Our Big Hairy Audacious Goal

FounderQuest S5E6
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Hey, Ben, how was your vacation?

Ben: yeah, my vacation was pretty good actually, so I got a little distracted by work projects that I couldn't just put down So I worked a bit more than I

Josh: through for you from you.

Ben: but I'm but I had a good vacation. How about you? How was yours?

Josh: Nice. Yeah, it was good. I think I worked a little bit less than you did, but it was, it was restful and got to hang out with the family a lot. And it actually felt like a pretty long vacation from two weeks. I was able to feel like it was a vacation by the end of it.

Yeah,

Ben: I think I got a solid week

Josh: that's pretty

and you had fun, right? You had fun on, on your work projects.[00:01:00]

It was, uh, you were driven to do it.

Ben: Yeah. I don't know where I picked up this concept, but it was, the idea that there are activities that you do that bring energy or add energy.

And there are some that take away energy. some people argue that, you shouldn't work on weekends and you shouldn't, do this and shouldn't do that. I'm like, you know what, if it brings you energy,Great. Do that.

in moderation, of course. you don't want to work. 80 hours a week, even if that gives you a lot of energy because you're kind of out of balance, right?

Josh: It's not sustainable at that

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. I enjoyed my work. I enjoyed the, the mental challenge, the puzzle solving aspect of it. And, as long as it's not taking away time from family and I'm giving myself some downtime, which I did, I think it's okay.

Do those work on the weekends or maybe not quite take two weeks vacation, only take one, that sort of stuff.

Josh: Yeah. Nice. so what did you work on?

Ben: So, um, before Christmas, I started working on, replacing our uptime, stuff. So we have all of our uptime checks running in Lambda and, They're running on, they're all written in JavaScript, and I can't remember which node runtime it is, but whichever one it is, it's now, past the supported window, and so those Lambda functions will still work, but, Amazon likes to, prod you a little bit to get onto the latest and greatest node and Well, I'm tired of being on the node upgrade treadmill to be honest.

And so I decided to rewrite them all and go and So that's what I did before Christmas. So that was kind of fun. And then After Christmas, I am as part of our as part of our cost savings measure, you know He talks in the talk previously about we're joking phrase to cut costs And one of the things that costs us a fair amount of money is our elastic search cluster.

it's not cheap and I don't love it. Like it, it does the job, but it's not super fast and it's not great to work with. thankfully it's low maintenance and so it's not much of a headache, but still I thought, well, you know what? Why don't I try replacing search?

holiday project. Yeah,

yeah. So that was my post Christmas project. and, I think what's number five or number six of our grand revisions to our search, implementation. but,

Josh: say, yeah, I remember we ran like solar even at one point back in the day, didn't we? And I remember you replacing that and that was like a huge victory for us.

Ben: Yeah. Elasticsearch replaced Solr and that was huge. Yeah. so this time, we've been playing with Clickhouse for Insights and I thought, why not give Clickhouse a try? It's fast. You know, it does things. Uh, and frankly, we don't use the advanced stuff in Elasticsearch. We don't do, The deep, I don't know, all the things we just do plain string matching. I mean, basically an I like is enough for what we really need for our customers. Right. And I mean, ClickHouse can do that. So anyway, import a whole bunch of data into the ClickHouse ran some queries. I'm like, yeah, this works really well.

so to be continued, it's not finished, but I'm pretty excited. I like, query times returning in milliseconds rather than seconds. You know, it's kind of a big deal.

Josh: Yeah. And not to mention like not having to run Elasticsearch eventually. and just, we're already going to be running ClickHouse and we happen to have a great [00:04:00] ClickHouse hosting provider, I believe so.

Ben: Yeah. In fact, I got to interact with them over the holidays because as I was loading all this data into ClickHouse from the past six months, I started running into some problems with, ClickHouse internals that, and you know, I'm, I'm kind of a ClickHouse newbie and so I don't always do things the best way.

And I found a bad way to do things. And I, so I reached out to their support. And, they were super helpful in explaining to me what I, what problem I was causing and how to fix it. So yeah, shout out to double cloud for their great customer support.

