Colleen Schnettler: Finding your audience on a marketplace

Transcript of episode 24

Matthias:
Good evening, Colleen. Nice to see you today.

Colleen:
It’s good to see you as well. It’s morning here in California.

Matthias:
Oh yeah. We’re nine hours apart; Germany to California. One is finishing the day, the other one is beginning the day. Okay.

Colleen:
Yeah.

Matthias:
So, glad to have you here. Could you walk us a little bit through your life? What happened that you decided to be an entrepreneur? What kind of entrepreneurship is that? And what’s the status of your life today?

How Colleen got into entrepreneurship

Colleen:
Sure. So, I am a software developer. And I got into software because I always wanted to have a product business; that was always my goal. I love the idea of the independence and the freedom. I also have three young children, so the flexibility that working from home and running your own business gives you is something that has really appealed to me. Although I work more now than I did when I had a regular job.

Matthias:
Oh yeah.

Colleen:
But it’s always been a goal, for a lot of reasons. Like I said, it feels the autonomy and the freedom. And also, I love the idea that your upward mobility is limitless. So, if you have a job-

Matthias:
What do you mean by upward mobility?

Colleen:
So, if you have a job, you’re going to cap out at whatever the max salary at Netflix is these days.

Matthias:
Ah, okay. True.

Colleen:
Which is a lot of money, but you’re going to always hit a ceiling, in terms of how much money you can make and how much responsibility you have.

And so, that’s one path, and that’s a great path that for some software developers, is works with their life, and they’re really happy to go down that path. But I’m more high risk, high reward.

Matthias:
Okay.

Colleen:
So, I’m more like, “Let’s go in. Let’s go all in. Let’s see if we can build this business up to have a life changing amount of money.” And so, all of those aspects of it; really the lifestyle, the autonomy, being in charge, all of those really appeal to me in terms of building and growing a software business.

Matthias:
That’s great. It almost feels like cause and effect thing, right? If you’re an entrepreneur, you have more control over – No, it’s not really true because your customers have control. But it’s more cause and effect, right? If you work for somebody else, all kinds of other factors come into play; your colleagues, the company, as such and the market and everything. So, being an entrepreneur is more direct experience, right?

Colleen:
Yeah, I totally agree. I think that it absolutely gives you – It’s hard, but it gives you a lot more freedom, in the long run.

Matthias:
Yeah, that’s right. And more and more uptick. That’s correct.

Yeah, I was a big fan, or I still am a big fan of your Software Social podcast together with Michele.

Colleen:
Thank you.

Matthias:
It’s one of my favorite podcasts, really! The conversations go really deep, and you cover a lot of ground. And so, I heard that you have founded a business called Simple File Upload. Can you tell us a little bit about that one?

Colleen:
Yes, of course. So, this would be my first product business. Well, it’s not actually my first product business. Like five years ago, I put an app in the iOS App Store and I didn’t know what I was doing. In terms of a business perspective, I did everything wrong. It made sixty dollars. It was a good experience.

Matthias:
I know that.

Colleen:
So, that was really-

Matthias:
I did the same thing. Yeah.

Colleen:
Yeah, that was really my first product. I mean, that was maybe it was like eight years – It was a long time ago. It might have been eight years ago. So, that’s back when some guy had put some game in the App Store and he made a million dollars.

Matthias:
Oh boy.

Colleen:
And so, that was like the thing to do. And again, that made sixty dollars. I did everything wrong. I learned a ton.

Matthias:
I can imagine that

Colleen founded simplefileupload.com to ease a laborious process

Colleen:
This product is a lot more thought out. And what it is; it’s essentially a widget that you load into your site that provides you a pleasing UI and it direct uploads – Your users would drop a file into the Dropbox and it will direct upload those files to S3. And then it returns to you a URL of the files stored in the cloud, behind a CDN. So, it takes away all of that. Like, really, everyone needs file – Most people need file uploads.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
And it’s such a laborious process. It’s just a pain because you got to get S3 set up. You got to get all your IAN. You’re going to forget about CORS, and you’re going to go back and forth. And then you’ve got a CDN provider. You have to pull in another service for CDN provider, et cetera, et cetera.

Matthias:
Yeah, so much work.

Colleen:
It’s so much stuff. And it’s not that it’s so hard. It’s just so annoying.

Matthias:
Yeah. So boring and so annoying.

Colleen:
So, the product isn’t revolutionary. I mean, there’s other products similar to it out there. But what I was trying to build – So, I’m a Rails developer by background and I’m independent.

Matthias:
Ruby on Rails.

