Should you start a startup with your spouse?
Hello and welcome to build your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2020. I'm Justin Jackson. And today I'm chatting with Michelle Hansen, co founder of geocodeo. How's it going?
Justin:It's good to see you again. Last time we hung out was Laracon?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Laracon twenty 17 when my husband, Matthias, and I were giving a talk on scaling a side project.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. I remember that. Have you been back to Laracon since?
Speaker 2:I haven't myself, actually. We just the schedule, hasn't worked out, but we really hope to get back. It's a great conference.
Justin:Yeah. I really liked your talk. It was actually one of the fur few talks I've ever seen, done where there's 2 people on stage because it was you and Matthias. And it was interesting what, when you have 2 people talking about their experience, especially about building a company, it's kinda refreshing in some ways because so often it's just from one person's perspective. And you did it with your your spouse, which is even have you ever had that experience where you're at a party and then you're telling a story and your spouse is like, that's not the way it went
Speaker 2:at all?
Justin:You know what I mean?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's we both look at things from different perspectives, even if we've experienced, the same events. We're both looking at different parts of the business and come away with them with different learnings as well. I think that was something that was really interesting was we had both learned different things from different things and hadn't fully articulated them before that. That's something we we every once a year or so, we've
Justin:done Yeah. Did did a when you're getting ready for that talk, did anything come out, like, as you were thinking of things from your perspective and things from his perspective? Were there some surprises? Like, were did some things come out? You're like, wait, like, that's how you experienced
Speaker 2:that? There wasn't huge surprises going into that talk, but I remember that we did practice in front of, a friend of ours. Some of you who listen to the podcast may know scotch. Io. It's, like, coding tutorials and things like that.
Speaker 2:So one of the, founder or both of the founders of Scotch are good friends of ours, but one of them is in DC, and so we were practicing in front of him because I think we had, like, 45 minutes for the talk. And we just kept running over because we kept being like, oh, well, we really have to mention this and we have to mention that. And Nick was kinda like, guys, you kinda gotta cut some stuff here. Because we just had so much to say about it. Because also, we hadn't really talked to anyone about it all that much.
Speaker 2:You know, building your own company from your house, just just by definitionally, you don't have coworkers that you're talking about that with. And it's Yeah. You know, there's Indie Hackers and there's and there's these other things, but we actually weren't even involved with those, those places yet. We didn't know about them. And and so we just hadn't really talked about it with other people before.
Speaker 2:So it was definitely interesting doing those run throughs with him and him being like, wait. Like, hold on. Like, back up to that because that was really interesting, and you guys just totally bossed over.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I can even I mean, going back, this podcast is interesting because we have this journal of every conversation John and I have had. And, well, not every conversation, but a lot of our thoughts at the time.
Justin:And it's interesting to go back in time and go, wow. That's what we were thinking then. That's what we were going through then. You know, that was the pressure we were under. And, you're I mean, yeah.
Justin:It's things evolve in an interesting way. And what is kind of, on your mind at one point of your company's development is totally different than what's on your mind later. Right? Or is has that been your experience or no?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What do you think you've learned from relistening to your podcast when you were first starting this?
Justin:I mean, part of it is just the pressure that, you know, when we were when we started that, Jon was still working full time. But I was, I had my own little business kind of going already. But I was dedicating almost all my time to building the company. But we weren't making any money yet. And the pressure that put on me is I mean, I I can think back and I can go, oh, yeah, that was pressure.
Justin:But then when I go and listen and I can hear it in my voice, there's like some desperation there. Right? And then how how quickly that can change from, you know, being desperate to almost the flip side. Right? Yeah.
Justin:That's been interesting. Yeah. I think the number of things we thought we were gonna build or we thought we needed to build and how many of those things didn't end up happening. And also what we got right. Like there was tonnes of hunches that we had, that ended up being exactly right.
Justin:So yeah. There's there's a ton of stuff in there. I still get every time I go back, I'm like, what? Also, I think just time frame. Like, in my mind, we've only been working on this for 6 months.
Justin:But in reality, it's been it's been, since 2000 December 2018. I mean, January 2018. Sorry.
Speaker 2:Time flies.
Justin:Yeah. Time does fly. You know, a lot of folks who listen to this show are wondering how do you find a good idea. And so I'm wondering with Geocodio, like, how did you 2 find that idea? Did it was it like, how did that happen?
Justin:How did you know there was gonna be demand?
Speaker 2:We knew there would be demand because we had the demand ourselves. Yeah. So it it came out of something that we needed ourselves. And you talking about kind of the pressure and stress of starting out. That brings me back to when we started out.
