Good tweets are good

Aaron

Hello, Colleen.

Colleen

Hey, Aaron.

Aaron

Welcome back to the show. It's been a few weeks, but obviously, you and I talk all the time. But I don't know what's been going I guess we had Father's Day in the middle there, and I think your kids got out of school. So a lot's been going on.

Colleen

Yeah. Tell me about your Father's Day. Did you have a good day?

Aaron

Oh, man. I had a great day. So Father's Day was, like, last Sunday, I think, and we went to church in the morning and then came home and did lunch. And then when the kids went down for a nap, Jennifer said, you can you can leave. You can do whatever you want.

This was the plan. You know? It was wasn't like, oh, shoot. It's Father's Day. You should leave.

This is what I I told her, like, I kinda just wanna go, like, be alone for a little bit. Yeah. And so what I did was something I haven't done since the kids were born, is I played a computer game. But not only did I play a computer game, I went to a fancy hotel and sat in the lobby and drank a fancy coffee and played my computer game all alone, and it was amazing. You remember you remember when you came to Dallas and needed a weekend away from your kids after being a solo parent for, like, a month and a half?

Yep. And we went to a fancy hotel and worked in the lobby? Same lobby.

Colleen

Nice. That's the one. Very nice. So you were

Aaron

just

Colleen

hanging out in the lobby with your latte and your computer game?

Aaron

That's exactly what I was doing. It was Love it. So much freaking fun. And then, so that was, you know, until about 4, and I was like, you know what? I kinda wanna, like, I kinda wanna have a drink and continue to play my computer game.

And one of my best friends was out town, and his house was empty. And so I texted him, and I was like, hey, man. Can I go to your house? And he said, yeah. Let me turn on the air for you.

So he, you know, turned on the air from his phone, and I went over to his house and made a drink there and played my computer game and ordered Uber Eats to his house. And it was just

Colleen

That's amazing. That sounds amazing.

Aaron

Amazing. I came home at 8 o'clock or 8:30 and just felt super refreshed and ready to go. So it was an it was an awesome day.

Colleen

I love it. Well, good. I'm glad you had such a nice kind of relaxing, recentering day. That's wonderful.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. I it started with, like, I wanna go to the fancy movie theater and see a movie, but there were no movies that I wanted to see. And so it ended on this video game thing, and it was, like, oh, that was way better.

Colleen

It was

Aaron

a good day.

Colleen

Nice.

Aaron

And your kids are out for summer now. Right?

Colleen

That's right. Summer is here. The weather is beautiful. This is actually their 1st week out of school. They start camp next week.

So this week has been a little bit hectic, but we're figuring it out. But it's been great. The so in San Diego, we're known for our beautiful weather. But this year

Aaron

This is the first time I'm hearing of that, Colleen. This this is the first time you ever mentioned how wonderful it is out there.

Colleen

Someday someday you're gonna be like, you're gonna move to San Diego, and you're like, oh, this is what she was saying.

Aaron

Listen. It's like a 130 in Dallas this week. So, yeah, maybe.

Colleen

Yep. So May we have this thing we call May gray, and the marine layer comes in and just it's cloudy. And this year, because of the unprecedented rain, which again is not a lot of rain for anywhere else in the country. It's just a lot of rain for San Diego. May was was mostly overcast.

And so the last day of school, the sun came out, and we went to the beach, and it is just the weather's just been perfect. So it's been really fun. We're we're loving the summer here.

Aaron

Yeah. I'm really happy for you or whatever.

Colleen

You know, I can drive my golf cart to the beach. I

Aaron

don't actually wanna hear about that at all.

Colleen

I am not kidding you. You'd you will no one believes me when I say this. The sand on Coronado Beach is golden, like, actually golden.

Aaron

Yeah. That feels yeah. I don't let I don't like that. I gotta admit. I I don't like that.

I don't like that it's beautiful. The sand is this fake color, that you can drive a golf cart, that your kids have never seen rain. You know?

Colleen

You're missing out.

