← Previous · All Episodes · Next →
How To Improve Survey Response Rates With Extortion S3E14

How To Improve Survey Response Rates With Extortion

This week The Founders talk about the recent Ubiquity hack and subsequent denial. They also talk about difficulties in obtaining customer feedback and possible schemes to increase the response rates. Would it help to personalize emails with recipients' social security numbers in the subject lines? Listen now to hear the debate!

· 36:02

|
Show notes:
Links:

Tailscale
Ubiquity hack
Front
Write for Honeybadger

Full transcript:
Ben:
The struggle is real when it comes to WiFi here. Because until two weeks ago you could've said, "Yeah, use Ubiquiti, it's all great." Now, there's this big disruption that they're having this attack that they didn't want to admit to.

Josh:
Yeah. I didn't hear about this.

Ben:
Yeah. So the thing that was terrible was that they said, "Oh, there was a leak at our third-party vendor." Well, the third party vendor is Amazon Web Services. If you're going to pin the blame on AWS for your lack in security, that's pretty ridiculous. So there was some whistleblower that came out and say, "No, they're really idiots. They're not logging access to the databases."

Ben:
Their press release was like, "Well, we don't have any evidence of access to your data." The whistleblower was like, "Well, they don't have any evidence of access to your data because they don't do any logging to their database." So they have no idea who's been querying what. It's like, oh, yeah, that's not great.

Josh:
That's cool. That's a good excuse.

Ben:
Sure, yeah. So the vagueness plus the misdirection stuff and it's just like, "Okay, my opinion of them just went through the floor."

Josh:
You never track it, you never know.

Ben:
That's right. Exactly.

Starr:
Yeah. It seems like the, I don't know, it seems like you just got to take the hit. Whenever something like that happens, you just got to suck it up and take the hit.

Ben:
Just like YOLO, "Yeah, well-"

Starr:
Yeah. YODO, you only die once.

Ben:
Well, you have to figure also my dad has probably been breached five or six different times from five or six different large companies. So it's like, who even cares anymore? I'll just spray my social security number and my birth date anywhere. I'll just put it on my billboard in my front yard. Yeah, have at it.

Josh:
Yeah. Publish it online.

Ben:
The dark web is like a light gray web now. There's just so much data out there. But it's Ubiquiti or do you buy, I have a really small house so I don't really need these mesh systems which promise this outrageous speed for outrageous amounts of money. So I don't need the great or whatever. And then if you don't go with those options, then all that's left really is TP-Link or NETGEAR. It's like, "Well, okay." But like, fine. It just doesn't seem like there's a really great quality product from a great quality company. I don't know. Maybe I'm just-

Starr:
Yeah. There was a couple of weeks ago.

Ben:
Yeah. They wisened up weeks ago.

Josh:
Yeah. I'd probably still just buy the Ubiquiti gear to be honest. Because they're all leaking your data.

Ben:
That's what I'm saying.

Josh:
Like, yeah, who's better?

Starr:
Yeah. That's why you use TLS.

Ben:
For real. Yeah, can you imagine we actually lived at a time when you would just not even use TLS to log into your websites or no WiFi?

Starr:
I know. I know.

Ben:
Can you remember those days?

Starr:
So unsafe.

Ben:
It's amazing. I had a friend who was all anti WiFi because, this is over 20 years ago, because he's like, "You just take all your secrets and throw them out the window so anybody can get at them." Yeah. It's remarkable to think that we lived that way. Speaking of security though, I was... I don't know why I was looking at this. But for some reason, this morning I looked at Tailscale again. I don't know if you're familiar with Tailscale.

Josh:
Yeah, what's that?

Ben:
It's a startup that they provide basically a smart VPN. It's like a vpn with some magic sprinkles on top. Basically they take a WireGuard which is a late generation VPN product. So you might be familiar with stuff like OpenVPN or even way back in the day Cisco stuff that was done on hardware. But WireGuard is the latest generation of VPN software which is actually not crazy to setup. It's actually reasonably easy to use.