Speaker 2:So we actually didn't start out with Geocodio. We started out with a mobile app, and that app would help people find the opening hours of grocery stores and coffee shops near them. So this is, like, 2013. And so now you just type that into Google and it says, oh, you know, there's a, you know, there's a Starbucks open until 11 or or what have you. And it didn't at the time.
Speaker 2:And so you had to you know, if you needed milk at midnight, you needed to remember which grocery store was the closest one and then go to their website, and then type in your ZIP code, and then, like, then you would, you know, 5 or 6 clicks deep. And then if you've, you know, you're in some sort of midnight crisis where you need milk or you need coffee at 3 o'clock in the morning.
Justin:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so Oh, I
Justin:can totally identify with all of this. When you when you have kids, you need you need to make those trips all the time. You
Speaker 2:need diapers at 1 o'clock in the morning.
Justin:Yeah. Like, it's an emergency. What's open?
Speaker 2:So, yeah.
Justin:So you so you you you you would experience that yourself and you're you thought you should create a a mobile app to
Speaker 2:do that. Yeah. So Matthias had actually created this app for Denmark. And, I think he launched it there in 2012 and it'd become the number one app in Denmark at one point and we and it had, like, 500,000 downloads. And we actually calculated at one point, like, the percentage of the Danish population that had downloaded it because there are only a population of 5a half 1000000.
Speaker 2:So that was a really fun metric that I don't think we will ever, beat that. But so in, sort of going to 2013, we had always talked about launching things together. You know, he's a developer. I do product. He put us together.
Speaker 2:We make stuff. Mhmm. But it really wasn't until we were feeling that pressure that you were just talking about, because we were pregnant with our daughter and when we finally did the numbers on how much daycare would cost, we realized we had to get something else going. In the US, daycare, on average is about $25,000 a year, which is more than college in a majority of states. Like, state college tuition, it's more expensive, and parents just have to come up with that cash right away.
Speaker 2:You don't save for it for 20 years like you would for college.
Justin:So we knew it was
Speaker 2:gonna be expensive, but then we found out just how expensive it was, and we were just like, okay. So we, you know, we can't spend our weekends, like, binging Game of Thrones anymore. Like, we need to, like, launch stuff now Yeah. And get this going. And so so we launched that app and then in order to have that app work though, we needed geocoding because in order to display a map online, you have to have the coordinates.
Speaker 2:The maps and computers don't understand addresses. They understand coordinates. And we are using Google for this, and the problem was is that every time someone opened the app, we would have to reload all of the coordinates because there are a lot of Google still has a lot of restrictions on caching and storing the data, which basically they just don't let you. So, and we could get a certain number for free per day. I think it was, like, 25100.
Speaker 2:And then if we needed anything more than that, you needed an enterprise subscription for, like, $20,000 a year that will let you get a 100,000 a day. And we're, like, we have
Justin:Almost as much as day care.
Speaker 2:We have 5,000 stores on the tap. Like, we need more than 25100, but we need way less than a 100,000. And there wasn't really anything where we could just pay for what we needed. And so just in order to keep this app going, which at the time, I think it was making, I don't know, 3 or $400 a month in ad revenue, which was, you know, in the terms we've been using, you know, maybe a week's worth of daycare, if that. So not enough.
Speaker 2:It was something, but, not really enough. So we're like, okay, we but we can't let that go. And so he built a very, very rudimentary geocoder just for our purposes. And, as the, like, months went on, friends of ours were like, hey. Like, you know, we like, we've got a similar problem.
Speaker 2:Like, you guys should just, like, slap a paywall in front of this, and then maybe other people will basically pay you to host it. And then instead of having to go get some crazy enterprise plan, you can just keep using it and basically have it for free if you've got a couple of customers using it just like friends of ours. And we're, like, cool. Like, that would be amazing. Like, so we could, you know, we could release this and have other people pay it and cover the server costs, and then we can just use it.
Speaker 2:So that was our initial definition of success was it covers its server costs, which we had like, 2 tiny little digital ocean droplets. So I think our costs the 1st month were $20 and, our revenue was $31 and we were just we were elated. It was that we were wildly successful as we had, conceptualized it.
Justin:Yeah. Is it is it isn't that funny, like, especially in the early days well, there's so much in there that I can identify with. Like, that feeling a lot of indie hackers or bootstrappers get started like that. Like, the the motivation comes after they have their first kid or, you know, there's something that's making them hungry. And when Tyler Tringa says that building and owning a sass is the new American dream, that's what he's talking about.
Justin:Right? It's like that there's a lot of pressures on families in 2020. And once you have kids or even if you don't have kids, it's just it's not the same as it used to be, you know, for our parents. And so there's this idea of like, how am I gonna make this life work? How am I gonna pay for daycare?
