We're back baby!

Aaron

Hello, Colleen.

Colleen

Aaron.

Aaron

It has been a minute.

Colleen

We are back.

Aaron

We're back, baby. I mean, we've been talking the whole time. We just maybe haven't recorded every conversation. But we're back. Lots of interesting things to share.

So where should we start?

Colleen

Well, I think we should start with our announcement.

Aaron

We got into tiny seed. So Colleen and I, are officially funded. So, yeah, how about you tell us how exactly that happened? Because you know a little bit better than I do.

Colleen

Yes. Well, I it's a little bit of a funny story. I applied to TinySeed, and then I mentioned it to Aaron after I applied.

Aaron

Yeah. Just like a, Oh, hey, by the way, I applied for TinySeed. I hope that's okay. We're not gonna get in, so it shouldn't be a big deal.

Colleen

Yes. What can I say? An important co founder relationship needs good communication.

Aaron

Yeah. So that was and, honestly, it was fine. I was like, sure. That sounds great. I love Tiny Seed.

I also don't think we'll get in. And then, well, we got in.

Colleen

We got in. Yep. I mean, it's because of that video of yours I cut from 7 minutes to a minute. That's clearly why.

Aaron

Well, you asked me to make I think you maybe did ask me to make a 2 minute video, and I delivered just the most fire 7 minute video ever. And later, I found out that you cut it down, and I was partially offended, and it partially made sense.

Colleen

Yep. Yeah. I think this is just I mean, I I feel like this is gonna change the game for us. I feel like it's a good example of shooting your shot. Like, obviously, I'm I wasn't even I was literally going through the application.

I was like, maybe I shouldn't apply. Maybe we're too early. So good for us for shooting our shot. And the thing is though, now the real work begins. Right?

Like, it's one thing to get funded, but we are a fundamentally, conceptually a bootstrap company. So we are focused on revenue, not growth, if you will. Does that make sense?

Aaron

Yes. But we are focusing on growing the revenue. So Right. Tell me.

Colleen

I meant as opposed to, like a if we raise if we go out Yeah.

Aaron

I gotcha.

Colleen

Raise 1,000,000 of dollars and we're just trying to get as many users as possible. Like, we're focused on growing a sustainable, excellent revenue generating company. This should just really help us do it faster.

Aaron

Yeah. So, what this does is this frees you up a lot to focus more on the business. So I just got a job. So I'm like I'm like 2 weeks in into this new job that I love, and Colleen messages me and is like, hey. I applied for funding.

It's like, oh, surprise. So here's the deal. This, so I work at PlanetScale now, which turns out is amazing. Like, it looks cool from the outside. It's even cooler from the inside.

So this funding, what this is gonna do is this is going to free you up, so that you don't have to, do all the consulting that you're doing, and this will help, bridge that gap. And I will continue to work nights and weekends, while I work my day job at PlanetScale. And I

Colleen

think it's also important to keep in mind is that was always our plan. I mean, even if we had even if you were in a position where you could quit your job, which you're not, but if you were, it would still put such pressure on the business to support 2 people full time. I think we are both in agreement that with or without funding, we had always planned to go this route. I'm a little more flexible. So I was always gonna go full time first.

So this just enables us to do it faster.

Aaron

That was always the plan. Break you free first, and then at some point later, I will join. But, yeah, this just speeds us up, which is awesome.

Colleen

Yeah. Yeah. I am super excited to and to me, like, when when I think about this and and it's kinda like how do you what what is this money really gonna buy us? Like, what is this funding really gonna buy us? To me, it gives me the ability to focus on what's best for the business.

There are many, many times I'm, like, deep in the code, which I'm happy to be there, but also that's not moving our business forward. So being able to big being able to think big picture and strategy and these kinds of things, I think is really going to help us, move faster. Right? Like, fail fast. This is a big thing we've been talking about.

Right. We haven't had the podcast in months, but you and I have been talking about privately, is how do we fail faster on this? And I think this freeing up of my time so I can actually think distribution, strategy, pricing is really going to enable us to get there.

Aaron

Yeah. I think so. Yeah. I'm super excited. We have a retreat coming up with them, I think, at the end of this month or something.

But you and I also just saw each other in Austin, like, a couple weeks ago We did. Which was awesome. Nice to be in person again for that. Yeah, and this is I feel like the past 6 months have been insane for me, between conferences and going part time at 2 people, then leaving 2 people, and then starting at PlanetScale, and then getting funding. So, conferences are over.