Josh: Yeah. We like double cloud so far.

Ben: So yeah. And like you said, like we were going to run Clickhouse anyway for insights.

So let's try it. So yeah, if we can cut out that Elasticsearch cost and get better results, I'm all for that.

Josh: Cool. Well, you kept your tradition of replacing a data store, while I was on vacation. So nice job.

Yeah. Yeah. And still got to play some board games and, you know, hang out with the family. Yeah. We did some cards and things like that. It's nice.

Ben: Did you get anything fun for Christmas?

Josh: Oh,let me see. yeah, I did. I'm blanking on all the good stuff though.

Ben: Or,

Josh: blur. I got some good things. I got people some good things for Christmas. I got my wife, Caitlin, a,PC, a gaming PC, like black Friday deals, but she's been playing a Baldur's Gate, just like a Dungeons and Dragons inspired, role playing.

Game and, she's been playing it on her M one, Mac, which is just like the base, like whatever the first M one was that they released, but it was choppy and wasn't really keeping up with the game. so, uh, figured if she's going to be a gamer, she needs to have a PC. So, I was pretty stoked to get some good deals on, uh, monitor and, uh, tower and everything.

Ben: That's cool.

Josh: So she was very excited.

Ben: Nice.

Josh: you?

Ben: I Gave some cool things and I got some cool things. one of the cool things I got was a little, stand for my monitor. So I can actually use my iPhone as my webcam. And, uh, it's not a big deal, but I thought it was really fun. And, so now I get the fun, stage manager [00:06:00] thing where it follows me around and stuff and didn't have to spend however much money I want a studio display.

It actually has that built in.

Josh: Yeah, that's cool. I haven't looked into like using the iPhone, integrating the iPhone into my setup yet.

Definitely makes a better webcam than just about anything, anything out there. Except for the DSLR setup that people do, which I actually do have a DSLR. I could do that with, and I have in the past, but I just, I ended up taking it off my desk just cause it's huge and I really don't, I don't need that level of production,at this juncture, so

Ben: Right.

Josh: if I get on Twitch or something, maybe I'll pull it out again.

Ben: Yeah. You're not a Twitch streamer yet,

Josh: not, yeah, I'm not doing my, yeah, whatever live coding, we'll see. Maybe, maybe I'll come around to the influencer life this year. Got to do what it takes. Right. I gotta say like this week, I'm struggling to get back into the swing of things this week. maybe it's the fact that there was, you know, it's like a, it's already a short week and we're kind of jumping in right off the end of a holiday and we've got a big year ahead of us, but it's, I will [00:07:00] say that it's been a little bit of a struggle to, get in the, get back into

Ben: Yeah, I was thinking about that, this week. I'm all for like jumping in on January 2nd, you know, and just diving in and going full tilt. But, Roel right now is on vacation because his kids are out of school this week. so I guess they were out last week and this week versus hours.

They were out the prior two weeks and they're back this week. And so I was just kind of weighing okay, would I, how would I like to take off the first week of January and relax like I don't know. I guess that might be nice. So so you're saying yeah, that would be that would be kind of nice

Josh: I think it would be, although it might just be deferring the, like the first of the year jitters until the second week. But I do think, I feel like we did have a late start one of the past years. I don't know if it was a full week or not, but I do think that,kind of like having low expectations for the first week or two.

is not a bad thing to kind of ease back into the year. Also, I am off. Next week. so that's the silver lining here is that I do get, I'm like back in for this week and then I get to take a little bit of a [00:08:00] break next week as I, well, maybe a break. We'll see. Taking the family to visit, the grandparents, taking the kids to visit the grandparents, out of state, that, that may be a vacation.

It may not. Um, I, but I have high hopes for it.

Ben: Well,if the vacation doesn't include Disneyland then your chances are higher that it's gonna be an actual vacation, right

Josh: Yeah. Yeah. I think,this is, it should be pretty, yeah. Pretty low key, and there's it's nice weather there, and everyone has pools and everything, so I'm hoping that it'll be kind of like relaxing, like pool days and that sort of thing.

Ben: nice,

Josh: think we might hit up the zoo.

Ben: Well, that's one benefit, I think, of living in the Pacific Northwest at this time of year. Like, it's so dreary outside that you might as well go inside and work.

Josh: Yeah. Yeah, the winter is kind of the time to work. And I've come to like that. it gives you permission to work really hard in the winter, because you know you're going to like, For a lot of the summer,

Ben: You're planning on goofing off in the

Josh: I'm, yeah, which I'm totally doing again.

Um, but yeah, it's, and it works [00:09:00] well cause the summers are so beautiful up here and there's so much fun things to do outside away from a computer screen.

Ben: Yeah. you can relax for the rest of the week. You know, we're coming near the end. We're cruising here on Thursday and Friday. You can just get that vacation prep mindset going and just write this week off.

Josh: I might, yeah. I might check out early tomorrow and Go see a movie or something. I haven't checked what's playing, but that's been my like relaxation thing lately is, taking Fridays a little easier and going and whatever, going to a matinee or something like that.

Ben: yeah, totally. One of the benefits of, being a owner of the business, right? You can do that. Take off in the middle of a Friday. Do whatever you want. I heard that, uh, speaking of movies, that, uh, Godzilla minus one is very good. Have you

Josh: I really want to see that. I've heard, um, I've heard similar things about it and I have not seen it yet. So. If that's still in theaters, that might be what I opt for.

Ben: Yeah, I got invited to go out with a bunch of guys and go see that over the break and I missed it [00:10:00] But one of the reasons I mean I had a conflict, but I was also hesitant cuz like a it's a Godzilla movie but be like the last movie I saw in a theater was like the last Star Wars movie Because it was just so loud and I'm just like, I don't need this in my life I don't need to go deaf just to watch a movie, But I heard the movie was really good and it's not like a bad Godzilla movie, it's actually excellent.

And, uh, and my wife's like, well, just wear earplugs. I'm like, I would feel

Josh: Yeah, I've, I've heard people do that. Yeah. different people are, yeah, some people are more sensitive to the sound than others too. so yeah, there's no, no problem with that. actually my daughter, Tatum is, I've been started taking the kids just to see movies, lately. And they're kind of starting to be that age where they can sit through a movie and basically, but she's had the same complaint.

Ben: She's like, why is it so loud in here? Like, and it is they really crank it up. So there you go. If you feel like going to see a movie tomorrow, go, maybe go check out

Josh: yeah, yeah, I might do that.

Ben: And maybe we can go together [00:11:00] remotely, you know, I can put in some

Josh: Yeah.

Ben: and we

Josh: There you go.

Ben: out.

Josh: Nice. Yeah, anytime.

Ben: Well, one of the things that I thought of over the break, you know, thinking about the getting insights launched and, what can help us get motivated to, Get it out the door. Right. Cause you know, that last, that last 10 percent of the project takes the last, 90 percent of the time is the classic thing we got in our world.

Josh: And we're in that 10 percent

Ben: and when that, yeah, we're totally in that 10%, like there's so many little things that you discover, like, oh yeah, and we need this and we need that. And what about billing? You know, those, those minor details when you go to launch a new thing. and so I was thinking like, earlier this week, like what can really like, give us a rallying cry, can really motivate us to just buckle down and get this out the door.

And I had this random thought, how can we get a hundred customers paying us a hundred dollars a month for this new feature by the end of March? At the first quarter. And so I threw that out there. I'm like, Hey, let's try this. And like, I was kind of nervous about saying that. Cause like, Hey, we haven't typically set revenue based goals.

Honey badger. we're [00:12:00] kind of laid back, you know, like that. And, and B I'm like, I have no idea how we would actually achieve that goal. So maybe that's more of a wish than a goal, but

Josh: I thought that was an exciting challenge anyway.

yeah, I love it. it's good to put an audacious goal out there and I don't have really any idea how we'll do it either, but we've started brainstorming ideas and,that's coming together. I think like in the past, it's been, hard to predict outcomes like that because you really just, you don't know.

Um, I mean, I don't know if anyone's gonna buy this new thing we have. like I have a really good, um, feelingthat people will, but, we'll see if we can get a hundred, but this is this could be our current customers too, to be clear. So we want basically a hundred people paying for this new thing, paying a hundred dollars more.

So if we can convince some of our existing customers to upgrade, which I think is probably our best shot to, uh, to achieve this. Then, if we even got to half of it or 75 percent or, or even exceeded the goal, yeah. I think it's good to have something to [00:13:00] shoot for though.

And it'll put some time pressure on us, to have a date. And, now that we're talking about on the podcast, then we'll have to hold us ourselves to it, I guess.

Ben: Yeah, yeah, when you proposed this, for the podcast material, I was like, Oh, wait, now we're going to be accountable for it.

Josh: we're going in on it. so a hundred by 100 or whatever we're calling this, that's, March 31st is when we're going to, uh, I guess we'll have to do a, um, a retrospective episode or something and, and say how we

Ben: So, so if you never hear about this again, then you can, you can, you

Josh: hear us bring this up again, then just please forget it, forget about it.

Ben: Do not ask.

Josh: no, but it's good to plant a flag, right? Like if nothing else, it makes great content.

Ben: It does. Yeah. Yeah. and I think it's one of the things that I think is useful about a big, hairy, audacious goal like that is to kind of shake out some of the cobwebs and like they make you think like, okay, well, how would we accomplish that? And I think you, I know I get into a groove of here's my daily thing.

Here's my next task. And I don't [00:14:00] think big usually, right. I

Josh: Mm hmm.

Ben: And I think having a big goal like that says, okay, I have no idea how I do that. So let's think about it. And I think that's been useful in that we came out with a bunch of ideas on things that we could do. I mean, we came out with a list of ideas of things we could do that's much longer than the list of things that we actually have time to do.

but any one or two of those things that I was on that list that we would do would be a good thing, I think. Like, it would get us closer to the goal, even if we didn't actually match the goal. So I'm personally, I'm a goal setter. I love goals. And I love the idea of, let's try and do something big.

And because anything will be a success at that point,

Josh: Well, it seems like a win to me because, I mean, even if it's the worst case scenario, we actually ship the thing. if it even encourages us to do that, then it's a win in my opinion. if we can ship a little faster because we're a little bit more motivated and,and hopefully

we'll be able to capture some of those, customers. and I think we will, like, I don't know if it will be a hundred or more than a hundred or. or what, but based on what people are saying so far, [00:15:00] I think we could get a few customers today, if we had pricing done.

Ben: Right.

Josh: So, I guess we could talk about, some of the things we need to do in the meantime. and then maybe a few of the ideas we have to actually get those a hundred customers after we have the ability to charge people for it, or for people to pay us, I think, pricing is probably the thing, um, cause people do need to pay, be able to pay you for a new feature or a new product.

but then also we, we have some like foundational things that we're rolling out, like the UI changes we've been working on So we want to give people some. time to get used to that and have it out there before we introduce this other big thing that we're adding to the product.

Um, so this is kind of a a two stage rollout. so we're going to roll out some UI changes, hopefully in the next month or so, or sooner. and then in the meantime, I think the products pretty much. Ready, otherwise, aside from pricing and a few backend things, that I think we need to do, make sure that, there's like some throttling [00:16:00] maybe so people don't overwhelm us, add in some of the safeguards that we haven't really needed for our own consumption.

but I, it feels like there's not too much left to do on the actual product side,which is pretty exciting.

Ben: Yeah, I think the functionality itself is pretty solid. Like we've had people using it and people outside of us using it for a number of weeks now and haven't encountered any real showstoppers. so yeah, I'm feeling pretty good about that. Some of the features that we deployed in December were like the badger sense was really cool.

