Idea to Validation to Launch: The First 365 Days of Tuple – Ben Orenstein – MicroConf Starter 2019

0:00[Music] [Music] so this story is about the last year of my life quit my job start a company it's all about the details so let's go back to a year ago I was working a job and it was actually a pretty great job it was Koshi it's fun it's challenging I enjoyed it but at the same time I was working on someone else's business and there was an opportunity to do like a little bit of equity but it just never got to the point where it was super exciting for me and I'd always sort of felt like my eventual destiny was to run a software company and so I knew I had

0:46to leave that time there were only two problems didn't have the idea and I didn't have a co-founder but then suddenly just about a year ago two things fell into place the first was the co-founder so there's a person that I had been singing with actually in a course so I sing in a barbershop quartet I seen classical music in a course and I met this guy his name is Joel and we sang together for a few years Joel previously started a company and sold it to this giant health care company and it was more or less an aqua hire and he had completed his earn-out

1:19and he was getting didn't be itchy he didn't like being at this big company anymore so I started going over to Joel's house on the weekends and I would pitch him business ideas that's when the idea started to happen for us so I had this document this little note on my phone I know you can't read this it's not the point but you can maybe pause this video some other time later steal on my business ideas if you want and I would work my way down this list and picked them off and be like all right Joel what do think about this and we kind of hash it out

1:46and none of these really made the cut until this one which says screen hero replacement so screen hero was a tool developed by a Y Combinator company for doing remote screen sharing so if you and I wanted to collaborate on something you could kind of join me on my computer we could both control it we could see what was happening we could talk live and screen here did this better than anybody and they got huge and people love them and then lack bought them and shut them down ostensibly screen heroes features were rolled into slack calls I dispute that so there was this sort of great answer

2:24to a need of the market that then disappeared and so I kept asking my friends like hey what do you use now the screen hero is gone and they kept saying nothing and I was like well feels kind of dumb of me to not at least try this so this is the calendar event when Joel and I had kind of like are we gonna do this meeting you can tell this is a Thursday morning at 10:00 a.m. you can tell how worried I am about missing this because there are five reminders I'm not amazing at waking up early 10 a.m. is not super early for me but you know it's

2:54borderline so Joel and I sit down and we we actually get into some pretty heavy stuff like I remember asking him like hey like you I've heard you talk maybe about having kids do you think that's gonna be a thing that would happen soon because I mean that that's personal but it would impact I'll start starting a company together and we had a really deep conversation and we were aligned philosophically and so I walked out of that meeting thinking this is probably happening I would say afterwards we I felt like it was probably 80% I think I think we're gonna do this and I was looking around for

3:26some way to get myself all the way there because it was still kind of scary and what I did was I reached out to one of the screen hero co-founders on Twitter so i DM them and you probably can't read this but I'm gonna tell you that the most relevant part is is there any chance I could buy an hour of your time at whatever rate you think is reasonable to go through the questions I have for you and this is a trick I stole from Jason Cohen this by the way is a really wonderful tactic if you want to have a meeting with someone don't ask if you

3:55pick their brain ask if you can buy an hour of their time because that's like triples the likelihood that they say yes and by the way no one ever asks you to pay for their time just about so we scheduled this his name is Feroz he said yes this time I only have three reminders cuz in the afternoon and this is the screenshot I took while we were on the call so on the left side are a bunch of questions we had for him on the right side is us on the video call and the gist of this conversation was for us thinks this is still an opportunity he

4:25gave us some sort of information about like what had happened on the acquisition what the market looked like but the his position was like this is still needed you should totally do it and then we're like alright this is definitely happening once once that once we got that it was like okay we're doing it so Joel and I both pick our last day we gave her a notice at our jobs this thing's gonna happen and then suddenly there's a plot twist someone that Joel had hired at his previous company at his previous startup reaches out to him and says hey dude I just quit my job because my boss was an

4:59I have a whole bunch of money say if I have a bunch of runway I'm trying to figure out what to do what are you up to it shows like that's funny you should say that so this is April 22nd last year we have a chat about Spencer and Joel basically says look Spencer was one of the best people we hired he's kind of a machine he works really hard he would be a great engine to sort of add to the company and he's available and interested we should we should do it and so Joel convinced me I knew Spencer a little bit but not that well to be

