Hammerstone · Mar 9, 2023
<div>Refine: https://hammerstone.dev/<br>Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis<br>Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger</div>
Aaron
Hello, Colleen.
Colleen
Hello. Good morning, Aaron.
Aaron
Good morning. We are now the proud owners of an almost C Corp, but I think a night and not yet C Corp. I actually, I kind of thought we were C Corp already, but apparently not. So it's been kind of it's been kind of a nightmare.
Colleen
Yes. It has. I do think the funniest part is we thought we were complete as a c corp, and then we found out we were not. So it has definitely been, quite the journey to get here.
Aaron
And, obviously, this is why we pay attorneys ungodly amounts of money because you and I have no idea what's going on here. Our attorneys are quite good and obviously, worth it to handle this for us, but man alive.
Colleen
Yes. Way more than I anticipated. I, of course, am not gonna share the amount here, but I shared it with my indie hacker group. We had a meet up the other night, and people were just like, you did what? And I was like, I know.
Apparently, this is a whole thing. 1 of my and I'm I'm sure he was exaggerating, but one of the guys made a joke, and he was like, yeah. The joke about, like, raising venture funding is you raise $5,000,000, and the first $100,000 goes to your attorneys.
Aaron
Yeah. I could see why. I mean
Colleen
I could see 10%. I could see
Aaron
Yeah. Our our deal feels pretty straightforward. Take the LLC, convert it to a c corp, and, man, it is, it is not as straightforward as I had hoped.
Colleen
Yeah. I do have to say, though, having I don't wanna say proper attorneys. We have we've had proper attorneys. But having an attorney who is into, like, well versed in funding and C Corps and LLCs and really lives in the startup world has been amazing. Because I always thought with attorneys, you'd have kind of an adversarial relationship.
Aaron
Same.
Colleen
But we're like, but I mean, our I mean, he charges us in 7 minute increments to be our friend, but he's also He's
Aaron
the only friend I have that does that, but we are friends.
Colleen
I really have enjoyed having an attorney who knows this stuff and can walk us through this stuff. And I am glad. I think, you know, in 5 years, we're gonna be glad we went through all this pain and suffering right now.
Aaron
Yeah. And that's that's the goal is there's a huge, tax advantage potentially of being a C Corp, and not there are downsides, of course, but not enough downsides to wipe out the huge potential advantage of being a c corp. So that is, that's the reason we're doing it. There's also some immediate taxation benefits between being taxed as a c corp versus a flow through entity, like we're taxed right now. So that makes for very uninteresting radio.
But I think based on her email yesterday, everything is signed, and they're filing with, the state soon to convert us to a c corp.
Colleen
Yeah. I think we are by the end of the week, for sure.
Aaron
I told you this, I think, maybe yesterday or whenever we talked, but man, they're like running a business side of running a business
Colleen
sucks. Right?
Aaron
But it's just
Colleen
a tremendous amount of work, like the lawyer emails and the accountants and the lawyer Yeah. And the business and stuff. It's like, wow. When do I have time to actually work on my business?
Aaron
Yeah. Exactly. So speaking of time to work on the business, that's gonna happen for you in March.
Colleen
I am excited. I feel like all of I've been I've been spending time, maybe the last 4 to 6 weeks, just putting all of the pieces in place to enable us to move faster. But, of course, when you do that, it feels like you're moving slower in the beginning. But I'm starting to feel like all the dominoes are lining up. And, yeah, March is the 1st month where I plan to do no consulting and only 100% hammerstone product business, etcetera.
Aaron
Yeah. So the I think the key there is that you hired someone to take over, basically, your role at the client. Right?
Colleen
That's right. That's right. And, of course, our product is complicated. There's going to be, you know, a lot of ramp up and things like that. But, yeah, it I mean, and it's going so well.
And so I am just so excited to be able to even now. I mean, it's only been a few weeks, And, my this new person is already handling the communication and responding to their questions and their issues, and it has just been so liberating. It feels so good. And so it's gonna enable me to focus on product, business, everything else that needs to be done to turn this into a, air quotes, real business.
Aaron
And this was the whole this was the entire point of the tiny seed money so that you could stop consulting and not go hungry. And so now, you know, however many months later, we're here. Like, we get to try it now. Hooray.
Colleen
Yes. This was the entire point. And, yeah, I get to try it. Right? This is the thing I have always wanted to do, is actually have the time, energy, and space to try and build a business.
And as we have talked about before, we have a business. Like, it works. But to move us into a product focus, less services focus, more product focus, that's gonna require a fair amount of work. No. A ton of work.