Yeah, I think figuring out the pricing has also been top of mind for me for the past month or so and I think I'm feeling pretty good about a plan there about how we're going to tier that. We're thinking a long, long time. Like, do we do just plain old usage based? Uh, we're straight up like AWS does where we, you know, basically bill you pennies.

for gigs, or are we going to some sort of tiered thing, which is what we already do today, and we're more comfortable with. And I think we're pretty much settled on. We're going to go with a tier approach one because that's what we know. But a two [00:17:00] also just from a business point of view, it's.

It feels better to have tiers because you can have a better idea of, you know, projection of revenues versus a straight up usage thing was like, I have no idea what our revenue is going to be next month, right? Because who knows how much people are going to use? and you also get to build in, I think, you get to avoid the trap of like cost plus.

Like if you do a plain old uses based thing, I start to tend towards this idea like, okay, whatever we pay, then if we, charge X pennies more than that, then we're good. And that's, not necessarily the best way to get the most value, from the product that you're offering.

And we have, we have other things that we might want to add later that also wouldn't fit into the usage base necessarily. So I think tiering is definitely the way we're going to go. And so we just need to add that into our pricing structure. We need to put some new, pricing controls slash quota monitors slash things.

So people can actually know, how much data there's something because. And at the day, even if we do tiers, of course, we're going to charge based on the amount of data that's coming in, right? We can't just be like, Oh, free unlimited data, you

Josh: it's going to be tied to it somehow.

Ben: right. So we're going to have [00:18:00] to, put in some UI for that.

but other than those things, I think we've made all the big decisions. We've got all the big lifts on the actual functionality. So yeah, it's a matter of tying things up, putting the last coat of paint on there and tying it up with a bow and handing it out.

Josh: Yeah. This is, one of the things like I liked about setting this deadline was that, it changed the conversation around like how, like the decisions we're actually going to make to get this, get this done. and one of the things that we've talked about is that. We can always change the pricing later, or we can, there's there's a lot of things that that we would like to do in an ideal.

scenario like,adding this, feature, it's big enough that we'll probably want to rethink some of the positioning. of the product we, we've done some of that work already and we have a vision of some of that, of where we want to go with it in the future.

but in the meantime,we want to get this into our customer's hands and. Give them the ability to pay us for it basically. And so we've talked about how, we can always, change this, in [00:19:00] the future. and right now the goal is just to, you know, ship the simplest thing that like gives our current customers the ability to pay for it.

and that won't like create too much friction for them. because we've talked a lot about like different things we could do with our pricing. and all of them would, probably involve more like decision. You know, inflection points for our current customers. if we like rolled out this brand new, completely different pricing strategy or something for the whole product, like getting people to opt into that feels like you're asking a lot more than just getting them to opt into like, Hey, here's this new thing.

you can optionally add it to your current plan or something like that or start using it and we'll start billing you for it. and if it, if it doesn't work for everyone after that, we can always then work on the future, like big pricing overhaul.

Ben: Yeah. And We're 99 percent sure that we're going to start out with a free level so that people can try it and send their own data in and hopefully get hooked, right? so the trick is going to be, okay, what is that usage [00:20:00] point that allows people to try it, but not, never have to pay us, you know?

Um, I know that, a lot of times in the freemium world, And we don't do a great job of this, but a freemium success a lot of times depends on just how viral your product is, right? If you can get more people in the door because they're using the free, because they're sharing it because it's a collaborative thing or whatever, then that's even better.

otherwise you're just having to deal with the costs of those customers, sending in that data and the customer support and so on. But, we found over the years that even though we don't have a great virality story, it does really help us with word of mouth to have a freemium plan because a developer who is just trying this for a side project doesn't have a budget or doesn't have permission to use the company card or whatever it is, they can come in, they can try the thing, they can play with it, they then think, oh, this is cool, I like this, and then they take that.

To their job, their day job, or their next client, or they tell a friend. so while we can't really track, that sort of thing with any kind [00:21:00] of great SAS metrics or analytics tool, we do see that's helpful. And so again, we're, we'll try to have a freemium level here so that people can try it and decide if they like it and then, hopefully get hit that limit soon enough that they feel the pain, they decide they want to plop down the payment.