I'm at a job now that I feel really, really qualified to do, and I, like, really enjoy it. And so I think everything is starting to slow down a little bit for me.

Colleen

Excellent. And let's talk a little bit about your conference is. Is that part of your job requirement? Because I feel like you should not be speaking at any more conferences. I

Aaron

don't think it's part of my job requirement. I think they're happy when I go. And I personally like doing them, but I don't like the situation I got myself in where I had one in September, 1 in October, 1 in November. Like, that was

You had

Colleen

a lot.

Aaron

Yeah. That's

Colleen

2 in November. You had 2 in November.

Aaron

Yeah. That's true. Yeah. I did. I forgot about that.

So, I had 1 September, 1 in October, 2 in November, like a week apart. And that was bad.

Colleen

That

Aaron

was, that was bad. But I enjoy doing it. I think I'm good at it. It's fun. I would just maybe like to do maybe 1 or 2 a year instead of 4 a month.

So

Colleen

Well, and I was gonna suggest too charging a speaking fee or something. Like like, I know you enjoy doing it. It's good for PlanetScale. It's good for you, But you've been speaking at so many, and as you said, you've had a crazy 6 months. And I think managing energy level long term is an important thing for us.

So just a suggestion is you could just start charging a speaking fee.

Aaron

Yeah. That's a good idea. I got paid to speak at Universe and Lyricon.

Colleen

Okay.

Aaron

But Longhorn and Fullstack EU did not pay.

Colleen

Yeah.

Aaron

But, yeah, I think that's a good idea. That'd be nice to get at least some nominal fee out of it would would be nice.

Colleen

One of the things, speaking of our business and tiny seed, so I was speaking to someone before when we were kinda deciding, like, is this the right move for us right now?

Aaron

Mhmm.

Colleen

And just something he said that really struck me and and has stayed with me is when you think about how you wanna build this business, yeah, you might want to only have this business for a couple years, but think about it in a 10 year timeline. Because there is a non zero chance that one or both of you will be running this business for a very long time. Mhmm. So when you think about and this the reason I bring this up right now is because talking about how busy you are and your energy levels and, just for both of us, like, managing that long term, I think, you know, it's a marathon, not a sprint.

Aaron

Yeah. I agree. I got I got real sprinty there for a minute with conferences. Yeah. So I agree.

Colleen

And so I actually we haven't you know, you've been so busy even though I saw you last time I saw you, we didn't really talk too much product. So I would like to give a little product update because

Aaron

Tell me.

Colleen

My team has been crushing it. I know some people are always on the fence about hiring, but man, it has worked out really well for the Rails product.

Aaron

My team. What a boss. How many how many people are on my team? There are

Colleen

3 people on my team. Wow.

Aaron

That's crazy.

Colleen

And I think, you know, it's been so interesting because I have learned so much working with these people and, just, you know, I managed someone 15 years 10 years ago when I worked at a Fortune 500 company. But I have never managed I mean, it's been a long time since I've managed contract developers, and I think it's been a great learning experience for me. And I have seen a lot of areas where I can improve, so I'm actively working on that. But anyway, that's off topic. I wanna tell you about our product updates.

So what we noticed when we started we've had a lot of demand for the rails, component. And so I did the first 4 the first five people and started onboarding them. And I noticed, as you and I have talked ad infinitum, there is a hole in the visual aspect, the UI. And so literally today, I'm about a just version the gem and the m MPM package. All of the CSS styles have been pulled out of our partials into their own yeah.

Their own file. You can choose to import or not import or import and override as you desire. And wait, there's 2 big things. And you can now plug in your own custom date picker.

Aaron

Okay.

Colleen

We switched to pick a day. I wanna say switch pick a day. No. We switched to flat picker, and the UI is so much better. Sorry, date range picker, but like, it's no jQuery dependency.

Like, the UI, I think, is just so much better, but we have written it in such a way that you can choose to plug in your own component there, which is huge. That was a huge literally, everyone asked for that. So CSS has been pulled out. That's been pulled out. And you can set up an initializer to scope all your stored filters, both when you save them and when you load them, which is a huge deal because what was happening is people were having to override the create methods of the stored filters controller in order to if they wanted custom attributes on their table.

So, it's like it's just exciting. It's like 3 huge things, and and you know when you like ship a product, you're like, oh, like this thing is really these three things were really, really bothering

Aaron

me. So Yeah. The styles one is huge. It's huge.

Colleen

I mean because that is

Aaron

that's everyone's biggest complaint always.

Colleen

It is. It's like I am so excited. Like I said, literally just versioned the gym 20 minutes ago. So it's no one's using it yet, but I am so excited for people to be able to overwrite their styles. Our our guy who did that, like, it was a tremendous amount of work.

He is amazing, and he meticulously went through every single partial and pulled out the styles and put them in like figured out how to name them so they made sense and put them in their own file. And it's gonna make a huge difference because we have one guy who we have one customer who rewrote our overwrote all of our views, which is not good. I mean, it it was just it was not ideal. Great, but that's like a good

Aaron

customer experience.

Colleen

It was not a good customer experience. Even if I write a, you know, a generator to to dump all the views, and we might get there eventually if you wanna change the fundamental HTML, but you can get pretty far with just overriding the styles. So Yeah. Yeah. So from a product side, it feels really good to have finally gotten to this point.

Yeah.

Aaron

Yeah. That's that's gotta be a huge relief. And the the initializer, I like that because that's is that the same, like, scoping it down to teams and tenants and that sort of thing?

Colleen

Exactly. If you have tenancy scoping so the rails, I think you guys do it differently in Laravel. But, like, the rails part, if you go with the happy path, it includes the stored filter partial. But the scoping, you have 2 issues there. You had what stored filters do you load.

So, you know, our client has a lot of tenancy concerns. So you have to scope to a specific area, etcetera, etcetera. And then when you save a stored filters, what additional attributes do you want on that table? Since the create update, you know, all the CRUD actions are in the gem, you don't really you did not have a way to hook into that before this got merged. So this is a big deal.

Gotcha.

Aaron

Cool. That's awesome.

Colleen

So it's like 2 really

Aaron

Feels good.

Colleen

Feels good. And we sold a license yesterday, another one. So we're still selling them.

Aaron

Before you could sneak in there and raise the price.

Colleen

I know. I am I'm gonna like I literally have the PR to turn that off, like, ready to go, I think. And and, and so he snuck in there and bought it before I raised the price times 10.

Aaron

Great. We'll take it.

Colleen

Good for him. Good for him.

Aaron

Way to go, guy.

Colleen

Yeah. So I think product stuff is feeling really good.

Aaron

Good. So do you wanna talk about plans, like, for the next month or so, like some of the stuff that we figured out when we were in person? Sure. So, I think we have divvied up kind of areas of responsibility for the next, maybe, several weeks or maybe to the end of the year because we've got Thanksgiving

Colleen

Christmas too. Yeah. I think. And we have the retreat. So the next 2 weeks are kinda shot anyway.

Aaron

Yeah. So we had a lot of good feedback from our Internet friends, and I think where we landed is I'm gonna focus on just, like, really driving home the Nova implementation. So that means, doing whatever updates are necessary for Nova v 4, which shouldn't be bad, And then really focusing our landing page and messaging and sales and everything to strictly Nova, which doesn't mean which, you know, doesn't mean Laravel goes away, but we're gonna focus it on Nova, and we're gonna drop the price, I think. I think that's what we decided. We're gonna drop the price for Nova to be more in line with the Nova ecosystem.

So that's my those are my marching orders. We're gonna get that done and try to start pushing some sales through different, Nova channels. And then on your side

Colleen

Yeah. So on my side, I'm focusing on replacing myself with the client. And, yes, I'm probably gonna hire again. So if you're a contract rails developer, and you're like Or join

Aaron

Colleen's team.

Colleen

Join my team, please let me know. Yeah. So I think I've been kind of on the fence about that, honestly, but I think where we are in the development cycle, that is still the right move. And then the question is just how senior of a person do I need? So, yeah, I think I think that's a good move.

I think I should do it. Like I said, I don't want us to be a consultancy, though. Right? And so we are a product company. We wanna be a product company.

So finding that balance between consulting on the product for the client, like hiring someone to do that versus trying to sell the product elsewhere is a little bit tricky, I think. But I think where we are because there's gotta be a point. I mean, I think there's a point where we we just say, here's your support contract. Like, not here's Colleen or Colleen's person who is permanently embedded with you. But here's the support contract.

This is how we define it. But I don't think we're there yet. Like, there's other

Aaron

things there yet.

Colleen

Like, I think there's more product think that's the right move. So I do think I'm gonna hire someone else. So that's that's really I mean, that's from now, for the next couple weeks, trying to find someone and embed someone in there, that's a good fit. Yeah. That's a lot.

Yeah. So that's kind of what I'm focused on right now.

