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Startups Should Solve Real People's Real Problems (with Michael Drogalis)
994 Plays11 months ago
A few months ago, Michael Drogalis quit his job and decided launch 4 viable startup business ideas in 4 months, publically documenting every step of the journey. Over here at Developer Voices it seemed fun, inspired, and just crazy enough to work.
We had him on the podcast a few months back just as that journey was beginning, and since he launched his first startup things have changed,. The reception has been better than he expected and the plan has been updated to go all-in on idea number one. But why? What's changed? What happened between brainstorming 4 ideas and launching #1 into the world? How is he figuring out what problems to solve, and how is he coping with the workload of being a solopreneur with a business idea and only himself to rely on?
It's definitely time for an update, and to see what we can learn from a fellow geek who wants to start a business, but most of all wants to build technology that people find useful and valuable. Let's hope he succeeds...
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ShadowTraffic: https://shadowtraffic.io/
Michael’s Previous Appearance: https://youtu.be/jqS2TbxssQE
Follow Michael’s journey: https://michaeldrogalis.substack.com/
Michael on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-drogalis-01029924/
Michael on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MichaelDrogalis
Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins
Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/
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#podcast #softwareprogramming #programming #startup #technology #kafka #postgres #shadowtraffic #entrepreneur
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Transcript
Michael's ambitious startup journey
00:00:00
Speaker
This week on Developer Voices, for the first time we have a returning guest. You don't need to have seen it, but you might remember an episode a few months back where I talked to Michael Dragalis. He just quit his job and had announced that he had a plan. He was going to create four new start-ups over the next four quarters and publish every step of the journey. It's kind of a mad plan and
00:00:24
Speaker
In many hands, it would be an obvious immediate failure, but Michael had the skills to pull something like that off. And he certainly had the eloquence and the interestingness that watching that from the sidelines was going to be fun. Well, time has passed. He has now launched the first of those four startups. And as they say, no plan survives contact with reality. Things have actually gone better than he expected. So the plan has changed.
00:00:51
Speaker
And I thought it would be fun to catch up with him again and see where he's at. Now that he has the first of his four startups launched and out in the wild and looking for customers. This is one of those discussions that's a lot about tech as
Prioritizing real problems over hustle culture
00:01:05
Speaker
usual. It's also a lot about problem solving and finding real world problems worth solving. And it's just a little bit about psychology.
00:01:14
Speaker
One of the things I love about Michael is he's kind of the antithesis of this startup valley, silicon culture, hustle and hype thing going on. He's not trying to hustle and hyper-growth his way to success. He's not trying to shout above the crowd. He's just trying to solve useful problems with technology. And he's listening a lot more than he's talking. So I'm glad he took the time to talk to us.
00:01:40
Speaker
I'm your host, Chris Jenkins. This is Developer Voices, and today's voice is Michael Dragalas.
00:01:59
Speaker
Michael Dragalis, welcome back. Thanks for having me again. I'm glad to have you. It's the first time I've been able to say welcome back to Developer Voices. You were our first repeat guest. Yeah, it's an honor. We had a lot of fun on the first one, and so I'm looking forward to catching up again.
00:02:14
Speaker
Well, me too. I'm looking forward to living vicariously through you. Living in interesting times. Yeah. So the last time we spoke, let me recap the previous episode. The last time we spoke, you had this crazy plan to build four startups in four quarters in a kind of, if I can say sophisticated version of throw it at the wall and see what sticks. And your plans have changed.
00:02:44
Speaker
And I really want to know what's happened in the past 90 days that have caused your plans to change suddenly.
Focusing on the first startup's potential
00:02:52
Speaker
So take me through it. We were about two weeks into the first quarter when we spoke. What's happened since then? Yeah, that's right. So the idea was I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do professionally. And it was a pretty good narrative to sort of figure out, OK, what's the idea going to be? What domain am I going to work in? What business size? And so trying to iterate every 90 days and just
00:03:14
Speaker
expect to burn through different plans was actually mentally very helpful. And so I started with my first idea, which was basically solve the problem that creating demos for software is actually complicated. It takes a lot of time to put the data into the system to elicit the behavior you're looking for. And so I just started with that problem. And I'd say I went through my process, which was talk to a lot of people, try to understand if it's a real problem.
00:03:40
Speaker
Dig in with those people kind of why why is it painful? what what are the consequences of that problem and then Go from there and I'd say probably like six or seven weeks in I knew that there was something good here I mean, I don't want to get ahead of myself. I actually I don't know that this is going to be a successful business I don't yet have paying customers, but I've worked on enough products where The trajectory of what I'm doing looks pretty good. And so I'd say that gave me enough confidence to say okay, I
00:04:09
Speaker
I'll put aside the other three quarters. I'm just going to focus on this for the rest of the year." And it actually did feel a little silly pulling back the four startups and four quarters thing, but I think that they were kind of necessary for each other. I don't think if I jumped in and I said, I'm just going to focus on this one idea, I would have had the success. It was actually approaching with the mindset and saying, I've got 90 days to do this. I don't want to regret it when I'm done and say, oh, I wish I worked a little bit harder. I think that sense of urgency is what really propelled me to get to the core of this idea very quickly.
00:04:39
Speaker
That's kind of how the plan altered. Okay. There is a sense of urgency. I rewatched our previous episode, and I can see the sense of urgency. I can also see a sense that you're giving yourself permission to fail, to experiment, to make a fool of yourself if need be to get there.