Justin:How am I gonna, you know And you start, you know, calculating these numbers. And I think that's what motivates so many people to get into business because it's like, okay, we gotta figure something out. Right? And then when you have any sort of success outside of your regular date were you both working regular full time jobs at this point? Yeah.
Justin:Yeah. So when you have any sort of success, like when you make that first dollar, in profit, you're like, here we go. Right? It just feels like such a victory to have something outside of the man paying you. Right?
Justin:Like, it's just like, okay. This is it. This is it. We're we're onto something.
Speaker 2:Once we had revenue, we quickly went from, this is awesome. Like, people paid us to, holy shit. People paid us. Our product sucks. Like, this why are they paying?
Speaker 2:It's like we were actually so surprised that people wanted to pay us that when it came time to charge people so that the the payment model we initially had was that it was just pay as you go and then we would charge people once a month for whatever they'd use, roll it up, which we still have a plan that does that. We had it all set up with Stripe and, you know, we had billing stuff and everything, but we didn't actually write the billing code that would charge people. And so I remember it was, like, February 1, 2014, because we launched mid January 2014, and we're like, oh, we're supposed to charge people today. We didn't actually make the thing that lets us charge people because we didn't expect to have anyone to charge. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so yeah, very very quickly we developed this feeling of responsibility towards the product and towards the users that if people were going to pay us, we really had to have a product that was worth paying for.
Justin:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And Who
Justin:who are these users? Were they they they folks like you? Like independent developers?
Speaker 2:Hacker News people.
Justin:Okay. And so no one really big? Like, a lot of people doing side projects? Or were there some legit companies using it early on?
Speaker 2:I think it was mostly developers playing around with it. Like, that was really who we intended it for in the beginning was developers who are stuck in the situation we were where their projects, whether they are their own side projects or a project they need to do at work, that they they were just stuck and they needed to use something that would let them store the data and use it without any restrictions, which is the big problem that people still run into with the the major geocoders.
Justin:Yeah. So the the a lot of folks who were, like, starting a project, they they have an idea for a oh, man. I like, would trail mappers wouldn't be in this category. Right? People doing trails, is it mostly, like, major landmarks and and roads and things?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know if you would use this for trails, but, for example, one of the early use cases we learned about was fleet tracking. So if you're if you had trucks, and they they they'll sometimes ping them every, you know, 100 yards or so and get the nearest address of where that truck is.
Justin:Gotcha. So so they start building this this, app and then they realize, oh, we're stuck here. Like, we need a way of of, is it store it's a way of retrieving geo coordinates. Right?
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Justin:Yeah. So we need a way of doing this. What are we gonna use? And when you showed up, it was like, oh, well, let's use this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Our big selling point at the beginning was we'll let you store the data. It's affordable, so you can, you know it'll free for most people, but if you have higher, you can just pay us for whatever it is beyond the free tier and not be locked into an annual plan. And then just having a really nice API to work with. So it was very API focused in the beginning.
Justin:And so so you got your first you had your 1st month, $31 in revenue. What what happened after that? Like, did it did it grow quickly or slowly? What was kind of that trajectory like?
Speaker 2:So it continued to grow, but very slowly. We got a ton of feedback because of the the launch. I mean, we had, like, hundreds of emails to go through for people who are like, hey, this is great, but, you know, do you support the UK? Or, like, do you do this or you do that? And we were, like, no to a lot of those.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. But then we sort of slowly added new things. So for example, I mentioned fleet tracking. So that's reverse geocoding when you're taking coordinates and trying to get an address. So I think we added reverse geocoding in, like, a month later in February.
Speaker 2:And then a couple of months later, we added the ability to retrieve Census data. So there are these things called FIPS codes and tracked IDs that, the U. S. Census and Statistics Canada use for identifying particular areas of land that you can use to then connect to other government datasets. Added those.
Speaker 2:A big thing for us was adding a spreadsheet upload. So what we didn't realize was, if you had a spreadsheet of addresses and you needed the coordinates for them, the only option you had was to email it to this guy who would get it back to you in a couple of days. And I think Patrick McKenzie has talked about this. If you can find a business process where people are emailing spreadsheets to one another, that's a really good sign of a business. You can turn that into software business.
Speaker 2:And so we added that, and then, a huge tipping point was a customer asking us if they could have, you know, like like, 5,000,000 lookups a month, like, as a and they wanted that just, like, every month. And with our pricing, it didn't really make sense and so we developed a model where we basically give them a dedicated server of our software and they could just run it as much as they want for a flat fee because that was a fixed fee for us and so we could do that. And then, so, that was the beginning of what we call our unlimited plan, which that was huge for our revenue, and and things started to take off from there. But it wasn't until another three and a half years later that I went full time on the company. I think because we were so conservative, because we had a family, like, you know, it we we were really, really cautious about it, and rather than being excited that we had this revenue, we were more scared that it was gonna go away at any minute.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. When did you, when did you introduce the the unlimited plan?
