We Sent the Email! And Made No Sales!

Aaron

We've just started. So I listened to software social.

Colleen

Yes.

Aaron

And you guys were both you guys both kinda had a manic energy. I don't know if I don't know if it was super late or what was going on. I think you were on your wrong mic, so you sounded like you were in outer space. I think maybe Michelle was it was, like sounded like maybe 3 in the morning or something, but it was a whole it was a whole vibe.

Colleen

I know. I know. That was because we were supposed to have the meeting. So I was at my co working space because I figured I wasn't gonna have to talk. I could just watch, And then it was, like, oh, we can't have the meeting.

Let's do a podcast real quick. And so she was exhausted, and I was frazzled because I was not prepared, and I was in my co working space. So, yeah, it was it was a special episode. Yeah. It was great.

I I enjoyed it.

Aaron

Real quick. What's the what's the takeaway there?

Colleen

What's the takeaway? I think the takeaway is we're just getting started, and we have a lot to learn and a lot of work to do.

Aaron

I think that is the takeaway.

Colleen

Right? I mean Yep.

Aaron

I was encouraged that she said, oh, wow. Y'all have come super far on the landing page in the past week. That was nice to hear.

Colleen

Yeah. She was really pleased week over week with the landing page, but, you know, of course, we still have a lot due. I mean, I think I'm sure we'll get into it, but

Aaron

Let's get into it.

Colleen

Okay. Let's get into it. So last week, of course, it was disappointing for our listeners. We sent out an email to 500 people telling them they could buy Nova. And of those 500 people, how many bought Nova?

Aaron

I'd have to check, but it's 0. It's 0 people.

Colleen

So, of course, you know, it'd be great if this was the field of dreams and, you know, 5 to 10 people just bought Nova, but that's not how it works. Yeah. No. That's not that's not the way. And so I think that beginning I mean, you and I talked a little bit about this last week.

Right? Because I am kind of where you are where you were 2 weeks ago where I'm a little overwhelmed with the things I have agreed to do. And so I think that, unfortunately, wasn't the dopamine hit we had been hoping for. No. But it was not

Aaron

a it was an anti it was the reverse of a dopamine hit, whatever that is. It was a dopamine draw. It took dopamine away.

Colleen

Yeah. But I don't think we did anything wrong.

Aaron

I agree.

Colleen

And we are just starting. I mean, we're just starting. It feels I mean, we just started last week. That's how we had to think about it.

Aaron

I agree. I think the most valuable thing we learned or I will say the most valuable thing I learned is that the value needs to be more clearly commune like, I think the landing page is good in that it's a huge improvement from the old landing page, which didn't say a freaking thing about refine. But the new landing page just doesn't, it doesn't sell at all. Like, it's just Correct. It's super basic.

And so the options are, like, drop the price to $50 or actually prove that it's worth what it's worth, and I would rather take the

Colleen

Absolutely. I think there's so much work to be done there. I mean, even if you look at, like, the torchlight page, I really like how you guys started did the initial torchlight, how you did the initial, torchlight page. I think we haven't really done that. And, actually, Zach reached out to me, and he was like, hey.

Why'd you cut out all the copy I I made you?

Aaron

And I

Colleen

was like, well, we didn't cut out all the copy. We were just trying to get something up quickly to meet this timeline, and he also offered, you know, to work with us. So once we have a smidge of time Mhmm. To get that done, I think we should sit down with Zach and really think hard about this again, about how we're going to its value or show its value.

Aaron

Yep. I'm super into that. Yeah. It was, not ideal.

Colleen

Yeah. But if you think about it, we don't really tell you anywhere what it like, we don't give there's no videos. There's no, like, here's a scenario in which this could save you money. Here's a scenario in which you would use this. Like No.

If I wasn't building it, I don't know that I would have bought it based on call to action. But Yep. We but we have it now, and I think that's still I guess what I'm trying to say is we didn't, air quotes, nail the launch, but first of all, we're not launching in a traditional sense. It's like a soft launch. 2nd of all, it's better to do something than do nothing

Aaron

and make That's I fully agree with that. Okay.

