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Hook Relay Is Livin' That FULL Duplex Lyfe! S4E3

Hook Relay Is Livin' That FULL Duplex Lyfe!

This week on FounderQuest, the hosts go over some features of Hook Relay, share some research on broadcast email solutions, and discuss operational security tips for compliance (get a guard dog). Plus, Goatse is remembered as the original Rick Roll (NSW - Do NOT Google it).

· 19:57

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Show notes
Links:
Hey Dumpster Fire

Full transcript:

*This is an unedited automated transcript which is only about 80% accurate*

Starr
 
Yeah, well, sad news. Um I did not see my printing press last weekend because I I came down with a cold, it wasn't it wasn't covid, so don't worry, it's okay. Um But we're waiting for the test to come back. So you know the difference between now and the before times is now when you get a cold life shuts down and you can't really do anything until your results come back. 

Josh
 
Well and you know the other thing about like during the pandemic, everyone's home like just the printing press market is just going wild right now, so like, there's going to be gone, I'm sure it'll be gone long gone by the time you're feeling better. 

Starr
 
Exactly, everybody's going to print their manifestos, 

Josh
 
right? Yeah, 

Ben
 
well, you know, since my kid is able to take care of his own school needs and I didn't have to like sideline myself for that, like, like star, I actually got some stuff done this week, but uh but not going to tell you me. So I've been really get into this groove on having other people do things, so 

Starr
 
it's not definite, 

Ben
 
it's so nice, so nice. So shall I was able to deliver a feature that we want in Hungary there for a long time and that is being able to deliver to multiple your ills. So we give you a hook address that you post to and then you can say, okay, up to three different Charles will then get that delivery that post. So 

Josh
 
that's pretty cool, 

Starr
 
wow, Broadcasting broadcasting 

Ben
 
your publisher, this is something that one of our customers asked for and something we've wanted for a while and, and uh I apologize, I think to shop because I kind of dropped the ball on, you know, helping this get this, get this feature over the goal, you know, he uh he had done some work a few months ago and I just was distracted and didn't really uh follow up on it, like, I should have, and then and then once I did follow up like I should have, then it's like, you know what, I don't think we want to go with this round, I think I want to go a different round. So we ended up re implementing the whole thing in a different way, but so I appreciate his patients but got that launch, That's feeling pretty good. 

Starr
 
That's awesome. So um so hook really is a product that we're uh you know, we've lost, you can just go sign up for right now, right? Yeah. Ok. Yeah, so it's uh it's like magic for your wife hooks, so if you if you want to um if you want to send a web hook, you just send it to our service and then we make sure that it gets deliver, that's super reliable, that I don't know, there's just a lot of details that you have to implement around doing web hooks, right? And we do this for you. And so now it sounds like you can have that sort of broadcast to multiple points 

Josh
 
also works for inbound web hooks. So no matter what the flaky services that is sending you sending you web hooks, I think what we're doing right now is broadcasting, by the way, um but yeah, no matter what the flaky service that you have to integrate with, you know, to send to receive data from them if your app goes or maybe your app is flaky, if if your app is going down, um you can just be sure that when you get back online, hook relay will be there to relay all the web hooks that you missed. 

Starr
 
Well, I've got I've got a term for it, you can feel free to use this in your marketing. So that means that um since it does both outbound and inbound, that means you're full duplex 

Josh
 
well, Duplex. I like it, I like it going to write it down, You know, like that would be an awesome, like if we did kind of like, you know, like, like I don't know, like s marketing theme, like with me on colors and stuff and we're like full duplex. Just that going well together. 

Ben
 
Do you remember speaking of the eighties, remember back and when you connect with your modem and it would be the wrong duplex setting. And so everything you typed would be double right? You get every care, it could be a double f. You know? And they're like, oh man, full duplex. I gotta reconnect at half duplex. Yeah, 

Josh
 
we should we should do like a, like a marketing, like, like a Youtube video, you know, like this little sketch or something of you trying to connect to your modem. Yeah, 

Ben
 
awesome. 