Ben:
And then Tailscale took that to the next level with making it super easy to just connect to whatever. So basically you run their little agent and you can VPN into your network without even having to worry about the stuff. They do the authentication for example, through Google Login or through Octa or whatever. So you don't have to hop on a box and create keys and send out stuff to people one on one. It's basically all just magic.

Ben:
So I was playing with that this morning and it's really quite neat. I was like, "Okay." Well, I'm on my iPad reading about it and I'm like, "Well, just install this iOS." I'm like, "Great." So now I have a in thing. Then it gives you IP addresses for all your internal stuff. It's really cool. We already have VPN for our stuff but I thought that was, well, do a switch.

Josh:
Yeah. At this rate we wouldn't even need to pass our those OpenVPN files or whatever. That would be nice.

Ben:
Yeah. And they have ECLs and stuff. So you can say, "Oh well, the marketing person gets access to the internal dashboard but doesn't get access to SSH to these servers." And then of course there's audit trails and stuff.

Josh:
That's pretty cool.

Starr:
That's really cool.

Ben:
Yeah. It's pretty handy.

Starr:
Yeah. On their features it says magic DNS. I think we need a little more magic in our lives. So I'm going to... Yeah. But that would be useful even if you are... I don't know. I can imagine it being useful if you are traveling and you want to go on your home network even. That would be pretty nice.

Ben:
Yeah, I was thinking about replacing my laptop with a Mac Mini and just leaving it in my office and then using Tailscale to hop in if I ever needed it to do anything. Most of the stuff is getting whatever. It's like I just do it at home from a different machine. But I was just like, "Well, maybe there is that one thing that I'm going to have on my machine at work and I want to have at night." So I was like, "Oh, Tailscale." Put that on there and, yeah. Fun toys.

Starr:
Yeah. It's pretty neat. 

Ben:
Not where they do security though. I have been spending all week on customer stuff like sales stuff, marketing stuff.

Starr:
How's that thing going?

Ben:
Well, I've been floundering a little bit. It's not my background and so everything is more difficult that it seems like it should be. There seems like there's a lot of friction there. Like for example, the early part of the week, we had some suggestions from Harris about some changes that we could make to the website. And-

Starr:
Yeah. Harris is a sales consultant guru guy. Okay.

Ben:
And then we had some other suggestions from another good friend of ours that we can make. So I was looking at the home page and it's like, "Man, copyrighting is hard." It's like getting into that mindset of, okay, what's your customer perspective? When they come to this page and you have a candidate here who's interested, what do they want to see? And then trying to get in that mindset and then come up with some copy that speaks to that mindset.

Ben:
I know that there's this notion of, you go get your customer's voice from reviews and things like that. But sometimes you just got to create stuff. I don't know. So I've been doing that and it's not a skill that I have worked on developing and so it feels very painful to try and come up with it. It's like, "Oh really, this stuff is taking a lot of energy and a lot of effort. I really don't want to do this. I'd rather go plug into some VPN or something."

Starr:
I remember, I think it may have been after a MicroConf or after... I don't think it was Bacon Biz but maybe even that first Bacon Biz we went to. We were having dinner with Reuben Gomez and talking about our homepage. He was like, "Well, what does your customer want when they come to this homepage? What are they looking for?" I was just like, "I don't know. I have no idea. This is so hard."

Ben:
Yeah. It's hard to ask too.

Starr:
Yeah. People don't even know. People can't tell you. People don't know what they want.

Ben:
Yeah, yeah. That was the whole point of that switch workshop that I did way back, several years ago, talking about jobs to be done and getting in the mind of your customer. Why are they showing up today? Why are they checking it out? I've also been emailing people, like we talked about before, emailing people who are signing up and seeing how they're doing getting engaged with the product. And crickets. Zero responses. I think I've gotten one response. I sent dozens of emails, each one hand crafted but zero, maybe one response. That's tough. That's real tough. When you do the work and you don't see any results, that's a challenge.