Colleen

And make incremental progress on top of that.

Aaron

Yeah. And I don't think either of us thought this was our launch. I thought No. I think we both thought, okay. We have to do something, and we could just not on the on the marketing or business side, we could just sit around and not do anything forever.

So let's do something knowing full well it's not not gonna be our final thing. I feel good about that. And Okay. You know, now I feel good about the things we can change. I I think in the beginning I was like, oh, man, this sucks.

But now I feel like, okay, there's there's some good stuff here that, should we rename the company from Hammerstone to Refine? No. What is going on there?

Colleen

Okay. Yeah. There does seem to be a fair amount of confusion

Aaron

Yeah. Around Apparently. Is.

Colleen

I guess atypical to have a different product name from company name. Used about that.

Aaron

People do seem confused, and I I am empathetic to their confusion. I do not want them to be confused.

Colleen

Maybe we should just call it query builder? Oh, no. Because that's what the client calls it, query builder.

Aaron

I know. Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's very accurate. That's

Colleen

Yeah. Yes.

Aaron

Yeah. I don't I we don't need to do anything there. I just when Michelle said that,

Colleen

I was like,

Aaron

it's so interesting to me.

Colleen

But,

Aaron

yeah, I'm open to whatever, but it's not worth wasting our time on right now, I think.

Colleen

That was funny though. I was like, yeah. I guess I can see how people.

Aaron

You're overwhelmed. Yeah. You did say that, so you can't keep it out

Colleen

of it now. Take that back?

Aaron

No. You can't.

Colleen

Yeah. I think there are the client is, using it heavily, but some of the things they are asking for at the moment, and so I've been hustling trying to get some of that stuff. Like, one thing we knew would be a problem is the turbo frames rendered in a partial. Turbo works by matching up the ID. So if you have a partial that provides the same static ID in the same modal, when you get your turbo response back from the server, it doesn't know where to put it, so it puts it in the wrong place.

So that's super fun, and that sounds like a really solvable problem. Like, the initial the initial take on that was like, oh, that's fine. I'll just send it a custom ID. But all of these things, it's a it was just like a lot of little things. Like, I can't use DOM ID, which is a big thing people use in the Rails world because it's not a persisted model.

It doesn't have a DOM ID. And we have nested turbo frames, so we have, you know, 3 to 4 turbo frames per partial. And our stimulus state controller is using the static ID of the turbo frame to render the state. So it's been a lot of, like that's just kinda been like, it's great because I'm getting better at turbo and stimulus, and I had been leaning so heavily on Sean. So the more and more ownership I can take of that, the better.

However, comma, it'd be great if they were just using our React component. I know. It would

Aaron

make everyone's life a lot

Colleen

easier.

Aaron

Their theirs included.

Colleen

I know. Right? Their guy is a React developer. He's like, can I use a React component? But, ultimately, the team decided that wasn't the best choice.

So it's it's fine. It's just, like, little stuff. You're like, so the client and that and and so what's happening to me is, like, that's just one team from client. Client is big. I think we've mentioned that a few times.

So then I get someone on another team who's like, oh, I need I need an hour of your time or 30 minutes of your time to talk about this thing, and then I got Mhmm. Came in this morning to another team telling me this they show me this database query, and there's no way Refine built this database query. Mhmm. But it's a query, so they assume that I can They

Aaron

assume that you're the expert. Oh, no. I wasn't aware of that. That's scope creep.

Colleen

Yeah. That just happened this morning, and I was like, this is not like, I looked at it. I was like, we did not build this query. Like, there's no way. It's anyway.

So it's just managing that. And I onboarded our new contractor on Monday. I onboarded him poorly, I think. I should've I should've pushed him another week, but he was ready to get started. I didn't wanna lose him.