Speaker 2:That was May of 2014.
Justin:Okay. So that would have been would would that have been a a year after launch? Or
Speaker 2:4 or 5 months. We launched in January of 2014.
Justin:Oh, okay. Okay. So 4 or 5 months. Wow. Okay.
Justin:So you you you figured out a a pretty good pricing model pretty early on.
Speaker 2:Sort of. We you know, some of our model we copied from competitors. So Mhmm. The major geocoders gave you 25100 for free per day. So we sort of lucked into a freemium model because we're like, well, if this is every what everybody else is doing, we have to do that too.
Speaker 2:But then what we really wanted was just, you know, pay 50¢ for another 1,000 on top of that. And so we we kind of looked at what some other developer focused products did with pay as you go models. But then, yeah, the unlimited subscription was really just because we were listening to our customer and turned out they needed that, and we found a way operationally to do that in a pretty cost effective, profitable way, that it would work for us. That was where that
Justin:Yeah. So going back to the the original kind of, metric, how long was it before Geocodio was paying for daycare?
Speaker 2:I don't think we actually took checks out of it to pay for daycare instead, and this is, perhaps a very American thing of me to say. I think the first thing we took it out for was to pay off some of my student loans.
Justin:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That was pretty exciting. I think the first time we, like, we we were so scared that the money the revenue was gonna stop and we're like, you know, Google could change something and then it's all gonna go away. And actually, they did. Like, I think at 2015, they finally added a pay as you go model that was half of our price and we were terrified by that. And, instead, so so, like, so we had to cut our prices down and we're like, shit, this is the end of this.
Speaker 2:And then our revenue and customer growth went up after that and we were very perplexed. Wow. But So we were we were so scared that something would happen that we basically didn't pay take money out except to pay taxes for, like, a year or, you know, in expenses for like a year, year and a half. And then our air conditioning broke in the middle of July in Virginia where it's, you know, a 100, a 105 degrees and super humid. And we had to buy a new air conditioner.
Speaker 2:I remember it was $8,000 and we had, like, $20,000 in the business bank account, and we were like, I I guess we have to do this. Like and it was so scary to take that out, but also kind of liberating at the same time because otherwise we would have had to finance it and end up paying $10,000 or $12,000 at the same time. I think that was really the first moment. It was like, wow, this can actually give us a level of freedom that we don't have right now, which was a huge motivator to see the kind of change that could happen. I think it was after that it was like, oh, well, you know, we can take out $500 and get rid of the student loan or things like that.
Speaker 2:It was a very gradual process of realizing that this could be a sustainable source of
Justin:Yeah. And you know what the hard part about that is? Is that in the beginning, the thing that motivates you to start is often, like your needs are immediate. We need to pay for daycare now. I need to pay off this student loan now.
Justin:And so, you know, people go, okay. Well, I got what what am I gonna do? I'm gonna start a side hustle. I'm gonna start a podcast and get advertisers. I'm gonna create I'm gonna build an app.
Justin:And, I mean, that of course, like, that's that motivation is what gets you in the game often. But the the challenge is then it can be years before the business starts to alleviate some of that pain.
Speaker 2:And I think what kept us kept us going, you know, even if it was those financial stressors that prompted us to get off our, butts and create stuff, was we very quickly got this feeling that even if we didn't make any money, we were getting so much satisfaction
Justin:out of this
Speaker 2:because I think anyone who has worked for anyone else, you know, whether that's a big corporate job or even a smaller company, inevitably you are only doing a portion of what you are capable of when you're working for someone else. You have a role and you do the stuff in that role and you might be capable of doing 10 other things that are not directly related to that role, and I always found it deeply frustrating to not be able to sort of bring my whole professional self to work of everything I was capable of working on, and everything I wanted to challenge myself with, and everything I wanted to learn. I found that so frustrating, in multiple companies. So I don't think it was anything that had to do with where I worked. It was just about me, and and what I wanted to be able to do.
Speaker 2:And to have the freedom to be able to create something and then say, yeah. We're gonna we're gonna try something out. We're gonna add this new feature, and, no, I don't have a pile of spreadsheets of data that tell me that this is the right thing. I'm just talking to these customers and they say they need it and then there's this competitor and they're pretty terrible. You know what?
Speaker 2:I think we got something. Let's just do it. Let's see what happens. You can't do that in a large company that is, by its nature, risk averse because you've got all those other salaries to pay. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And so that was so rewarding as a long time, even if we we hadn't planned on going full time on it, just as an outlet for all of the professional aspirations we had and all of the impatience we had about, you know, wanting to challenge ourselves more. That was so rewarding more than really any of the financial outcomes we had for a very long time.