00:04:59
Speaker
So this is something that's interesting. It's not just the external business you're trying to build, but the inner mind games you're playing with yourself to try and get it built. Yeah, it's very unintuitive because you think if I make a mistake, everyone's going to remember and my reputation is damaged. The reality is that nobody remembers your failures. Like I started my four startups and four quarters thing with a content marketing
00:05:23
Speaker
style. I put out posts every day about the intersection of business and psychology. Nobody cared. I posted 30 very long posts, just absolute crickets. And I jettisoned the idea because it wasn't working. No one has ever come up to me later and been like, oh, that was a stupid idea. Why did you do that? I just stopped doing what wasn't working. And I did more of what was working, which was talking about the problems of the business that I wanted to solve. And that generated some traction. So yeah, I think cold today in that mindset of not being afraid of mistakes,
00:05:52
Speaker
remembering that people have much shorter memories of your failures than you do, it's really helpful. Okay, so perhaps then we can go through some things that scare me about the process, or at least rub against my instincts, right? And the first one is, okay, you've got an idea, you know you can build it, great. Then your plan is to go out and talk to people.
00:06:20
Speaker
And sure, you can do like mailing list stuff and write blog posts and I'm comfortable with that. But at some point, are you hitting up all your contacts and saying, I want to badger you for an hour about this? Are you cold calling people? How are you actually getting individual feedback on your idea?
00:06:37
Speaker
Yeah, I don't want to sound prescriptive because I think there's lots of ways to succeed, but I'll tell you what I did.
Validating startup ideas through outreach
00:06:42
Speaker
So I started with my problem statement, which was that I believe it's really hard to make demos. And so that's my baseline truth. What I did first was I reached out to all my friends that I thought might have this problem. And I said very simply, here's my one paragraph problem statement. Here's a couple questions. Number one, do you recognize this problem? Number two, do you have this problem?
00:07:03
Speaker
And if you do have this problem, number three, how bad does it hurt? What are the consequences of it? And I spent maybe two weeks doing that. And once I was validated at that baseline level, I went out a little step further. I made a landing page, which was basically like, OK, here's the problem framed in a more polished way. And here's a little bit about the solution of how I might solve that. And I took that landing page. I went on LinkedIn. I went on Twitter. I went on social channels.
00:07:30
Speaker
And I talked more about the problem. And I hinted at the solution with the landing page. And from there, I started to really validate what I was doing. I was able to create some traction with my posts there. I had a waiting list on the landing page, even though I had no product built at the time. I drove people to the wait list.
00:07:46
Speaker
And I had, over time, a bunch of people sign up for the waitlist. I would start talking to... I'd just email them and say, hey, I'm working on this. Would you chat with me to better understand your problems? Some percentage of those people talk to me. And by then, I kind of expanded several layers out of my inner circle. I had my friends, then I had my social friends. By the time I got to the waitlist, I didn't really know these people.
00:08:08
Speaker
they were several links away from me in the relationship chain, and that's kind of how I got to full validation. I was like, okay, people I don't even know are interested, they're signing up, I should definitely build this product. And that was kind of my process for figuring that there's something here. How did the feedback change as you went from people who were obviously on your side to randos?
00:08:32
Speaker
It gets maybe more harsh and direct. I think when you're friends, you have to remember, don't want to hurt your feelings because they're nice people and they like you. And so you always have to have that lens on, is someone just being polite to me and trying to placate me? I'd say as you get to people who know you less and less, you're getting more honest feedback. And so yeah, you just have to prepare yourself for that mentally and then run a good process to extract the best feedback. I'd say the challenge
00:08:58
Speaker
when you go from friends to not friends, is that your friends are very easy to talk to. They want to help you. People you don't know, if you get on the phone with them, the most challenging piece to overcome is that there's a fight or flight instinct. You don't really know that person. And so you have to assess, are they a dodgy character? Are they going to scam me? And you, as the person who's running the business, need to calm them down and get them on the same level. Build your credibility that you're a real person trying to solve a real problem for them. And there's a bit of a process to that.
00:09:27
Speaker
What is it? Give me some tips. Yeah, how would I unpack that? I would say kind of my...
00:09:34
Speaker
My rule is to let the customer or the prospect do most of the talking in the beginning. And that's the way that it should be, not just because it lets them warm up and feel like they're more of a participant in the call, but because what they have to say is actually much more important than what I have to say. My solution doesn't matter until I understand your problem. And so I try to control the flow of the call
00:10:03
Speaker
Establishing credibility that they know that I'm a real authentic person, but number two that they're doing a lot of the talking I'm understanding their pain and only when Kind of we see eye-to-eye on what the problem is that they have do I go in with my pitch and say okay? That's the problem that we're both looking at here's my take on the solution And I maybe go through a couple slides and then sort of see what they think and that's been pretty successful for me
00:10:27
Speaker
OK, I'm almost surprised because I mean, it's a very generous thing for someone to talk to you, give up their time with no real prospect of getting a solution out of it quickly. It's not like it's not like you can say, ah, well, here's the product today. This is going to solve your problem. How do you I just I can't quite see what kind of numbers did you get? How many people did you go out to? How many people were on the wait list? How many people actually did you talk to?
00:10:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny you frame it that way, but I think that's how you have validation that you're working on something that really pains people. It hurts enough that you're willing to talk to somebody who doesn't yet have the solution. Oh gosh, how many people did I email? I probably sent 200 some odd emails I tallied up the other day. I think the wait list by the end was 115 people. I ran 55 sales calls. They weren't all from the wait list. I would say my percentage from the wait list was
00:11:23
Speaker
perhaps a 15 or a 20% response rate, which I think is pretty normal. But yeah, I ended up doing, I counted them 55 sales calls, which is a lot of repetition. So yes, with my processes, I had it down by the end. So on the one hand, 55 sales calls sounds petrifying the average programmer, I think. On the other hand, at some point in that process,
00:11:47
Speaker
What was the reaction from you internally?
