Froome to PCI, the daringly handsome Kevin Griffin and Mike from gently used domains who has a nice personality, Dave from rekod max of online or not Stefan from talk to save on Brendan Andre of bright beds. Team tuple, Alex Hillman from the tiny MBA Remi from memo.fm, Jane and Benedict from user list, Kendall Morgan. Ruben Gomez of sign Well, Corey Haynes of swipe file, Mike Wade of crowd sentry Nate Ritter of rooms deals and a mass of subscribe sense Jeff Roberts from out city. Justin Jackson from Mega maker Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom analytics, Matthew from appointment reminder. Andrew colver epilate train John Koster, Alex Of course. Oh systems. Richard from stunning. Josh, the annoyingly pragmatic founder, Ben from consent kit, John from credo and editor ninja cam Sloane, Michael Kapur of new see proposals who by the way tweeted at us that we are saying his name wrong but didn't have his name is Michael I'm like I am so close to doing like a deep rabbit hole on how you pronounce Dutch last names. Please tell us Okay Chris from URL box Kaylee of toss like Greg Park from trait lab, Adam from Rails autoscale Lena and Alex from recap Z and Joe mez allottee of rails devs.com proud mama from Apple net, LLC. Anna from cradle Monza from Ruby on Mac Steve of being inclusive Simon Bennett of snaps shooter backups. Josh Smith of key hero.io Arvid call James hours from Castaway to FM. Nathan have developed your UX Jessica Melnik Damian, more of audio audit podcast checker Eldon from nodal studios and Mitchell Davis from recruit kit. Thank you, everyone. And please do tell us if we're pronouncing your name wrong or your company name.

Colleen Schnettler 35:24
And tell us we're saying it wrong. But don't tell us how to say it. That's way more fun.

Michele Hansen 35:31
We should read this in like funny accents or something one of these days or like, shuffle all of them or I don't know, like, Can you do a British or Australian accent or something that

Colleen Schnettler 35:41
would I don't know. I'd have

Michele Hansen 35:46
that would be fun. Okay, good chat.

Colleen Schnettler 35:49
Good chat. All right. I'll talk to you next week.

Michele Hansen 35:51
See you next week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai