Two Separate Businesses

Aaron

Hello, Colleen.

Colleen

Hello, Aaron.

Aaron

How are we doing today?

Colleen

I am doing really well. I just had lunch with a friend from college who I haven't seen in 12 years.

Aaron

Nice. Yeah. It was fun.

Colleen

I know. It was just fun. And she turns out she lives in Dallas. I didn't know that because I'm not Oh, maybe

Aaron

maybe I know her. What's her name?

Colleen

You don't know her. It's a big city. That's weird. I don't wanna say her name. She doesn't even know I have a podcast.

What if she googles herself and she finds her finds our transcript?

Aaron

The way that you looked at me and said, you don't know her. Well, that's fun. A lot has changed in 12 years, I'm sure.

Colleen

Yeah. Well, and I don't have any way, like, I'm not, you know, people my age keep in touch, I think, on Facebook, but I'm not on Facebook. So I didn't I was even I didn't even know where she lived. So that was a that was kind of a fun afternoon diversion.

Aaron

Nice. And I assume she was in your town. You did not come to Dallas without telling me. Correct?

Colleen

That is correct.

Aaron

Good. Thank you.

Colleen

How are you?

Aaron

Josh I'm doing alright. You know, I took last week off from PlanetScale, which was super nice. And this week, I'm back at it trying to get the final things tied up, to launch this course, which I think is very good. But, yeah, doing doing alright. I've been working so I do my my morning work sessions.

I get out here into the shed at, like, 6:30 or so, and I've been spending those morning and night, actually, sessions on, the reporting interface now. So for for us, not for playing the skill. And that's been going that's been going great. I am actually really pleased with how it's turning out, and I think I may take the filter implementation out of this reporting interface and make it the default, filter view in Nova because it is so much more compact, and it's so much prettier, honestly, and it's so much simpler. So I'm feeling really good about how this is turning out, and I think we should have something, fake but still clickable by, I would say, Monday or Tuesday.

Colleen

Oh, that's great news. Yeah. I love you've shown me some mock ups, and I think it looks great. I'm I'm excited for that.

Aaron

Yeah. I I think it's gonna be good. I think it's going to be easy to communicate that because we'll be able to show them and say, like, this is what you get. Don't imagine it in your app. Like, this is exactly what you would get.

Isn't this amazing? And they will say, yes, and here's my money. So that's the goal at least.

Colleen

I love it. So while you were off, talk to me every day, and we had a lot of deep deep thoughts as as one does.

Aaron

Yeah. I think there was one day. I don't remember which day it was, but we talked like we talked on the actual phone instead of, you know, on Tuple or Whereby or something. And I think I was just driving around, the rich neighborhood, looking at big houses, drinking a McDonald's soda, talking to you about how we're gonna make this thing work. So I do that.

I do that sometimes. Sometimes I'll take the kids to get coffee in the morning. They don't drink it, but I do. And so we'll take I'll take them to get coffee to give Jennifer some time. And then on the way home, we'll cruise through the rich neighborhood and look at the big houses on the huge lots with the mature trees.

And I'm like, yeah, one day.

Colleen

One day. Give it time. Give it time.

Aaron

Yeah. So we talked about a lot, and I actually just published last week's episode today, and it's a I titled it something like, March or plans for March, and then in parentheses subject to change because I think after we got off last week's podcast, we might have changed everything. We talked to our dear friend and advisor and had some realizations. So why don't you take over from there?

Colleen

Yeah. That whole thing was so funny because that had not been my intention. So we were gonna have that call because of, like, some c corp stuff. So we were gonna talk, like, business y stuff, and he started asking us some really good questions, I think. The most important one being, what does the business need?

Like, how do you Yeah. We're still not doing it. I mean, we're just not.

Aaron

No. Not even close.

Colleen

And we spent a lot of time talking about what we're building and our markets and go to market. And I feel like I mean, it was it was kind of crazy because it by the end of it, I kinda felt like we are seriously considering changing our strategy as cofounders and business owners.

Aaron

Yeah. It was helpful. Talking to him is always helpful, but this one was particular particularly helpful because I think one thing that we realized, I think I said to you after we got off, is that we're running separate businesses near each other, you and I.

Colleen

Yeah. Yes.

Aaron

Like we're pretending it's this one thing and it's not. It's just simply not. It is not one thing. It is 2 things. And if you count the big client as a consulting thing, it's 3 things product, but it's just simply not.

And so I think another thing, and we talked about this a little bit on the podcast last week. Another thing we realized as we went through, like you found some assessment. You love these assessments. Like

Colleen

I do.

Aaron

Hey, here's here's a questionnaire. Why don't we fill it out and talk about each other?

Colleen

I do. I love them.

Aaron

You love those things. I didn't realize that until just now. That is not the first one you've had me do.

Colleen

That's correct.

Aaron

So you found this assessment, I think, was it a Jason Cohen thing?

Colleen

I think so.

Aaron

Or was it? I think it was. Yeah. And, you know, one of the questions, some of the questions were like, what what is Aaron good at? What is Aaron bad at?

What is Colleen good at? What is Colleen bad at? And we both answered, you know, for ourselves and for each other and nailed it, by the way. I have a good read on you and you have a good read on me. And turns out we're not good at the same things and we're not bad at the same things, which is great when you're co founders unless you're working on 2 separate businesses by yourself.

So. Yep. Yeah. So trying to figure out what to do with that information, but it is good information to have.

Colleen

Yeah. I think it was good to come to the because because to your point, we've been telling ourselves this is the same product. But I mean, it's not it's not at all. It's 2 different code bases, 2 different languages, 2 different customer segments, 2 different prices, 2 different go to market strategies. Like, we are so limited in our resources.

We don't need to be running 2 different businesses. Like, we need to aggressively focus in whatever direction I think I emailed that to you on, like, Saturday. I was like, fill this out before I talk to you. I think I think I emailed that to you on, like, Saturday. I was like, fill this out before I talk to

Aaron

you on Sunday. Yeah. I think he said, I don't know if you'll do this over the weekend, but here it is.

Colleen

Hey. At least I didn't text you and tell you to do it. Right?

Aaron

That was boundaries. Fine. Yeah. Well, it would have been fine.

Colleen

But I think that was a really good exercise. So after we had our call with our mentor, I think I said our our kind of, like I think we came out of that, and I said to you on the phone, because I was walking home, I remember this, I said, I don't care what I have to do. Like, I'm gonna do whatever is necessary to make this business successful. And I want you, Aaron, to do whatever is necessary to make this business successful. But one of the things we had talked about was kind of switching roles where I become more of the product person and you become more of the salesperson, marketing person.

And at, like, this you know, I was walking home. I was thinking that was true. And then I started thinking about it. I was like, the only way we succeed if we is if we lean into what we are already good at and what we already wanna do. And Aaron obviously doesn't wanna do any more marketing and sales than he has to.

I think, like, my weakness is product, like vision, direction, and you're great at that. So however we align our efforts, like, they have to be where we lean into our individual strengths, not this whole, oh, let's maybe switch roles stuff. Like, that's not gonna work.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I found that I found that really, helpful and very encouraging that we have different things that we're good at and different things that we want to be doing. Like, I think that's the point of of having cofounders.

Colleen

Yeah. Totally. And and I think, like, as we discussed, I think that it's just it's gonna work out really well, but I think we have to lean into our strengths. It's one of the things so I was listening to Bootstrap Web this morning, and Brian Castle, who's a Rails developer, zip message guy, said was talking about learning Rails, and he said his whole purpose for learning Rails was to launch a SaaS. So you have people I'm like that.

That's like me. Right? Like, I wanna learn all when I wrote down what do I wanna learn from this business, all of the business y stuff like marketing, sales, like

Aaron

Yeah.

Colleen

Landing pages, email automations, whatever. Whereas you so he's he's talking about selling to developers in this segment, and he talks about, like, the developer developers that just want to be in their perfect code, and that's more you, I think.

Aaron

Yeah. For sure.

Colleen

You have, I just think, awesome product, like, vision. I don't know what a better word is for that. But but and your ability to execute is really, really good. You can execute on that really quickly. And so, yeah, I think together, you know, some cheesy Marvel movie, like, quote here.

But together, like, if we if we align our efforts, like, it's really gonna work. We just have to figure out how to align our efforts in the same direction, on the same product. Yeah. We just have to figure that out.

Aaron

And we can. The good news is you have started to extricate yourself from the client. And so, you're starting to gain back some of your time, and so we're starting to have at least you full time thinking about this and doing full time. It's actually, I'd be curious to hear how full time it's been on product so far. But, you know, you've put people in place to get out, of the client a little bit and be more of an advisor there.

So now's the time. Like, I would be, I would not be thrilled if we had had you full time for this on 6 months and then had the realization like, Oh, maybe we should work together. So, in terms of timing, it's pretty good. But speaking of client extrication, how's that been going? This is know, the 1st week of of March.

Colleen

So this is complicated. Overall, it has been going really well.

Aaron

Good.

Colleen

But I I now have a team of 3 people that work for me, and one of the things I have noticed as I try to figure out how to manage these people is I have to be pretty involved. Like, our product is changing quickly. We are trying to serve our client, which is our primary customer, but but make this so other customers can use it. And so when I first started managing this team, like, we never had meetings.

Aaron

Like, I

Colleen

was like, we don't need meetings. Meetings are terrible. I'm, like, anti meeting because I used to work at a Fortune 500 company, and we had meetings to have meetings to have meetings. Right? And so I was like, we don't need that here.

Developers hate meetings. We're not gonna have any meetings. And that was a mistake. And so I'm gonna introduce I'm gonna start introducing like, I literally hate this term so much, but I'm gonna say it. Like, weekly stand ups.

I know. I need a better name. Weekly sit downs. Yeah. Weekly high fives.

I don't know. We're now going to have

Aaron

You know, we started this to get out of get away from the man, and you are the man now.

Colleen

I know. I know. I just have found that not meeting doesn't work. And so we're gonna do weekly team meetings. I'm doing 1 on ones more frequently as people request them.

So I don't know how that's gonna go. I'm a little worried that's gonna turn out to be a huge time suck. But, also, if if these three individuals are the primary now like, their primary although they're all focused on the same customer, that is our primary, like, development pipeline. That's our primary product pipeline. And I have to be really involved because I set the direction of the product.

I tell them what's important and what we need to prioritize. Do we need to prioritize, you know, Rail 7, Rail 6? Does it matter? Webpacker, ES build, whatever. And I need to be able to maintain whatever code they write.

So I have to understand every aspect of our code base. And so, one, getting out of the client is going pretty well, but I am now introducing this additional layer of time commitment in order to properly manage these people. But I think if I properly manage them, then I will we will all be able to align in the same direction.

Aaron

Yeah. That was that was gonna be my guess is that it might be a little bit of an upfront cost to do these stand ups or whatever, but people will go off the rails less, if you have these more frequent touch points. So it may feel like it's gonna cost you time, but, hopefully, it prevents you from getting quagmired, and it saves you time in the long run. Mean, that's the goal. Right?

Is you have a bunch of tiny course corrections instead of reaching the end and, like, f. Now we gotta Yep. Now we gotta take a week and a half of Colleen's time to do this thing.

Colleen

Yep. I totally agree. I think it will be worth it. I think too, building a little camaraderie with the team will be good because they don't reach out to each other very much. So I am the bottleneck in that those relationships.

So I think also as we get to know each other better, you know, it won't everything won't have to be asked to me or come through me. And just, like, clarity of vision because we have what are almost competing priorities because we have the client who has a lot of feature requests. They're finding a lot of little bugs. So how do you prioritize all of those versus, hey, we don't really have a business. Like, we need to sell this to I mean, we do have a business, but we need to sell this to other people.

So we have these priorities of, I've got we we gotta sell this to other people. And if all we do is custom development for 1 client, then we're a consultant, not a product company. So it's a lot to to balance and manage. And so, you know, I'm sure there will be many times where someone's like, well, which which one is more important? And that changes a lot.

Yep. So we'll see how it plays out, but I, yeah. So good and bad. Mostly good. I think it's gonna be good in the long run because everyone will know what we're trying to do.

Aaron

It sounds mostly good. Did you have more time to work on Hammerstone, the business, this week than you did the week before?

Colleen

No. No. But we're getting there.

Aaron

Okay. I'll ask you next week.

Colleen

Yeah. Ask me every week. Did we have our big chat this week or last week? It was last week, wasn't it?

Aaron

Which which big chat? Which big chat.

Colleen

But no, ask me again next week, because you're right. The goal is

Aaron

I'll ask you again next week.

Colleen

More time on Hammerstone the business. That is the goal.

Aaron

Okay. Speaking of product and why I love it and why you hate it. 1st, why I love it. You showed me this query yesterday, and it had a bunch of joining tables, and I realized, oh, there's a there's an optimization we can make here on behalf of the user. When they do this thing, we can intelligently stop them, you know, one joining table too soon and do this thing instead.

And I was like, oh, maybe we should start doing this. And you're like, yeah, that's not a priority right now. Yeah. I did. My my inclination was like, oh, there's a problem, and it's producing suboptimal SQL.

Maybe maybe we should maybe we should fix this. You're like, don't do that. I I forbid I forbid you from doing that.

Colleen

I did say that. It's true.

Aaron

So that looked amazing to me. And then I hear you're struggling with, CSS bundling. So what the hell is going on there? That's everyone's worst nightmare. Well, JavaScript is everyone's worst nightmare.

But what what's the deal?

Colleen

I just think okay. So you asked me if I had more time to work on Hammerstone the Business. One thing I feel like I've been trying to do for 3 weeks on Hammerstone the Business is I have a list of maybe 10 things that I can implement on the Gem side that will make the GEM better, easier to use, easier to install, add, like, the FilterPills views, which are gonna be really cool. And it was just one of those things where I was like, if I could just get, like, 2 or 3 hours, I know all of this. I can knock it out.

Right? So last night at 8 o'clock, I was like, I'm just gonna do it tonight. Because yesterday, we got stuck in all that SQL query stuff. Right? Because that was most of my day yesterday.

And I was like, I'm just gonna do it. And I was tired. Right? Where's 8 o'clock at night? It's late for me.

Aaron

Oh, my goodness. Imagine. I know, right? Dear listener, it was 8 o'clock at night.

Colleen

I Anyway Goodness. Okay. Please. Like, you don't go to bed at 9:30. Shush.

Aaron

I mean, yeah. I I I do go to bed by 9:30 or 10.

Colleen

See? See? 8 o'clock is late. Anyway, that defeats the purpose. So I am I'm like, I'm gonna do it.

Like, this is this just needs to get done. I'm just gonna get it done. And, like, I was really excited. I get in there. I start knocking out these little issues, man, and I get to this freaking CSS bundling issue.

And it was just so frustrating. Like, I just hit kind of a low not like super low, but, like, kind of a low point where I was like, man, we have been working on this for, like, 2 years. Like

Aaron

The hell are we doing?

Colleen

It was so frustrating. How is this I feel like I mean, how is this still an issue? And the reasons that it's an issue is because depending on what version of Rails you use and what your asset pipeline is and whether you use webpacker, esbuild, or import maps. Like, we change it like every version of Rails, by the way.

Aaron

I I have observed that from the outside, and I think y'all are insane for your asset pipeline. It makes zero sense to me.

Colleen

It just like, I don't know. I don't know. So context, I don't know much about JavaScript bundling in Rails. I just use whatever I'm supposed to use for the Rails version that I'm in. But now, you know, we want our product to be able to work with webpacker, esbuild, oh, old school, like, just import a style sheet like normal.

And I just got stuck on this import because we have this build statement in in our gempackage.jshan that converts the Tailwind CSS to an index CSS. So if you are using Tailwind, you can import the raw Tailwind file. But if you're not, you don't have to install Tailwind. Right? You can just use the index dot CSS.

But, again, depending on which Rails version you're on and which whatever, how you import that CSS, whether you have Tailwind or not, changes. And it was just something that should have been so quick and like, oh, so frustrating. Man, and I was like, how are we still dealing with these issues?

Aaron

Yeah. That's super discouraging.

Colleen

It was. Like, it was discouraging. I was just like, oh my gosh. This this feels like a problem we shouldn't be having anymore. And, you know, it just got me thinking about, like, where we are.

And I feel like we're just I don't even understand why it's taking so long. Like, I feel like we're moving so slowly. Like, I've been telling our, you know, our founding customer, who is incredibly patient that, you know, I told him I'd have it for him in December. It's March, Aaron. Like Yeah.

Aaron

Feel out my bones.

Colleen

What is the like, I don't know. I'm like, am I getting in the way? Am I not working hard enough? I feel like

Aaron

I It's not that you're not working hard enough. That's not the answer.

Colleen

I don't know. It's been really frustrating. So on the plus side, because someone else is handling the majority of the client work, I have time to think about adding these 10, 15 things to the gem and making the gem better, which is really good. But on the negative side, I feel like a lot of the work for the gem outside of our primary client just hasn't it hasn't been a priority because we haven't had time to

Aaron

prioritize it. Yes. You've been working extremely hard, just not on that one particular thing.

Colleen

Yeah. And anyway, I just

Aaron

And that one particular thing is the thing you want more than the thing you've been working hard on.\

Colleen

Right. That's exactly correct.\

Aaron

We want the product business. You've been killing yourself doing client work. And so then when it comes time to pick up the product and it just punches you in the face, It's super discouraging.

Colleen

That's exactly right. That's exactly what it was like. I finally I was excited because I was like, I finally have time for just me and the product. Right? Like, I don't have to worry about the client or whatever.

And it was like, this is gonna be great. I'm gonna do these improvements. It's gonna be so great. I'm gonna be shipping it by literally, tomorrow is Friday, and I I thought I would it would be done tomorrow. Like, I was like, I'm gonna be done tomorrow.

So, anyway, that was discouraging.

Aaron

That is discouraging. I, I validate your discouragement. That sucks. Thank you.

Colleen

Thank you.

Aaron

That's like that's like wine and chocolate discouragement. Like, well, f this. I'm gonna go watch TV and have a glass of wine. Yep. Feel that.

That sucks.

Colleen

Yeah.

Aaron

Yeah. I find I find those little see, what's so frustrating, beyond what we talked about, about those types of issues, is that they're ancillary. Right? It's not even it's not even like you're you're deep in the weeds of ARL or ARL or whatever y'all call it, like fighting some gnarly bug. It's totally ancillary to the product.

It's like, I have the style sheet. I just need to bundle it. This is not an interesting or valuable problem. Like, this this is this is garbage work, and I find I find that that's really frustrating for me, particularly on packaging and bundling JavaScript packages because it's like the thing worked. Like, I'm looking at it.

It's working on my computer. Now, I have to figure out the magic incantation to get it to NPM with, you know, type module or whatever so that people can install it and it works. And I find that just extremely discouraging. The way that I the way that I worked around that npm thing was I did it once and was like, I'm never doing that again. And so then I spent, you know, 6 hours writing a script to where we could tag it on GitHub, and it would publish to NPM.

Because I was like, one, I'm never gonna remember how to do this, and 2, I never wanna look at this again in my life. So I feel that those those problems that don't add value, that just suck your soul, those are those are the worst ones.

Colleen

Yeah. That's a good way to describe it. Like, it's a problem that doesn't add value.

Aaron

Yeah.

Colleen

And so, ugh, it was frustrating.

Aaron

Yeah. And that was that was maybe even on International Women's Day when that happened, the nerve.

Colleen

I know. Right? It totally was.

Aaron

Like, today's my day.

Colleen

That's not horrible.

Aaron

Man, sorry to hear that. Well, I hope you get the CSS thing sorted, once and for all, and you can put that behind you and take that energy into actually doing product stuff.

Colleen

Yeah. I hope so too. I mean, I'm sure I will. It was just like, oh, this is supposed to be easy. Why is this hard?

So Yeah. Yep. Gotta figure that out today.

Aaron

Well, beyond the or I guess on that encouraging note, do we have anything else?

Colleen

Yes. So in our plan to align our vision, we have to figure out what that vision is going to be.

Aaron

Big time.

Colleen

So one of my favorite founder videos, like YouTube videos, is Michael Seebel from, Y Combinator, and he says, what sets apart the top 10% of founders.

Aaron

K.

Colleen

And love it. Highly recommend it. It's only, like, 7 minutes long. And one of the things he talks about is, he said, you know, relentless execution. But he says what'll happen is people will come to his office hours, and he has them every 2 weeks, I guess, and they'll say they wanna do something.