Josh
 
Yeah. So 

Ben
 
yeah, in fact, I used, I used to create this morning for doing an inbound hooks setting up. So we're working on the broadcast emails, that's the task, that's another task has been on our to do this for a long time. Uh I was working on that this morning and uh we use postmark for our email delivery and when one of the things uh they did recently a few months ago they had this new feature and their product called announced broadcasts, announcements, broadcast exactly what it's called. But basically before this feature, post Margaret, just about transactional email, like it could only send things that were triggered by a user, right? Like a password reset email or you know, in our case we send a lot of notifications for errors, you know, to individual users, 

Ben
 
but then they launched this new broadcast feature which allows you to use their infrastructure for, you know, kind of marketing, like emails like maybe announcements about your, you know, new products or your new features or maybe have new terms of service or whatever. So more and more of a broadcast email rather than an individual email. And uh one of the features that they have and the reason why I was using the web book is they can they have, we'll add an unsubscribe link for you at the bottom of the emails that go out. And so of course the person may click the unsubscribe if they don't want to hear from us anymore, which would be, you know, totes sad, but it happens 

Ben
 
and then it goes to postmark and then postmark records that unsubscribe intent and then sends it can optionally send a web hook to you. And so uh yeah, so I set up a cookery, they target for that postmark web hook so that even if our app goes down, which of course it never does, but if it did then we would have all those, you know, web hooks from postmark happily saved in Hungary. They uh getting along of it to see is nice. I wonder 

Josh
 
like the go ahead. Sorry, 

Starr
 
I was just going to say. So you can um the inbound web hooked payloads get saved and then you can just pull them down whatever you want. That's convenience. Like I want I want that inbound with a hook data, but I don't want to build a web hook right now, I don't want to build like something to like get that right now. I just want I just want to know that the data someplace and get it later. 

Josh
 
Yeah. Yeah. I wondered like the utility of that feature might be pretty, pretty huge depending on like what people are doing with web hooks these days, you know like I don't know like receiving, you know, recording payments or um activated subscriptions. Yeah, 

Ben
 
or you know if you're if you're building a feature that's gonna accept the web hook but you don't it is not launched yet or you don't know exactly what you're going to get because you know sometimes your provider might say, well this is what we're gonna send you but you actually really be sure. Right. So you can, you can set up the cookery. They link first start getting some real web hooks from them. See what they're like before. Well yeah actually we 

Josh
 
don't have an option. Yeah, we have an option to like to not just receive but not forward. Right. Right. Yeah. So he's a sort of as like a interim development. 

Starr
 
Can we have an option? Um do we have an option to receive and just immediately discard just for you know, just when you're just fed up with that website provider? 

Ben
 
Yes. I think we actually do have that. So we have like this. Yeah forget this. We have a disabled button so the link still works like I can still post to it but it won't, nothing will happen with the payload is just goes into it either devon all 

Josh
 
you can set up like that. The dumpster fire thing like like a base camp did well back where we, you know, we have someone just burn it for you. I mean it's probably like, it's like yeah environmentally responsible to 

Starr
 
like get sense to like it gets sent to a, did you see that star? We just take the exact yeah I didn't see it. No. 

Josh
 
Okay so it was pretty awesome. Like they yeah, I forget like what was the, what were the emails like it was, you would give you like they had an address that you could um, email at? Hey, right. Hey dot com. And like they had someone actually like with a printer set up in a webcam and everything. Like they were just like, like they would print out your email I think and like just burn it like in front of the camera or something like that, Wasn't it? Something like that. Yeah, 

Starr
 
That would be a weird job. 

Josh
 
Yeah. Well, it was, yeah, it was definitely start. Yeah. 

Ben
 
Yeah. We should definitely something that I don't know. Maybe every time you get a look at it, tickles a honey badger. I don't know. I can think of something. 

Starr
 
Yeah, that's an even weirder job. I don't think I want to do that. Good. 

Ben
 
Yeah. So I got, I got a tweet dM today um, from someone uh, asking about something from a previous founder quest episode in which we talked about. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. That was cool. So, you know, everyone's always welcome to do that because that's fun for us. The uh, the message was a question about, were we talked in the previous episode about the automation, the automated monitoring that I added for our sake too, compliance stuff. And the question was like, you know, did we go with a particular provider? And yes, yes, we did. We went withdraw to, so we looked at van to and looked at secure secure frame and we looked at Dorada and uh, they're, they're pretty comparable all three of them. But are we, it came down to, we really liked draw to just a bit more than secure frame, 

Ben
 
which would be perfectly fine solution I think to you, we almost went with him and then an advantage was kind of like in this kind of distant third like they're okay. But what I really like drought and secure frame. So I don't know why. I didn't say who he selected before but there it is in case anyone is curious and didn't feel like actually asking uh there you go, 

Starr
 
awesome. And remember the, the answer to the first security question is all of the above. Mhm. Oh my God, they're gonna drop us as a customer now. I just violated the terms of service haven't giving 

Josh
 
out the answers. 