The role of sales calls in product development
00:11:50
Speaker
Did you feel like your solution was evolving a lot or that you were just getting roots on it, getting a sense that this was actually hitting home?
00:12:01
Speaker
It was definitely evolving. The persona that I was talking to was changing or at least varying throughout the call. In the beginning, it was my simple pitch. I call it the $10,000 demo problem. It's expensive to make demos. Here's why. As I started to talk to more people, I got to see different dimensions of the problem. I talked to a lot of different sales engineers who talked about how
00:12:20
Speaker
their buying is that the customer wants to try their product but they don't yet trust them with their production data. For the sales engineer it's a chicken and egg problem because they can't yet show the value of the product until they have their data and so it was a whole other face of the problem that I hadn't seen. I talked to engineers who have problems with load testing. Imagine you're a company that deals in compression and you want to show some bad behavior but that bad behavior is only visible when you have data that has a certain statistical profile.
00:12:46
Speaker
And so now i had three different personas and i just saw more and more of this as i talk to people. And i would say people can ask how do you come up with the roadmap for your product. I have some ideas but it's mostly just talking to people people have fantastic ideas when they see your problem and they resonate with it i probably have five years worth of features that i could build. Are legitimate i mean people get excited about this stuff and they really have a problem all you have to do is be attentive and ask the right questions to get what you're looking for.
00:13:15
Speaker
Okay, so that raises the question, how did you then prioritize? Because I remember when we spoke, you said you were spending about three days of the week on marketing, and the other two on building stuff. That's really not much building time. Yeah, a lot of what can be exhausting talking time. How did you whittle it all down? Over a 90 day span, it's actually not that bad being 55.
00:13:38
Speaker
over 90, talking a sales call every other day. I tried to stack them on days where I could batch them together. But yeah, I would say just getting those 30-minute bits of feedback here and there, it's just enough to propel you. But I leaned on my intuition of how long has it been since I got quality feedback? I'd have periods where I'd have lots of feedback.
00:14:01
Speaker
And I get nervous that I wasn't building the product quickly enough. And then I'd have periods where I'd be deep into building the product for a week or two at the time. And I'd say, who's going to use this product? I haven't talked to anybody in a while. And so whenever I got nervous on one end of the pendulum or the other, I would go seek more feedback or I would go seek more quiet time to code the product. And yeah, there wasn't really a science there. It was actually just more of an intuition thing.
00:14:25
Speaker
I wonder, because I'm thinking of this from the perspective of someone working in a larger company, right? Which happens often. And you can often end up with a project that lasts three to six months with no one really developing any healthy anxiety about getting feedback from the outside world. And you're working on such a smaller time scale. I'm wondering what you think we can learn from the individual.
00:14:54
Speaker
getting that feedback from the world, you know? Yeah, there was a good line that the CEO of Confluent told me one time. He said, it's important to have urgency and decision making, particularly for things that have no immediate consequences. And I think about that all the time.
Urgency and public engagement
00:15:10
Speaker
It's very easy to work at your job, get your paycheck, feel like everything is stable. But if you really want the product to succeed, you have to have the sense of urgency about connecting with people immediately. It's just not going to happen that you're going to create the product.
00:15:22
Speaker
you're going to drop it out in the world and the market is instantly going to respond. You have to consciously build that following over time every step of the way. And I think the most effective way to do that is to build in public, to actually show people what you're working on in a very unvarnished state. And the more you can create those touch points every week with people either through social or on sales calls, I think the better because then when you're ready to launch your product, you've got a ready to go audience and it really helps get you out there.
00:15:53
Speaker
So as you were going along, getting feedback from people, are you showing them like, are you showing them the half baked product or are you showing them like the spec? How is your discussion evolving with outside people over those weeks?
00:16:10
Speaker
Yeah, this really enters the art of B2B sales, which I'm the weakest at and I have so much respect for salespeople. B2B sales cycles are really long. They involve many people. They involve different decision makers and budgets. What I've learned over time is, number one, get someone live on the call. Get them actually talking to you. As I said, number two, validate that they have the problem that you're looking for.
00:16:33
Speaker
Number three, I bring in my pitch deck for like, okay, here's the problem that we just looked at. Let's actually look at a concrete set of slides about it. And then here's my solution, just a small number of slides that help you transfer from problem to why I think I have the solution to what you're working on. Only then once someone said, okay, I have that problem, I understand your solution and I like it, and I can commit some time to actually looking at your software with some
00:17:00
Speaker
You know success criteria do i sort of like fork over the the poc or the the software in a rather unvarnished state people are happy to like look at these things in an incomplete state but you gotta make sure that like it's a it's a two-way street where like they've got the problem and they're willing to sort of commit the energy to actually trying it and telling you whether that's met the success criteria or not okay so that
00:17:24
Speaker
In a kind of sales term, are you looking for people that actually have a checkbook before you have these discussions, or are you just looking for people that can commit time rather than money? It depends. In the beginning, it was sort of like, okay, I just need you to have the problem so I can make sure that even if there's no sale after you try this, at least I got some feedback because you got to start somewhere.
00:17:46
Speaker
Over time, my rule is that if I'm going to start working with someone to do a POC, there has to be a path to a decision maker and a check. Because the trap that so many people fall into is you really want someone to use your product and so you're willing to give it to anyone. But if you're not careful,
00:18:02
Speaker
That person may have no decision making power. They may have no power over budgets or annual plans, and you're just completely wasting your time. And it's kind of hard because you feel like you're making forward progress because someone's finally using your thing. But until you've vetted that a decision maker is in the room or could be gotten in the room, you're really at risk of just wasting your time. Yeah. These are things I've heard from salespeople, but it's unusual to hear them on the lips of a programmer.
00:18:30
Speaker
So you are in addition to building the software from scratch and building the business idea from scratch, you are constructing a sales pipeline and you have to? Yes, that's right.
00:18:47
Speaker
So you were constantly, I'm assuming, you were constantly focusing on the kind of mailing list, Twitter stuff, things on LinkedIn to get the list of people who would then sign up, who would then be emailed out to whittling down that funnel to the point where you can actually
00:19:05
Speaker
Not just talk to people but pick and choose whether they're hot enough prospects to potentially sign a check by the end. Yeah yeah and if you do this long enough you start to develop in your head this probability of like how likely is this person going to be. To be like a good prospect for me like if they if they work for a pre revenue company.
00:19:25
Speaker
They're probably not going to buy your stuff because they have enough problems. If they work for a super late stage company, boy, you're going to have a hard time getting to the decision maker. There's a sweet spot for each product. For me, it's probably like a series B company where like, okay, you're up and running, you're making some money, you feel good. You got problems, but you're not yet mature enough to tackle the kind of thing in-house that I'm doing. And so yeah, as your sales pipeline gets bigger and bigger, you get an intuition of what's going to be a good fit for you.
00:19:54
Speaker
Did you find that there were people that were more productive, like personas that were more productive to talk to, and were they the same as the ones you find more enjoyable to talk to?
Effective communication and prospecting
00:20:06
Speaker
Sometimes those two can be different. And that's, again, another trap. There's people who are very fun to talk to, but they may have no budget. They may not actually have your problem. They're just interested in the tech. And that's fun. And you should probably let yourself have some part of that once in a while. But you really got to focus on the people who resonate with your problem. At the end of the day, I want to make a business. And the people who are most interested in the problem that I'm solving, they're the people who are going to help me get that done.
00:20:36
Speaker
They have a really complicated job, which is they have to do everything that I just said. They have to get somebody comfortable on a call with them. They have to make sure they understand the problem. Then they got to run a POC. They've got to make sure that they're able to go for the technical win on the POC to assign check. It's not probably the thing that I would want to be doing for the rest of my life, but I enjoy hearing about that process insofar as that I'd be able to help with it with my product.
00:21:01
Speaker
Did you find they were the best kinds of people to talk to? Because I would have thought they were the most burning problem to quickly create convincing demo data.
00:21:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think between sales engineers and developer advocates like yourself, everyone shares this mutual problem of they're trying to show off their product and show its value. It's complicated to do that unless you have the right environment to do it within. I found both of those roles really instructive to learn from. Let's get on to the building of it because your budget has two days left in the week.
Technical strategy with Clojure stack
00:21:40
Speaker
During which you have to go from a landing page. I know you've got the front end skills to knock that up fairly quickly, but how do you build? What are you, what are you choosing to build out your product?
00:21:52
Speaker
Yeah, I went with a full closure stack, which is a little bit niche. To be clear, I mean, I kind of went through this 90-day period. I focused very heavily on marketing early in the cycle. There were periods later in the cycle where I was exclusively focused on building. So it's not like I just had 48 hours in the week to cram it in. It sort of changed over time. But yeah, I used closure for the back end, which I've been working in closure for
00:22:15
Speaker
almost my entire career. I used ClosureScript on the front end, which was sort of a strategic move because the Closure ecosystem supports cross-compilation from the JVM to JavaScript. And so I was actually able to take the bulk of my product and move it to the browser. If you go on the website for shadow traffic, you'll actually see a little animation of shadow traffic apparently running. It really is. That's actually it running in the browser. Really? Yeah, it was just a huge boost in velocity to be able to do something like that.
00:22:45
Speaker
That's nice. That I can see a huge advantage to, but there's a downside potentially. I've worked with ClosureScript. I know it's got better since the days I did it full time, but you could easily lose two days to a particular compilation thing that never come up before. Did you come up against that risk of using something that's personally tested but still experimental?
00:23:13
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I would say the day before I launched, I hit this insane stack trace with ClosureScript. And I'm with you. It used to be really rough to use. It's quite good now. I think it's fairly battle-tested. But I came up with a stack trace that was completely indiscernible. I had to go find some help. I'd say the thing that's propelled me through all these situations, ClosureScript and anything else that I've encountered, technical or otherwise, was this sense of I have 90 days to ship. Am I going to sit here for two days? Am I going to look at this stack trace?
00:23:41
Speaker
and Google it and see, okay, there's nothing. Okay, my head hurts. I'm going to go on Twitter for a while and burn half the day. Or am I going to figure it out right now? And some of that is like, nose to the grindstone, really apply everything that I know to get it done with this sense of urgency. Or some of it is like, do I really need to do it this way? I mean, I did a lot of things in the project that people would call
00:24:02
Speaker
You know not that technical debt is probably what you would call it but it's what i had to do to get it shipped and i. Most of these things i look back and i'm like yeah it's not perfect but it's clearly good enough to get it out the door and good enough probably for like.
00:24:16
Speaker
a year and beyond. I think the temptation for a lot of programmers is to perfect what you're doing at a technical level early. And to win, you have to do the exact opposite, which is to ship as fast as possible, commit all the sins, get it out the door. Because the risk that you have is that nobody wants what you're building. And until you validated that, you haven't really earned the right to build it in the right way. And hopefully, I'll earn that right to go fix some of the problems that I introduced.
00:24:45
Speaker
Yeah, I think as long as you can sort of balance, not committing a horrible problem, but these more aesthetic things, that's kind of one way to do it. Let's dig into that then. You've had to cut corners to launch this thing within 90 days. Which corners have you cut, and which things would you like to cut but said like, no, this far and no further?