Right? And we don't even know if it's gonna work yet. We have a ton to do. We gotta see if that's even gonna work. But here's the thing is I think we've we've been hiding I don't wanna say hiding.
Maybe that's not fair. But maybe we've been kind of sheltering ourselves with the security blanket of the services contract we have, which is is great. And we've been doing that for 18 months. Yeah. And so to move away from that services contract is a huge risk because we might get out there and find out that no one else is gonna pay you this kind of money Yep.
For this product. So it's a huge risk. But, also, if we never take the risk, we're never gonna know. And it's better to know that now, I think. And so we'll see what happens.
But, yeah, March will be the 1st month this is March.
Aaron
This is March. Yes. Welcome.
Colleen
Welcome to March. This will be the 1st month where I plan to be a 100% on just the business.
Aaron
Oh, I'm so excited. I'm jealous. I'm so excited. I'm excited you're here to
Colleen
I'm
Aaron
just focus on that. And, of course, it won't. That's not how it'll play out, and the client will need you, and there's still a transition period. But, man, to even consider that as an option, it's amazing.
Colleen
Yeah. It is exciting, and it's scary too. You don't really realize it's scary until you're there. Because I was like, this is all I have ever wanted to do professionally, ever. And so I didn't really appreciate that there would be this element of, like, oh, crap.
If this doesn't work, this doesn't work.
Aaron
Yeah. Yeah. Uh-oh. I'm a dog that caught the car. Now what do I do?
Colleen
Well, I was talking to a friend the other day about Wild Bit, and I was like, I love how Wild Bit like, they just launched stuff. Right? They just kept launching things. They just have this whole suite of products. And I was, you know, referring to Hammerstone.
I was like, actually, that was our original vision. Like, we have zeroed in on filtering because that seems to be a need, and we think that's gonna be our flagship product. But we can just keep building things. And so I guess where I'm going with this is it's good to remember that, like, even if I give this my all and we can't get this particular product off the ground, we'll just make a new product.
Aaron
Yeah. That is actually not just making a new product, but that is my dream to just have a bunch of products. That's that's all I wanna do. I I don't wanna talk to attorneys. I wanna I wanna hire somebody to do that, but I I just wanna make a bunch of products.
Colleen
I, so I was listening to I don't remember because it was a couple months now, but it was the, who are the guys that make they make apps.
Aaron
Gonna have to be more specific.
Colleen
I know they make apps.
Aaron
I don't know these guys.
Colleen
Oh, man. Okay. They have a really popular Tools for Developers. It's Tools for Developers.
Aaron
This is fun. Keep going. Tools for developers. They're guys. They may have This is gonna be the
Colleen
most boring podcast.
Aaron
No. No. No. 2 guys. Tools for Yeah.
People are playing along. They're trying to figure it out too. Okay. So it's 2 guys.
Colleen
Okay. 2 guys. 2 guys. 1,000,000 of dollars.
Aaron
Oh, wow. That nerd has gotten a lot. I think.
Colleen
They're they're very they're not in our network. They're, like, famous. They were on a podcast. I feel like it begins with an r. They make apps, like, for develop no.
Not they make tools for developers, and people were really skeptical about it at first because they were like, oh, developers won't buy tools. As soon as I say it, you're gonna know.
Aaron
No. No. No. No. Okay.
So 2 guys, 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars, not in our network, starts with an r, dev tools.
Colleen
Dev tools.
Aaron
You probably heard it on a podcast. So it's probably on Exactly.
Colleen
We heard them on a podcast.
Aaron
My First Million are indie hackers.
Colleen
That's probably true. Starts with
Aaron
our Retool?
Colleen
Okay. Yes. Wait. Is that it? No way.
That might be it. Hold on. I think you got it. No way. It was retool.
Aaron
I'm the smartest man in the world. That's amazing.
Colleen
Okay. So let me let me backtrack on what I said. Maybe it wasn't 100 of 1,000,000. Maybe You
Aaron
should do that more often. That was
Colleen
fun. We'd be great at charades. We gotta break it
Aaron
out. Man.
Colleen
Microcom charades.
Aaron
If if this doesn't work out, charades or stand up comedy, I think we would be just fine. Alright.
Colleen
Okay. Can I say wait? Side note on that. I love that so much because, Aaron, before I started hanging out with you, no one thought I was funny ever. Like, people don't think I'm funny.
Like, I am not funny. And then we went to the, the micro comp, and people are like, you guys are like a comedy team. I'm like
Aaron
Yeah. They said, do you have do you have this routine practice? Like, that's all off the cuff, man.
Colleen
That was awesome. So I appreciate that that you bring that up. Yeah. Okay. So where I was going with this story is the CEO of Retool was on one of the podcasts I listened to, and maybe there are 3rd maybe there are tens of 1,000,000, not 100 of 1,000,000.
To me, it's all the same.
Aaron
Same.
Colleen
Anyway, so he was talking about the relationship he has with his cofounder, and he was talking about how, like, his cofounder is, like, the idea guy, and he is, like, the implementation guy turned into a business guy. And that made me think of you, because I was like, I feel like that kind of mirrors our relationship pretty well.
Aaron
I'm glad to hear you say that because I agree. Okay.
Colleen
Yeah. I mean, eventually, I'm just gonna be like, Aaron, go think of a new idea, MVP it, and then we're gonna go sell it. Like, this is gonna be, I feel like, our relationship.
Aaron
Yes. And that is why your what what are you? The CEO or the president of the c corp?
Colleen
Both.
Aaron
Both. That's right. That that is exactly why. Because, frankly, you're you're in charge. So I'm super happy about that.
But, yeah, that's great. And they do retool makes a great product, and I agree tens of 1,000,000 and 100 of 1,000,000 is the same thing to me. I super don't care about that. Yeah. Them and I feel like there's another there are 2 others.
Command, is it command bar that just makes, like I think they just make, like, the command k that pops up the quick search. They make an implementation of that. And then a company that is enormous is, Flatfile, and they handle CSV, uploading, importing, cleaning, kinda like a data pipeline thing, but they just started as, like, a CSV uploader. And stuff like stuff like that gives me great hope where it's like, no, if you if you can figure it out, and that's what we're trying to do, if you can figure it out, people will pay a lot of money for this.
Colleen
Yeah. So right. So circling back to why I brought that up is a we are going down this path now. You know, I'm taking us down this path starting this month where it's like, okay. We we've done I think it was someone I think it was Ruben Gamas had a tweet the other day about, like, the hardest place to be with your product is when it's kind of sort of working.
Aaron
Yes.
Colleen
And I feel like we are in the kind of sort of working right now. And so we have to figure out if how we get from kinda sort of working to crushing it. And it just feels great. I think having these this team I have this team in place now. Side note, I have this team in place.
Aaron
I know. I was I didn't wanna call it out because I didn't wanna minimize it. But, wow. Look at that.
Colleen
Right? It's so funny because, like, the early days of me remember, like, you know, years ago when all you wanted or all I wanted was to have a business, and you'd hear someone on a podcast talking about hiring and their team. And you're like, I can't even like, I can't even picture myself there. So
Aaron
Here you are.
Colleen
We have this team in place. I know. We have this team in place. They're amazing. That is going to enable me to do 2 things.
And those 2 things are just work on the product to the point where I can go back with all of these people who are not using it in production, our first founding customers, and really get it working for them. And there's just been so many roadblocks to actually doing that. And I feel like those roadblocks, like, literally this week, I feel like those roadblocks have been removed. And so that and I mean, and the next step is, like, find more customers. I've got a a deal with my buddy.
He was he was harassing me at my last indie hacker meetup. Not harassing. I don't mean harassing him.
Aaron
He was giving me a
Colleen
hard time about cold emails, and, like, I made a deal with him. I was like, by the time I see you next month, because we see each other every month, I was like, I will I will have done something. Right? I'm not saying I'm going to send out thousands of cold emails, but I will be on the path to finding more customers and figuring out, you know, how to how to source leads and how to find people and all of that stuff. All that, like, business stuff, we have to execute on if we're gonna turn into a business.
Aaron
So here's a question. We've talked about how we think reporting might be the more valuable thing. So when you start going to these new people, obviously, the people that have the product already, we need to get that working better for them. But when you start doing cold email and cold outreach and stuff, what are you going to be telling them about?
Colleen
So I think it depends on the time. I mean, what's your as soon as we can get an MVP, what's your timeline on that MVP for for reporting?
Aaron
Well, for Laravel, I'm gonna try to do it before the end of this month, so end of March.
Colleen
And No. It's kinda go ahead.
Aaron
And you'll be able to use the entire front end. You'll just have to build out the back end, which beyond refine itself, the footprint won't be huge, but there will be, you know, there will be a footprint. You'll have to do some CSV generation and emailing and scheduling, that sort of stuff. So for me, end of this month, to have someone friendly, like, install it and use it.
