Idea to Validation to Launch with Ben Orenstein – MicroConf On Air

0:00[Music] all right and we're live sir den Ornstein thank you so much for joining me today ma'am thanks it's like to be here indeed so for those of you watching welcome to day 6 of Micro Kampf on air you're either watching this at microphone air.com or you can head to youtube.com slash micro Kampf if you want to ask questions have been Ornstein whether it's about his Michael Kampf talk from last year or really anything that's been going on with him you can head to micro conf connect calm and get into the slack group there we have a microphone on our channel and folks are pumping thoughts and questions in there

0:46before we get started thanks so much to Basecamp and stripe they are our annual partners headline partners this year and as always we you know love love working with them my guest today as I said at the top of the the stream is Ben Ornstein he's the co-founder of tupl co-host of the art of product podcast and you know we like to to structure the discussion a little bit around especially folks have spoken at my ground there there talk Ben's talk last year was called idea - validation to launch the first 365 days of tuple and that went live in the past couple days on that micro kampf youtube channel that

1:26i mentioned earlier youtube.com slash micro conf we also I believe producer Zander sent me a note that all of the micro comp 2019 videos that's growth and starter and Europe are all now available on our YouTube channel so I mean switched we made a decision in 2020 with the expansion of Microsoft and trying to bring more trying to bring more stuff to entrepreneurs especially earlier stage folks who have a tough time perhaps getting out to in-person events that instead of selling our videos that we are you know essentially letting them go live for free and can head over there and check those out Ben have you watched your talk since we

2:06pushed it live I actually haven't I didn't know it was live I've been on a Twitter break so maybe you can be there something but otherwise I was not not we're yeah I think we I think we add mentioned you or something but it'll be good you do you often go back and listen to your podcast or watch talks in order to improve I do listen to my podcast sometimes which feels a little bit weird but it's like my memory is so bad that last week's episode is like still you know like 20% new to me just somehow I'm like oh yeah I forgot we were dealing

2:35with that yeah so listen to podcast send me regularly I don't watch many of my talks I'm actually not sure I've seen like a whole talk I've given before on video yeah I watch I I do listen the podcasts that I do and I find that it helps it's sometimes it's agonizing and I but helps me improve you know helps me realize weird speaking patterns or oh I should have asked this question or whatever talks I do have to 1.75 them I just cannot sit through a full 45 minutes of me but I have learned a time watching them so it's it's no limited recommended yeah I've gotten over the

3:10listening to myself thing like that makes everybody uncomfortable at first I think but I'm now used to that but the watching myself is kind of a new level of discomfort I think that I'm not I might not be quite ready for it yep yeah totally so we do have some good we have some comments we have some questions I want to kick off with the first comment we got in micro cough Connect it's from Ken Wallace he's at bow to kiss on Twitter he said this is still one of my favorite talks in my notebook during this talk I wrote these things and these are pair of phrases of what I got from

3:40what Ben said perhaps not word-for-word quotes one thing he said is it is impossible he's quoting you essentially it is impossible to ship early enough live frugally set money aside build your savings so someday maybe you can be your own first investor your early projects are just your practice companies and practice products ask for what you want any of that we're gonna bail with you yeah I'm yeah I'm pleased I think I still agree with all of that advice maybe that means I'm not growing enough or maybe I just I got I managed to get a couple things that are lasting that also kind of rings true yeah yeah that makes

4:21sense you know you mentioned before we we started recording your you know hanging out in your apartment kovat is is on your mind you know and I think it's on a lot of our minds and and different folks were dealing with it in different ways but what like what impact has that had I'm curious I think both personally and and business-wise well business-wise our app is a tool that's used by developers when they're working remotely so the market for the number of working home working at home developers probably went up 500 times in the last couple weeks so we saw a pretty huge surge in inbound interest which is

5:03nice on the business is doing well side presents its own stress of course it's like it's exciting and it's good but now it's also just like well everything just got turned up to 11 in terms of work requirements and so before we were we had like nice growth and things were going well but and it felt pretty calm and now it's like okay the growth is coming fast enough that like suddenly there's like so much work to do and our little team which is like 3.2 people at this point or so is it's starting to feel like wow there's too much now so it's it's it's a you know good and bad I

5:38would say on the work front yeah good problem to have but still a problem yeah exactly I remember top I remember hearing you talk about and other people but like you're talking about like with drip like always feeling like oh I need to keep adding this person here and like turn this rep into a revenue into another person and scale at this part and I'm feeling that now for the first time before it felt like like we were like we're able to like build things and make stuff and even like be manual and keep up with everything and now the growth has like changed dramatically and so