So, if he's listening, I already apologize to him for my brain dump of an onboarding. But we're we're working on some stuff together, so it's super great to get him up to speed because that'll help with all of it's kinda one of those things. Right? It slows you down in the beginning, but, ultimately, it's gonna be good for the business, and it's gonna be good for the product.

Aaron

And he's primarily helping with the front end stuff. Right?

Colleen

Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully, he's gonna get his wrap his head around all the stim

Aaron

Good.

Colleen

As we're gonna have there's, like, custom things client wants to do, and so it'd be great to have another stimulus guy to help out.

Aaron

Well, hopefully, that takes some some work off of

Colleen

Yeah. Yeah. I think you know, the workshop's in, like, 10 days. And as much as I talk crap. I know.

As much as I talk about it, I still feel like I'm a long way away from completing it, which is a little frustrating, but, I'm Yep. It's just get it done. Just like you were. Right? I'm speaking of getting things done.

Got it done. Nice. Today today is the, due date. Last night,

Aaron

I've I've finished editing the last video. Got it done.

Colleen

Awesome. That's great news. Congratulations.

Aaron

Thanks. Yeah. I'm feeling I'm feeling much, much more relieved because this whole, you know, this past weekend, I spent all of pretty much all Saturday and all Sunday recording and editing videos. And then on, you know, the nights leading up to, you know, Monday night, Tuesday, We're just recording recording and editing the last videos. And now, like, tonight at, you know, 5:30 or 6, I'm gonna go inside and just freaking hang.

Colleen

You won't walk.

Aaron

Gonna, like, party. What

Colleen

to do

Aaron

with all this stuff.

Colleen

I'm gonna,

Aaron

like, have a glass of wine and watch we crashed or something. Yeah. I I was talking to, I was actually talking to Ben, the 2 fold CEO, and was like, man, I just really got myself in a bind. I took on too many extra projects, you know, when I was at my old job because it was just kinda it's kinda bored. And then they all came home they all came home to roost at once.

And so this one's this one's off my plate, and I will not add anything onto my plate to replace it. So I feel great. I'm feeling super good.

Colleen

Oh, great. I'm so happy to hear that. I think somewhat similar to me at, like, the workshop, which I knew was gonna be a lot of work, but, also, I took that on before we kind of decided to change the pace of attack. Like, if we were still at the old pace of attack, I think it would have been totally fine.

Aaron

Yep.

Colleen

But, coupling marrying all those things together, it's just like, ugh.

Aaron

I was joking.

Colleen

Yeah. I was joking with my husband. Like, I'm I was like, I'm gonna have to fly to Portland just to take a break. So we're gonna give the workshop on Monday, then I'm just gonna sleep all day Tuesday.

Aaron

That sounds great. Super into that idea.

Colleen

So that's that's that stuff.

Aaron

Alright. So what else do we have to talk about? What's next?

Colleen

So I feel like per the discussion we have, I don't have any time in the next 10 days to start working on the marketing, but there were so many good ideas. I know. I brain dumped them into our Notion doc. There were so many good ideas that came out of our initial email in terms of, like, how to market properly, if you will. And so I think our next step as a business, outside of all the tech stuff, is to work like you just said, like, work on the value prop on the landing page.

Okay. Can I say, I really like the idea of the marketing emails? So someone recommended that we do, like I wrote it down. What was it? It was like?

Aaron

Like, a series about how you could use it or, like,

Colleen

what series you're interested in? Less techie. More like, it, more like yeah. Like, day 1, faceted search for your product catalog. Day 2, custom reports for your boss.

I love that idea.

Aaron

I think that's genius. Yeah.

Colleen

Yeah. I think that would be a great idea. So I feel like just looking at this list of marketing ideas, obviously, tweet thread version. We'll we'll do that. Right.

Talk to people in the Laravel community, reach out to get maybe an article, think about if we want a product hunt and how we wanna do that. I feel like that's later, the product hunt. I feel like the website, I think once we're honestly, like, we'll see each other in 3 weeks, 2 weeks. Mhmm. So we but I think the marketing site is, like, number one priority.