00:25:10
Speaker
Yeah, I can think of two immediately. So I'm a big fan of Tailwind, which is a CSS framework that integrates directly into your HTML. Beautiful when you use it all the right way. There were cases where Tailwind, for whatever reason, just wasn't working. Probably a user error. I had to go smash in a bunch of CSS into its own files. I had to mix them back and forth. I think if somebody looked at that, it's not horrible, but it got me past the problem that I had.
00:25:36
Speaker
Second example is I would love to use Terraform to set up all my AWS resources. Didn't have time to learn Terraform. I'm running it all on Bash scripts. And so when I want to build my website, I go into the directory, I build the project, I run the script that uploads everything to S3. And yeah, it's not the best. It's definitely at risk of me making a typo and messing something up. But honestly, as long as you're careful, in the beginning, it's plenty good enough.
00:26:03
Speaker
Okay, I guess you've got an advantage in that your product is not like you're running a database for people where there's critical data they could lose. You've got a huge advantage that it's all made up data anyway. You can always make up some more. Yeah, that's exactly right. I think you're touching on something really important, which is that if you're going to start a business, you have to size it appropriately.
Balancing work-life with suitable problems
00:26:24
Speaker
If you want to start a database company,
00:26:27
Speaker
It's mission critical. You're going to need a lot of people. You're probably going to need a lot of money. It's important. You're going to need a lot of testing. If it's just you, what I'm doing, I'm bootstrapping my business by myself. I tried to select a problem that was appropriate for a single person that could be sized to at least help me make a living.
00:26:46
Speaker
I'm not gonna get calls at like two in the morning that I need to wake up. I wanted to do something that's not mission critical. I think that's okay. Everybody wants their product to be mission critical, but I think people should think about that again. There's lots of not mission critical problems, and if you want to live a life that doesn't require you to be pinned to your laptop all the time, it's worth thinking pretty hard about what it is you want to build.
00:27:07
Speaker
So I can see that shadow traffic fits that bill very nicely. The thing I've wondered about it is, okay, I can see it suits you as a kind of small to medium scale business. It definitely solves a real problem that people have. I wasn't sure when you first told me about it that it was a large enough problem that you get enough people saying this is painful enough that I will actually hand over my credit card to you.
00:27:34
Speaker
And how was the sense of pain, need, what's the nice way to put it? You demand from the market actually manifested. Yeah. And maybe this is where we're going to have to have like the part three follow-up. The challenge with enterprise software is that the sales cycles are so long that it's impossible to know with any degree of certainty into the future of like, am I definitely going to have success here? I have enough.
00:28:02
Speaker
kind of people deep down in the pipeline there near the end where i feel like okay these deals are eventually close i'm eventually going to make some money into my into my my business account and so yeah it's it's just it's a it's a gauging thing it's a.
00:28:19
Speaker
I think my guiding light is that never in my career have I had this many people see the problem and agree on it and say either yes now or no, but probably later. And so it really is a judgment call at the end of the day. I may come back in six months and just say they were all really close to the end, but none of them closed and that would be okay because I've never had a project where this many people were so committed to the problem. But I think as long as you
00:28:47
Speaker
mentally commit to running the kind of process that I described. I'm going to find a problem. I'm going to talk to people and I'm going to build a solution guided by their feedback. Eventually you're going to figure it out. And I believe the same is true for me too. Okay. We'll give you some numbers on that. If you're willing to like, how many, how many people do you need to make this a viable business to like pay the mortgage, put food on the table or
Sustaining business through client acquisition
00:29:12
Speaker
even better. And how many do you have in the pipeline confidently?
00:29:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it depends on the price. I mean, this is another aspect is when you're really early on.
00:29:22
Speaker
What's the business model? You have to make it up and you can change the business model over time. I'm still figuring out an appropriate price point. I would say I probably need about 10 customers to baseline make a living off this, which isn't impossible. It'd be one thing to have 100 customers. 10 feels doable if I'm in the right ballpark and I'm working on the right thing.
00:29:48
Speaker
Yeah, two or three customers that I feel confident I'm going to get there. And then I've got a whole bucket of leads that are at all different ranges between very hot and I don't know if it's a coin flip about whether they work or not. And so I'm waiting to see what was the impact of the launch. I launched the product publicly yesterday. And I don't know what's going to come out of that. It's always hard to tell at first, but we'll see what happens to the sales pipeline after that.
00:30:15
Speaker
Did you say you launched it yesterday? Actually, I'm going to ask you that in a second. Firstly, pricing, that's one of the big hot problems that everyone faces. How did you, you're approaching launch day, you've got to, you've got to get off the fence and say, this is my pricing structure, which is horribly painful, because you will get it wrong. And you'll have to do yet. How do you deal with that anxiety and that decision making?
00:30:41
Speaker
I didn't deal with it very well. I would say I bore that pain around until the very last minute. I talked to a lot of people. I messed up some sales calls because I didn't really have a pricing structure nailed down and I came off as not credible. And so that's definitely a weakness in my skill set. But yeah, at the end of the day, I talked to a lot of people and the message that I received is like, okay, remember, you can change this. It can change from customer to customer. Don't be afraid to iterate just like with your own product idea.
00:31:10
Speaker
Yeah, there's only so many pricing models that you can kind of pick. I mean, there's this per seat, there's volume-based, there's usage space, there's cluster-based. I say the strategy that seems to be working okay for me is to just be very transparent with people that I'm still figuring this out. This is my tentative model. But more than anything, just being like, okay, what's the value of what I'm doing? If I deliver this solution to you, how does it help you in terms of dollars? And just trying to have a transparent
00:31:38
Speaker
friendly conversation about that has been pretty helpful. And so that's kind of where I'm at with that one. Okay. Give me some more details because I'm from what I know of your product, right? It's solving the demo problem, right? So you could price it per data set.