Josh:
Those emails, we've tried it. We've made a few attempts at eliciting a response from people that are signing up like that. If you think about the number of products that you sign up for that you get emails from the founders and the number of them that you respond to, I think people are just overwhelmed with that particular channel or whatever. I think it's programmed into your head like, "Oh I'm going to sign up for this, I'm probably going to get a flood of emails and I'm just going to ignore most of them because they're run of the mill onboarding or looking for feedback."

Ben:
Yeah. We actually had one person cancel recently who was in the trial period. They said, "Yeah, you send me too many emails." That's not why they canceled but that was part of their message when they left. I was like-

Josh:
I listen to those people.

Ben:
Yeah. Maybe I should just turn off all of our automated emails and just send the one from me.

Starr:
There you go.

Ben:
Try that for a few weeks and-

Starr:
There you go.

Ben:
Our emails, we put so much work into them. Those videos are awesome. I don't know.

Josh:
I think it's pretty well established that emails work pretty well for most people. I think you have a... There's always that vocal few that just hate emails. So you're going to hear from them much more than you're going to hear from people that actually read the emails I think.

Starr:
I wonder if it would be more successful to use something like a chat widget where it's like they're in the product, you're the only message happening there. They're not surrounded... Your message isn't buried in 50 other messages from 50 other companies.

Josh:
Yeah. But we get the responses from the... When you sign up the into introductions thing.

Ben:
Yeah, the onboarding.

Josh:
I was surprised with the number of people that actually filled that out. It's much higher than the response rate that we get on that kind of email that you send. Even if it's personal. I've never been able to see a difference between personally emailing someone versus having an auto respond. I think everyone just assumes they're automated. Personalization is so good these days that it's really, I think, it's really hard to tell from the user's perspective unless the entire email is literally about them.

Starr:
Yeah. I suspect a lot of people use email like they I do. Which is I just give it a quick scan and if it's not immediately applicable to me I just delete it. So, it could be a custom written email but I'm just like, "Oh, this is a company I didn't ask for. Okay, this is spam, just delete."

Josh:
Yeah, maybe just go get that Ubiquiti dump and put their social security number in the subject line or something.

Starr:
There you go.

Josh:
Just to show them that you care.

Starr:
There you go. That'd be awesome.

Josh:
Let's really personalize it. Your date of birth is-

Ben:
Then even some, those emails that you get, like, "I saw you on your webcam. Send me bitcoin or else I'll send this video out to the world."

Starr:
There you go.

Josh:
Are you saying we should extort responses?

Ben:
Exactly.

Starr:
Yeah. That's one thing that we've dealt with for a long time which is just a lot of the things that people say to do, we do and then it's just you don't hear anything. It's like, "Okay. Is it me? Do you just not like me?"

Josh:
Have you tried bribery though?

Ben:
No, I haven't tried bribery.

Josh:
Bribery might work. Offer a 50 or $100 gift card or something to someone and-

Starr:
Yeah. Or even a free t-shirt.

Josh:
Well, the free t-shirts work for our credit card thing. My feeling is that you'd want to go a little bit... You could try the free t-shirt thing for the email you're talking about, the feedback thing. But if you really want to sit down with someone, if your goal is to get them on a Zoom call or something and just pick their brain, give them something of real value. Because that's valuable. Think about what their time is worth. It should be at least comparable to their time and probably a little bit more just for the contact switching cost. So I can see it happening. You were talking about developers here.

Ben:
That's good. Yeah. So, "If you respond to this email, I'll give you a free t-shirt. If you get on a call with me, I'll give you a $50 gift card."

Josh:
There you go. Have some tiers.

Ben:
Choose your reward level. Then when you do an onsite thing once COVID travel is not a problem anymore, and then we could do time share presentation thing where they come in for four hours at a resort or something. Have you ever done one of those?

Starr:
No. Of course not.

Josh:
I know that that's a thing. People totally-

Starr:
My in laws do.

Josh:
They like to game the system.