Justin:Yeah. That's actually an important distinction, I think. And actually, it'd be good to get your your take on this too. Some of the advice I've been giving to folks lately And you might disagree with this, actually, because But was, you know, I got into doing a lot of this side stuff when I still had babies in the house. And in retrospect, I'm not sure if that was a great thing because it was just so much effort in service of something that I was hoping was gonna alleviate some immediate pain.
Justin:But babies are just so much work, and I just felt like, Ugh, maybe I should have In retrospect, I wonder if I should have just relaxed a little bit, and just enjoyed the baby stage, and just gone to my day job, and come home, and, you know, help take care of the babies. But instead, I went to my day job, I came home, I helped take care of the babies. And as soon as the babies were sleeping, I was working on and hustling on this other thing. And I had no, like, real mental energy, for being a parent. What do you think about that?
Justin:Do you think people should wait? Or do you think it's it's okay?
Speaker 2:We we launched Duikodeo when our daughter was 4 months old. So I, we we took a pretty similar path. I think when, you know, you you said enjoy the baby stage, and I sort of laughed to myself because I don't think anyone enjoys the baby stage.
Justin:Like, you
Speaker 2:know, you're waking up several times a night, you're exhausted all the time. If anything, I think it's a good time to have a side business because the rest of your life is so draining and you need that dopamine badly. And you're better to get it from having a side project that's fulfilling to you rather than drinking or being absent or whatever, all those other things where people try to find a way to make themselves feel good when you're woken up 3 or 4 times a night and you come home and there's crying all the time and diapers. It's not fun. I think there are some, beautiful, amazing people who find that rewarding.
Speaker 2:And, I am not one of those people, which is very taboo for a woman to admit. But so all the other women listening, it's okay to not enjoy the baby stage.
Justin:Oh, my wife and I talk about this all the time.
Speaker 2:And so I I do have some regrets around starting a company when she was so young. More that, you know, we were working we're both working full time. And so we would get home and it was just chaos for, like, 2 hours because we would then be able to respond to customer emails. And so dinner was spent. Like, what was happening with the company that day?
Speaker 2:Like, like, what are all the emails that came in? Who do we have to respond to? What went wrong? Like, who do we need to find time to talk to tomorrow? Like, if we had a potential customer who wanted to talk to us, I would pray that they were on the West Coast and I could do it at 7 PM my time, because otherwise I just couldn't take a call during the day.
Speaker 2:It was so stressful, And so we would come home and dinner conversation for, you know, 3 years was, what's going on with the company? What are we doing next? And and sometimes I think it was probably a good thing for her to see us, you know, turning our living room into a whiteboard and taping stuff up to the wall and wireframing out processes during Sunday breakfast, but also we were talking about the company. We weren't talking to her and we weren't really talking with her because there's not a whole lot of 2 year old can contribute to a conversation about business. And even sometimes now, sometimes she'll be like, why do you guys have to like talk about it so much?
Speaker 2:And then other times, you know, last night she has a Giacodio t shirt that she like wore to bed and,
Justin:you
Speaker 2:know, sometimes she's into it. But, so, sometimes, I I do wonder if we were less engaged as a result just because juggling a full time job and a family and a side project is a lot, but I'm a I'm a believer that adults just don't get enough dopamine. We, like, we need more happy things in our lives. We don't have recess. We don't have team sports.
Speaker 2:And if you get that sense of satisfaction and, you know, personal fulfillment from having a side project, then I think that's a great thing.
Justin:Yeah. And it probably helped a lot that you were doing it together. Like, I get I I do get a lot of emails from, you know, one of the spouses is really trying to build this thing. And the other spouse, is bitter about it because it's like, oh, now you're gonna go into the basement. You just got down back from work, and now you're gonna go into the basement and work on your computer again.
Justin:You know? And I can see that leading to resentment, even though the the one partner who is working is like, what? But this is in service of our family. This is like, what? This is what I need to do for our future.
Justin:I can see it leading to resentment, but you 2 had the the advantage of doing it together. Do you do you think that was helpful?
Speaker 2:I think it was. I think on I mean, on anything, it's helpful to be, on the same page with your spouse and to involve them in some way. And even if they're not part of building it and it is not something that's in their area of expertise, they can still be a sounding board. You know, we say oftentimes that, one of my hats that I wear is to be a rubber duck to Matthias when he's struggling with something. You know, the concept of rubber duck programming where you keep
Justin:Mhmm. A
Speaker 2:rubber duck on your desk to talk to when you're struggling with something. And I'll say that sometimes my job is to be the rubber duck and he's he's struggling with something, and then I just ask him a bunch of very basic questions about it or just help him follow the thread, and then he'll figure it out. My job isn't to figure it out. And, you know, parenting with someone, you have to be on the same page with them, you have to talk about them, you have to talk about problems. I think it's a very similar dynamic.