Colleen:
Yeah, Ruby on Rails. And I’m an independent developer. So, I do consulting and contracting. And I just found that like client after client after client wanted some kind of file – Everyone wants file uploading. Everyone needs file uploading. And I just had to do it over and over and over. And every time I did it, I would do it a little bit differently and it always took a while and it was just such a pain. And then the client gets annoyed because now they’re paying their hosting bill, wherever they’re hosting and they have to pay their AWS bill, which is annoying. And no one ever really knows how much your AWS bill is going to be. That’s always a mystery.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Matthias:
And so, I found for my clients – A lot of the people I work with are not that technical. They’re more product people or businesses. And so, I found that then, I have to give them access to AWS. So, then I have to make them their own account. Then they have to go in there and pay their bill. And the whole thing is just really painful.

Matthias:
Yeah, it’s really weird and a lot of steps to do. Yeah, right?

Colleen:
Yeah, it’s a lot of steps to do. So, I built this service mainly for me, so I could stop implementing file uploading.

Matthias:
Okay.

Colleen:
I mean, really, this thing, it takes five minutes. It’s not fancy it. It works. It direct uploads. And so that’s nice. So, you don’t have to worry about –

So, the direct uploads, for people who don’t know what that is, that means I go right from the browser to S3. I don’t hit my servers.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
So, that’s just faster, and it’s higher level of integrity.

So, all of these things; I did at once really well, and I packaged it up as a service and now I sell it.

Matthias:
What I would mostly find interesting about this is, one, is you scratch your own itch, because you had to do it all over again for all of your clients. On the other hand, this is almost perfect validation, because if a problem is reoccurring, and you can watch your clients have that problem, it’s ideal for a startup, I think. Normally, we have all kinds of difficulties to validate our problem ideas.

Thinking about the audience for this product

Colleen:
Yes, I think so. And I think, as ideas go, again, it’s not unique or different or original. So, I did struggle with the, “Will people pay for this when they could do it in three to four hours?” But that’s about just finding the right customer.

Matthias:
Yeah. Finding those people between product and technology; a little bit of both. People who can imagine how much work it would be if they did it by themselves, but they really don’t want to.

Colleen:
So, my customer is exactly what you said. It’s the person or the company that is right between technology and product. Because it’s typically the company that wants to move quickly. They’re trying to get their service out there. They don’t have people who can just do this full time. I found that that’s really my ideal customer. And there’s a lot of people like that who are trying to iterate quickly. I mean, like myself, right? Like people trying to grow businesses.

Matthias:
Yeah, sure.

Colleen:
They don’t want to spend hours fighting with AWS to do something as mundane as file uploading.

Matthias:
What I feel here is that you have a good understanding of who your audience is; the people who could potentially be interested in your product. What characteristics they have. Is that true?

Colleen:
I’m still figuring that out because what I just told you is my theory. And now, I’m in the process of trying to really hone in on the people who are using the product to validate that hypothesis.

How Colleen, the new entrepreneur, found her first customers

Matthias:
How did you find the first members of your audience? How did you find the first people who at all wanted to use your product and how did you contact them at all or how did they find you, on the other hand?

Colleen:
So, this is a bit of a hack, but I am so glad I did this for my first product. So, it was my first product. So, first I launched it in the Heroku Marketplace, as an add on. And so, of course, experienced product people, that makes them really nervous because there’s so much platform risk there. But for my very first product – I mean, as everyone knows, we’ve been told over and over and over, “Yeah, you’re a developer. You can build whatever you want. How are you going to find the people to sell it to?”

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
Where are those people?

Matthias:
Exactly.

Colleen:
So, I mitigated some of that risk by first launching it in the Heroku Marketplace. And all of these big services have Add Ons. And Shopify, you can do apps, and Cloudflare, I think, has apps now. I just think that was such a good move for me because I was quickly able to validate it and see if people were going to buy it; like pretty fast. I mean, it’s only been alive seven month-ish. And the majority of my customers have come from Heroku. It just helps. It’s a good traction channel for me right now.

Matthias:
Absolutely. Because that’s exactly where people are, who want to build products, right?

Colleen:
Yeah.

Matthias:
They more or less all start in Heroku. I did so, too, when I built my startup. I started there because they take away so many infrastructure problems. They allowed you to get started quickly. After a while, okay, you grow out of it. But it’s a good start, really. Heroku is a good place to start.

Colleen:
I think so, because I have tried – So, now it is open to the world and I have really been trying to do customer development to figure out where these people are and how to reach them. And it’s challenging; I’m really struggling with that.

Interviewing customers to validate hypotheses

Matthias:
Can you walk me a little bit through your steps of customer development that you do?

Colleen:
Sure. So, what we have been doing is just interviewing. So, I’ve just basically come up with these hypotheses of who my people will be, and I look for people that fit that and I’ve been interviewing them. And so, I’ve talked for a while. I thought it would be a good product for just like, pure front-end developers because it abstracts away the stuff.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
But very senior pure front-end developers are really into how the images are served. So, they want them served in WebP at the exact correct size. And they want the size to be taken care of at the server.