Starr:
Yeah. We went and stayed at their timeshare in Mexico one time which was nice and they had to go to some seminars or some, I don't know, sales presentation, something like that.

Ben:
It's just either you pay in money or you pay in time. They figure, "Huh, I could pay in time. That's fine."

Josh:
Well, a lot of the Timeshare places, you can just stay at them like a hotel. But if you do, they still give you that offer of you get whatever, a $200 gift card. It's usually a fairly decent offer. But then you got to go spend whatever, an entire morning or more at their sales thing. But I know people that don't own Timeshares but they stay at Timeshares. They will go to those things just to get the prize and then they have no intent... They know what they're doing and they still go to them.

Starr:
Yeah. That's so funny. There's so many different kinds of people in the world. Because I would rather stay home.

Josh:
Yeah, same here. There's no amount you could pay me, there's no amount you could pay me to, yeah, sit through one of those.

Starr:
Yeah. The more complicated some system is for me to pay for something, the more I think I'm just getting ripped off. It's like, "Okay, it's a hotel room, it costs $200." Verus, "Well, it costs this much, but if you have three friends stay with you, you can activate the 20% bonus round where you get to shoot three basketball hoops." It's like somebody has done the stats on this and I'm going to lose.

Ben:
The LTD must be just insane for their customers. To be able to have X amount of employees at the facility for Y amount of hours and then whatever else they do for you while you're there, that's a fair amount of money you're putting into that marketing engine.

Josh:
Timeshares are not cheap.

Starr:
No, they're not. Yeah, so this week I've been looking a little bit into conversion of free users which is pretty interesting. At least conversion of basic users I would say. We've had different free plans over the years. The most recent one is basic. So yeah, I still need to... I'm going to do a little video I think and go through everything. But the gist of it is I think we're looking at around... If you consider all... We have this question.

Starr:
We want to possible alter the free quota, the free error quota, to try and get more people to upgrade. Because right now, very few people who are on the basic plan, actually use the quota number of errors. So I was like, "Okay, well, how do you decide what the actual quota is that you want?" So, as part of this discussion, Josh was like, "Well, can we actually see what our existing conversion rate is among people who go over quota who are on the basic plan?"

Starr:
That conversion rate is around 30% at least in the sample of data I looked at. If you look at people in North America, it gets up to I think around 55%. It's pretty high.

Josh:
Not bad.

Starr:
So that's just one more factor to be at play by. Honestly, I was really gratified to see when people need to upgrade, a lot of them do. I think that's a pretty good number. I don't know. It's just fun getting to mess with that stuff. I got to use JupyterLab which is this, I've talked about it before, it's this data science thing. I don't know. It's just fun.

Ben:
Now, did you also look at the overall free to paid conversion ratio? I know I did a quick query or two about that. But I was wondering if you dug into that any more.

Starr:
Yeah. So just to be clear, I only looked at... I basically only looked at accounts created this year and that were created with the basic plan. So, there'll be some people who get left out of that if you start with a paid account and then you downgrade to basic but then you go over quota. You're not counted in this, because that's just getting too complicated.

Starr:
So with that caveat, the total... If you just divide total people who upgrade from basic divided by total number of basic accounts, that is around two percent, which I think is roughly in like with what we saw before or what you were seeing. If you look at North America, it's about double that. Well, then the obvious question is, okay, well why is it so low?

Starr:
It's like, well, one reason is probably that... If you look at that same group and say, okay, "How many of these people went over their quota at least once?" Well, that's five percent, I think, if I'm remembering correctly. So five percent of all basic users ever went over quota. So the rest of them were just never in a situation where they needed to upgrade.

Ben:
Yeah. They're not going to upgrade just out of the generosity of their hearts just so they can pay us.

Starr:
Oh no. Who would do that?

Ben:
But two to four percent is a pretty... That's in the range of typical freemium conversion ratios I think if I'm up on my current stats. That's what I've heard on the internet anyway.

Starr:
Yeah, I don't know. At some point you have to wonder what's worth it. It's a pretty low number of absolute conversions. Right?