Aaron

Yeah. And then beginning of the new year, prices go up like 10 x, and

Colleen

Yeah.

Aaron

We start trying to execute new strategies.

Colleen

What What I'm doing now is I'm going to remove the ability to buy it for $1,000 and do a call for pricing because I think the we we had talked about having a base price that's much higher, plus an onboarding package, and you have to buy them together.

Aaron

Right.

Colleen

So executing on that, I think, is is something I'll do soon. I mean, like I said, I think I literally already made the changes on the website. I just have to push it live. So that's something I'll do soon, and then we'll see if anyone actually calls.

Aaron

Yeah. I mean, if people keep calling at, you know, $5,000 product fee and $5,000 onboarding fee, that's good.

Colleen

Yeah. So yeah. But I think the big push for the rail stuff will be after the new year. We have a lot of we have some product stuff we're working I mean, we will always have product stuff we're working on. So, yeah, I think strategizing, like, how to come out of the gate fast in January is is good, is what we're gonna be working on.

Aaron

Yeah. I think so.

Colleen

I think it will be interesting to see if this kind of divide and conquer strategy works or if we both need to be focused on the same thing. Because I am a little concerned that not being focused on the same thing is not the right way to go.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah.

Colleen

Right? Like, maybe the answer is Nova, and I help you with the Nova. You know, like, maybe it's better to focus in hard on Nova right now, and I help you with email sequencing and how do we use our list and all that stuff, and then later, we're both focused on Rails. Like, that's kind of the thing we'll have to figure out.

Aaron

Yeah. That'll be interesting to see because, I mean, we will be pursuing 2 vastly different strategies, you know, Nova at 249 and rails at 10 ks or whatever.

Colleen

Right. So

Aaron

And it's gonna be it's gonna be really, really interesting to see. But then also, I don't know how much help I am on the rails side, more more than 0. Like, I think I'm good at talking on, like, the demos and talking database level stuff, but less than a 100% helpful. Yeah. It'll be interesting.

Colleen

It'll be interesting because there's so much we could do together. Like, one of the things I think we got one of the very good pieces of feedback we got from our Internet friends was no one really knows what we're selling. If you go to our home page, no one people like, what what are you selling? I don't. So that kind of stuff I mean, there's a lot of room for improvement, I think, there.

Aaron

Yeah.

Colleen

And that's something we can do together.

Aaron

Yeah. Absolutely. And I think for Matt Wintzing, who is listening, he would tell us that divide and conquer means that you and I work together to divide the enemy and conquer them, not that you and I split up to conquer separate enemies. So, Matt, I know that's your hobby horse, and I am well aware that divide and conquer means Colleen and I stick together.

Colleen

I didn't know that. That's a fun fact.

Aaron

I think I actually did learn that from him when he complained about it to somebody else recently. But

Colleen

Yeah. So that that is something we'll have to see. And I think, you know, as we talk about trying to figure out the best way to work together given our circumstances, I think we'll figure that out in the next couple months. Because if you're trying to do Nova and you there you go. If you're trying to do Nova and sorry.

I'm distracted because you're blurry.

Aaron

My amazing camera keeps going out of focus.

Colleen

So sorry about that. Okay. Yeah. So I tend to think we would be better if we are both focused on the same thing, but we have 2 really interesting possible traction channels, distribution channels here. So we do need to do both.

I think it's worth our time to do both. So what we could do is kind of an experiment is see how November, December goes with you focusing on Nova, me focusing on rails. And if we're kinda like, like, we didn't make a lot of progress in either, then we can change strategy.

Aaron

I think so. I think it would be wise to spend the next 2 partial months, the next 2 holiday months working on both of these things, and then reassess and see if we should consolidate around 1. But I don't think it's I don't think it's crazy to say, well, let's try both for now, get them both over, you know, the starting line of these new strategies, and then kind of reassess from that point.

Colleen

Yeah. I mean and for me to sell a $20,000 a year product is a whole new skill set. So I really wanna learn how to do that and see if I can do that. That and that would make a huge difference. Right?

If we could go out there and sell, you know, $20,000 high value funnel and the low value funnel or that's not the right term, but you know what I mean? Like, the high touch funnel and the low touch funnel.

Aaron

High touch and

Colleen

low touch funnel. And it might be that, you know, 70% of our time is on the low touch funnel because those are more of the traditional marketing activities, website, email list, stuff like that. And then the remainder of the time is high touch since those deals take a lot longer to close. There's probably a lot of downtime, right? Like, you have a call and they have to go talk to 15 people and then you have a call and so yeah.