Matthias:
Ah.

Colleen:
Yeah. I mean, the images are behind the CDN. They’re really fast. That’s not something I offer. And so, it wasn’t super intriguing to them; at least the few I spoke with.

So, then if you talk to pure back-end developers. So, that was my first hypothesis was this is going to be perfect for the React developers. And some of them liked it, but unless they were product people, they weren’t like super jazzed.

And then I talked to pure back end developers. And again, if they’re not product people, this helps you move faster, but they just seem to want to roll it themselves. They’re like, “Oh, I’ll just use AWS.”

Matthias:
Okay.

Colleen:
So, it’s been interesting. So, this is good, though, that I’m now narrowing in on the people. The joke is all indie hackers make products for other indie hackers, which is a waste because none of us have enough money. But the truth is, those are my people. My people are early stage startups trying to move quickly to trying to move quickly, who just want to get the feature done.

So, for example, I’m doing a deep dive with some of my paying customers. I have a real estate. I have an accountant. I have a nail salon.

Matthias:
Interesting. So many different domains.

Colleen:
Yeah, it’s really interesting.

Matthias:
Wow.

Colleen:
Yeah. So, it seems like – I guess what I’m trying to say is the super deep technical people don’t necessarily want to use my product.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
Technical people trying to make something, like a business site or their consultants, and they’re trying to move quickly, those seem to be more my people.

Matthias:
Hmm. Interesting. And what happens if you contact them? Do you have regular customer interviews or prospect interviews?

Colleen:
You know, I’m trying, but this has been a struggle. People don’t seem to want to talk. I mean, it seems – which, I guess, is good. There’s one or two customers that have been in really great communication with me, and the rest just seem to be like, “Hey, it works. I’m good.”

Matthias:
Oh, okay.

Colleen:
That’s good, right? No complaints, I guess.

Matthias:
Yeah, no news is good news, in that case.

Colleen:
I think so.

Initially, Colleen went the “product first” route

Matthias:
But how about the people who should be interested who are not yet your customers? Did you have many conversations before you had the product? Or was it simply the idea that you had, and you started right away coding it?

Colleen:
It was just the idea, and I started right away coding it.

Matthias:
Ah, okay.

Colleen:
Again, I feel like this is a first-time-founder mistake, but I feel like it’s a mistake you have to make sometimes because so many people – That’s the thing; so many people want to launch products and they just never launch them, because all this stuff gets in their way.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
And so, I knew, going into this, I didn’t really know if anyone was going to buy it. But I also knew that if I didn’t launch a product, I feel – I’m a big believer in momentum. So, I felt like it was worth the risk to launch the product and find the customers after, even though this is generally terrible advice.

Matthias:
Normally, yes.

Colleen:
It’s terrible advice. But for me, it was worth that risk because I had the traction channel of Heroku, and my product is pretty simple. I’m still now doing it backwards. So, now it’s had mild success, and I’m now trying to find those people I just described to you. Like, where do the early stage SaaS, but already profitable people hang out? Where do I find them? How do I get them to use my service? So, that’s what I’m doing now.

Matthias is trying to automate customer development

Matthias:
This is interesting because that’s exactly the problem I want to solve with my startup. It’s so interesting. I had failed with several ideas before, I think four or five ideas. And after a while, I thought, “Hey, maybe you’re not talking enough to customers or to prospects, not yet customers.” And so, I called myself, Get The Audience. It’s “get” in the sense of understand, not in the sense of get more of them.

Colleen:
Okay.

Matthias:
And I’m trying to automate this process. Like finding; where do I find them? What do they talk about? Who are they? Who are the most leading people? Who are the following people? Who is the most active in a given audience? And when are they online so that I can reach them?”

And I decided to go on Twitter, as a platform, to do all this searching and listening and so on. Basically, I started as a pure Twitter listening tool. Also, without customer interviews again.

Colleen:
Yeah.

Matthias:
Same mistake. So, I simply put a waitlist outline out there – a landing page where people could sign up for a waiting list. And suddenly, 100 people signed up, all from the Indie Hacker community.

Colleen:
That’s awesome.

Matthias:
I thought, “Is it really awesome or is it this usual indie hacker thing that we help each other kind of support system that we are for each other? But usually not our customers. We don’t make good customers to other Indie hackers.

Colleen:
Right.

Matthias:
So, it happened. And then I built the minimum viable product. You can watch people, what they say, when they say it, and who it is. That was the first MVP.

Colleen:
Okay.

Matthias:
And after that, I got the first people paying for that. Now, I’m going into customer development. More like, for example, the new version allows you to define personas with their goals, their aspirations, their challenges. So, who is your typical customer? How do you call them? What do you call them and what are they trying to achieve; like jobs to be done?