6:10it's it's like well I I used to just be able to do all the sales stuff and now every time I open up the thing it's like there's a half a day of working here and I can't do the other things that I want to do and need to do and so it's I think we're we're hitting the scaling thing which is cool it's it's better than hitting the no one wants to buy our thing but it's also it's like a whole new set of challenges for sure yeah and it's something that I don't think a lot of us feel it coming or even though we know that it will if we

6:40gaile because you can tell yourself i just can't imagine that the three of us can't just grow this to a million dollar company or a two million dollar you know or maybe we'll hire one person to get there and then as you start getting there exactly what you're experiencing it's like no now I get it like I could work 70 hour weeks and not be able to keep up with this yep and it's also the thing it's really where I notice it's really impacting us just in being able to prioritize the things that are most important like I think and maybe I'd actually be curious what you think on this lake I think the

7:08best thing I can do like my kind of zone of genius thing is actually around product management it's like determining like what we should build next how it should work how it should look at that kind of thing and then that feels most important to me I think but like I also Amanda Ling sales which is now like becoming an increasingly large commitment and that is not zone of genius stuff for me like I'm okay at it but I'm doing a lot of shuffling papers around and like filling out the vendor system to get paid and followed up on invoices and stuff it's like that doesn't seem at most high

7:38value and reasonably easy to hire if the product is I'm getting the feeling that the sales job is not that complicated it's just a process right it's you you do the demo people generally know what the tools does they have a few questions and then it's not like selling I don't know an ERP system or something right I'm cities for yeah right and I'm actually basically never selling it's more like large companies like we want to buy 20 licenses of avid enterprise plan and that's like great so I'm not trying to convince anyone to do it or like often even negotiating much really aside from like certain contract clauses

8:14so it's more like just walk through whatever they're processed is basically which is always involved and kind of annoying so it's I think it's tough for the kind of thing that someone else could do yeah yeah and that's like I think inside sales is generally like when we were in construction there was outside sales and inside sales and outside would go out and meet with the customer and they were really to build in the relationship stuff and then they had a contact called inside sales and they did all the admin is is it's more than that but it's what you're saying it's paper shuffling and it's kind of

8:45getting things done internally you're doing both right now but um yeah that definitely feels like something that because product is more you know you you hiring someone to run your prod at this point would be very very hard and would be a big risk right whereas you hired someone to do sales right now is is much more of a no-brainer I'm curious you know COSO Cove it is for better worse is obviously you know increase in revenue I mean it's it's a plus for the business personally it how is it taking a toll on you yeah 100% health stuff is like my most like vulnerable area it feels like to me and

9:25in terms of like mental response to it like my my mental response to most risks is like pretty measured I think something about health risk to me and people I love is like extra scary and so I've been struggling mentally with that part and it's also of course like there's more isolating happening and I'm super extroverted and I love spending time with people mm-hmm I like being in person with them and so that bits been tough as well yeah I can imagine well thanks you know thanks for showing up no just fun and easy but I you know I do appreciate it we have fun we have a

10:09ton of comments thoughts questions the first question is from Mason Hensley and he said I'm curious about Ben's thoughts on screen Esso which is the first competitor that that we've heard about you know for for a tuple and I don't know the thoughts may not be the right question but obviously it's I'm sure it's on your radar sonar radar yep saw it happen interested to see what happens there don't have like exactly a fully form response on that yet wasn't surprising like it was it was honestly a bit surprising how long it felt like we had this sort of clear space in front of us or as like doesn't seem like almost

10:47anyone else is coming after this market right now I've said that in times on my podcast I was like someone's gonna do this you're like oh this is a nice space you know hundred percent yeah and so like it was not a surprise that that day came eventually where someone's like oh yeah this yeah that there's a competitor totally so not shocking I mean still it's a it's a stress as well but like the good news is the market just got enormous ly bigger it's kind of good to say that there's enough to go around as an understatement I would say and I think we also feel

11:20motivated it's having someone else do something it's like it makes you maybe lights a little bit of fire and so I feel like we're all kind of like alright well we we have to keep kicking ass yeah yeah that can be good Forrest asks what advice might you have for someone who built a SAS app as a side project for themselves and has been using it for about a year but it absolutely pet but is absolutely petrified to put it out in front of anyone else for fear of rejection just thinking about it cuz a bunch of fear just thinking about it causes a bunch of fear and anxiety for

11:53such a person of course definitely not me asking for a friend yeah huh that's interesting to me this is not even a business question no to me this is a why is that so scary mm-hmm what in your past made that so scarier or what's what's the real risk here this feels like actually a sherry wall in question mm like a therapist question it's a - general because because I'd be shocked if this were the own if this business thing this it's a SAP or the only place this sort of reared its head and so I would I would think about trying to get to the