Aaron

I agree. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I don't wanna I don't want to, like, spend any social capital on, like, trying to promote, like, doing a big tweet thread right now when I feel like the marketing site is just kind of anemic.

And honestly, I don't I don't know if I wanna even do that before we're ready to sell in just regular Laravel because the the Nova market is just so it's so small compared to regular Laravel. So I'll kinda wanna, like, hone the marketing message, hone the value proposition, all of that on our current landing page, even though it is, you know, specifically Nova. And then Yes. We can then do some of the bigger stuff when it's Laravel time. And all of that all of that value proposition will carry over to just regular Laravel and Rails, but I'm I'm personally wary of spending social capital on the Nova.

I still wanna blow it out for Nova because I don't 1, I don't think we're ready, and 2, I don't think that many people are gonna care. I'd rather do that for Laravel or Rails.

Colleen

Yeah. I'm fine with that. We're pretty close on the Laravel side. Right?

Aaron

Oh, yeah. For sure. So Yeah. That's why just, like, looking back to last week, Michelle was, like, why don't you do a big tweet thread about this? I'm, like, this isn't that launch in my mind.

You know, you may disagree, but in my mind, this isn't that launch. This is alright. Let's get something out there, get roasted by our friends, fix it, and then do it again late.

Colleen

Yeah. I'm fine with that. I I think, again, I don't have any time in the next 2 we really need to before we do anything else, like, I think the marketing site is what we really need. I think that's a good plan. I'm down with that.

Aaron

Same page.

Colleen

So it's interesting speaking of Nova because I was listening to framework friends, and you and Andrew were talking about the pricing, the downward pricing in the Laravel community. That was really interesting. Mhmm. And I I knew that, but I hadn't really thought about that yet.

Aaron

Mhmm.

Colleen

But you can see how what is Nova? 2, $300?

Aaron

100 for a single site. Yeah. And, 300 for unlimited projects. Okay. Colleen had to run out, so we recorded this in 2 parts.

So I'll splice the second part together now. Okay. So we were talking about pricing in the Laravel community, pricing of Nova. Nova's a $100 a site or 300 for unlimited, and our thing is $1,000 for an add on. So it's 10 times the price of Nova just for an add on.

So

Colleen

Right. And so that's obviously just psychologically an incredibly hard sell. But I do think that it's great that we have this for Nova, and we should absolutely sell it. But, also, I think a lot of the value comes from the people or the companies that need it for user facing queries. Mhmm.

Because we provide so much in terms of, like, the full user experience, whereas maybe people are using Nova just for themselves or their team of 2. They don't really

Aaron

care. Right. That's a good point. Because they in those situations, they're probably the developers themselves, and so they're just writing potentially writing the queries themselves

Colleen

on that. It's a what are the the vitamin versus the, what's the other pain?

Aaron

Painkiller,

Colleen

maybe. Yeah. It's a it's a vitamin. If you already know how to write SQL and you're the only person who sees your admin dashboard, like, it's a nice vitamin, but depending on your revenue and, your ability to pay for a product, you could be you might think it is not it's too expensive.

Aaron

Right. Which a lot of people a lot of people got back to me and said it's too not a lot. Several people got back to me and said it's too expensive.

Colleen

That's fine. I feel very strongly that we should not lower the price right now.

Aaron

I agree.

Colleen

Like, those are just not our people right now, and if down the road we want to come up with some kind of deal. Okay. I did wanna ask you one thing.

Aaron

Tell me.

Colleen

Because we're listening to framework friends, and you were talking about Taylor's reach Mhmm. And how, you know, he has this whole ecosystem around Nova. Is there a way to, like, partner with him?

Aaron

Potentially. There is a way to ask him. There's no Potentially.

Colleen

You can probably only ask him once, so we have to be ready. But you you were talking about that, and I was like, look. I understand, like, Nova's super cheap, and he sells it for super super cheap because he has this crazy reach. Mhmm. What if, you know, for an upsell of however much we decide, it would be a package, and you'd get Nova kinda what we're gonna do with bullet train.