Speaker 2:And for the people who are coming home from work and then putting the kids to bed and then just disappearing into the basement, I would encourage them to get their spouse involved in some way because I bet their spouse would not be resentful if they were involved in some way in it, even if just as a rubber duck sounding board to help them work through things.
Justin:Mhmm. Now but what if to play devil's advocate? What if the other spouse doesn't want to? They're just like, no. I don't I don't want you doing this right now.
Justin:Do you think it is better for people to just wait? Because one thing I tell folks is like after the diaper stage, that is a the once the diaper stage is done, you your world kinda opens up. Right? Like, the what? It it's really crazy.
Justin:There's all sorts of things you're dealing with. Fevers and feeding and and after the diaper stage is the first time it kind of your world opens up a bit. And, so my advice in the past has been, well, you know, it's okay to wait. Like, the, you know, the kid will be out of diapers in a bit, and then your world will open up. Do you think it's do you think people should wait if if things aren't quite aligned?
Speaker 2:I think you shouldn't shirk your parenting responsibilities to make it happen sooner. I'm a firm believer that parenting should be 5050. And if someone is getting out of parenting in order to work on it, then that's a problem. But if we're just talking, you know, 8:30 and kids are asleep, then I think it's okay. I mean, I guess I can't speak to everybody's relationship, but I would encourage that spouse to take up a hobby that they can do, sitting next to their spouse when they're sitting downstairs working.
Speaker 2:You know, I, I don't wanna speak too much for them, but I remember talking to Abigail Otwell, Taylor's wife, a while ago and, you know, she was saying how their goal from the beginning had been for him to have a business so he could work from home and they would talk about it together. But there was a period of time when she was running her own, children's clothing
Helen:brand online.
Justin:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And she would work on her sewing and he would have his laptop and they would both be sitting at the dining room table together. And I thought that was, you know, such a great image and one that that stuck with me because they're not working on businesses that are remotely related to one another, and the other one probably doesn't have a ton of subject matter expertise to contribute to the other one's business. But they're doing it together and they don't have to be talking, they don't have to be engaging in it. But I think so much when, you know, when when you have maybe, especially if you have a stay at home spouse and they're not talking to another adult all day
Justin:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It's important to just be there. You don't necessarily have to talk, but I think figure out what is that other stressor in the relationship that is causing that resentment. I would dig into that. I would say that that the side project work is a a the resentment about that is a symptom of some deeper issue that you can work through, but maybe you need to talk to each other more.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Not to become a marriage counselor, which I am definitely
Justin:not. Well, no. I I I mean, I just wanna talk about this stuff because to me, this is the real stuff. Right? And and the the the thing I've had to, ask myself as I've been building things is, you know, what is this in service of?
Justin:Right? And one thing that you said that I think resonates with me is you're like, man, Matthias and I would have been doing this. Even, like, just having this project that was our thing that we could do outside of work, and we can make decisions, and we could, decide the direction of this thing. That was enough in the beginning. And to me, that that is a big piece of it.
Justin:Because if all the only reason you're doing it is this desperation to, you know, you every month, you've got this $1,000 shortfall in your family budget. And you're like, ah, if I I just gotta build something. And then it becomes all about getting that extra $1,000 a month. And there's not, it's just really hard in that case. Because if that's all that's driving you, it's going to be Like, this is why I When Jon and I talk about, like, we say, Hey, would we ever sell this company?
Justin:I go, I don't know. Because what would I Like, I would just wanna do what I'm doing now.
Speaker 2:You'd have to go start another company anyway. And that's that's hard. Like, we people ask us all the time. And we've even had people offer to acquire us, and and we're just, like, no. Like, you know, I, like, work from home with my husband.
Speaker 2:Like, my dog is my coworker. You know? He sleeps all day. You know? Like, we get to go pick our daughter up from the bus stop at 4 o'clock.
Speaker 2:We don't have to fight traffic every day. Like, what more could I possibly want? Like, what could any company offer me that would somehow be better than getting to make my own decisions, complete autonomy over my work, working with my husband, the flexibility to be with my family when I want to be. Now that also means that, yes, we can go get her at 4, but we're also gonna get ping from intercom at all times of the day even when we're on vacation. Like, it just never really stops.
Speaker 2:You know, peep so sometimes people say, you know, oh, you're you're so lucky. You can, work whenever you want. And I I heard someone say this couple of years ago and it stuck with me. It's not that you can work whenever you want, it's just that you work whenever. But that is the price I'm willing to pay to be able to work with my husband and make our own decisions and not be encumbered by some broader corporate process that I used to grate against.