12:24source with someone that's trained at helping you unpack those thoughts and analyze them yep no I think that's good advice totally coincidentally I'm about two hours ago I was on Twitter and I had this thought about shipping and the shipping muscle you know the muscle of learning to do it in a fear behind it and I did spit out like a four or five tweet tweet storm that basically was like here are the fears that that I often feel or that a lot of us feel when we ship and here's why and here's what I think you should do about it and you know ship that what I say doing things

12:56in public creates opportunity but it's scary to do so in blah blah blah so not that's not you know that's more of a stitching on a pillow type tweet that's not gonna fix it for you but it is funny that this is just such a common thing right it's such a common thing for all of us to and whether it's shipping software whether it's shipping your info product a blog post a book chapter a live stream micro comm talk like all of these things are so scary Ashley the first couple times you do them and I find that the more I do them like the first live stream ever did I

13:26was just terrified you know and even though I've done I mean you and I have both done dozens and dozens of talks in front of hundreds of people it's different live streams for some reason at least for me we're different and I was really scared to do it and I'm glad that producers ain't forced me to do it now I'm like much more comfortable you know and it's just that's almost what I would say it's like you know once you get over it and you do it the more you do it the easier it becomes it just becomes less of an event that you run away from yeah I would say one of my

13:56life philosophies that I believe very deeply is in the plasticity of human brains so just because you react a certain way or feel a certain fear to a given situation right now does not mean that it has to be like that and with effort you can change just so much about your personality and how you deal with things absolutely growth mindset right versus fixed Mike Lawler asks he says I'm wondering if Ben has tips for launching an info product for folks who don't know you've launched several info products to the in the developer space he says I'm working on one similar to refactoring rails it's Postgres on Rails

14:32but I don't have near the following that Ben has my approach so far as to write a really good conference talk and give it at meetups hopefully one day and submit it as to as many conferences as possible what else can I or should I do um that sounds good I don't know if Adam wagons Talk has been put up on the channel yet yes yeah micro contact yeah okay so maybe that that's probably still on its way then all right cool so Adam is better at this than anyone I know and so I would defer to his advice but I can kind of give you the TLDR

15:10which is be useful on the Internet so conference talks is good although sometimes conferences are rather competitive so you might actually have a hard time getting the talk in there but if you make an incredible six tweet thread on some useful post stressed thing that rails developers going to find useful and then you do that once a week and maybe turn some of them into blog posts and you know or have a podcast or kind of I think the medium is actually not super important because it's kind of more like what you're gonna stick with and do regularly but just that basic idea of like how do

15:43you deliver lots of value to people for free in a place they want to consume it in a way you can keep up with and then eventually you know sell them something mm-hmm yeah that's good advice and producers and are just slacked and said that Adams talk is live so great youtube.com slash micro cough and search for Adam Whalen if you want to watch that talk it was a very good talk you're right on this topic Stephane has a question for you he says in terms of idea validation did you choose to work on tuple because of the big hole left in the market by the acquisition of screen

16:16hero what I mean is if that didn't occur do you think you'd still be creating a start-up and how would you validate the idea hard to say the the lack of a really good option was a big reason that that idea got bumped to the top but there were other factors like the fact that it was a tool for developers which was an audience I already had access to and also a also I felt like I could make a good product for them because I understand them because I am one so the combination is what really made it become number one if there had been an

16:51awesome version out there that I was using a loving I probably wouldn't have started I think but I don't know what I would have done instead and validation I think this I think there's been a fair amount and there's a lot set on the unvalidated on the on the YouTube channel and also in some of my previous talk I believe so I can you can check out those mm-hmm cool Nick from dentally says as a young product how his tupl approached enterprise sales versus self sign up was it something that was planned or worked as you went as large customer requirements became evident yeah much more the latter and in fact in the

17:28beginning we just told people no basically we're like sign up with a credit card and they'd be like we want SSO and we're like sorry and we would just sort of push people away anyone and like you know paying with POS or negotiating contracts we just said no to in the beginning because we feel like we needed all our focus on building a great product and then over time the interest went up and up and sometimes the numbers started to go up and up and it was like you know what do we really want to say no to this or do we want to maybe build single

17:57sign-on so we built single sign actually in response to basically a dream customer came along and said like we're interested in using this we as a society a breaker what you want to do and I was like guys I think we should build SSO so we did and actually they just on boarded this this week so that that's paying off which is nice but also it opened us up to a lot of other enterprise deals but we just kind of have slowly some of it honestly has been a mental shift for me because I'm a developer I don't love doing the sales thing inefficiency drives me crazy in a way that doesn't