00:31:57
Speaker
and hope that people want to generate lots of different interesting data sets. You could just do per table that you output. How did you decide it? What did you put it actually down to? Yeah, it's an awkward one because like you said, I think intuitively you would say it's its usage space, which is like, how much data do you generate? That's how much value that I got out of it. But it's also kind of a development tool. Like I have people who are using it just to like,
00:32:22
Speaker
run their IDE and make sure that their local environment has anything in it. And there, it's not so much the data. It's the fact that it's connected for the user. It's almost perceived how many developers are actually using it. And so what I'm tentatively settled on is number of connected clusters. And so if you wanted to run it against 10 Postgres clusters and five Postgres clusters, I have a price for that. If you want to add additional concurrent instances to that, I have an add-on price for that. And that's it.
00:32:52
Speaker
Perhaps you want to run a shop shop against five posters clusters and you want to run. I'm one of those an additional twenty concurrent instances to scale up the volume I basically just have a little multiplier for that and that's right now I kind of expected to change overtime as I learn more like anything else.
00:33:09
Speaker
Yeah, that's fair enough. That reminds me of something else, because I know originally we're just going to do this for outputting data to Kafka, which is going to be version one of this product. And I remember pivoting pretty early on to make sure you included Postgres. What happened there?
00:33:26
Speaker
I talked to a lot of people and they said they wanted Postgres. It's kind of like I said, I've got some ideas, but mostly if I talk to 50 plus people and 25 of them say the same thing, it's probably a good idea to go pursue what that is. And there was a definite pattern for Postgres rather than, say, MySQL or Mongo.
00:33:45
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. It was sort of reflective of the state of the database market. I actually talked to very few people now who use MySQL, which is inverted from maybe like 10 years ago. I feel like Postgres has just gone through the roof in popularity as far as the defacto database. And so yeah, that was as a side note, just something very interesting to see as a shift in technology. Yeah. I'm wondering if that could be a selection bias, but I can't see any way it is. That sounds like it might actually be just a real world trend.
00:34:13
Speaker
It could be. Is that like Postgres? I do too. But no, it's an interesting point like selection bias. It's another thing that can drive you into a trap when you're starting a business. You talk to people who are all like you, but it turns out there's only so many people who are similar to you when they're already around you. And so yeah, getting out of your comfort zone with your initial friends is really important for validating these ideas.
00:34:36
Speaker
Yeah, you got to talk to complete strangers if you can get their time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I promise we come back to this. You launched this week, so there you are late last week.
Overcoming launch fears
00:34:50
Speaker
I've seen so many startups, as we say in the UK, so many startups bottle it at that point to just say, actually, I've changed my mind. We'll push it back a couple of weeks. I'm not ready. Did you feel that anxiety? How did you deal with it?
00:35:05
Speaker
I felt the opposite. I felt like I have to launch because I need more people to talk to. That little voice in my head that was like, you need more leads in your pipeline, launch earlier. I didn't feel bad about it. And this was, again, a result of building in public. The whole way I've been working on this project, I've been posting screenshots on Twitter. I've been changing the API. I've been getting feedback from people on LinkedIn. And so it was already in-face half out there. And so when I actually launched the product, it didn't feel like a very big step anymore.
00:35:33
Speaker
Now you can try it before you could you could try it like visually through social media now you can try it for yourself and it made the the gap so much smaller and Yeah, it sort of inverted the Inverted the the feeling behind it as you say yeah, it's interesting you do have the anxieties I would expect but just like you reversed the arrow yeah, that's right your anxiety is not being seen in the world enough and not getting
00:36:01
Speaker
getting the pain early. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That seems like a worthwhile thing to cultivate in this world. If you can't get rid of anxiety at all, you might as well have it work for you. Yeah, you got to find the right set of drivers for you to do the right things. You want the right behavior, and the right behavior is talking to a lot of people who have the problem, and so you want to do anything that gets you closer to that, as close to that as possible.
00:36:27
Speaker
Okay, well, let's talk about the tipping point then, because the other thing I've observed with startups is they hit launch date and they think they've finished. They spent all that time building and they think launch is when the race is run, when actually it's really when the race starts, I think. So what's coming now that the starting gun has now been fired, you're out in the world, what are you doing next?
00:36:51
Speaker
Yeah, I actually feel that too. I mean, it's an exercise in resetting goals. Initially, your goal is launch the product and hopefully you have some sub-goals along the way to get some users and hopefully possibly some customers. I'm not sure what's next for me, but I would say the game hasn't fundamentally changed. It's still go find users who have the problem, get them to try the thing. And so I have yet to actually do the exercise of resetting what my goals are. But whether the product is out there in the world or not,
00:37:18
Speaker
It hasn't really changed. The goal is still the same, which is to go recruit customers.
Balancing product support with growth
00:37:23
Speaker
I may have to vary what I build and the demos that I show and the channels that I go to to recruit people, but yeah, still kind of the same game before and after. Okay. But you are going to hit problems of manpower, surely, in that as soon as you've got one paying customer, to your already overloaded work stack, you've got to add full-time support, right?
00:37:48
Speaker
How are you going to stop yourself being stretched too thin? That's a great question. I'm hoping I've built a good enough product where there isn't so much handholding needed every single day that all I do is support. I think that would be a sign that the product is just way too hard to use. Certainly in the beginning, I'm going to spend a lot of my time onboarding people. When I onboard someone to do a POC, I usually help them code up the shadow traffic file, answer all the questions. And that's great because I learn a lot.