Aaron

Not great. Saying. I am aware. Yeah. I saw a graphic or somebody tweeted at me, like, a weather chart this week, and it was like, oh, weirdly, Dallas is gonna be, you know, 15% hotter than it should be.

I'm like, great. That's awesome. So that's awesome for you. Congratulations. Really happy

Colleen

for you. Yeah.

Aaron

We are we are leaving Texas next month, though. Yeah. Not forever, just for a month. So we'll be we'll be in Vermont for the month of August, which if it's hot now, it's gonna be even hotter in August. So I'm glad we're doing that.

But Oh,

Colleen

that'll be awesome. Vermont is beautiful. You'll have a great time.

Aaron

Yeah. It's gonna be it's gonna be a lot of fun. Turns out it's really far away from Texas. We just kinda booked it, and we're like, it'll be cold there. And then we started looking at flights for everybody, and it's like, oh, It's not super easy to get to, But Yeah.

Whatever. What are you gonna do? We gotta go somewhere cooler. Yeah.

Colleen

You gotta get out of there. You gotta get out of there. That's why you'll you know, you were you live the work from home life. You can just

Aaron

That is exactly right.

Colleen

Get out of that state.

Aaron

Yeah. Well, you wanna talk shop?

Colleen

Let's do it. Let's start.

Aaron

You have been talking

Colleen

to a bunch of people. Excited.

Aaron

Yeah. I know. Is that where you wanted to start?

Colleen

Sure. No. I don't. I wanna start

Aaron

with your Back up.

Colleen

Tweet. Back up. Rewind. I wanna start with your tweet on Monday.

Aaron

Oh, yeah. I love talking about my tweets. That's a great place to start.

Colleen

Okay. So You

Aaron

know that it's true, though.

Colleen

I know that it's true. Let's talk about that.

Aaron

So I tweeted, as I do. So Monday, I think was maybe Monday a holiday for PlanetScale? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Monday was a holiday for PlanetScale, and so I just had this, you know, big chunk of uninterrupted time, which was super fun. And so I'd been working on, the, like, kind of Iframe embedding aspect of it so that we can embed this dashboard in other people's applications. And took a screenshot, sent it to you, was super pumped, and then took that same screenshot and put it on Twitter and talked about, you know, people people have no idea what we're doing. We've pivoted so many times. People have no idea what we're up to.

So I just keep tweeting, you know, I'm trying to tweet like, hey, remember this is the thing that we're doing. And it got a lot of really good, like, reception. So I tweeted this, screenshot and was like, hey. We're doing this embedded dashboard. We now have the ability to embed a dashboard.

And it was like, yay. We did it. And I put a link to, hello query.com/go, which is our sneaky way to track if somebody's coming from Twitter. And we got a bunch of people filling out the form that was like, I would pay for this. And that just, like, I was so freaking pumped because, you know, we've been in the desert for a 1000 years.

But now it's nice to have somebody say, hey. I see a picture of what you're doing. I'm going to come and tell you that I want this. So that felt like a huge win.

Colleen

Yeah. That felt like a huge win. So I wanted to lead with that because that is our huge win of the week. And now I think we should back up to how we got there. And so I have been talking to all the people I have been doing since we last talked.

I've done many things. I ran Google Ads to a specific landing page to get people in that way. I am continuing to do LinkedIn cold outreach. So I've just been talking to people and talking to people, and what we found was the real pain point is reporting for your customers.

Aaron

Mhmm.

Colleen

So your customers need to be able to build their own reports. And we keep running into this over and over and over. So I think the last podcast even maybe, we were still talking internal reporting for teams. Mhmm. This also covers internal reporting for teams because, of course, you can use it internally.

So that does not exclude that that case. But one one person, who maybe hopefully is listening, but he said something where he said, know, he said the bar is just so much lower for an internal dashboard. So I can just throw something together that mostly kind of works and looks like crap. Well, he didn't say crap. But, like, looks doesn't look great, and it's fine because it's just for me and my team.

Where if it is something I have to put in front of my customer, the bar is so much higher. And so there's so much more value in the thing that your customer sees. And another thing we heard was some companies I spoke with, they can even upcharge for this particular feature. So I can now offer you this dashboard where you can build your own reports, get your data out, get it to Google Sheets or Excel where you want it anyway, and I can upcharge. So it also puts us a little bit closer to the money, which I think is is smart.