Aaron

Right.

Colleen

And then you'd get access to his reach because here's the here's what we know about our product for sure is that it's really, really well done, and it's really well thought thought out. And that fits in very cleanly with the way that Laravel publishes software.

Aaron

Correct. And we also know that for the people who have the pain, it is really, really valuable for them.

Colleen

Yeah.

Aaron

So the the 3 or 4 people that have bought it and are using it in Nova love it. And so for the people that have the pain, it's useful. The question is just how many people have it and how do we get more of them.

Colleen

Right.

Aaron

But, yeah, I could totally reach out to to Taylor or David and be like, hey. You wanna do I would probably call it, like, business development deal because that sounds fancy. But basically, like, do you wanna help us sell through your channel and we'll give you, you know, some standard affiliate fee? And I don't think they would probably go for, like, a, like, a package deal, but I think they would go for, or they would be more likely to go for a more standard affiliate thing. Like, they'll send an email to their list or they'll, you know, help us promote it or something.

But, yeah, it's it's worth a shot. I I think it's a good idea. I, again, think we need to tighten up everything else before we spend that social capital. Great. But I think it's totally worth a shot.

Absolutely.

Colleen

Okay. So let's let's keep that in the back of our mind. I agree. I think we need to tighten up the, the value prop and the website and all that

Aaron

Yeah.

Colleen

First because we wanna be ready given that opportunity.

Aaron

Exactly.

Colleen

But I feel like that that's something we should think about because

Aaron

I was like, wheeze. Agreed. So random well, not random. Crazy thought. I have been thinking about Mike Perham's sidekick model, Sidekick and Sidekick Pro, because Sidekick's free.

Sidekick Pro is, I think, $1,000 a year. So it's kinda the same deal. Right? I think that's right. I've been wondering what you think about that model for us.

So to flesh it out, here's here are my full thoughts. I can tell you already have thoughts, to flesh it out, refine would be free, but it would not include the ability to add refinements or to query related attributes. And maybe there maybe there's some other stuff, but, like, if you just wanna query a single model, a single table, and you don't need to inspect any sort of attributes that are on other models or do refinements or maybe even, I don't know. Maybe even do nested groups. Like, maybe for the free one, we just say it's one level.

You don't get nested groups. That's totally free, open source. Open source, I think is right. But, yeah, totally free, open source. Anyone can use it.

If you want these other features, you pay a license fee. Thoughts?

Colleen

Okay. So

Aaron

Oh, no. This is either gonna be really good or really bad.

Colleen

I think it's premature to talk about that right now. So I'm not saying no, but I think that open sourcing, even a portion of a portion of this, is just gonna open up. I feel like we're already a little fractured with everything we're trying to maintain from, like, a software perspective. Like, there's 2 of us, and our contractor army is growing, but, you know, we only get as much time from our contractors as they have. So I don't hate it.

Mhmm. But I am I do not think we should even be talking about that yet because I think I think we should be able to sell a lot of licenses without having to do any of that. Now it's

Aaron

into that.

Colleen

I think that we, you know, we should hit a we should say we have to sell x number of licenses and then we'll we'll see where we are and reevaluate and think about that.

Aaron

K.

Colleen

I am not, totally against it. I just yeah. It doesn't feel like that feels premature to me. That feels like, the wrong way to get customers right now.

Aaron

I'm into that. It does feel slightly to me like, an easy way to avoid what I think is hard work. And so I'm I'm sensitive to the fact that that, like, sounds good right now because then it just seems easier. Right? And I don't wanna take the easy way out.

And I I I I think there is, like, if we do all the hard work of, you know, clearly communicating the value, I feel like we should be able to sell it. But Okay. No. You you go.

Colleen

I was gonna say, but interesting that you bring that up because what I'm putting together for this workshop is basically what you just described.

Aaron

Right.

Colleen

So that's interesting because we'll have it, and we can kind of, you know, we'll have it available almost. So if we make that choice in 6 months to a year, it'll just be flipping a switch.