5:29honest this is Spencer so we had this chat and and he sells me on him and I say yes and so player three enters the match now to be totally honest after this conversation station I have a little bit of a freak out because I feel I realized I'm like oh my god I think I'm doing that thing that they say never to do which is like start a company with someone you don't you don't know super well and I had a lot of stress about it and I had one night where I was like so stressed out that I like went for a run to try to calm down and I would like get

5:56exhausted and then gets dressed and then run and then get exhausted and I get stressed and like I basically couldn't I couldn't like work couldn't physically work the stress out of my body because I was like I don't I don't know this person like what might happen but eventually I talked to Joel about it again and and I'm a little embarrassed to admit the thing that they got me over this initially was I talked to my mom and I was like I feel like an idiot like I said yes this person I don't really know him that well what if it's what if we have always conflict and it's

6:23terrible and I did the stupid thing and we stumbled around on the gate and she goes well Joel says you should partner with him right and I was like yeah she goes well so it was like it would kind of be Joel's fault wouldn't it and I was like oh yeah okay yeah that's fine yeah let's do it and it's like just stupid brain things was like I was long as I can kind of blame Joel if this all blows up I'm fine with it the good news is spoiler alert none of that ever came to pass all that stress was for nothing Spencer's amazing super glad he's with

6:52us our chances of success I think are vastly higher because he joined us so this whole that whole little thing was just kind of a waste of brain okay so tuple meeting Saturday April 28th now we have a name so tuple was name that a co-worker suggested for those of you they don't know in programming a tuple is a data structure that takes things that are disparate and puts them together kind of like what our tool does it also kind of sounds like to people so here we are so we had a name and we're just about we're not quite a year ago now we have this meeting and on

7:26this meeting this is two hours on Saturday and they set one reminder no big deal weekend we figure out all the details like how we're gonna split the equity decided let's just do it equally we're all bringing different things to the table those things maybe have different values but look we're going on a long journey let's be equal partners the other things we decided were titles I am CEO Joe Lazar CEO oh and Spencers our CTO the really nice thing is we all I think have personalities that fit those roles and the one we wanted was the one that no one else wanted so it's like do I know you want to be CEO like

7:59no it was like great I got it so a few days later we signed our LLC Docs so this is us actually forming the company splitting up that equity and also opening a bottle of Dom Perignon don't be half of this purpose we're signing this on a cutting board for some reason I don't quite remember why this is actually on Joel's porch on his condo and then we get to work so at first getting to work happened in tuple headquarters which is actually Joel's condo this is his kitchen after a couple weeks of this Joel's wife was like would you mind not working in the kitchen and so

8:39we're like you're right we should get some office space we'll go into the bedroom so our office this is actually still where we work in Joel's second bedroom his wife is awesome and he's awesome and so they have like they let us use the space you can see we had these nice ergonomic standing desks although Spencer still sometimes prefers this position just an interesting way to review some code so Spencer and Joel start hacking away on this thing and here is the first prototype of tuple and again this is a screen sharing app so in the beginning we were just testing like how do you send data around so this is

9:13in a browser and this is a webcam that just goes like sort of in within the same computer so that's like the earliest day of the first time I was like oh my gosh we have a thing that sort of kind of works this is a later prototype so now you can even notice the background is different so Spencer and Joel are in different places and they've actually connected to browsers on to two computers to each other after a little while we realize okay there's no way this app can run on the browser it has to be crazy fast it has to use not that much RAM and not that much CPU so we

9:40need to build the desktop app so that's what this is early prototype of that you can see our Swift code in the background there that's some proprietary information feel free to steal that if you want to make a competitor this is the first UI of the desktop app I know it's great it looks good this is the second version of the UI clean it up a little bit this is a third version we're actually let's add a little bit of visual polish to this thing it's kind of getting there and this is where we actually hired a designer to make it look nicer this is Steve sugar by the

10:12way this is someone I met at micro conf and Steve C us up he didn't charge us as much as he could have because he was excited about kind of journey coming in on the journey and he was a friend of mine and he wanted to help us out and this by the way has been a recurring theme of starting a company people from micro comms have been helping us out like a lot with like major things like introductions and helpful advice and design work so micro conf has definitely increased our odds of success as well I would say so while Spencer and roll are writing