And so based on all of these numerous conversations I had and I kinda have a a decent process. It's funny. It's interesting how time consuming this this is. But, you know, I do the interviews, and I go back and rewatch the interviews. Then I take notes and kind of try to distill down the key problem areas and what people are paying to solve, and, you know, are they actively looking for a solution?

And it seems like allowing your customers to build their own reports, get their own data out is where we wanna be.

Aaron

Yep. I think so. Yeah. It does seem it does seem really time consuming to have all these calls, and I'm really grateful that you're doing them because I joined you for one recently, and they're not easy. They're just they're they're you do a really good job of, like, not leading the witness, and you kinda just let them talk.

You're also you you've you've found the right energy level because I think one time I joined you and you seemed depressed. Do you remember that? You were trying to withhold your excitement, and it came off as, like, Colleen is not happy to be here. So you you've modulated that correctly. But, yeah, this one that I was on, it was like, I felt super uncomfortable because the thing we had didn't meet their needs.

And I was like, I just I kinda just wanna log off right now. And I thought, man, Colleen

Colleen

out. Yeah. Don't bail on me.

Aaron

See you. Thanks for the call. But yeah. So you've done all these you've done all these calls, and I think we have I think we have decided, we've we've decided on, you know, this minor tweak, which is, like, yeah, it'll also be for internal reporting. And I think, more importantly, we've also decided we're not gonna change anything anymore.

Like, until we have until we have, an alpha to put in front of people, we're not accepting any more any more, advice or insight because it got to be a little bit too much there for a while. And so, I think we've transitioned from like, what would you call it? Like, problem discovery or customer discovery into what? Where are we now?

Colleen

I would say I mean, I would distinguish it as saying we were doing customer discovery before. Now we're doing customer interviews. And that's, like, subtle, but I think that the fundamental difference is like, yesterday, even on the call when I just told the guy, I was like, this is not gonna meet your needs. Thank you for, you know, thank you for your time. We're we're not gonna meet your needs.

Like, I I don't think what we were doing before is we just wanted to absorb all of the problem space, and we were open to building anything. And so customer interviews is is more almost like qualified leads. Like, I'm trying to think of it as, like, I get on a call with you to qualify that your problem is is a match for our solution. And, of course, there will be you know, there'll be we'll be building and iterating as we go. But fundamentally, this vision of embedded reporting for your customers is the vision.

And so, I think that's important for both of us just to have, like it's so interesting because I, of course, read a ton of stuff about this. And whichever way you wanna go, you can find very smart people that tell you that's the right way. And you can find very smart people that tell you the beauty of being a founder and the magic is in your own imagination. Don't let your customers tell you what to build. But on the other side, you can get people that are like, I built this really successful business by talking to a 100 people and building exactly what they told me to build.

So I think the takeaway is there's no wrong answer. Right? Either way can be successful. And I think our way that we are going we've we're trying to kind of balance that by talking to a lot of people and, you know, using our opinion. What you you had a better phrase for it.

What did you say? Did you say you had a point of view? Yeah.

Aaron

Yeah.

Colleen

Use really, like, more your point of view having worked in this space for so many years. Mhmm. But the the magic here, I think, of our partnership and this business is going to be the unique point of view. Right? Like, I'm not trying to kill your creativity or kill your vision for what this could be by seeing, like, well, these 25 people want an index view that looks exactly like this, and they need a drag and drop thing.

Right? Like, we're not doing that. Like, we're gonna build what we think is the right thing, and and go from there.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. So how does it how does it feel, to have transitioned into the the second phase out of just, like, the customer discovery?

Colleen

I'm gonna be honest. It feels great. For me, it feels great. When we were on that call with this wonderful person who I super appreciate reaching out, and I realized it was such a bad fit, I didn't sit there and think, how could we how could we solve this for him? I just, like I mean, I was just, like, yeah.

This is just not a good fit.