And then 2 weeks later, 10% of those people will come back and said they did the thing and they learned something. Whether it was the right thing or the wrong thing to do doesn't matter, and then everyone else comes in with a whole bunch of excuses of why they couldn't do the thing. And I've been thinking about that a lot because I tend to get in a cycle in my man, starting a business, you learn so much about yourself. I tend to get in this cycle where there's something I need to do. I don't know how to do the thing.

So I read 3 books about how to do the thing.

Aaron

Yeah, you do.

Colleen

I do a lot of books, and then eventually I'll try to do the thing. So I'm trying to shorten that cycle, and I think for us to help us align on direction, I really we I really need to hit those customer interviews.

Aaron

Yep.

Colleen

And so it's interesting because I told you I was like, I'm gonna try to do 10 customer interviews in March, And I'm gone the last week of March. So that's, like, in the next 14 days. And I made a list of people to reach out to, and I have a great network, which is awesome. But I'm also hesitant to draw on that network if I am not prepared. So I found myself even today being like, oh, I shouldn't reach out to this person because he's really busy, and I don't really know what I'm doing.

And so that's not gonna work. I'm just gonna have to do it. And if I embarrass myself in front of a pseudo friend, then life goes on.

Aaron

Life goes on.

Colleen

Yeah. Like, I I I was hesitant. I was like, literally, like, today, I was like, well, I shouldn't, I shouldn't reach out and schedule until I have my list of questions. I was like, no. No.

No. No. No. I can schedule them and make then I'll really be incentivized to finish my list

Aaron

of questions. If I know you, you'll have your list of questions. You can go ahead and schedule. You're not gonna show up empty handed.

Colleen

Yeah. So it's interesting because I've been wanting to do this. I've talked about this before. And one of the things people like like us people who are new to the startup game, we do, like, 5 customer interviews, and we're real proud of ourselves.

Aaron

Oh, yeah?

Colleen

And I had, Nadia, the founder of StoryGraph, which is gonna be a multimillion dollar company if it's not already, on the software social podcast. Before she launched StoryGraph, she did 100 of customer interviews. Like, wrap your brain around that. 100?

Aaron

100.

Colleen

And so we just we need to think I don't know. We just have to think like that. Like, I'm not saying we have to do 100.

Aaron

We're thinking small boy stuff. That's the problem. That's the problem.

Colleen

That's right. So Gotta get out

Aaron

of this indie hacker mindset.

Colleen

Yeah. But seriously, gotta get out of the indie hacker mindset, like, in the real business mindset. And so For real? My first inclination was there's no way I can do 10 interviews in in 10 days. Like, that's insane.

And it still might not happen because people might not be available, but

Aaron

but I was

Colleen

like, I can certainly try.

Aaron

I can certainly try.

Colleen

So and and this, of course, is in the spirit of us figuring out what our new direction is and aligning behind that new direction.

Aaron

Right.

Colleen

And so we we need to I mean, we have to talk to people. And and like I said with the the Michael Sebel video, one of the things he talks about is, like, even if they did the wrong thing, the people who win in the end are the people who say they're gonna do something because they think it's the right thing. They do the thing, and they learn something. It doesn't even have to be the right thing they did. They just have to continue to execute.

Aaron

Yeah. I like that. Yeah. I could see I could see, I could see some of that in myself too. Like, well, I can't do it yet because it's not I'm not, like, it's not quite right.

I see that a lot in myself, especially with, wanting to do sales motions. Like, it's not, it's not quite right yet. But yeah, I think at this point, any motion is better than no motion. And here's the other thing, Colleen. People like you.

Colleen

Thanks.

Aaron

You you gotta you gotta remember, everyone loves Colleen. So, if you reach out and you're like, hey, can I talk to you about this thing? I think you're gonna be okay.

Colleen

Yeah. I mean and these are all, like, warm intros, like, people I know where I have met at conferences. Like, I have, like, maybe 15 people on my list, so I I hopefully will get 10 of them to say yes. And hopefully, we'll learn something, you know, in about 5 weeks.

Aaron

I'm sure that we will. I don't know what it will be, but we will learn something.

Colleen

Yeah. So that's my, verbal commitment on the internets on our podcast to do that.

Aaron

Deal. Well, if you wanna be top 10%, tune in next week and we'll, tell you that we've done all of this thing, these things. Alright. Well, anything else?

Colleen

Nope. That's all I got.

Aaron

Alright. We'll wrap it there.