10:42code I was doing pre-sales so I would reach out to people in be like hey we're doing this thing we think it's gonna be really cool guess where our first 10 customers came from Micro Kampf exactly so last year I would here saying I'm starting this thing and if you got a micro come and say I'm starting this thing ever was like tell me about the thing it's like it's like going to be attics and be like guess what kind of drugs I've got mmm tell us all about the drugs so I would go and say look we're starting this thing to remember screen hero we're gonna make a

11:13thing like screen here and I think it's gonna be good and they're like oh my god tell me when you make this because there's a lot of developers here too so first time customers were all microc on firsts reached out to them after the conference and said like hey remember that thing we chatted about we're gonna do it I'm looking to start doing some pre-sales and so would you be willing to pay X dollars more on that in a second to join that'll get you access during the alpha plus a year afterwards and people started saying yes the thing that kind of cracks me up is like I was

11:39selling annual plans for a piece of software that didn't even exist yet sometimes people be like can I try it first I'd like nope we don't have it yet you just have to pay us money maybe like all right cool think that as an early vote of confidence this is our early validation right like do people actually want this I was like yes people who went to pay money for it for it and it doesn't exist that at least seems like we're probably not wasting our time if we can produce the thing the dream that I'm selling during pre-sales quick note on pricing the first person

12:08that purchased tuple was Adam Lavin and he paid a hundred and forty nine dollars for alpha access plus a year afterwards the next people that I brought into two people paid $1.99 to 49 299 399 and I just kept increasing the price and waiting for someone to say no and at one point Joel goes that's not how you find a price if you're looking for if you're searching you do a binary search like that's how you efficiently search a range of things and I'm like you're right I'm gonna say a price that no one will say yes to all right the next person like it's $5.99 and they said yes

12:41I know it's like wow and like by the way sending some of these emails like maybe a little bit sick like every time I had to be like $5.99 and I'm just like I stare out at me like oh my god okay enter and I just like just like force myself to send it like it's it's hard there's something really deeply psychologically challenging about pricing which is too bad because it's the best lever it has so it's so powerful for improving your business but it's hard and rejection is terrible or feels terrible not actually is terrible anyway the most I ever charged for a tuple was $7.99 per person for a year

13:14before it existed someone bought six seats of that paid us $4,800 kind of awesome if I just stuck with that 149 that felt good and felt like my reasonable first guess I think we'd be in a pretty different place now and when we switch to monthly I also tested a bunch of price range ranges like but can we do quarterly can we force people to people to do annually can we set a minimum like you know up some number up to ten seats per seat per seeded a hunter buxom on 59 a month twenty nine months what works I'm constantly testing pricing to this day there is no public pricing page 4-tuple

13:46and I want to keep it that way for a little while longer because being able to test this and not have to stick to with some random number that I just kind of made up has been super super useful these days I'm kind of honing in I'm getting closer to something that feels about right because now that our deals are closing faster people are not just like super shocked by our pricing but this has been like such a powerful thing for us as being willing to experiment there I think the final pricing we end up with will be pretty well dialed so this tweet went out November of this

14:16year we built for about seven months so there were three major versions of tupl there's like an early prototype we had to throw it away there was a later desktop app that we also had to throw away it wasn't fast enough and then there's the third major version which is what we ended up shipping so we announced like we need a date to motivate us because you know you can just build forever so we set the date I tweet this people get excited we get a little stressed and we go on retreat this is another thing that we've been doing as a company that has been

14:40useful for us is we booked an Airbnb for like three four days somewhere far away yes like an hour a couple hours and we go there and we just stay and we work on stuff it's like a look a mini company hackathon this is so nice because it gets you out of your normal routine and it lets just like well we'll end up working you know maybe ten hours a day maybe a little bit longer but it like it brings us together as a company I rented somewhere with a hot tub that was pretty nice so we go we hold up and a few days before our expected launch date on

15:09January 7th and there's a bunch of stuff we want to get in before we ship so we work pretty hard and we wake up on January 7th and there's still some stuff that we didn't make it in and I'm like you know I wonder if anyone would notice if we just started like the eighth to the 9th maybe to get a couple more features in there and we have an email waiting I wake up and I have an email waiting for me from somebody he goes hey it's jet launch day I'm excited how do I get in and I was like okay I guess we're launching so our

15:38first call ever was with someone named John Randall and we start off by calling him like okay we're gonna walk you through how to install the app we have like a phone thing going with him he installs the app we see him come online the availability stuff works not easy availability stuff we like actually shows up in our like friends list okay like I'm gonna hang up here and like then you couldn't call me and he's like okay so we do and it works and we start showing him features and like oh I like this a lot he likes the ferret the various things were showing him and it's