And the next version, the last one before I go into bigger marketing efforts, will be how do you validate your assumptions? You can invite them for an interview. The tool will automatically create all the Zoom link stuff and calendar stuff, hopefully or you can invite them to a survey like Google Forms or Reform or whatever forms. You can send to them and invite them to fill them.

So, it will be a kind of customer development tool. And I’m trying to get more startups, let’s say not so small, but five people and up, to use it because they really have the problem, “Where do we find these and how do we talk to them? And what do we do with the results?” et cetera, et cetera?

Colleen:
Yes.

Matthias:
Also, I’m basically scratching my own itch, right?

Colleen:
Yeah. So, does it work?

Matthias:
Sort of. I have a few people paying. I think they are eight. Eight or so. Yeah.

Colleen:
Yeah.

Matthias:
And many people are signing up each month, but they are not doing much. So, I have really an engagement problem there. An activation problem.

Colleen:
So, your customers defined their ideal customer and then your software is like scraping Twitter for keywords or for leaders in the industry based on the numbers of followers, stuff like that?

Matthias:
No. It all starts with an automatic bookmarking. So, the thing registers, whenever you click on someone on Twitter or you click on a tweet to see it, it’s automatically bookmarked.

Colleen:
Okay.

Matthias:
And from there you can say, “Create an audience for this person that I bookmarked.” And the tool displays a word cloud of the keywords that this person is using together with their audience. And you can also select, “Do you want to hear the person themselves or do you want to exclude and only hear the reactions, the engagement that they get?

So, you get a word cloud, basically, and then you can use those words as filters. For example, when the word, problem, occurs, you can click on problem and you can look, “What are they talking about their problems?” to really deeply understand what they are talking about.

And on another tab, you get the ranked list of people; the most active one on the top, then some below and so on, so that you can see who is – Like a cocktail party, right? You get onto the party and you want to know who’s the one to talk to, who’s the one who have the most influence? What are they talking about? And this thing is kind of a friendly host who introduces you to the audience.

Colleen:
Interesting.

Have you heard of the Sales Safari, Amy Hoy, Adam Hillman? They do 30 by 500. Are you familiar with that?

Matthias:
Amy Hoy’s name occurred several times in my blogosphere or in my sphere, but I didn’t read it yet. I actually have to.

Colleen:
Okay. That makes me think of – they have this whole concept of Sales Safari, which is essentially scraping Reddit and other forums for things exactly like you’re describing. So, I actually hired someone to do this for me. And basically, she read Reddit forums looking for keywords like “images” and “upload” and “problems” and try to suss out specific issues. So, this sounds really similar, but using Twitter. That’s really neat.

Matthias:
Yeah, nice. I have to read her stuff, because I came across this several times. Yeah.

Colleen:
Yeah. Cool.

Colleen pursues another idea in parallel

Matthias:
But returning to you.

Colleen:
Yeah.

Matthias:
I understood that you work with even another company yet?

Colleen:
I’m so excited about my new company. Yeah, and I’m going to start talking about it more on Software Social because it is taking up actually more of my time. So, I have partnered with two of my friends who are building out. It’s a it’s a set of developer tools, but the first thing we’re building is like a really complex, I guess, but easier for the developer, but a very feature full query builder.

Matthias:
Okay.

Colleen:
And so, we’re not funded – Well, we’re kind of funded. So, that’s pretty cool. So, that’s kind of changed the whole game. We have a customer who is funding us for a year to build out this product and they get an unrestricted license to use the product, but we keep the IP. So, we can then pull it out and package it. Yeah.

So, it’s really exciting. It’s like getting funding without giving away your company.

Matthias:
Yeah, I just wanted to say it’s even better than having a VC, because if you have a VC, you suddenly have a boss.

Colleen:
Right. I mean, it’s an amazing – The stars kind of aligned. And it’s this amazing opportunity. And what the product, the first product, the idea with the company is we’re going to build out a set of tools for developers. So, all of those things that you always have to do but you hate to do because they’re just annoying and painful.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
And so, the first one is going to be a query builder because which will probably go into like admin panels and things like that, but it’s quite powerful. I don’t want to say it’s more enterprise level, but it’s a different customer base in Simple File Upload. Simple File Upload is definitely for the newer companies, whereas the query builder that I’m building with Hammerstone is definitely for more established companies. So, it’ll be interesting.

Matthias:
Ah, I see.

Colleen:
Yeah, it’ll be a different audience, hopefully an audience with a little more money. So, it’ll be a little less painful. The kind of audience that’s willing to pay to solve their problems.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
So, yeah, that’s going to be a whole different set of customer development. Yeah. So, that’ll be interesting.