Justin:And I I do think it's not for everybody because you're right. There are pros and cons. I think the the the big kind of travesty of modern life is there's not more great employers. Like, it most jobs do suck. And the, you know, it's nice to see companies like Wild Bit I think Wild Bit just introduced, people first jobs or something like that.
Justin:You know, that's the kind of thing I wanna see because the you know, I used to, I think, be a bigger booster for people starting companies. Like, yeah, everybody should start a company. And now I'm just like, ugh, I don't know if I don't know if that's a good idea. Because it there's just it's really, really I mean, it's one thing to say is really, really hard. But there's just so many layers that go into having a company that actually makes it.
Justin:And there's just not that that's not a good enough solution for most people. And I just want more people to have a good life. So I on the flip side of it, I think it is I guess maybe the the answer is that eventually Geocodio and Transistor are gonna have to hire people and be the employers that we'd like to see in the world. But, yeah, even that's tricky for me because the not having employees has a lot of freedom as well. Brent?
Justin:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's it's it's, the the lack of any interpersonal work drama is, is really nice. Awesome.
Justin:Think about how much complexity that adds.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. You know,
Justin:just adding as soon as there's a 3rd person or a 4th person or 5th I think actually teams of 5, that's kind of the ideal size in my head. Like, 5 people's pretty good. But as soon as it's like 10 people, you automatically have the the same problems you have when it's a 105100. I mean, the the problems get scale more difficult, but it's all drama. It's politics.
Justin:It's jockeying for position. It's, you know, all this kind of passive aggressive behavior. And you can reduce a lot of that by paying people well and hiring the right people and having values and all those things. But, you know, no matter who you are, if you if you have 20 employees or 50 employees, you're spending a lot of your time as founder just dealing with people.
Speaker 2:And the other thing with hiring people is that it's a huge responsibility. And the way I think about it is you're not only making a promise to them that they're going to have a job in a month, you're making a promise to them that there's going to be a job for them in a year or 2 years, and you're making that promise to their family, and that is something I take very seriously. And thinking about how, if we were to hire a developer, for example, that's a $100,000 plus 30% in benefits, that's a significant amount of money. And while we could ostensibly cover that as well, I would then also feel pressured to grow more. And because of that responsibility to that person and their family, and I think that is a level of stress that I realize I I don't wanna take on at this point.
Speaker 2:And you you were talking about should people start companies at when their kids are babies. Something we talk about a lot is how with our daughter young and in elementary school right now, we don't want to add on the responsibility of of having employees to take care of in addition to her at this point. You know? Maybe 10 or 15 years from now when she's off on her own and and she's self sufficient, but, you know, at this point, it's just such a huge responsibility, and we have enough to worry about. We would we would rather find ways to make our business more efficient and make ourselves more efficient and, you know, improve our UX so we have fewer support tickets, purposefully grow slowly, though we had 90% growth last year, so we're not doing a very good job of that.
Justin:Wow.
Speaker 2:But, you know, making decisions in the business that don't lead to that huge growth and and purposefully not putting pressure on ourselves to do that. And I think sometimes it can be really, really hard because there are social expectations that, oh, if you have a successful company then why aren't you hiring people? Why aren't you going getting funding? What do you mean you're just fine how you are? And I'm like, yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm okay saying that working from home with my husband is my definition of success. Mhmm. And that's my definition of success, and I don't need to give into other people's definition of success, which may include the number of people that report to you or the, you know, numbers of 1,000,000 of dollars that you've raised. None of those things play into how I think about success. And and I think that's something that's really unique in the bootstrapper world is taking a very rebellious definition of of what success is and and rejecting those more common definitions of it.
Justin:Totally. Yeah. I think asking what is this in service of is that's that's the most important question you have to ask. And it again, it's tricky because, you know, when you're 6 months in and it's still not paying your bills and it's frustrating and you ran into a big obstacle, you'd be like, okay, what is this in service of? Well, it's supposed to be giving me more margin, and it's not.
Justin:So I'm done. And, you know, I maybe maybe the answer is again, going back to what you said, like, there was just something about the project that was good enough on its own that it was it was giving you life on its own. They were like, you know, we can do this even though it's not paying our full time salaries right now. And yeah. And and but and eventually but obviously, I think there's the second part of that is there has to be a limit and going, okay, at some point, we need to have some sort of mark in the sand where we say, okay, if if this isn't providing a full time income by 2050, like, obviously, we've got to shut this down.
Justin:Right? And I think I don't know. I guess that depends on your personal situation. But I know for me, I'm so thankful that Transistor did get traction because I couldn't have waited 4 years. Like, there's just no way.