16:06like at one point he goes are you sure this is now for this seems to just work and we're like don't breathe on it too hard like we happened to just like walk down this narrow happy path or the app works really well but to be honest the thing that we shipped January 7th what had like tons and tons of problems previously just a week before this I was like I should do a test before we actually bring customers in here and I tried it with someone and it was it was a disaster and if I caused like a lot of stress in me so I was like I don't know

16:34if we can hit this date so to be a little like at least walk this narrow happy path that John was wonderful so since then this was this was January this is like a couple months ago so we've been live for less than three months January January was like a lot of basics work so we technically hit this deadline and like we had an app that people could use but we were missing all kinds of things like someone would email me and be like hey how do I reset my password and I was like email me the password you want it to be and that will

17:02be your password I'll take care of it don't worry about it how do we invite more people I'd like tell me who you want to invite and I'll go on the rails console and make them accounts so January was about like just established it like getting some of those basic things done February was about stability so tuple is a an app written in C++ it's multi-threaded real-time it's pretty hard we're like web developers so we're coming from this like much higher level world where things are a little simpler and like never written any desktop app at all and now we're writing like a performance sensitive app so it crashed kind of a

17:35lot so February February was all about reducing the number of crashes reducing the number of dropped calls and that actually brings us up to March and March has been interesting I had this realization so for seven months we were building this app and it's all we thought about and my world looked like this app and then we launched and we started having customers and we started bringing more of them on and suddenly as well like we need to like give people good support and so we probably need some Docs and we should write down all these processes were doing and the world that wasn't the app kind of shrunk and

18:09the world that was the other stuff got bigger and bigger my focus kind of had to pull out or it's like yeah the app the thing that we're at the code that we're writing is part of this but there's there's so much more like we have to pay taxes how do you pay taxes like do you need an accountant it's like what's bookkeeping there's all these other all this other crap that you have to do with the company it's like my my focus especially has kind of lifted like a little bit up as far as a level of abstraction so we just hit another milestone this that this is March 21st

18:36this was I tweeted this basically before I came to micro conf we moved from alpha to beta and this is not really beaming not really false modesty like there's there's still rough edges for sure in the app but it's kind of it's kind of working and it feels it feels great there were a lot of times in those 7 months when we were building and even the work the week before we launched where I was like I don't know like we might just not be able to do this this might be too technically hard we might die not sure they're two stories I want to tell you

19:04from the last year that I think we're kind of interesting and worth being aware of if you're thinking about doing something like this so people talk about the fact that starting a company changes your experience and that you have higher highs and lower lows and I think that's true and I'll tell you a story that shows this so I it's like 4:45 on a Friday a few weeks ago and somebody emails me is like hey how do I get in the beta and like it's the end of the week and I'm feeling like a little cheeky so I'm like send me your credit card and it's like can I see it

19:37first and I was like so I said I can do a demo for you in 15 minutes if you promise to bring your credit card and sign up if it's good it says sure I don't like goddamn it now to do demo so I get set up and I show Matt of installed yeah and we do a demo and then like we're five minutes in and the app crashes and I'm like oh by the way before the demo I pushed a new feature out to production yeah I was like I can do this I know how to program this is just this little change it's gonna be

20:18great to have this new feature for the demo so we're five minutes dead in the app crashes I'm like oh my god it's so embarrassing and I even told this guy like bring your credit cards guru this is gonna be awesome app crashes and like okay Anna sucks I start I restart the app he restarts it we call him back and I'm like haha you know beta so we restart the demo and the middle of talking it crashes again and I'm like I'm now like really embarrassed very upset restart the call we talked for five more and I'm like aren't you impressed yet haha and you're like yeah and so a few

20:53more minutes go by crashes for a third time at this point I'm literally screaming obscenities like I'm so I'm just so embarrassed and mad and frustrated we finally reconnect I think we even bailed out to like a different like like a appear in I was like let's just do like a something that works to finish off this call and I'm like you know like the sack sorry it's not like this I just put something into production it's normally doesn't crash and you'll hear this often sorry about that but anyway like this is good talking to you he's like I don't know I believe you like I