Josh:
Yes. We never had the free plan before.

Starr:
Yeah. We have 10 times the number of free sign ups, then yeah, maybe it would be a higher absolute value of users. So it's like-

Ben:
Yeah. We've had that plan in place for about a year now. I was looking at these stats with Harris actually. He was walking me through some of that stuff. I happened to look back and... We launched them in March of last year. I think the key is with a two to four percent conversion ratio, depending on North America versus not, I think that's fine if you say, "Well, the costs aren't that high both in processing, data storage, et cetera, and also in customer service."

Ben:
For us, that's been the case. We don't have an overwhelming wave of basic customers who are soaking all of our customers for a time. And of course we have the quotas in place to keep them from soaking up all of our real, hard costs. So I'd say overall it's been good. I think it's successful.

Josh:
Yeah. I think as long as it's, yeah, as long as it's not costing us much, the way I look at it is it's a way to spread potentially more word of mouth. Increase word of mouth basically. Because the more fans of Honeybadger there are in the world, the better it is for us in the long run I assume. The more people that are potentially going to mention us to their friends and to their companies or potentially use us when they actually need something for a larger project or whatever. If they're already using Honeybadger, they've been using it for years as a free user, then we might see a return on that in the future.

Starr:
Yeah. That's a good point. Still, though, if you could double the amount of new customers we get from free plan users without causing a significant harm, why not? It's just, I don't know. So much of business just seems to be about making these minor, little improvements that just get you... What did the people at Turn/River call it that you like so much Ben like blocking and tackling? Just these little bitty wins.

Ben:
They're additive. You keep on stacking them and over time it makes a bigger difference. One of our-

Starr:
Yeah, exactly.

Ben:
One of our competitors, the way they try and keep a lid on their freemium support costs is they don't offer support to freemium customers. It's one of their features on their feature grid. Email support, crossed out if you're on their freemium. Yeah, that seems, I don't know, that... If you're going to have a customer, even if they're a free customer, I think you should probably acknowledge their presence by answering their support emails. That's all I'm saying.

Starr:
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. That seems reasonable to me. At the same time it's like, "Well, these people are signing up for this free service, we're giving to them something. The fact that we have given them something doesn't obligate us to give them the same thing for the rest of their life." It's this weird thing where you feel reluctant to change anything but at the same time it's like you're literally just giving somebody something with the hope that it will make you money in the end.

Starr:
I don't know. I totally get the hesitation to make changes that people might not think are cool and we want to be cool and everything. But in the end it's like, "Oh no, I signed up for this free service with the understanding that this company is going to try and make money off of me. Oh no, they're trying to make money off of me, I'm offended." I don't know, it just seems like part of the deal.

Starr:
It's like you got to... We have these plans and we just have to tweak them, adjust them, try and increase growth here or there. I don't know. I think it may be possible to make free plans a more significant driver of growth-

Ben:
Well, that'd be cool.

Starr:
... than it currently is.

Ben:
If we can double that conversion ratio, I'd be pretty excited about that.

Starr:
Yeah. Another thing I'm working on, I've got a table and a chart. So, if you're a visual learner you can use the chart. But if you prefer a table you got that too. Where it's just different error quotas and then projected increase in number of new paid accounts per month. I'm just giving you all a menu to choose from. I'm just your waitress. I'm just-

Josh:
Yeah, I liked Jupyter in that it inlines the equations. Does it build equations later on in the, whatever, in the document, build on previous ones or something? Is that how it works or?

Starr:
Yeah, yeah. So they're not really equations it's just Python code. Imagine you've got an IRB session and in between the little blocks of code that you have in IRB, you can just add markdown to explain what that is. That's all it is.

Josh:
Yeah, I like that. And then it shows the code inline. Yeah.

Starr:
Yeah. So if you do a-

Josh:
That's pretty cool.

Starr:
... calculation up at the top and you assign it to a variable, it's a global variable. It's still down at the bottom.