Aaron

Cool. See you later. Yeah. That was that was pretty freeing, to then not get off the call and question like, well, should we build something that fits his specific needs? Like, no.

We're not we're not in that phase right now.

Colleen

Yeah. How does it feel for you?

Aaron

Amazing. Feels wonderful. Yeah. The the being bandied about by every customer discovery call was was tough for me. And even like, I think I told you this, I had, you know, an idea for something else in this space that, like, is tangentially related to what we're doing.

And I thought, oh, that's actually a really good idea. And then I thought, you know what? We're not in that mode right now. We have what we think is the right idea based on customer feedback or customer discovery and our point of view, and that's what we're building. And we're not in the mode of maybe we should try something else.

And you know what? Maybe we end up being wrong, but it sure does feel good for now to be able to say, this is our experiment. We're going to build it and see what happens, versus what should we do? I have no idea. That was, emotionally draining for me.

Colleen

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I feel really good about this direction. It just seems like, to your point, we had a lot of interest from the tweet where we showed, you know, showed people what we're actually building.

We have a lot I have a lot of calls scheduled next week, and it feels it feels good. And and, you know, I'm hoping of the you know, I'm I'm hoping we get a group of I don't even want too many people. I I just want like, when we talk about like, a founding customer group, I just want a handful, like, maybe 3 or 4 people that we're like, your business fit like, seems like a great fit for these very specific reasons, and, we'll work with you. Like, you'll get early access. So I have asked a couple people who I thought I think are a good fit to kind of join us as founding customers, and we'll see how the interviews go next week.

But I like to keep that group really small and, you know, get something in front of them, and we'll go from there.

Aaron

Yeah. The interviews next week are the thing I'm most excited about. Because up till now, it's been like, we'll talk to anybody about anything data related, Power BI related, anything. These people are, I saw the thing that you tweeted, and I wanna talk about it. And so those are gonna just be much higher signal, I think, for us, and I'm really, really excited to hear the results of those.

Colleen

Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. It'll be nice because one of the calls we had, or was completely cold. And so it'll be it'll be easier, I guess, is a better way to say it, to have a little context, to talk to people that have a little context.

Aaron

Mhmm.

Colleen

So that'll be that'll be good. Yeah. So that's all good.

Aaron

That's all good. Alright. What are we talking about next?

Colleen

What are we talking about next? Well, you know, it's really interesting, and I'm sure we have talked about this before, but it's been a couple weeks since we recorded. This, like, for me, like, what to do? I was talking to him. I was talking to Corey Haines, who's a marketer.

Most people who listen to this probably know him. And I said to him I was like, it's like trying to put a puzzle together without all of the pieces. And that's just what this stage, I think, of building our business is. But it's it's just been really interesting for me being a developer turned founder, whereas you're doing the development of the product. Me, like, to figure out what is the highest leverage thing I can do right now.

Like, what should I be doing? What is useful? Should I work on SEO? At first, I was gonna you know, there's this great podcast with the founder of Datapad, and he basically built out this the complete SEO strategy for Datapad before they launched. So when they launched, they just had this phenomenal SEO situation.

Aaron

Cool.

Colleen

And, you know, but it's tricky because I'm like, well, should I do SEO? Then I'm like, well, we don't really even know who our ICP, our ideal customer is yet.

Aaron

Wow. Look at you. ICP.

Colleen

Oh, my gosh.

Aaron

You're so business.

Colleen

I love it. Business. I know. I find myself like doing acronyms and I'm like, oh my gosh, who are you?

Aaron

It just came out so fluidly.

Colleen

So anyways, so it's been for me, it's been interesting kind of trying to figure out, what to do. And, like, how do you market something before you have the thing? Like, what do you do? And Good question. Also, I would like to say, I know why the marketers are mad because the marketing stack that we have is ridiculous.

Let me tell you. So we have reform Zapier to close. I also had to do reform Zapier to Mailchimp. We also pay for Ahrefs. We also pay for Butter CMS.

We also pay for LinkedIn Sales Navigator. We I mean, who knows? Like, it's just

Aaron

Jeez. It's

Colleen

the amount of tools. Now, I totally get why people are going after, like, the full marketing stack as a product. Yeah. Like, it just it's crazy. So Close is a sales CRM, but they're not appropriate for a mailing list.