18:33other people so like filling out the same security audit for a bunch of people and like getting asked questions that I already documented on the you know on the website and and all that stuff just like kind of makes me cringe a bunch but I'm trying to grow up a little bit and just like tough it out and I'm also trying to think like okay I don't like doing this that that doesn't mean tuple shouldn't do this hmm this just means I shouldn't do this so I'm trying to just kind of change my mind around it it's it's a really interesting question so much of so many

19:04of us want to start an app that's self-serve or that we don't have a sales process or certainly that we don't have an enterprise sales process for all the reasons you've described and I think that's the beauty of of being you know self-funded or Indy funded is that you have the control and you can make the decision of man I just don't want to do this and I do want to constrain the business and I've seen entrepreneurs do that and that's okay right if you really wanted to grow slower and just never do sales then just don't do it but to decide no we do want to become you know

19:30a seven-figure name for your business and to realize either I need to you know tough it out or as you're talking about now hire someone I think that's a totally it's it's just nice to be in control of that and not always being saying what will make us grow faster and and I have to do that and feel like you're backed in a corner because it's a certain point it's not fun anymore right and it'd be correct more of a job like we don't do this to back ourselves in a corner and do things we don't want to do you know so it definitely sounds like a

19:59role that that you should be firing yourself from soon it seems like I can't wait I like it some of it's fun it's it sound like it's it's cool to close a deal and then someone like writes you a big check or does a big ACH or a credit card charge like cool this is oh yeah I'm I like it when the money shows up at the end that's a pretty fun fun game but I do feel like actually like there's this been this push and pull for us which is we really don't want to build a like a lifestyle for ourselves that we don't like that was clearly not the point

20:30that's not what we started this was to like create a job that sucks for us and but we also don't want to like hold the business back and it's like there's we have a good product people like it I want a lot of people to be able to use it especially now if they want to and I want to like I don't want to let my own personal proclivities like hold the company back that affects my co-founders it affects our customers so trying to like balance these things I figure out okay what should i do what should I do and firing myself and such as is

20:59becoming more of the playbook yeah for sure we have a question from Andy Peters he says man you make pricing sound easy so you talk obviously he's listened to the podcast art a product podcast if you haven't checked it out could you talk about your journey to finding the right and then he has that strike through and it says the current price the stock you talked about how you raised your prices along the way to see what people will pay can you talk about the thoughts emotions you had when raising prices did you ever have newer customers with higher prices than earlier customers did they ever know or care conversely

21:33did you ever have to reach out to early customers Nessun to pay more now that you have a more set price Wow how do I not ramble in an answer to that many questions start asking a bit that one no that's cool I actually I just I pulled it up so I can I can bite these off I want that one so I'm glad I make pricing sound easy I don't actually well I guess I'm glad I I don't actually think pricing is easy but it sounds like you mostly have absorbed my philosophy around it where you said can you talk about your journey to finding the right strikethrough current

22:02price and I think that's that's that's area mentality which is I don't try to think about a right price think about testing prices and think about testing them semi-regularly because there's nothing like just getting data from actual customers at to answer these questions a friend asked me like what do you think about pricing scheme a versus pricing scheme B and is like I think you should test each one for a month and see what happens it's it's just a the best thing I found for settling in on prices that makes sense I will I do want to do a quick brag which is the other day I sent her a pricing

22:36page to Patrick McKenzie and he did not tell us to charge more hmm so all right there that's a win I was like ok I think we that seems promising and then so he said yeah both emotions when raising prices it is mentally a bit challenging there were times when I was testing new higher price points where I would write the price and like kind of have to like close my eyes as I hit the send button or like take a deep breath or like I would write a price and then I like backspace over it make something lower like no no no do the one you want

23:18to do just try it or like just change that for 205 or that you know add something here and just there was a mental struggle I don't think that should be discounted so gird your loins I guess prepare yourself for it did you ever have newer customers with higher prices than early customers feel bummed or even churn I don't think that ever happened we eventually settled on our current pricing and that's been that way for a bit but I don't actually think we ever had someone said okay I heard this person paid less we walked usual for that to happen yeah yeah yeah I think that's one of concerns

23:56that maybe are not actually that common right and then finally did you did you ever have to reach out to early customers and ask them to pay more now that you have a more set price we are just actually I think we so we're just sorting to starting to bump into that we have some early customers that run annual plans that are starting to renew I think basically so far we've just grandfathered the mahal it's pretty the amount of customers that are on the old pricing is not super high to the point where it's concerning to us so we just been kind of leaving them alone yeah