Josh:
Yeah. It reminds me of a super advanced way to do napkin math which I'm a big fan of always.

Starr:
Exactly, yeah.

Josh:
But you could then convert that data into charts and pretty things like you were saying.

Starr:
Yeah. I like Jupyter. It includes the code with the output not only because it makes it easier to play around with but also it's... I don't know. Whenever I do analyses like these, I always worry that I'm not... It's like I'm just using some secret process over here. It turns out that I had a big problem with it and nobody's looking through my source file. So they don't know this. They just see the output which looks fine. But at least this way it's like there's a little bit of a sanity check. People can say, "Oh, that's actually wrong."

Ben:
Yeah, I know that feeling. I had a random thought about the free.

Starr:
Yeah, what's that?

Ben:
This random thought was first prompted a few weeks ago as I was working on setting up Front. So we recently switched from Help Scout to Front for our customer support and other shared inboxes. As I was working on setting up Front, for some reason I was logged in to one browser and then logged in again from another browser, I don't remember what I was doing, but as I did so, Front booted me out of my other browser. So I signed into browser A and then I signed in on browser B.

Ben:
When I signed in on browser B, I got kicked out on browser A. I was like, "Oh, I guess they're probably..." It might be a security thing. Or what it's more likely, is since they bill on number of users, they're probably detecting if a user tries to share their credentials and using multiple browsers then they're going to prevent that, right?

Starr:
Yeah.

Ben:
So that was my thought. So, a random thought for free is I wonder if some people are using basic more than they should by sharing a login. Because we do have a limit on the number of users.

Starr:
Naughty, naughty. Some people are blushing right now Ben, yeah, some people know we're onto them.

Ben:
So I was like, "Maybe we should have some session fixation and enforcement happening there to check that. But I don't know if it'd be worth writing the code to do that.

Starr:
I think for free users we should popup the little live stream video window in the corner that's just scowling at them. Just looking at them really harshly.

Ben:
We love our free customers.

Starr:
I know. It sounds like we hate... We don't hate people. It's just, yeah-

Ben:
We're just capitalists.

Starr:
It's just a matter of, "Well, should maybe more than five percent of our free users face a choice to upgrade or not?" That seems pretty low to me. I don't know.

Ben:
They can just think of it as we're encouraging them to exercise their capacity as human agents. To exercise their free will.

Josh:
We already give people three users on our free plan. So, at this point, maybe they don't need to share logins. I could see back when it was the one user plan, I imagine people were doing that. If we move back to it, like I would say, yeah, maybe we should think about that.

Starr:
Yeah. I don't know. There was all sorts of fun things that we're not going to do because they're just mean. Like Josh had thought of doing a black and white color scheme. I think we talked about this last show. It's just-

Josh:
Make it ugly.

Starr:
It's just us making up fun ways to annoy free users.

Josh:
No, but I think finding ways to make the paid version cooler is definitely- there's nothing wrong with that.

Starr:
Get an animated mascot.

Ben:
Speaking of, although this is going to apply to free as well, talking about making the product cooler, by the time this episode drops, we'll have a big feature released courtesy of Kevin, who spent the last little while working on an upgrade to our Slack integration. So now, you have the opportunity to... If you're a lover of threads and Slack, then you'll love this change because we're now using threads quite a bit between Slack and Honeybadger.

Ben:
For example, we'll get an alert and that'll create a message in Slack. If you reply to that message, then that will be added as a comment to the error in Honeybadger and back and forth. If you comment in Honeybadger, it'll show up in the Slack thread.

Starr:
Pretty cool.

Ben:
... also some interaction there. So yeah, looking forward to that. Kevin's really looking forward to it because he's tired of working on it. It's been baking for a while.

Josh:
It's a big effort.

Ben:
Yeah. And we've been using it internally for quite a while and it's great. Even me, as a person who does not love threads in Slack, I still love this feature. I think it's going to be great.