But they'll do sequencing. Mailchimp will do sequencing, but they're not a they're not a sales CRM. Like, it's just these things that are I know. Right?

Aaron

So is it all duct taped together?

Colleen

That's what it feels like. To me, it feels like like, if you look at how even our landing page is set up, it's like I have a sign up for the email list that goes to Mailchimp. I have a fill out the form for early access that goes to reform. Like,

Aaron

it's like That sucks. Yeah.

Colleen

Well and and this is why you see products out there that are like, here's your full marketing and sales

Aaron

Right.

Colleen

Stack. Right? Because

Aaron

That's why HubSpot exists.

Colleen

Yeah. Exactly. That's why HubSpot exists because it is just like it's not a problem. It's just, like, kind of funny to really get into this stuff and start being like, oh, I need this tool for SEO. I need this tool for my mailing list.

I need this tool for my CRM. It's just it's a lot to manage.

Aaron

Yeah. That sounds pretty fragmented. I think I've seen some some charts of, like, marketing the marketing tech landscape, and it is just obscenely fragmented, the the amount of tools that are available in that space. What do we use? What's butter CMS?

Is that to, like, drive the content on the home page or on the

Colleen

website, I guess? That's a headless CMS for the web page. It's unfortunately a little bit expensive, but the benefit of it is you can design your own views. It's the only product I don't know if there's other headless CMSs. I think this is the most popular one.

But, you can design all your views, and then I or you or whomever we end up working with can go in and just build new pages in the butter CMS, like, just using the fields, and it will populate with your view. Oh, cool. It's pretty it's pretty cool. You can, like, set up the routes and stuff. So I have all these different pages.

And then I was really particular about, like, the routes

Aaron

Yeah.

Colleen

Because for for SEO. So I didn't want them nested under, you know, weird stuff. Right. You can set I feel like with a lot of the off the shelf tools, you don't have that much power, or else I don't know how to use them. But, I really like butter CMS, but it is not cheap.

Aaron

So What what are what are we talking?

Colleen

$83 a month.

Aaron

$83 a month.

Colleen

It's a lot for a headless CMS. Right?

Aaron

It's a lot for a headless CMS.

Colleen

I thought so. I mean

Aaron

Mean.

Colleen

But Ahrefs, that's a $100 a month for SEO, like, tools. LinkedIn Sales Navigator's a $100 a month. Like Okay.

Aaron

So I know that we're not in, like, let's change our minds mode, but let's change our minds. Let's go, like, into marketing.

Colleen

Right? Let's sell a tool to marketers. We could totally I mean, that would be so funny if in, like, this is where this ends in a couple years where, like, this is ridiculous. Anyway That would

Aaron

be that would be the, the Matt Wintzing Summit arc. You start as, like, a super complicated, very cool simulation builder, and you end selling to marketers for, like, way more than the simulators ever would pay for it.

Colleen

Oh my goodness. It is so funny. And the the most annoying I don't know if annoying is the right word, but then you have to learn how to use all these tools too. Right? So

Aaron

Yeah. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Colleen

It's a whole it's a whole thing. I'm gonna be so good at this. I'm gonna be, like, a super superpower developer marketer because, man Yeah. It's like

Aaron

You know what? Here's the thing. The developer marketer, founder, customer researcher, there just aren't that many out there, and so you're gonna have all the skills when this is over. When when this is done and we sell it and we're super rich, you're gonna be like, I can just do this again. I just

Colleen

do it again. Why not? I got all the skills. Yeah. Anyway Just don't

Aaron

forget me. Bring bring me along as your developer slash comedian sidekick.

Colleen

Oh, man. It has just been so funny. Like, I was watching a video on how to use the closed CRM yesterday, and I was like, oh my gosh. This is a whole thing. But, anyway, that's that's a little off topic.