00:38:15
Speaker
Over time, my involvement tapers off because they have the idea of how to use it, they know how to apply it to more use cases. And so if I'm totally bogged down with customer X all day every day because they just signed the deal, that's probably a big warning sign to me that something's not right about my product.
00:38:32
Speaker
But you could get the situation where, like, your product is great, but it's like version one, and they just want to say, where's this feature I need? Where's that feature I need? Great problem to have, but it's one you can't deal with with a single man.
00:38:48
Speaker
Yeah, in that case, I'd probably have sold the wrong product and the right thing to do would be to kill the deal. This is another thing that's painful for first-time founders. Sometimes you should fire customers or you should more often fire prospects. You'll have people who are really into what you're doing.
00:39:04
Speaker
But it's not quite what you're selling. They're focused on an adjacent problem that's at a glance very close. But to solve it, you actually have to do something totally different. And if it's not an appropriate problem for you to solve, you should not chase that customer. I think any of these things is like visual metaphors that you're running a shop.
00:39:21
Speaker
And the people who are closest to the front door of your store, you want to take care of them. The guy that's all the way down the block, do not chase him. It is not a good idea to go far away from your store and construct another store way down the street. And so it's kind of a matter of discipline and not chasing things that would feel good to satisfy their need at the expense of not really solving the problem that you initially set out to solve. Have you encountered any problems like that?
00:39:47
Speaker
For prospects, I've never had to fire a customer because thankfully I've always validated it well enough that you have the problem that I'm building the solution for. But plenty of times I've had people who are very excited, very fun to talk to, as you say.
00:40:01
Speaker
didn't really have the problem that I was solving. And yeah, I wanted so badly to pursue them, make them happy, build what they needed. But I knew I would have been getting away. And the right thing to do is to just stop. Just stop the relationship, tell them, hey, thanks, but this isn't really going to work for me. It's a weird reversal because you think the customer is always right, always pursue them. But remember, you got to find the right kind of customer for the product that you're building.
00:40:29
Speaker
You have uncertainties, but not in the direction I would expect. You have insecurities, but not in the direction I would expect. You're really kind of judoing your own mind into this. Is that something you've done deliberately or do you just have an instinct for pushing yourself outside the bubble? I think it's learned instinct. I mean, I made just a bazillion basic errors with...
00:40:52
Speaker
shipping products over the years and building my first company that I think I've just learned a little bit better. But I would say you mentioned the word uncertainty. The one uncertainty that never goes away for me or probably for anybody else doing an early company is the question, does what I'm doing have any value? And that's kind of hard because if you're working for a larger company,
00:41:12
Speaker
your default answer in your head is, oh, yes, I work for this company. It's stable. If we're investing in it, it must be valuable. It doesn't really mean that it is. When you're on your own, it's a lot more apparent that the answer to that is maybe no by default or not yet. But if you're at the big company, you should probably ask yourself that a little bit more harshly. If I wasn't surrounded by all these people and all these other products that are doing well, am I going to win by default?
00:41:40
Speaker
You might not be and it's a good opportunity to energize yourself and figure out how can i build a better product or you know serve a better customer base. Yeah it's also the kind of question that can get you fired at certain organizations with tact for sure you don't wanna come with a wrecking ball but every company doesn't want to win at the end of the day and if you can do it with some diplomacy that's what makes you really valuable i mean most people. Don't know how to with some degree of tact.
00:42:05
Speaker
question product direction and more importantly find a better product directions can't do that you say like no this sucks you have to say like this this sucks but here's what we can do to make it better. I think if anybody develops those kinds of skills in a larger company it makes you very outsized in terms of value.
00:42:24
Speaker
Yeah, OK, so that leads naturally to the future of the value you're trying to get to. Where do you think you'll be in six months time? Give me a guess so we can look back and laugh a year from now. Oh, I have no idea. What I hope is that I have maybe like.
00:42:39
Speaker
two or three customers who are paying enterprise deals that are starting to deframe my living expenses. And I would hope that my signals are that, okay, what I'm doing has value, and it's just going to be a couple years of slowly bootstrapping this business to more and more revenue. I could see both ends of the extreme as well.
00:42:59
Speaker
I could see maybe people getting really excited about this now that it's out there in the world and a lot of money. Or I could see that all my deals fizzled out and hey, it's time to go try a new idea. And so yeah, I don't know. I think the best bet is middle of the road. I've got good leads right now that seem like they're credible and they should close at some point. And so yeah, hoping that that's how it pans out over the next few months.
00:43:22
Speaker
It's kind of the opposite of the impression you get from Silicon Valley, which is that you need absolutely indestructible optimism at all stages. And it's nice not to hear the opposite of that, which is realistically, you know, I see this guard rail on this side of the road and that guard rail on the other side of the road, and I think I'm going to stay roughly on the path.
00:43:43
Speaker
I have learned that everyone you talk to in big tech kind of overinflates their numbers. If you ask what the revenue is for a private company, casually, they'll pat it a little bit. If you ask what the customer count is, they'll pat it a little bit. If it's a new product, you ask how it's going.
00:43:59
Speaker
You know people create create some large number fabricated off something i think it's really important to talk to real people and ask what their actual numbers are. Give you an example you mentioned i have this wait list earlier i reached out to all those people i got probably a fifteen to twenty percent reply rate which feels really low i think you ask other people they would say like.
00:44:19
Speaker
Yeah, look at all the people who are coming to me. When I exchanged notes with other founders, they were like, oh, that's completely normal. People are just a little bit more skittish to get on the phone. And so yeah, I think it's important not to take numbers that face value from people who aren't perhaps being totally honest about the state of their business.