21:24trust you I can't use it if it crashes this often but if you say this is an outlier I'll just take your word for it I'm happy to pay for this I was like what so he does gives me his credit card and I sign him up right there and then we end the call and 20 minutes later I get an email from him and he says hey you're looking for investors for two pool and I was like oh my god like I have gone from slowly screaming obscenities in my house to this person being like do you want some money I was like oh my god it's like I I knew I had

21:56heard and I believed that like highs and lows would happen more than I was expecting but I didn't think they would be so close to each other it's just like I'm all over the place the other thing story that I'd like to share is of dual Mouse cursors so we were selling people on this dream with like hey remember screen hero we're gonna try to make something like screen hero and they're like great and a number of people would say you know what I liked about screen hero was that you each person had their own Mouse like I can control like might we each have our

22:23own Mouse to control it independently now this feature is actually insanely hard the operating system is like there is one mouse cursor and we're like no there's two and it's like no there is not so there's no non super hacky way to have two Mouse cursors so it's just this like constant battle we spent probably hundreds of hours of development time on dual Mouse cursors and it's just like was always by far the least reliable released reliable buggiest part of the app and then so we launched with it and people like oh cool dual Mouse cursors nice I like that and we're a few weeks in and we're still having bugs with it

22:59and I'm I go climbing with my co-founders and I'm like I'm just sitting there thinking and like belaying somebody and I'm like huh and Spencer comes down from the wall and I'm like how hard would it be to do like a mouse hand off where only one person controls it at a time if he made it really easy to flip like if I just clicked it if it just switched who's controlling the mouse but there was only one he was like I could do that this afternoon and I was like cool let's try that so we do and everyone's like this is great and they like it better than deulim house cursors

23:27as yeah thank you yeah so it's this feature so we eventually disabled dual Mouse cursors because again there's so many bugs in it so hard and it's my advice to you is advice you can't possibly take so lol good luck but it's basically impossible to ship early enough I have shipped I've done like a lot of products I've done like a lot of SAS apps and various things I've shipped a lot of things and done a lot of development work for myself for clients and it is so hard to really know what the minimum thing is it is basically impossible to do it without doing it a

24:07lot of times and so I would advise you to try to ship before you're ready ship a thing that feels incomplete that like like that feature like nobody who can't launch without this feature you probably can we could have launched without dual Mouse cursors we could have probably come out a month earlier maybe like like dozens hundreds of hours earlier and we were convinced like no we're not over building this is truly a requirement and it's totally not so again that's advice you sort of can't take without doing it so my advice is to do it a lot like ship a lot of things and get try to hone your

24:38spidey sense around this I had this thought also about Christian over here which is if I start talking about Christian he has to write down the things I say about him it's not about making my talk about a bunch of negative things about Christian but there's nothing negative to say about him he's like - nice a person really well okay a quick plug by the way if you like this kind of like story of what's going on I talk about this every week on my podcast does anybody listen to the podcast already oh nice awesome does anybody like the podcast just get like a look I'm not looking I'm

25:07not looking yeah so this is I talk about this like week to week so if you enjoy this kind of startup e story thing that's the you might enjoy that so to wrap up I just one talk about a couple of helpful ingredients and to be clear I'm not standing up here saying we've made it so like we're at something like 2km RR which is like not bad for a few months out but like we still burn way more than we take in right now it's like we are like default dead currently so it's a big problem to solve that's what I'm spending all my time thinking about

25:32that's my goal get us to Romney profitability so I can't say like for sure that this is how you should do it because it's not successful yet it might just die but I think we're on a good trajectory and so maybe consider these things as useful so number one is savings so I don't know if you caught this but so Joel and I so we're all working from savings we haven't raised any money and when Joel and I were getting ready to start the company we both said okay we have a year maybe meet a little bit more than that of runway and so we can take an honest crack at

26:04this thing and then when Spencer reached out to Joel and said hey like what do you guys up to a big component of him being able to join us was that he was able to also live off savings and he was like I mean I can go for like a month we probably would not have added him as a co-founder they would have like it wouldn't have just changed the option there we would have been able to do it so that's like a big a big shift in our futures in his future it was because we had all like lived semi frugally and set aside money and for

26:30years I was putting aside just cash in an account and I didn't know what it was for turns out was for this but it sure was nice to have this like this buffer there this thing that I could deploy and I invest in something that I I believe had a good chance of being good the other thing helpful ingredient and audience Omar put up that slide like no audience no company that's that's pretty close to true I think you don't have to build a big audience to have a successful company but man has this made my life so much easier it was not an accident that