Matthias:
Wow. So, query builder in the sense of database queries?

Colleen:
Yes.

Matthias:
So, I can configure kind of, “Find me all customers who spent more than 100 thousand in the last year” or something like that. Yeah.

Colleen:
Exactly.

Matthias:
Okay.

Colleen:
So, we build that SQL up. So, it’s a visual query builder. So, we provide both the frontend and the backend. So, that example you just described, “So, find me all customers who clicked on this page five times and bought a shirt that was red.”

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
And so, you can build that up in real time using the frontend view component or Hotwire, if you’re using Rails. And then we will create performance sequel. And we create the sequel for you and you just get your results.

Matthias:
Wow.

Colleen:
And so, we see this problem with larger companies all the time. I have seen it, my business partners have seen it where, “Oh, I need this report.” “Oh, you have to go back to the developer. The developer has to configure that scope.”

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
“Accounting needs this report.” “Oh, we have to go back.” It’s this back and forth, and it’s a huge waste of time and money for a company.

Two devs go down a 5-minute technical rabbit hole

Matthias:
Wow. This sparks all kinds of questions now inside me, because I’m a software architect. I teach software engineering methods.

Colleen:
Oh, I didn’t know that.

Matthias:
And I’d really like to go on a deep technical dive now, because – Shall we do it in this podcast? Is this interesting for people? I don’t know.

Colleen:
Who knows?

Matthias:
But we can do for five minutes. If it’s not interesting, we edit it away.

Colleen:
Okay.

Matthias:
I think you might run into one problem because with query builders, it’s always like you have one data store that you use for your operating business, for the normal, let’s say, a shop application or whatever you’re running on top of the database. So, the database schema is optimized for working on it, for modifying it, for having transactions in it.

And when you go to the query side, you want to have performant queries, the database schema has to be optimized in a maybe different way. And another point is, for example, these days, people are creating these microservices architectures with tiny little things operating on a single table or so. But for a query, you need access to many tables at the same time. So, you’re introducing coupling between those tables that you don’t want to have in a microservice architecture.

So, are you thinking of two database schemas; let’s say one for the operative side and one for the query side? Something like that?

Colleen:
So, we’re not right now. So, the multiple database thing, so the first thing is we sit on top of your ORM. So, we’re doing Rails in Laravel. So, at least in Rails, and I assume in Laravel, active record takes care of handling the multiple databases.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
So, the customer that’s funding us, they have billions of records and they have shards and the whole deal.

Matthias:
Oh, okay.

Colleen:
So, these things you bring up are like really good points. And the opportunity we think we have now is with these guys that we’re working for, we’re going to optimize it perfectly for their use case.

So, what we think it might look like – To your point about optimizing your database for queries versus however else you want your database to be – If you have billions of records or if you have so much data that that you need to re optimize for query building, we might then provide productized consulting to come in there and teach you and show you the best way to optimize in order to use a query builder for people that are that large.

Matthias:
Yeah, that makes sense. It makes total sense to give a little bit consulting services to package it up. Exactly.

Colleen:
Yeah.

Understanding the audience, precisely

Matthias:
And now back to the audience side; interesting. Two different audiences. And even your customers’ audience. For example, when you have this big customer with Hammerstone and they have billions of records of what? Of their customers, of their goods or what is it this kind of record?

Colleen:
So, they are using at they’re using Postgres time scale DB. So, they have like, “The user clicked on this.” “The user saw this page.” So, you have like that level of things.

Matthias:
Ah, time series. Time series data.

Colleen:
Yeah. So, that’s why they have so much data.

Matthias:
So, they are searching for patterns? Let’s say, patterns of customer behavior?

Colleen:
Yeah. So, that’s exactly right. So, again, it’d be like a customer, “I want to see all customers who purchased a product and viewed – They would probably have already not purchased – who have viewed this page three times and purchased a shirt that was red” or whatever specifically you need. But that’s the idea. So, you have these like nested queries that are looking for.

And we handle relationships. So, it would also be like – If you had an event company, for example – “Customer that had an event named X and on this date” and that kind of thing.

Matthias:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And how does Hammerstone do the audience development now? How do you find more people who could have this query problem? This query builder problem.

Colleen:
So, we, because our product is built both in Laravel and Rails. So, on the Laravel side, our Laravel guy has been really active in the community. He has released a couple of open source packages that have been incredibly popular. And so, he has been on Laravel Worldwide Virtual Meetup to demo one of his products.

Matthias:
Wow.

Colleen:
Yeah. So, I think that on the Laravel side, we’ve had a lot of buzz just around the things he’s been doing in the community.

Matthias:
Mm hmm.

Colleen:
On the Rail side, we haven’t done anything yet. The product is still a ways away from release. But yeah, we haven’t done anything on the Rail side yet. We should probably do that.