24:29cool Estefan has a question he said how much would you say having a non-trivial following on the web and a good reputation has influenced your startups growth if nobody knew about you personally do you think anything would be different in the end i I've gotten this question before so I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it I I mean it's all speculation right cuz I can't split test reality but I think it's pretty huge from the beginning we just had like it was easy for me to get a couple thousand people on the mailing list and it was easy to tweet a thing and then have a

25:00few thousand people see it it was it was just made getting initial momentum I think dramatically easier and also there was trust there too so people would sign up and say I've gotten so much value from your Ruby talks and from your podcast and whatever and so I was excited to come try this now that I have a need for it and so there was like sort of trust and rapport I guess that was was built over time through these things and so maybe we could have reached a similar level of success without that but it feels feels pretty unlikely to me I think this the

25:30slope would have been a lot flatter as we struggled to sort of get our name out there and get people hearing about us yep yeah I feel like it's an a really nice kickstart in the early days especially but the trust is almost more important than like the size of the audience I feel and it's if you can get those early adopters who trust you and are willing to give it a try give you the benefit of the doubt and then you start getting that feedback from them you improve the product quickly then words start spreading and I I I think trying to grow an eight-figure business

25:58or you know high seven-figure business just on audience in the SAS space is very very hard but you happen to have this amazing synergy with your audience being the exact customers you know should use this and most people don't even in if I look back at the audience I had when I was doing hit tail it's like only a portion of my audience cares about SEO and that was an SEO keyword so only a portion of my audience cared about email service providers when we launched rip like it was it was a good chunk but it was not a hundred percent you know and and I'm not saying yours

26:30wonder-percent or anything but I do think you had an incredible amount of synergy between those two that I think it was helpful totally and even beyond just having a bunch of people sort of in the early days who were willing to listen what I was saying it also because of that alignment of my me being like my audience I feel like it helped me build a better product and also do better marketing efforts like I could I could I had a good idea of what kind of things would resonate with people that would potentially buy our product what podcasts I should go on that kind of thing yeah and the the moral of that

27:04story is not Oh Ben had it easy because he had an audience and I don't and so you know whatever come talk comes from that it's well Ben was doing for free for like seven years and putting out podcast episodes and and giving stuff away on Twitter and putting out really valuable both free and then you know some paid info content that was always more valuable than the value no than money you charge like that's the lesson to take from this yeah I think the right way to think about it is investing it's like yeah it'd be great if you already had an enormous portfolio but if you don't and you want to one day

27:38have you know have these benefits start putting in what you can now so it'd be great if you already had this audience but just start putting useful stuff on the internet now for me I did it because I liked it and I enjoyed teaching and I enjoyed having it a little bit of notoriety in a tiny nerdy niche and so it was I was motivated to do it outside of thinking like hey one day I might start a business but I was it was more like hey one day I'm this might be useful I don't know like exactly how or why but like this seems like a positive

28:09asset to build up over time yep yeah doing things in public creates opportunity for sure last question of the day is were coming up on time it's from I'm gonna mispronounce his name and guess him he says Ben I joined late so you might have answered this but what percentage of revenue is from enterprise sales and feel free to answer that in a you don't hover vague you want to be and then he asks do you do any outbound sales like cold calls or is it all inbound it no outbound at all too much inbound to do right now maybe some day and I tried to like a little

28:41bit you know when things were calmer and didn't work that well for us like we have a trial so like a developer will try it at a company and then sell their boss on it and then some day you will often spread within the company and then we sort of kick off a enterprise-level discussion I would say enter it's probably still only like 10% 15% of revenue somewhere in there it's ramping up there's a lot more interest from bigger companies now because suddenly they're all sending the developers home so I could I could see that ratio I suspect that that chunk will change but it's not a huge part of the business yet

29:15yeah I would think without the co vid and they're working from home there are just more smaller companies who will be who work remote right and there is tend to have big offices and have less of a need for it so but this is definitely a tectonic shift we got a wrap we're at time thank you so much surfer for coming on if folks want to keep up with you you are rook r00 k on twitter although you're taking a break right now for a month or two I think but you can still follow you for when you get back to tuple dot app if they want to check out app your building

29:48and of course art of product podcast thanks again for coming on man yeah my pleasure is fun thanks for having me awesome so thanks for joining us for day six day seven is tomorrow and that is gonna be making the most of surplus family time with myself dr. sherry walling and 13-year old Finn walling it will be in the house is talking about some states gonna it's gonna be funny cuz that kid is hilarious so youtube.com slash micro conf same time same place noon central tomorrow thank you so much here [Music] you [Music]