I'm kind of excited to, like, try some, like, traditional, like, sales strategies. I wanna see how that all works. So I'm excited for that on the high touch side.

Aaron

Yeah. And I think you'll be good at it. I think we'll I think we'll both be good at it, but I think you you talking to these rails people, I think you'll click in pretty quickly. Yeah. Anything else?

I mean, it's been, you know, months.

It's been months.

Colleen

I mean, we're still growing, so that's exciting.

Aaron

Still growing. We're still here.

Colleen

We're like I I feel like it's all good news at this point. We raised money. We've got a great team. We're still growing. We just, you know, distribution.

I think at this point, it's it's distribution and product, you know, and product. There's still a lot we can do with the product. But, yeah, I mean, it's all good things.

Aaron

Well, you wanna hear a bad thing? Well, let's talk about GitHub Universe for a second.

Colleen

Okay. Tell me.

Aaron

I went to this conference in San Francisco and thought, okay, this is, like, this is my big break. Like, this is gonna change my life. Right? Big deal. GitHub First.

Really honored to be there. And I, spoke on a Thursday, I guess. And I'm on my my session is scheduled for, like, the garden stage, and I'm like, oh, that'll be nice. Outside, sounds lovely. On Tuesday, I go to rehearse, and I get, like, the, like, the pamphlet, the brochure that's like, here's the schedule.

And I'm looking on the schedule, and the garden stage isn't listed anywhere on the schedule. And I'm like, Hang on. My talk is not, like, not not my talk, my stage. Like, the whole thing isn't listed on the schedule that they're about to hand out to all the attendees. And then I look, and I'm like, okay.

Well, that's fine. It'll be live streamed. And so I asked my contact and they're like, now you're just live streamed. And I'm like, oh, no, this is getting worse. And so I'm already kinda like, oh, this is I'm a little bit embarrassed.

Like, my talk is kinda out in the yard, and nobody's gonna be there. And the time came to, like, do my talk, and Colleen, there were, like, 10 people there.

Colleen

Oh, no. It was so Oh.

Aaron

I was so embarrassed. I thought I thought this was gonna be, like, a big, like, moment for me, and there's nobody here. Yeah. So it's fine because my, like, my GitHub contact was there, and she brought some of her the people on her team. And she said it was an incredible talk.

And, she said, I wanna I don't know how you submit it for a TED talk, but I wanna submit it for a TED talk. I was like, I don't think that's how it works, but I'm I'm so glad you enjoyed it. So that's really good. Like, the the, you know, the business development connection of, like, this lady at GitHub really likes me. We work well together.

She wants me to keep, like, producing content for the read me blog. That's all really great. But, man, I was just so like, I gave it everything I had. Like, it there could have been 10,000 people there, and I would have delivered it the same way, and I feel good about that. Like, my job is to, you know, my job is to show up and do my job.

And so, I feel really good about that, but it was kinda like playing to an empty bar. You know? Like, I'm up there just singing my heart out, and there's 1 drunk guy in the back. It's like,

oh, this is kind of embarrassing.

Colleen

So I was wondering what happened, because on that day, I had a call like around that time, but usually when you speak, like, your Twitter's blowing up. And I kept checking Twitter, and I was like, why is no one talking about Aaron's talk? Like, to me

Aaron

Literally, no one was there.

Colleen

Oh, so bad. Oh,

Aaron

man. I know.

Colleen

Yeah. I would I thought this of all the conferences you have been invited to speak at, this seemed like the biggest. I too

Aaron

thought this was gonna be, like, a huge deal. I'm sorry to

hear that. Yeah. Thanks. I'm a little bit, like I I I shouldn't be embarrassed. That's not, like No.

That's not my problem. I'm a little bit embarrassed that, like, I got so excited and hyped it up, and then it was like, goo. But, hopefully, they they have assured me that I will still get the video. So, hopefully, I can make use of that video, and it won't be a total waste. Yeah.

And I may have to crop the video so you don't see, like, the 4 rows of empty chairs and then, like, my 3 friends out there.

Oh my goodness. That is not awesome. Wow. Not awesome. Not awesome.

Man.

Yeah. It's good content. I'll I'll write an article one day about, you know, playing to an empty room, and it'll it'll make good content. So Yeah. Yeah.

Well, anything else besides that?

Colleen

Nope. That's all I got.

Aaron

Alright. Good to be back.

Colleen

Good to be back.

Aaron

See you. Bye.