Josh: yeah, that's a great point. I've seen people move the opposite direction too. if they, like their job used us and they got to really like honey badger at their job and then they move on, or they're between jobs and we've had people come in and sign up for the free developer plan then and be like, Hey, I used you at my past job.

I'm working on some side projects now, or I'd like to get you into my new company, but they're, you know, we use. Sentry or whatever. I'm going to use this for personal things or maybe try to experiment with it. so it's, it gives a, it gives people a way to stick with you too. once they're like moving on.

Ben: And then, of course, we'll have to tell people about it, right? We'll have to have upsells in the app. We'll have to have notifications popping up. And, have to annoy our customers a little bit and tell them, all the new cool things that are [00:22:00] happening. We'll have to

think about our onboarding sequence.

there's a laundry list of things is infinite, right? And so that's, I think, back to what you said about having that date really helps. Okay, what really has to be done? and what can we punt on? what's nice to have?

Josh: Yeah. Yeah. And that's also the onboarding stuff is also part of the, reason we want to get this UI rolled out and, and get it refined and things, because it'll be a better foundation for onboarding people into this new feature. Then I think, what we have with the current thing.

And of course we don't want to have to duplicate the work we'd like to solve this onboarding and the new UI, and not in the old one, or both. I think we're pretty close to getting that done. And then, I think we have most of what we're doing with onboarding figured out, or at least in our head or on a branch, or a series of branches.

So, um, hopefully it won't take too long to get something that's, that's at least. good enough, and hopefully pretty good. I, as always with onboarding, or like telling people about new things in our app, we found with developers, it's important not to annoy them too much [00:23:00] and, We can be easily annoyed, believe it or not.

so that's always there's always some tension there. Like how like in your face do we want to get with,telling you about this new thing. so we're redebating, do you know, do we want to have some in app pop ups or like, how are we going to, are we gonna have like more subtle call outs?

I think we tend to opt for if we can do like subtle things that aren't like immediately, stop the world. Um, You know, type things, then we go for that because this is a mission critical type of application. And when you click into an error at like 2 AM, because you've just been paged. the last thing you want to see is a, Hey, check out this new awesome logging tool we built called insights.

Ben: Yep.

Josh: um, yeah, we gotta be extra,cautious When we're like blocking things.

Ben: Yep. Well, I mean, speaking of getting in front of our customers and possibly annoying them and telling them about the new things, I think, the number one thing about how we're going to get to that 100 customers using the product, I think is probably us reaching out probably me to be honest, reaching out to our [00:24:00] customers individually and selling it.

Really, contacting them, letting them know it's here. we've already sent an announcement email to like to, to the world. But I think it's going to take some individual sales outreach, which is not something that we've done much of at honey badger, if any, and it's not frankly, something that I really feel comfortable doing or really enjoy doing.

But, I think in this case, it's going to be super useful to get,someone's here, tell them about what we're doing, see what they're doing, really find out like, Hey, what are you doing for structured logging? Do you know about structured logging? how, is that something that you think could be useful, et cetera, you know, have a good conversation with our existing customers who are already like us, who are already paying us and seeing if this is a good fit for them. one of the things I think I wish I did better was having regular customer conversations. and so this is kind of a catch up thing, I think for me, it's okay, so this is going to be a check in kind of a sales thing, but,obviously I'm not a sales guy, so I don't think I'm going to be taking the hard sell pushy approach.

I think it's going to be much more of a consultative kind of selling thing where it's like, Hey, [00:25:00] does this fit, does this meet your needs? is this

Josh: Yeah, that when you were talking, that was the thought I had. That was like, maybe we can use our consulting experience. Cause both of us have, you know, you say we're not really experienced at sales or whatever, but we're actually very experienced with sales. We might be a little rusty.

but both of us were, successful at landing clients and selling them on ourselves and, and, building software for them. So I think there's probably some overlap there, in terms of, uh, I mean, obviously it's like nice to just have a self serve product that just sells itself, so you don't have to do the extra work.

but I think we're, I think we're capable of it. and it might be a big, opportunity for us in this moment. and also just like, uh, networking, I was at RubyConf late last year in November. and just getting back out into the conference circuit and meeting people.