Aaron

Yeah. I think I'm also, influenced by Andrew's recent decision to do this with bullet train.

Colleen

Yeah. I thought you might be. But let's remember he's been building bullet train for, what, 5 years?

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

Colleen

So so I think that we have to prove I think I think you're right. I think that that kinda feels like a way to get around doing the hard.

Aaron

I agree. Okay. Well, I'll continue to continue to not do that. But I do think I do think it's interesting if if we if the main objection we come up against is in the future. If the main objection, we communicate all the value and everything, and the main objection is I just wanna play with it for a while.

And, like, we can't get around that with, you know, long trials or money back guarantees or something. This could be a way to get around that. But I think we're super far away from that, so I'll table it for now.

Colleen

Okay. Cool.

Aaron

Alright. What else?

Colleen

Have we checked in? I might have asked you this. On timeline for the regular Laravel one being done?

Aaron

Yeah. So the regular Laravel one depends on the 2 front ends. I had a call with the 2 contractors last week, or maybe it was this week. Who knows anymore? And it was great.

They're so far. I mean, they're so far along. They're so close to being done. So, yeah, they're so close. And I think the thing that we're gonna end up with is incredible.

This is my first, like, time diving into it fully with them because Sean handled that. And so I had both of them on a call, and they were both kinda walking through their setup. For React, his goal is to be completely done with everything before RailsConf so you can use that.

Colleen

That's so exciting.

Aaron

So yeah. So that's good. And so I think, yeah, they should be wrapping everything up in the next couple of days maybe, or if not, already done. Right. Yeah.

And then I'm gonna try to pick it up and, like, do an do a brand new Laravel app with it and just kinda see what the sticking points are.

Colleen

And Yep.

Aaron

I need to get I need to get my hands dirty with the front end repos a little bit, and this will be

Colleen

a good way to do it. Yep. That's exactly where I was, like, 2 weeks ago. Yep. It was like I just need to put it in a clean app, feel it out.

It was great. It was so incredibly instructive.

Aaron

Yeah. So is your side done? Like, is your rails hot wire done? Can we sell that?

Colleen

Tell me. It's not done. I think so I'm making a big change, which I think I mentioned earlier about how the hot wire partial loads so they can load multiple partials in a modal if they should so desire.

Aaron

K.

Colleen

So that change is coming through. There's still a few, like, little bugs. It's really close, but there's still a few things that we're running into. And so it's re I mean, it's really close. Like, I think

Aaron

Okay.

Colleen

I think it's a a very short period of time, and we'll be we'll be ready to go. But

Aaron

And we already have the first person who wants to try it. Right?

Colleen

People that told me they wanted to be in the first. So I said, like We'll

Aaron

tell them that they're both the first and then not tell yeah.

Colleen

But it's it's tons of progress. Like, it like, with everything extracted, the last big piece we have are front end validations. There was some weird error in front end validations. We're getting kind of a couple, like, weird turbo error errors we're sorting out.

Aaron

Sure.

Colleen

But, yeah, we're really close, so it's really exciting.

Aaron

Okay. That is exciting. Okay. So I think what we had discussed yesterday we've we're recording this podcast in 2 parts now. What we had discussed yesterday was basically you're on workshop duty until it's over.

Is that right?

Colleen

So in my perfect world, what I'd like to do over the next 2 week oh my gosh. I'm workshop all week, like, next week. I mean, obviously, I have a job, but I'm but all of my spare cycles will be on the workshop. And then when I see you, I mean, hopefully, we can start really take a couple evenings or mornings or whatever and aft you know, we're the 1st day. Thank goodness.

Aaron

Mhmm.

Colleen

And so really try to dive into some of this, value prop stuff. That's what I'm thinking. So that that's kinda what I'm I'm thinking the timeline that week that we're there is when we really start thinking about how we want to

Aaron

I'm into that. That sounds great. Anything else we need to discuss here?

Colleen

I don't think so. Okay.

Aaron

I think we're good. Cool.