Colleen
That's awesome. So I think the move will be now much like every month, I'm sure this month will fly by, but I think the move is I will originally reach out to people about refine in rails, what we have now, because I'm my first cohort of people I'm gonna be looking for are gonna be technical people.
Aaron
Mhmm. And
Colleen
then by mid March, I mean, even if we had kind of like a screenshot or a you've shown me Oh,
Aaron
yeah. I have screenshots. Yeah. In progress. Fake, front end that's not tied to anything already.
So yeah.
Colleen
Yeah. And I think then the move would be once you get them on a call, be like, oh, we're also gonna be launching this reporting tool, if you will. Like, is this more appealing? And just kinda see where people what people feel like in terms of that.
Aaron
Should we call it a reporting suite? Doesn't a suite sound much nicer?
Colleen
Oh, yeah. Suite sounds awesome.
Aaron
That does sound awesome.
Colleen
Reporting suite.
Aaron
Yeah. I don't know what's required for it to be a suite, but I don't think it matters. I think with marketing, you can just say anything is anything.
Colleen
Yes. I think you can say anything is anything. Yeah. I like it. Reporting suite for your we'll figure out.
For your application sounds terrible. Reporting suite for your users.
Aaron
Sound terrible, but, it could use a little work. Yeah. Reporting Reporting for your SaaS application. Yeah. I mean, that makes it just makes so much more sense than query builder.
I mean, it doesn't make more sense. It is easier to understand. Just easier to communicate about.
Colleen
And so that's why I think like, I had a couple potential calls of people that were kinda like, yeah. I wanna see the documentation. So I think when I look at how I'm gonna start approaching people, it will be refined first. Like, refined for rails. This is the product.
You can buy it today. And, with with maybe on the call, it you know, maybe I'll have in my back pocket, like, oh, and we're also working on this. Is this more interesting to you?
Aaron
Mhmm.
Colleen
Or is this something you feel you would rather buy?
Aaron
Yeah. I like that. That makes sense to me. I do like the idea of if you are able to get on the phone with people, obviously selling them the thing we have, and then also using that opportunity to get feedback on the thing that we think is potentially better.
Colleen
Yeah. That's what I think. I I think that makes sense. And, again, where I am with the refined rails, like, I don't anticipate this month to be a big like, to really sell anything. Like, this month is still a building month and a get everyone who has bought it happy month and let's see where we are month.
But I think all, again, all of those pieces putting all of those pieces in place are are finally moving us in the correct direction to finding product market fit.
Aaron
I agree. We will start, iterating those cycles much more quickly, which will be nice.
Colleen
Yes. Exactly. Even you know, we had an onboarding call last week, and it was so nice because we had an onboarding call. We were then able to break that down, you know, see what was hard, see what wasn't hard, and modify it. And, you know, we're hoping to have another onboarding call next week.
So just just actually in the process. We were moving so slow before just because of the technical, technical challenges and the feature requests and bug bug finding in our client. And so it feel it just feels it feels good because it feels like we are moving a little bit faster. Like, March is the 1st month where we can actually start kind of moving forward.
Aaron
Right. Feels good.
Colleen
It does. It does. Yeah.
Aaron
So on my side, I am done with my course at work. So thanks. All my all my nights and weekends, are now free again. So that feels amazing to have that behind me. Yeah.
So that's a good that's a good thing for both my time and, like, my head space. I feel way less stressed. And so the goal now for my spare time is, like I said, this month, get the reporting, for Laravel done into such a place that somebody that knows us and likes us could use it, and then start to give me feedback on that. So got 1 month to do that. I think it's totally feasible.
I think it's like, a lot of the front end stuff, I've already kind of spiked out the implementation, and it's great. Like, I actually ditched all of the Vue 3 library that we have and just rebuilt a new one using, the Tailwind Labs headless UI stuff. And it is just it is just so much simpler. It's so much easier to use. Our other library supports Vue 2, and so we couldn't use headless UI.
But this one doesn't, and it's it's just amazing. And, also, not having to think about how to make it infinitely customizable for everyone makes it so much easier. So it feels great. I'm enjoying it a lot, and I think we can make pretty good progress. So hopefully, it'll be installable by the end of this month in the Laravel app, which is gonna be cool.
Yeah. It's like a whole new
Colleen
Yeah.
Aaron
Half product. I don't I don't think it's an entirely new idea, but it's it's pretty different than what we've been doing. So that'll be good.
Colleen
Yeah. Absolutely. That'll be great.
Aaron
So this week, I have, just been cleaning up a bunch of stuff. So stuff got behind while I was doing that course, and so I've been updating a bunch of our packages for Laravel 10, which released maybe a week or 2 ago. And credit to the Laravel community. When a new, a new version of the framework comes out, boy, are they on it? We, we like to update the day of.