Justin:I I that so for me, it was like, this needs to be kind of making money. I think in my head, I was like, it better be making, you know, a fair chunk of money by year 1. And by year 2, my hope would be that it was providing at least some sort of income for me. And then I think I said by year 5, I want it to be providing a full time income. Yeah.
Justin:Do you have any thoughts about that? Like, when when people should give up?
Speaker 2:I think the reason why it took off is because of the work you did upfront in understanding the customer and where the holes were in existing products for what they were trying to do, but then continue to do that work and understand why is it you're signing up with Transistor? Why aren't you what else have you tried? What are you really trying to do here? And continuously improving your product by talking to the people who need it.
Justin:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And I think that's the big mistake that people make that even if they have those goals in their head, they can be very well intentioned but dig themselves into a hole because they continue to build without getting enough feedback from people about what they really need.
Justin:Oh, totally. And and there's there's times where, I and I I'm I've got a meeting here right away, so we can't get into this too much. But I know, like, you and I are both big customer research people, And I would have maybe next time we do a call, I'll get you to go into your process. But it's it's surprising to me, you know, how many people I ask, like, they're gonna bet their lives on this thing. They're gonna quit their jobs.
Justin:They're gonna invest a bunch of money. And you go, okay. Well, what evidence do you have that people want this? And they say, well, I don't know. Well, how many people have you asked?
Justin:Or how many people have you observed paying for something like this or demanding something like this? How do you know? And I go, well, I haven't asked anybody. Or even the other thing that I see, because now customer research is becoming kind of the the the, a trend, is they'll ask 10 people and I'll say, okay, well, what did you find out? Well, nobody really seemed into it.
Justin:Or nobody really there wasn't any when I asked them what they're how they were currently solving the problem, there just wasn't a lot of it didn't seem like they're hungry for a solution or a paid solution.
Speaker 2:Do something else.
Justin:Yeah. And I'm like, okay, well And then they're like, Yeah, but I'm gonna keep going. I'm like, What? -No. -No.
Justin:You've got it. And so, yeah, I think that is the I mean and of course, customer research is just one layer. Right? Like, think about you and Matthias and all of the layers and layers of experience and skills and things you bring to the table and certainly privilege and everything else, there's this big stack of stuff that you 2 brought to the table before you'd written a single line of code for GeoCODio. Right?
Justin:And that helps. And people sometimes, I think they they they miss this idea of no. No. No. No.
Justin:It's all about the work that happens before you start coding. Right? It's it's it's everything that comes before that. Your entire life's history, everything you've practiced, all the skills you've developed, all the relationships you've made, and then sitting in the water and observing and researching where you think that next wave is gonna come from. That's the key.
Justin:So maybe to end, like, what do you think are some simple ways people can start practicing that kind of customer research?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the the first thing I would say is, you know, if you've gone out and talked to people and they weren't interested in it, take that as a sign, not that you should stop, but that there's another way of thinking about the problem. I think so often people, they get really excited about something because they they experience the problem themselves and then they come up with the solution to it and then they show the solution to people. They talk about it and they're not excited about it And I would say that that don't give up on that problem that first inspired you, but maybe consider that your solution for how you're articulating a solution to something is what's off. And I think people it's not a very intuitive process when you have an idea for something to extrapolate out its key parts and say, oh, here's the the problem I had and then here is the the way I packaged up a solution to it and recognize that maybe it's that packaging you came up with that's flawed but there is something to that problem that you identified.
Speaker 2:And the direction you go in for a solution, you you might actually have to talk to people about 10 different options that are totally different from one another. But if you understand what their problem is and how often they experience that problem and how many other tools they're currently using to solve that problem, that will point you in the direction of a solution.
Justin:Totally. Totally. I wish I could keep chatting forever, but I got I got it ended here. Michelle, we'll definitely have you back on again. Folks can check out Geocodio.
Justin:It's geocod.io. And you are on Twitter at mjwhansen, h a n s e n. Definitely recommend following Michelle for product insights, customer research insights, some parenting insights every once in a while. Right? Yeah.
Justin:Thanks for being here, and I'm just gonna read out our Patreon supporters, and that'll be the end of the show. Thanks to everyone who supports this show on Patreon. Chris Willow, brand new, Mason Hensley, Boria Solar, Ward Sandler, Eric Lima, James Sours, Travis Fisher, Matt Buckley, Russell Brown, Evandro, Sassy Pradyuma, Schembecker, Noah Praill, Robert Simplicio, Colin Gray, Josh Smith, Ivan Kerkovic, Brian Ray, Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Michael Sitwer, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis. They'll be at Laracon coming up. Dan Buddha, John's brother, Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Sammy Schuichert, Mike Walker, Adam Duvander, Dave Junta Junta, and Kyle Fox at get rewardful.com.
Justin:Thanks everyone, and we'll see you next week.