00:44:38
Speaker
OK, so that makes me think of another number because you say you just said like two to three enterprise customers, two to three years paying the bills. That requires a reasonably deep bank account for you to survive that number of years. Right. And I know you told me that you had an offer of funding that you turned down.
00:45:03
Speaker
How did you, faced with your own personal bank account funding your runway, how did you turn down such an early offer of investment? I'd say bootstrapping it the whole way doesn't need to be the only option. I may need to take a break and do some consulting for a week or two on and off just to make up the bills. It's not that investment into your company needs to be the only way to make a bridge between where you are now and in the future, and I expect the same for me as well.
00:45:31
Speaker
But I would say, yeah, be really careful about taking investment. I think in my case, yeah, it would be cool if someone injected a million dollars into my business bank account tomorrow. But there's a price to pay, which is that I have to sell them part of my company. I have to sell them shares. And that changes everything. I've got somebody else involved who wants to drive the direction of the company. They're expecting growth and returns at a certain rate. And you really do sign up for a different game. I think for me, I decided at the outset that I didn't want to do that. I wanted to bootstrap it all the way.
00:45:59
Speaker
Or at least through some number of customers and then maybe decide later what to do. But yeah, if anyone is listening who's building a business and you think investment is the thing that's going to make your product take off and get lots of customers, it's probably not if you're at the very beginning. I haven't spent very much money at all trying to get this company off the ground I spent.
00:46:21
Speaker
I don't know, 100 bucks to get a Slack account connected to other companies. I spent 70 bucks on G Suite. I spent $40 on a domain name. And I spent $8 on AWS. It's very tenable to do this. It's not that you need to have hundreds of thousands of dollars to go validate your startup idea. You can afford the time of you, right? Yeah, exactly. And so you just got to think about what's it buying you and what's it going to cost you.
00:46:49
Speaker
OK, yeah. Well, there's one last point I want to leave on, which is I remember when we talked last time and you were planning to do four startups in four quarters, you said you had a list of about 10-ish businesses.
00:47:05
Speaker
that might work. And as it turns out you've settled, you pretty much put all your eggs in the shadow traffic basket. Are there any ideas, in pivoting to this one idea, are there any ideas you miss, you think were viable but you're just not going to do, that you wish you'd had a crack at, that maybe someone else listening could run with?
00:47:25
Speaker
Yeah, I'd love to share. Maybe I'll just post the list out of my notes app on social after this. I'd say the one that I was most excited about, I've got the problem, not the solution, is that I found finding in-home childcare really hard in the United States. A lot of the people who are running in-home daycares,
00:47:42
Speaker
They're very busy, they're probably not connected to their phone, they're working 10 plus hours a day. And so you can't really easily get to these people and sort of figure out what's the capacity? If you take care, do you have time to come see me? And it just struck me as this very open problem to solve. You have an infinite market.
00:47:58
Speaker
are just going to keep having kids for all the rest of humanity. And so it's not like you're going to run out of people to sell to. They're always going to need people to take care of their kids. And so that was one that I was really excited about. Similarly, on a consumer front, I wanted to tackle the business of
00:48:15
Speaker
How do you pick your child's name? Again, infinite market. People will always be naming kids. The process for my wife and me was like, just keep saying words until it sounded right. And I had wondered if there was anything in linguistics about why do people like certain words? Is it in the phonemes of the word? Is there anything out there in research that would help people find the right name?
00:48:39
Speaker
A good name matter. And so, yeah, there's all these little problems out there that I think would have been fun to solve, but I've become wedded to this one. Yeah, you settled on the technical one, probably for good reason. But yeah, that makes me I have to say this. So I won't name my children on the record, but we had part of our decision making process. It was the rhythm.
00:49:03
Speaker
Both of our children have three syllable names because did a Jenkins works quite nicely. That's exactly what I'm talking about. I think there are reasons that people pick names. And if you kind of reverse engineer, I mean, you actually have reverse engineered it. You do it for other people. I don't know. It's just kind of fun. It's not it's not maybe mission critical like I said earlier, but.
00:49:23
Speaker
We're always going to be naming children for all the time. I think the pain of finding childcare would have been a more viable business idea, but we'll leave that to one side for now. I think we're probably going to get you back in a year for the shadow traffic part three to see how it all finally broke down or built up. But for now, I wish you the best of luck. You're still in week one of launch. I hope all your boats come in. Yeah, thanks, Chris. I appreciate you having me. Cheers.
00:49:52
Speaker
Thank you, Michael. Now, as this episode is going live, Shadow Traffic should be in its third week. If it sounds like something that would solve problems you have, go and check it out at shadowtraffic.io. That's not a sponsored mention. He's not paying me to say that. I just like the journey Michael's on. I like the humility he brings to it, and I want good people to succeed.
00:50:15
Speaker
I'll put a link to it in the show notes. It's also worth checking out if you want to see a snazzy closure script application in the wild. I bet you haven't seen many of those in your time. If you've enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to like and subscribe, rate and share. I'm always watching for that kind of feedback, of course.
00:50:33
Speaker
That will be doubly true for this episode, because Developer Voices is absolutely a technical podcast, and it always will be so. But those stories where a technical life stretches out into other areas, I find those interesting too. Let me know if you do, and I can keep it in mind when I'm inviting new guests.
00:50:53
Speaker
We'll be back next week with another guest and another new episode. But for now, I have to head off to the school and collect my kids. For now, I've been your host, Chris Jenkins. This has been Developer Voices with Michael Dragales. Thanks for listening.