26:59I'm making a product for an existing audience so I have I've been teaching developers for years so before I got into entrepreneurship I was a developer but I was always giving conference talks I was always producing videos producing courses tweeting useful things and just trying to be useful on the internet and when I started to Pillai had something like ten thousand Twitter followers add a few thousand people on a newsletter I had but just like lots of videos on YouTube of me being competent about programming things and so and podcast with a few thousand downloads per episode and so like almost all of all of our customers just about come from Micro

27:33Kampf slash people listen to my podcast slash people that follow me on Twitter this is just like it's huge so I mean if you it's hard to get started uh Sassa maybe you don't know the idea maybe you don't know what product you want to get going on but you can certainly get going on being useful on the Internet Adam Lavin gave a talk last year at starter on on this and I think he does it better than anybody else so it's worth trying to dig into that you should have access to that video as an attendee but start thinking about building your audience now I didn't know again it was

28:01like the money I didn't know why I was building an audience turns out it's for this and it's also it's for this now but it'll be for something else later right like if a tuple might just be the first company that I do and I might have a different one ten years from now but if I've continued to grow people that like me and know me and trust me that'll just make the next thing even easier the next thing is relevant skills so when I was working as a developer I made sure to work on interesting SAS apps like I was I was trying to kind of learn while

28:27getting paid it's a super useful for me so by the time I went to launch tuple I knew some things along those same lines practice companies so I launched lots of like little side I wouldn't maybe not companies practice products is probably better term for it but I've like I made my first dollar from a stranger on the internet somewhere in 2009 I recorded a screencast on my computer it was called vim for rails developers it was like the nerdiest niche eeeh sting is like this particular nerdy text editor here's how to use this text editor better if you are a Ruby on Rails developer and I sold it for nine dollars

28:57on Shopify because that's what you used for you know selling stuff online and so I just I've been doing this every few years I've shipped something and tried to make something and tried to sell something and I feel like we've avoided so many potholes and there are so many philosophies that I've already sort of distilled into my head because I've been doing this for a while one last tip I wanna throw out before I wrap up is just ask for what you want this is my this is my thing right now so I'm doing sales a lot and it's crazy how often people will sort of hit you with an opening offer

29:28and you can just ask them for something different and they'll say yes I'll give you two two examples of this one from sales one from marketing so in sales I was talking to someone he's the CTO of a company that is doing well make a lot of money and he's like so like I think we'd love to start with maybe two people and like do you do it free trial and I'm like we don't do a free trial because we want to make sure all our onboarding and support are things that we invest in paying customers he's like okay that makes sense and also tuple is the

29:54collaboration tool so I think it makes more sense if you maybe just bring the whole team on rather than just two people so you can sort of get a sense of what it's like for the team to use it amongst themselves so mate and so happy of the team ten people okay so what if instead of free for two you paid upfront for ten and he was like yeah okay sure that makes sense and I was like okay and this is this is when I was asking for fifty dollars per person for a month so I went from like nothing to a $500 a month subscription just by being like

30:21how about this instead and he was like sure that sounds good the other place we do this is on is on Twitter so if you submit the tuple like you want to hear when this launch landing page which is still up by the way we're still doing like private invite-only right now on the next page it says hey thanks so much for signing up excited that you're here by the way we are honestly a small team there's just three of us if you wouldn't mind sharing a link to this page would help a lot here's a tweet button thanks smiley face people do this every day

30:47like their if you go look if you looked on Twitter and searched our domain name there are hundreds like literally hundreds of tweets where people have just done this and it's the same exact like prefilled tweet text that I put in there so I know they're just putting button clicking tweet because we asked them to because they're nice people because they're willing to help us because they're sort of following along in the journey if they feel a part of it and it's great so I think that's all I have for you that's some advice that's what's going on I hope you found that useful I really enjoyed talking to you I

31:12really enjoyed being the emcee this year and thanks so much for listening so about like 20 minutes into the talk I was like oh boy this is one of these stories where he kind of starts building something without asking anybody about it so can you kind of kind of cast some light on like what validation you did besides talking to the founder of screen hero and you know how you decided that it was going to be a profitable business yeah I mean I felt like we cheated a little bit honestly like there was this product that everyone loved then it went away so it's like that seems like you