Matthias:
Maybe test something with a few people who whether they resonate. Yeah.

Colleen:
Absolutely. I think with like the goal of Hammerstone is to build spectacular software, right?

Matthias:
Yeah.

A product with an interesting approach to launching it

Colleen:
So, a lot of people are always told to launch, launch, launch and you launch a very, very small MVP, which is great for some people. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re doing something different where when we launch, our product is going to be airtight.

Matthias:
Oh, wow. Okay.

Colleen:
It’s just a different approach, I guess, from the typical approach. Because like Simple File Upload, when I launched that like it worked mostly. I mean, it was not very featured when it launched. And I’m happy I launched it because it forced me to put it out there. But from a software perspective, it’s great now. But when I launched it, there were a few things I was like, “Hmm.”

And so, like I said with Hammerstone, we’re taking a totally different approach where it’s going to be like just airtight when it launches. It will have been enterprise tested with this first enterprise customer. And so, it will have been through the wringer.

And I think our goal then will be to do kind of a soft launch; get a few people and just kind of get them integrated and then really ramp up the marketing machine.

Matthias:
I think this works because you have this big customer already, so you can optimize. For example, for really serious use cases you can test, you can make that thing rock solid. You wouldn’t be able to do that if you have no customers and no runway, right?

Colleen:
Totally.

Matthias:
So, just the customer is super useful to have an approach like that. Yeah, I get it.

Colleen:
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I couldn’t have done that. That’s why they tell you to launch early because you don’t have money coming in from a product.

Matthias:
Yeah, right.

Colleen:
So, it makes sense.

Matthias:
Cool. That’s even better than a VC. And they let you have the IP. That’s amazing.

Colleen:
I know.

Matthias:
I find that amazing.

Colleen:
They’ve been just wonderful. They’re really big name. I don’t know that I can share it publicly, but they are a really big name in the Rails ecosystem, and they’re basically like doing – I mean, they’ve just been so wonderful to work for, because they’re super into code quality and like just building a spectacular product. And so, it’s been really, really a fun experience.

Matthias:
Nice. Nice.

Colleen:
Yeah.

Approaching a market with free value, like open source

Matthias:
The other pattern you mentioned is the Laravel community that your colleague has done so much work for or given value into the community. That’s another thing that pattern that I see emerging. For example, last week I had Kevon Cheung from Hong Kong in my podcast. He’s @meetkevon on Twitter, and he’s writing email courses for how to get more engagement on Twitter, how to find your audience on Twitter, and also all kinds of things. And he’s now offering cohort-based courses, e-books, etc, etc.

So, he also started by giving free value into a community around him. And he said this worked really, really well because you become credible, you get people who take you seriously because they see that you know what you’re talking about. So, giving value for free at the beginning is a really, really powerful strategy, I think.

Colleen:
Yeah, you know, there’s a lot of tradeoffs, I think, because during the open source project can be mentally and emotionally taxing.

Matthias:
Hmm. Yes. Yeah.

Colleen:
But I think you’re absolutely right, especially for us as we are kind of new to this; we’re not well known, if you will. For us to go in and provide these open source packages has really given us some name recognition in the Laravel space.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
And so, when we’re ready to launch the paid product, I think we will be well positioned. People will know that we build quality software. We don’t just push stuff out the door.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
So, it’s a different strategy, but hopefully we’ll work. We’ll see.

Matthias:
Yeah. You already become known for four quality software, right?

Colleen:
Exactly.

Matthias:
Because in open source, you can really see if it has quality or not. For example, if you go through GitHub and study the issue trackers with the open issues and the resolved issues, you really see how people will behave when they have issues to solve.

Colleen:
Yeah, absolutely.

Matthias:
Nice.

Colleen:
So, yeah, it’s that provide-free-value-upfront strategy with that one.

Matthias:
Yeah, that’s a kind of pattern. Yeah, right?

Colleen:
Yeah.

Matthias:
Wow. Totally different mechanisms. Like for Simple File Upload, you’ve got this marketplace approach where people come to the marketplace, are looking for solutions and you meet them there. And for the new company, it’s totally different. You have one big one, but that keeps everything moving and have the Laravel community; kind of community approach. Yeah, so many different possibilities and opportunities to develop an audience. I always find that amazing.

Colleen:
Yeah, it definitely is. It definitely is.

Different ways to approach your audience

Matthias:
Last week, I had a young entrepreneur from Florida. I think she’s even 19 or what. And she meets her customers at the dentist, for example, in the waiting room or at a baby shower on a party. That’s so amazing.

Colleen:
Wow.