Starr
 
Maybe it's none of the above. Hopefully they switch out the questions. 

Ben
 
Uh speaking of questions, we got a we got a vendor questionnaire, security questionnaire the other day and I was looking at the answer. I was going through and answering the questions and there was this whole section about card data. And I thought to myself, oh how quaint like back in the day when we had to actually worry about securely storing credit card data. You know, these days, you know, we use stripe and we don't care. We never touched a car or data. And so I was able to, you know, Mark in a to all those things. But I just, it's kind of a blast from the past to see questions about, you know, do you, do you ever send credit card details via email? No, no, we do not. Our whole 

Josh
 
payment system, man. Yeah. 

Starr
 
Business card data though. We just like have those in a box in the closet. 

Ben
 
Yeah, we secure this to our 

Starr
 
business cards. 

Josh
 
Well, they're apparently there are vendors that are still doing it that way. Yeah. 

Ben
 
Yeah. Which is kind of scary when you think about it. 

Starr
 
You know, it's funny like with the compliance, I've been um there's been a couple of times where um, well, I've got to explain my setup. So I've got a little office in my backyard. I'm the only one here. Um and there's been a couple of times where I'm about to like go into the house or whatever my computer's on and normally like I'm just going to leave it running and stuff. And then I was like, nope. I, and the compliance says I've got to lock it before I leave my office from which I uh and it's like, okay, it's like, should I leave the door open the office? No, I gotta lock it, compliance says I've got to have, you know, adequate physical security measures 

Josh
 
like you want, like one of the squirrels getting in there. Okay, finding it unlocked? 

Ben
 
Well, I appreciate your diligence star. That's, that's going above and beyond right there. 

Starr
 
Oh, thank you. Thank you. It's, it's ridiculous. But yeah. 

Ben
 
Well on that note, one of the things that has annoyed me about the compliance requirements is that they prefer that you have um your screen saver lock Within, you know, x minutes,  minutes or whatever it is. Right? And they actually check that we have an agent that runs on each computer to make sure that we actually have that enabled and I surveillance. I never had that enabled because you know, like you like who's who's here? Like it's just me, like I'm the only person here, right? But now I have to have this screen saver that locks and 

Starr
 
sometimes you want to read things so that takes a little while or like watch a video or something. Mhm. 

Ben
 
So, but you know, it serves the greater good. So 

Josh
 
I already had my screen saver set because I have perfect operational security. 

Starr
 
What's that outside that window, josh behind you? Is that Massad? I think it's Massad, 

Starr
 
but they can't get in. They can't get in. Okay. Good. Just banging against the door. 

Josh
 
I got the dog patrolling the perimeter right now. 

Josh
 
Yeah, well I learned to keep my screen lock at a small time window when I shared an office with my brother because we would like actually, I don't know, I don't know if you ever actually got me, I think I like one time I like installed a Cron job, like a random crime job on his computer that like remember that it played like uh like read out like a random random spot quote I think with, you know with the with the speech to text, text to speech thing in backup in Mac. Os. Yeah, I remember after that I was like he is going to retaliate and I need to, I need to like up my security game. So 

Starr
 
that would be one way to like um to harden an office. It's just like encouraged employees to prank one another. 

Josh
 
Well that's where I think it started. Like I think we're kind of like doing that a little bit and yeah, it is a I don't know if I should if it's recommended but it is hilarious. 

Ben
 
That sounds, that sounds perfect for like an internal security team at a large enterprise. Like they should give prizes for the best pranks, you know, that actually expose security weaknesses like that, you know because you know they do these things like they will send an email to everyone in the company and like click on this link and then someone does and they're like, oh gotcha, you weren't supposed to 

Starr
 
click on that. It's fishing 

Ben
 
and everyone's like, oh you suck. You know? But if they made a crowdsource it. 

Josh
 
Yeah, get everyone involved. 

Ben
 
Yeah, totally. 

Starr
 
It's like whoever the best rick roller is gets a bonus 

Josh
 
a hackathon where everyone's a target. 

Ben
 
Maybe maybe you have to maybe have to put some parameters around it like maybe it's only the week around april fool's right. And so you know, people can be on a higher guard. I don't know 

Starr
 
how it makes sense. Otherwise you'd have foster a climate of like continual mistrust. Yeah, it's like, just just see that important business document I sent you bob. It's like good try Jeff, try 

Ben
 
not falling for it. 