31:45know call that 65% validated like that seems pretty good I don't think the world has changed I don't think people will stop collaborating or that there's fewer fewer remote developers than before I think there's way more if any so given that I then I went to the next level which is like can I get people to actually pay me money for this and like I said like we charged somebody $5,000 for a thing that we had not even shipped yet and so I was like this it feel like maybe we'll launch this thing and no one will think we've achieved what we promised so that's not like a risk like

32:13I'm like remember screen here oh that was awesome we're gonna build that and so now they have this really lofty expectation I'm like well we might miss this and then people might be like upset but to me like once we once we started getting charging a real money hundreds of dollars a time I was like alright we're probably not totally blowing in here they'd been good talk just curious so it was supposed to be two founders originally and then you brought a third and I guess it took you about a year is that correct to kind of get here yep what would the process of looked like if

32:43it actually just was the two of you would you have still tried to launch within that year do you think would taking you longer curious how you think it would have changed that's a really good question I mean so like Spencer is invaluable to us like he I would say of the three of us he has the strongest kind of like work engine like he's just like he ship stuff he's just like he's fast and he's kind of relentless and when I'm like hey dude I think you have to learn like multi-threaded C++ he's like I'll buy some books so like he he he is it's totally changed our trajectory

33:12to have him before that and also I think having so Joel and Spencer I've been writing code which meant I felt free to go do sales and marketing so I'm doing that pre-sales I'm like writing content to try to like start driving like early leaves the mailing list I'm going on podcast I'm speaking of conferences and the fact that we had two people on the product versus want like I think I wouldn't have devoted nearly as much time to that stuff if we're only two of us I would like I would have needed to write more code I think it would've been like harder I think would be much much

33:40harder going honestly if there's just so much work that three is man is nice hey Ben thanks for the talk this is great thank you you mentioned building an audience what would you recommend in all your years of doing this that you've learned that somebody's starting doing that today I could apply yet going like well pick something you like like something you're passionate about and that lets like I started teaching programmers because I loved it not because I knew like one day I'll make a pair programming happen sure will be nice to have a bunch of Twitter followers I just started doing it cuz I like I love teaching so if you love like

34:13if you love teaching then start teaching if you love recording a podcast try that trying to find like a medium that works for you like I record a podcast every week it feels like not at all if you look no work to me I love recording the podcast it does not feel like a slog to some people recording a podcast every week we feel like a slog to me it's great so I try to find like ways of being useful on the internet that don't feel too hard to me and also like don't overanalyze too much like I think is a little bit of a tendency to sort of like like what's the

34:38optimum strategy for building an audience that's like well maybe just start trying and then you'll learn so much by trying that like the advice I'll give you will be meaningless because you'll know more about yourself and the people you're trying to help I got a question you had two points one you mentioned savings that your savings help you out tremendously I can see that I'm jealous but whatever and then to you says they're not as much as there was before us it's been a year - you said you were shipping small companies small products so I was wondering how did you do that without being getting distracted

35:17like that seems conflicting especially when you're trying to validate and a product and a customer I see I might not have been totally clear those those other companies and products happened before this one so it's mostly I've done a pretty good job of staying totally focused on this there was I almost I kinda had a false start of launching a course while I was doing the company did I raise a little bit of money and I realized like this for a number of reasons this is a bad idea I should just keep my eye kind of on the ball this is the biggest opportunity in front of me right now

35:45yeah any other questions for Ben it was like going once going twice situation there make him walk it's great I've been doing it all two days as you sat there I've been Thanks I watched her some of your videos on the video service that was okay so I recognize you they're cool my question is obviously someone who's passionate about software development like how hard is it for you to not be able to do that on a day to day basis and have to focus on the company now yeah and what's that like good question it felt like a sacrifice at first because you're right I'm not writing

36:27almost any code I have written maybe 5% of the code for the company and so at first I was like oh man I'd rather write code then like do sales and marketing and things like that but then I realized something which is that this is a truth for me is that I love learning new things I like the steep part of learning curve or something that's kind of hard and I can't figure it out and I need to get my wits about me and sales and marketing it's just like that a new one of those like testing pricing was so fun for me like it was like and it was like

36:54it was like a nerdy thing that spits out money if you do it right and so I've actually come to really enjoy it like I like doing sales calls and it's for now Rob was saying like you'd get bored of that after six months and like Daniel right so true so I think I'll have to find a new thing eventually but for now it's keeping me stimulated so I don't miss the code thanks again Ben [Applause] you