Other things I wanted to talk about, I guess that was that was really it. Oh, a little bit we don't have to figure out pricing yet, but one of the things I wanted to talk to you about pricing is we're in this early stage where we want people to try the product. We want feedback. And I was watching actually Ben's video that he gave at MicroConf about preselling Tupelo.

Aaron

Or interesting? Okay. Yeah.

Colleen

Yeah. Yeah. And he talked about when he was preselling Tupelo, he just he started really low. I forget the exact number. And he sold annual plans, and he just increased it every time he talked to someone.

Aaron

Mhmm.

Colleen

But one of the things I was reading this is not from Ben's thing. This is just from, I don't know, one of the many books I'm sure I've read. You want people to try it, but you don't wanna attract the wrong kind of customer.

Aaron

Okay.

Colleen

So if we have a product that is gonna be minimum $300 a month, which I don't know if you're listening to this and you're a potential customer, don't freak out. I don't know if that's that's where we're gonna land. We don't want to draw people in at $20 a month and build to their specifications because that's not the type of customer that we want. So I do think that's just something to keep in mind even though we're not too pricing yet as we talk to these, like, founding customers. Would would even be just like what kind of, you know, alignment in budget?

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. I feel that tension. So I'll be curious if these people that saw the tweet and booked a call, if any of them have done Power BI or Tableau or anything to try to solve it already because that anchor's super high. And if they haven't, well, then that's a that's a, you know, there is no anchor, so that's a little bit different.

But, yeah, that that's an interesting tension of how do we get them in how do we get them in, but how do we also not build for cheap developers? Because I don't wanna do that anymore.

Colleen

Yeah. So that that that was just something we need to be mindful of, I think. And I will be as I talk to people. I mean, this first round, I just wanna see if we're a fit. Right?

So I'm gonna go back to the people I talked to that were a fit and and talk to them again, hopefully, once we have kind of something more to show them. But, yeah, it's just something to keep in mind. I was like, that's really wise. Like, we don't wanna be like, oh, for you, because you're special. We're gonna give it to you for $20 a month.

Right? Because that's just not building for the market that we wanna sell to. Yeah. And so yeah. That's it about pricing.

Aaron

Yeah. I think we should, just charge as much as humanly possible.

Colleen

So, you know, it's interesting. So we had a call with someone using Power BI, and I told you there's actually someone, in my office space who has this problem, and they use power. They're trying to get Power BI stood up, and it is just a nightmare. And that is all I am hearing from people over and over that it is a expensive nightmare. But the way they get you is they charge you per seat in the beginning, and then you do full embedding.

And it's all of a sudden it goes from a couple $100 a month to several $1,000 a month.

Aaron

Game over.

Colleen

So yeah. It's game over. So, it's been kinda cool because I've been able to work a little bit with a guy in my workspace, like, in my co working space who has this problem and and actually see him struggle with it. But, I mean, he's just spending a tremendous amount of time on it. And I'm like, oh my gosh.

This is so ridiculous.

Aaron

Yeah. There's gotta be a better way. Yeah. Yeah. It's nice that Power BI exists, and is very expensive and is not universally loved.

Unfortunately, it is extremely powerful. And so, to carve off any of their stuff, we have to get the people who aren't really using it for everything that it can do, which is fine. Those people exist.

Colleen

Right. And I think that's, like, something, our friend said to us was, like, when we talked about, are we gonna are we gonna launch with charts and graphs, which we're not gonna launch with charts and graphs. We're gonna launch without them. And he was like, the customers really need charts and graphs, or is that just this perception that we've put on them because we think they will. Right?

Like and so I thought that was a really good point. It's like, what are they actually let's really jobs to be done this. Like, what do they actually need? Like, what are they actually doing? Are they putting the data in Excel anyway or Google Sheets anyway?

Probably. And the people we're targeting, that's where they're going anyway. So interim circle charts aren't really buying anyone anyway. Right?

Aaron

Good. Good. Because I don't wanna do that right now.

Colleen

No. No. One thing at a time. One thing at a time.

Aaron

One thing at a time. Alright. Anything else on the list?

Colleen

Nope. That's all I got.

Aaron

Okay. Well, let's call it there then.

Colleen

Alright.

Aaron

See you.