Starr
 
That's fallen for it. You got one of those word, macro viruses in there. I know it. 

Josh
 
Do you see like someone on twitter posted like this Apparently rick Astley got rick rolled on Reddit like a few years ago. Obviously that like you just Yeah, the person, the person that did it got like, I think like, like, like a century of Reddit gold or something like that. Like you just you just win the internet totally like Yeah, that's yeah, that is winning the internet right? Like that's the ultimate prize. Yeah. 

Starr
 
Are giant Zoomer fan bases. Like what? What's rick rolling? Mhm. 

Ben
 
Even my kids, You know what rick rolling is Oh, they do. Okay. 

Josh
 
It's just one of the ones that just never goes, Yeah. People are just never going to give up. 

Ben
 
It's going to persist through the generations of time until the sun has the heat death. 

Josh
 
That's that's that's heavy. 

Starr
 
Yeah, I guess it could be worse. It's not go to see 

Josh
 
Oh man. Yeah, 

Josh
 
that was, I don't know like there was like there's that thing goes around like always like, like date yourself by like the earliest mean, you remember or whatever and I think goats, he was one of the earlier once. I won't forget it. So 

Starr
 
there was a time before they called the means like maybe that, I don't know. 

Ben
 
Yes. 

Ben
 
Well do either of you have any last hurrahs for our lovely summer season before the weather turns cold and gray and rainy in any plans to do something fun? Don't 

Josh
 
know why we have kids in school now. And so our plans are to drive them back and forth 

Ben
 
repetitive lee. 

Starr
 
I'm just trying to survive. That's basically it and it's trying to get through, 

Josh
 
I mean, and get, yeah, we'll probably like, I've been like, the weather has been nicer outside lately. So I've been trying to enjoy the yard while I can because like, yeah, it's just the weird like pacific northwest thing now where like most of years rainy and what used to be the thing that made it worthwhile was the wonderful summers is now like half of the summer is also now cloud covered in smoke and, And like °. So, um, like right now everything is like picture perfect pacific northwest and I've been really enjoying that. 

Starr
 
Yeah, last in the past. It's pretty nice. I'm, I'm looking forward to the drizzle coming back because there's just too many people out on walks, you know, like I like, I like, I like to be solitary on my walks and these amateurs only come out when it's nice outside. Um you know, so yeah, I can't, I can't wait for a little bit of drizzle where I got my raincoat and I can go and you know, walk through my neighborhood and be alone 

Josh
 
is we are kind of at the point where like you start, you start to like, uh like not dread fall or so much. Like I'm kind of looking forward to it again and like, you know, seasons, seasons are nice, but then like you halfway halfway through the winter, I'll be like ready for summer and summer will be a long ways off. But I'm looking forward to fall right now. 

Ben
 
It's kind of kind of funny like there's definitely this uh there's a sense of angst when there is too much, when there's too much sun for too long. You know, when people like, I, I need I need some grey, I need some rain and then, and then the grain grey comes and the rain comes and you can just feel this, this uh you know, things are back to, back to where it should be. You know, it's just kind of fun and of course, yeah, february comes around like, oh, it's a son, 

Josh
 
you know, and see, I just want, I just want all of this on like a light switch, so I can just change it depending on the mood that I'm in. Um 

Ben
 
you know, Yeah, we really need some weather management technology. 

Starr
 
Uh We just need to get in with the movers and shakers that control the weather. 

Josh
 
Yeah, I think, I think it's the folks over at DARPA from what, from what I hear from the internet, you know, 

Ben
 
or you just, you know, take a vacation. I mean the old fashioned way you just go to some place, warm 

Josh
 
vacations, 

Starr
 
vacations, That's 

Josh
 
so that's so pre that's so pre . We we stay in one place and control the weather now. Yeah. Mhm. 

Ben
 
Yeah. It sounds like a lot more fun actually 

Josh
 
and it does. 

Josh
 
Yeah. Well I don't know, I've done stuff this week but I don't remember. Me neither and what not. So 

Starr
 
yeah, sure you make this a short one. I guess we should. Okay, well you have always been. Sorry, let me do that again. Um You have just now, just in this very moment finished listening to found request. If you want to right to serve you go do that. Um If you're interested in writing for us, you know, check out our blog honey badger dot I.  slash blog and look for the writers page. Well the right for us link I mean and just yeah, stay safe and we will catch you next week. 

Ben
 
Have a good one. Thank you 



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