Matthias:
She says it’s almost natural; conversations like, “Oh, hey, what are you doing?” “Yeah, I come from there and there. I’m running a startup doing this or that.” She in the personal finance domain. She creates a budgeting application for four ordinary people who want to have better finances.

Colleen:
Yeah.

Matthias:
And it’s amazing. She meets ordinary people all the time; is talking to them. Almost reminds me of Rob Fitzpatrick, also had last week on the podcast call with the Mom Test; asking ordinary people at Starbucks about their problems. That’s a totally different approach.

Colleen:
Yeah, I still feel like doing it this way still feels hard. I mean, if you look at the most successful businesses in our Indie hacker space, it seems to be the people who have transitioned into software. So, they have domain expertise in a different area.

Matthias:
Oh, yeah.

Colleen:
Or people who have a friend or a spouse or someone who is deeply ingrained in a different community.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
Because I feel like here I am building software for software developers and I think we can be really successful doing that. But I still think the secret sauce is to find one of these underserved by software communities and figure out what they really need. I mean, man, those people seem to have the most success.

Matthias:
Yeah, it reminds me of Arvid with his embedded entrepreneur approach; you really have to embed yourself into a community or audience or whatever that you happen to have connection with. For example, with his life partner, she’s been a teacher and they embedded themselves into this Chinese-English teaching community. It’s amazing. You have to have some kind of contact to get into that.

Colleen:
Yeah, I just seem to think that is the most successful way to go about it. And I think it makes sense then that like I make a product for developers because that is my community.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
But when you talk about like getting an audience, like as we were talking about the top of the hour, Simple File Upload, I need to find those people that are indie hackers but have already been successful or at 10K plus a month.

Matthias:
Seriously, yeah.

Matthias works on a systematic process for audience building

Colleen:
Yeah. And honestly, I mean, I’m only doing average at finding those people. So, it’s a learning experience, I think.

Matthias:
Yeah, absolutely.

I’m just designing or I’m trying to design a system for that. For example, I always recommend, if you are looking for a certain kind of audience, imagine what they are doing.

Colleen:
Yeah.

Matthias:
For example, “Software developers; okay, they write software. What are they using for that?” “Yeah, they’re using integrated development environments, databases, compilers, frameworks.” “Who has written those frameworks?” “Ah, this one?” “Okay, follow this one on Twitter.“

So, by looking at what people do, what they use for that and who has created the tools they use or the books or the conferences they attend or the journals they read, I’m trying to make people think about their audience as just ordinary people creating things and using other things to create that. So, I try to send them to the famous book authors or to the conferences or the tool makers.

For example, one of them said, “I want to do something for bloggers; for people who blog.” Okay, what are your people using?” “Yeah, bloggers use WordPress when in the beginning. After a while, they are crazy about WordPress. They use static site generators like Hugo or Gatsby or whatever.” “Okay, so follow, for example, Gatsby, the audience around Gatsby. So, have a look at what people are talking about in that community. Or go to WordPress. Follow WordPress. Let’s have a look at what those people are talking about.”

And suddenly, they have points in space where they could – I always call them digital watering holes – where the elephants meet. Where you find people who are talking about the same thing.

Colleen:
Yeah, I don’t think file uploading is that exciting. I don’t know if anyone’s talking about it.

Matthias:
No, but what if you go, for example, to if you follow Visual Studio Code on Twitter, just trying to grab their followers?

Colleen:
Yeah.

Matthias:
Or what if you go to someone amazing like Kent Beck or what? Follow Kent Beck, just to find your people there who talk about software development, quality software development and entrepreneurship as well. For example, if you go to Rob’s followers, try to find people who want to be serious software entrepreneurs.

Colleen:
So, what would you recommend? So, if step one for understanding your audience is – I mean, of course, there’s more than a few steps – But generally speaking, if step one is to hone in on these digital watering holes, then what do you recommend; engaging with the community then in these Twitter threads and just kind of being more present?

Matthias:
Yeah, absolutely. First of all, you will need to find them at all; these watering holes.

Colleen:
Right.

Matthias:
But you ask yourself, “What are they doing?” “Okay, what are they using?” “Who has created that?” “What they are using?” “Okay, I found the watering hole.” Then you’re trying to explore what they are talking about, who are the important ones and when can I reach them? At what time of day?

And then you engage. You enter the conversation and trying to add value to that conversation. For example, when two people are talking about some {indistinct 43:31} problems or some deeply technical stuff, you simply enter it and try to help.

And after a while, you will be perceived as someone, “Oh, she knows what she’s talking about.” “Oh, maybe I should contact her. Maybe I should ask her” and the conversation gets going. And yeah, it’s almost like stealing followers from someone.

Colleen:
Yeah, I like that idea. I mean, that makes total sense. So, I don’t really use Twitter as marketing; I don’t really know what that means. I’m trying to learn. But since I’ve been pretty public about what’s happening with Simple File Upload, someone with like thirty thousand followers gave me a shout out for hitting 10000 uploads.