Like it's surprising, like the people that are out there and the connections you can make. and then, strangely enough, like a lot of people that I know are now using LinkedIn again, with all the, social media meltdown that's happening out there. Um, but being out, being back on LinkedIn, like I'm actually like interacting with a lot of [00:26:00] people from the past that I, I haven't talked to in a while.

And it's like those conversations like inevitably, trend towards work. And then now you're telling someone about the cool new thing. You're working on and they're like, Oh, well, I'll have to check that out. And I'm like, Oh yeah, that's sales and network networking and sales actually does work.

and yeah, I think it'll be good for us.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. It'd be a good change of pace. I just wish I had more time. More time to do that and do all the other fun things that I'd like to do, you know?

Josh: Yeah. Yeah. That's like the story with every like job we, we have out of our multiple jobs, but we are saying no to more things this year, per our last, last episode. And, I think that's relevant. so hopefully we can carve out more time to do some of those like high value things that, that we've been neglecting.

Ben: yeah. I think one of the, like one of the tweaks that we were, we're making, we're still in the process of, it hasn't been like a hard switch, but, like the day to day tasks that we work on, like before we had typically each of us, whatever you want to do, just go do that thing and, when it shows up on a PR, then we'll merge it and that's, It's great.

And so we kind of had it off in a bunch of different directions. And I think[00:27:00] we're saying no to that now. And now we're like, okay, we need to focus everyone, this whole team on getting this thing done. And what are the steps we have to take to get this thing done? And okay, you do step a, you do step B and a little bit of a change of pace for us.

But so far it's feeling really good. I like how it feels as a team. We're all focused on this one goal. it's kind of a, kind of a neat thing.

Josh: Everyone's on the same page for once. and I think there's it's both are nice. Like it is nice to just be able to go off and pick your project and work on it. I think everyone likes to do that every now and then, um, just go hack on something just because it's what you feel like doing.

but there's a lot to be said to get the whole team on board and one, one direction I mean, we're always pretty much on the same page in terms of vision, but yeah. working on one big feature is like a little bit different from our normal workflow, which is more chaotic and,

Yeah. A little more anarchy.

Ben: I've been catching up on the startups for the rest of us podcast episodes, and, paying particular attention to the one that talk about sales, [00:28:00] for the reasons I just discussed . but, and thing that's come up time and time again and Rob's episodes is he's talking about focus and how important focus is.

And I think yes, this, having this focus on this thing really right now is giving us the velocity. Get over this last hurdle, get this done. And, hopefully, by end of March, significantly change the revenue picture so that, we're seeing new customers sending us or our existing customers sending us additional money as they get value out of the new features,

Josh: Yeah, I love it.

Ben: looking forward to it, it's going to be a great year.

Josh: I can feel it.

So, um, I think, we might be back next week I'm not sure if I'll, I'll be back for the podcast next week with my. second vacation coming up. but either way, we'll be back to hopefully talk about the, um, the UI rollout, I'm going to just like commit us to this because that is the next big thing on this plan.

And we're going to like, actually do this build in public thing. and hold our feet to the fire. so we will be back with a, with an episode, in the near future, to tell you about how we're [00:29:00] rolling out this new, new UI. and I think we might have a unique approach to it, so I'll just, I'll just leave it at that.

Ben: Cool. Well, this has been fun. It's nice to get back in the saddle and, uh, well, we'll take a little break again, but we'll be back in the saddle again once Josh is done with his second vacation. Uh, it's been a great chat with you, Josh, anything else?

Josh: Uh, nope. Just, reminding people, this has been FounderQuest and, you should go give us a nice review, or five star rating on the podcast platform of your choice and, uh, we'll catch you next week.

Ben: See ya. [00:30:00]