Josh:
Well, he made it an option for you so that you can turn the threading off if you want to. So if you don't like threads, they're not forced upon you. But I have to admit, this is a really cool workflow idea use case for Slack that I haven't seen... I don't think I've seen this anywhere. People might be doing this but I haven't seen it.

Josh:
Also, it has all the embedded actions too that you would have in the Honeybadger UI for managing errors. I think the ideas that it gives you, it's just another UI alternative to our web app. So for people who don't want to use the web application, or don't want to spend as much time on their browser, or maybe they just like Slack centric workflows, this gets you closer to just being able to use Slack as your interface to Honeybadger basically.

Ben:
Yeah. It's pretty cool. We had considered making this a feature that was not available to the free users. Maybe this could encourage people to upgrade. But in the end we thought, "Well, this is just so cool, let's just go ahead and give it to everybody." So I don't know if that was the right decision but that's the way we're going so far. I think people like. I hope people like it.

Josh:
Limiting Slack on the free plan would be potentially... That would be interesting though because it's such... So many people use it. I'd be tempted to upgrade for something like Slack if I didn't have it. But we have always taken the approach of giving those... Whatever the ones that everyone use like Slack and GitHub, those are the ones that we make available and then-

Ben:
Hold back on Jira. Yeah.

Starr:
The understanding I'm coming to about free users is that they tend not to upgrade for nice to have things. Maybe this is just users in general. So I have a hard time really imagining that many free users upgrading for a really cool threaded Slack back and forth type thing. But if they needed to access GitHub in slack and they couldn't do that on a free plan, that seems pretty like a need to have verus a want to have.

Josh:
Yeah. That's what I was talking about by the way. No GitHub in Slack basically.

Starr:
So free plans only get, they only get to send messages, to send errors to Atlassian products. It's the reverse of a lot of enterprising. It's like free users can only send things to the enterprise products that nobody wants to use.

Ben:
I like that line. I think-

Josh:
That's extra evil. Because if the free plan also has the error limit that would drive you insane if you're someone who's already using Jira because you're some enterprise sign up, so there's no way that you can use the product without upgrading.

Ben:
Yeah. We could do logins where you can't login with an email address, you have to use Octa.

Starr:
There you go.

Ben:
You have to use an SSO provider to be able to login.

Starr:
Since we're thinking outside the box, I've got a good one. So, instead of having an error quota for free users, we can have a number of errors. So it doesn't matter if you send us 100 errors. If your quota is 10,000, you're getting 10,000 error messages.

Josh:
We'll fill in the gaps.

Starr:
Yeah. We'll make ones up. We'll make some up.

Ben:
That's pretty good. I like it.

Josh:
They all come in at the end of the month like we have a window. It's like-

Ben:
Gotta meet your quota. Here they are.

Starr:
Yeah. It's a weird back and forth because I love our customers, I have every intention of being cool to them. I want us to be cool and for people to like us. At the same time it's like, "Well, it's our job to try and optimize the business and make money." I don't know. So it's like you don't want to go full on Intercom with it and just steal money out of people's pants when they're in the shower. But at the same time it's like, maybe we can, I don't know, make people happy to let us rifle through their pants while in the shower. I don't know.

Ben:
At the same time, our kids still got to eat. Got to put shoes on the kids' feet.

Starr:
I know. I know. Shoeless and starving.

Starr:
So you've been listening to FounderQuest. Go give us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever. If you want to write for us, then check out our write for us page. Just go to www.honeybadger.io, go to the blog, look at the write for us link, click on it, read through the whole thing and follow the instructions to a T. Yeah, when you do, a coded message will appear via carrier pigeon on your desk within two hours.

Ben:
That's service.

Starr:
It is. It is. We really believe in service with a smile.

Ben:
Will the pigeon be smiling?

Starr:
I think that's physically impossible. But I think they're always smiling inside.

Ben:
No doubt.



Subscribe

Listen to FounderQuest using one of many popular podcasting apps or directories.

Apple Podcasts Spotify Overcast Pocket Casts Amazon Music YouTube
← Previous · All Episodes · Next →