And so I was a little bit behind with some of my package updates. So I I had to rely on the kindness of the community to give me a break, but I only missed it by, like, a week. So, I know, right? Your face is like
Colleen
That seems
Aaron
really good. Yeah. Yeah. People are updating like the day of updating their apps to Laravel 10. And I'm like, y'all, what?
The the app that I worked on for so long, for like 5 years, at the old company, they're still on Laravel 8. I'm like, yeah, that seems, that seems reasonable to me. And actually our first customer, our first refined customer, who I won't name by name because what I'm about to say, he was on Laravel 56 until several months ago. And so it does give me comfort that, like, there are lots of real apps out there in the world that are many versions behind and not everyone updates the day of. But Yeah.
Regardless, I got our, open source stuff up to Laravel 10, dealt with the accountant, just lots of cleaning up stuff that I had been avoiding. So it feels good to catch up on all that stuff. You know, the feeling like when you've got you just have stupid stuff hanging over your head, and it's a bunch of little stuff, but it just it just, like, weighs you down. That that is the feeling that I've had, you know, leading up to finishing this course. It's like, I got so much stuff I gotta do.
Like, we're also gonna try, to move this summer. Same same city, just different house. Oh, I didn't know that.
Colleen
Do you guys own your house?
Aaron
Yeah. We do. So we're gonna try to sell our house, buy a new house that's slightly bigger because we have 2 kids, 2 bedroom, and we would like to try to have more kids, but, you know, it's a 1200 square foot house, pretty small.
Colleen
That is small.
Aaron
Yeah. It
Colleen
looks big in pictures.
Aaron
Yeah.
Colleen
Maybe because your deck or something. Cause your backyard.
Aaron
Yeah. The deck is like maybe half the size of the entire house. So and then so, of course, you're, like, trying to get preapproved for a loan, and they're like, hey. Can you give me every address that you've ever lived at? And you're like, why?
I'll give you the one I'm at right now. I don't I don't remember where I lived 14 years ago. Like so just a lot of stupid stuff, but it's all getting done. Things are getting crossed off the list and I'm feeling great. And tomorrow I'm going to the zoo with the family.
So I'm actually doing some fun stuff on, on PTO days. So feeling very light these days.
Colleen
Oh, that's great.
Aaron
Yeah.
Colleen
Oh, website. Yes. So I got the documentation done. Finally.
Aaron
Oh, yeah. Finally. Yeah. We have that.
Colleen
Speaking of, like, little things that just feel like Seriously. That was just something that just felt like such a slog. So I would like to, mid next week ish, send that out to customers. Can you there's just, like, a few little things that need to be fixed in the Laravel side. I think the header and then, like, just linking out to it.
Aaron
Yep. Yep. I can do that.
Colleen
That'd be great.
Aaron
Yeah. So we have Ruby docs live, but they're all directly addressable by URL. So, yeah, I can do that. Yeah. I think that's probably it.
Do you have anything else?
Colleen
Oh, what are you gonna do with your shed quarters when you move?
Aaron
Sad. Leave
Colleen
it. Really? I guess
Aaron
you can't
Colleen
move it. Can you?
Aaron
I had thought about it. I mean, it's sitting on, you know, it's sitting on cinder block, so technically, I could absolutely move it. But it's air conditioned space at this point, and so I think it's worth more here than it would be gone.
Colleen
That makes sense.
Aaron
Just the the struggle to move it. So that's what I tell myself. And I also that also gives me, an excuse to do it again. So what
Colleen
That's right.
Aaron
When we get to a new house, I'll do it again and I will do it completely differently, but I will do it again. This time this time, I'm going to, not do everything myself. I'm not even I'm hardly gonna do anything myself. I have a friend who, who also got a shed quarters. He got his maybe, like, 6 months ago or something, and he had somebody install the drywall.
He had somebody carpet it. He had somebody paint it. He had somebody install the AC, and he was done in, like, 2 or 3 weeks. I was like, That's, that's really interesting. So you're telling me that professionals are a little bit quicker than an amateur trying to learn from YouTube.
That's that's really interesting. How about that? Yeah. So and it probably ended up being cheaper because of all of the stupid stuff that I did. So, yeah, I'll make a new one and it'll be even more awesome somehow.
But, yeah, this one will have to stay behind. Yep. Cool. Alright. Is that it?
Colleen
That's it.
Aaron
Alright.
Colleen
See you later.
Aaron
See you.