Matthias:
Wow.

Colleen:
Yeah. And the website traffic.

Matthias:
That’s good.

Colleen:
Yeah, I mean, I didn’t really think anything of it and the website traffic on that day just spiked. I had like five new signups. And then and then it occurred to me – This was only like two weeks ago – It was like this light bulb moment for me that like, “Oh, Twitter can be a marketing tool.”

Matthias:
Oh yes, absolutely. I think Twitter is a fantastic tool because people are really open and are talking about what they’re doing. Sometimes, for example, on Instagram, it’s pure vanity; people are posting the their pictures, looking beautiful, etc.

Colleen:
Right.

Matthias:
I think – Exception with serious photographers, for example. They also post on Instagram, but for a different reason.

Colleen:
Right.

Matthias:
But on Twitter, it’s really open and people are sharing, at least if you’re in the right spaces there.

Colleen:
Yeah.

Matthias:
Yeah, that’s amazing. A shout out from a thirty-thousand follower account. That’s really good.

Colleen:
It was pretty cool. And it was funny because I didn’t even know what was happening. And my marketing person was like, “What happened? You got this huge spike of views?” I was like, “Oh, very cool. Thanks, man.” So, that was pretty cool.

So, I like that idea. As I said earlier, that’s very much the like Amy Hoy way to go about Sales Safari.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
She talks a lot more about Reddit, but whatever; like point being is like finding the community, engaging with the community.

How Colleen became co-host of a podcast

Matthias:
Yeah, that’s it.

And let me ask you, as a last question, let’s touch this Software Social podcast. How did that idea come about? How did he get that one?

Colleen:
So, we started that. So, I have always, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve always wanted to start a business and I just really needed a push. I just really needed some inspiration. And everybody, and it seems like every tech guy and his friend have a podcast.

And I was listening to one and it was lovely; the hosts were wonderful, but the guy in the podcast – This was again like two years ago now. And I’m just trying to launch a business – and the guy in the podcast said he had quit his job and he was going to get in his car and drive all the way to California with his dad and they were going to live in their car, whatever. It was something like that.

He basically was like, “Hey, I want to move from Oregon to California. So, I’m just going to get in my car and I’m going to drive there. My dad’s going to fly up and drive with me.” And that’s great. That’s awesome. But I have three children; I am a mother and a wife

Matthias:
You have a family.

Colleen:
I have a whole lot going on here, right?

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
So, first, there were no women in the space doing it, which was kind of disheartening. But it wasn’t even that there were no women, I didn’t feel like I was getting a balanced perspective. Like, how do you really start a business when you have to balance life? How does that work?

Matthias:
Yeah.

Colleen:
And so, Michele had recently moved to Denmark. And she was just going to go and stay for two months, and then they decided to just move there forever. So, I wasn’t seeing Michelle anymore, and I was like, “You know what? We both have lives. We can’t just get in our car and drive across the country because we feel like it. We just can’t quit our job because we feel like it. We have all these other responsibilities.

Matthias:
Exactly.

Colleen:
So, when we started it, the goal was to kind of provide the perspective of what’s it like starting a business and still having a life and not working twenty-two hours a day.

Matthias:
Hmm, hmm.

Colleen:
So, that’s what that was about.

Matthias:
And so, you created the podcast to stay in touch with each other or what would be the main purpose of the podcast?

Colleen:
Yes, the main purpose, because when we both lived in Virginia before we both moved, we would meet every week. And as you know, and if your audience doesn’t know, like Michelle Hansen is a co-founder of Geocodio, and they’re wildly successful. So, it was kind of a neat, you know, we’re very, very good friends. And also, she’s been there, because she and her husband, built Geocodio together.

Matthias:
Yeah. She also built a business. Yeah.

Colleen:
Right. And I was just trying to get Simple File Upload off the ground. So, it was mostly to just hang out and talk.

Matthias:
Yeah, cool. That’s really interesting because Michelle is an experienced founder. She started several years ago, right?

Colleen:
Yeah.

Matthias:
And she’s successful with her husband. And you are a new one. You’re trying to get all these struggles. Yeah, it’s amazing. I love that. I keep listening to those episodes in my car when I’m on the way to the grocery store, for example. Yeah, that’s great.

Colleen, this has been quite a ride! I thank you very much for sharing all this information with us, all these experiences, these feelings and everything. So, I think this will be a really good episode for our listeners. Thank you so much!

Colleen:
Great. Thank you for having me on.

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Outro

Thanks for listening to The Audience Explorer podcast, today.

You can find me on Twitter at @GetTheAudience and you can check out the blog at gettheaudience.com

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