So did those guys really name their app after a meme? Huh? Buggle up fellow kids, it's time for FounderQuest!
You know Josh, you know that feeling you get right before vacations coming up and like the Thursday or the Friday before you like winding down and just getting ready, your mind's getting invocation mode? That's definitely happened to me. Since we have our vacation happening next week, I'm definitely, it's Thursday right now, just after lunch and I'm like yep, feel that vacation coming on. Oh yeah, for sure, yeah, Hack Week is definitely starting to wind down and I am looking forward to it.
Yeah, at the same time, I'm like super excited about this stuff we're working on and so my brain is going a mile a minute. I'm like, we're going this, I'm having problems like actually focusing on one thing because there's so many things I want to do. So that's a weird contradiction.
Yeah, that's been a vibe around here the past couple weeks, I think like we've been pretty excited and I know I like really need the vacation, but it's going to be hard to, I think it's going to be hard to disconnect, it's going to take me a few days. I can usually does. Yeah, yeah, I'm really struggling with the idea of actually taking a vacation. I don't take a lot of them.
So I'm wondering how far I might have my typical of my work for a couple hours every morning before the family wakes up and then I do my vacation stuff. So I actually think that works out pretty well for me because then I get my, I don't know, my work. It's done. And then the rest of the day I can just relax and read a book or play with the family or whatever it is.
Yeah, yeah, it's nice if you can get it an hour or two and then still disconnect, especially if that's a five hour of things that you're just really driven to work on. So we'll see I might get a little coding in or something in here and there, but I'll do my best to make sure it's only fun coding. Hopefully the support, hopefully our customers take it easy on us for the support queue since this is the one time of year where like everyone is on vacation.
So we have to have to make that keep the lights on still. Yeah, yeah, this is not the time for every customer to start asking us a bunch of questions. Yeah, yeah, speaking of which real quick, this isn't the topic of the episode, but since we're talking about it, you had an interesting idea about our on call rotation this week that I liked, which was to normally we have the four of us rotating. We each take a week on call.
And so we rotate between those, but your idea was for the holiday since we know we're all off was to split those on call rotations up until a couple days each. So no one person has to be on call for an entire week of Christmas. If you happen to draw the short straw, so I think that's nice. Yeah, credit where credit is due.
It was my wife's idea to do the half week rotation and credit also to Kevin who's on rotation this week and he was willing to go back on a little sooner than he would have otherwise to do this. Although to be honest, as we traditionally have done the past several years on any badger, I was going to hop into the page of duty scheduling tool when I was going to take Christmas and New Year's for myself because
my kids are older like I'm not having to wrap presents at midnight or whatever it is and wake up at 4 a.m. when the kids wake up and that sort of thing like the rest of the crew does everybody else has little kids and I just feel like I can take one for the team on that and spare people having to worry about that and they can enjoy their families. So so anyway, I was going to do that anyway.
So then when my wife came with this idea and the team was into it, I thought cool let's do that. And so Roel had Christmas, the week of Christmas and then I think you had the week of New Year's. And so I put myself at the second half of the Christmas week, which in our rotation, we go like Monday to Monday. So that ended up with me taking Christmas and then that ended up with Kevin then being on New Year's.
And so I double-checked with Kevin, I'm like, hey, since you didn't really volunteer for this, is this okay? And he said, yeah, it's fine. It's accept that I do have a plan to go to New Year's Eve party. And so I took I ended up taking New Year's Eve off of get on because that's very that's gracious of you. I don't do New Year's Eve parties. I just actually what we do. We have tradition in our family of New Year's. We hang around at the house and we play war games. That's what we do all night.
We celebrate with some Martin Nellies and some the Fudge and things like that and then we go to bed. Yeah, that's a nice tradition. And it works with on call. It does. It works really well. But I think I will be skipping my usual tradition of deploying something big on New Year's. That's what I've done in the past because no one cares if honey about your goes down on New Year's day. So I've often done like big major database migrations or things like that.
And this year, no plans. So I'm just going to relax. Nice. I hope you enjoy the holiday. And I hope we all can get some actual relaxation and vacation time in because we've got a big year. I think we've got a big year ahead of us. And I'm excited. True. But before we move on to that, I should say, since we're talking about vacation and stuff, we are not going to be recording podcasts for the next couple of weeks. Sorry, but you will have to be without us for a couple of weeks until January.
This is it. So enjoy this one. This is going to be a good one. It's a good one because we should get to the point here in a minute. But yeah, I think it's going to it's we're going out going to go out with a bang. And I'm excited for 2024. But first, we need to talk about, I don't know, how do we dive into this? This is where the record scratch sound comes into play, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So about a month ago, things really came to a head.
We were we're looking closely at our finances and realizing that we just have been spending a lot more than we thought. And bringing in less than we thought. That's a bad combination. And so we really had to stop and make some painful adjustments for us. Some things that we haven't had to do before. If we rewind back a year, though, if we go back to fall of 22, like revenue was fantastic.
We have been growing and growing on the revenue side. And we had a pretty good work chest in the bank. Like we thought pretty good about that. And we thought we can do more like we have some resources. We can do some more. And we started working with some consultants to join, do some updates to the to the marketing site. And we did know they're higher. That's when we brought Roel on. So that was spring of 23.
But what we weren't paying us close attention to was that the revenue numbers are actually going down every month. So if you may recall back in the fall of 22, that was when there was like a lot of talk in the press and media and stuff about, oh, there's going to be a recession. And the economy is going to be terrible and blah blah blah. And everything was fine. But there are a lot of people saying it's going to be bad.
And so what we started seeing, although we didn't realize it at the time, we started seeing was a lot of our customers like really looking at their expenses and saying, oh, we better cut some costs. We better trim what we're spending. And so we had some customers who are like overpervisioned here spending more than they should have with us. And so they they don't agree their accounts. There are other customers who are like, we just need to turn this off.
And so there was no like big dramatic decrease, no like great Exodus or anything. But we did see a continual drop in our monthly revenue numbers like every month consistently. Like we would still had new customers coming in and still have people upgrading. But we also had people downgrading and we had some people leaving. And that just got over several over years worth of time. It got pretty dramatic as far as the revenue picture goes.
So we realized in November about a month ago that we were spending, I think at this point, we were spending definitely more than we were bringing in. And so because we hadn't read us at our spending to these new revenue levels. And that was. Yeah, we were spending at like the 2022 rate. And in the meantime, we've had a whole year of basically like revenue losses, which like you said, I think it was easy for us because we've like grown.
I think feel like we've grown a bit of a thick skin in terms of the highs and lows of the SaaS business. We've learned that there are going to be times when the revenue trends down, but it's usually going to correct itself. And we just have to write it out. And obviously like doing this long term.
It's important not to like stress out constantly over that stuff. And so we got pretty good at that. But maybe we got a little too good in this case. And did it really stop and take a look at the larger trends until until last month when it was it was a little late for like I feel like we we should have had this done this work probably like six months ago.
Yeah, I think one of the things was like going back to that last year planning meeting. We had planned to spend down our cash like we. Okay, yes, we're going to spend more than we make for a while. And that'll be fine. And I think since we're in that mode of thinking like as we saw the bank balance dropping. It's like, okay, yeah, that we're working according to plan. No big deal. Yeah.
But but I think you're right. Like we should have realized six months ago. It was dropping more than we wanted to because the revenue had dropped more than we had realized.
Yeah. The good news is that we are dealing with it now and not another six months from now. Yeah, the good news is that there is somebody paying attention to the money and like when the bank balance got to a certain point like we know wait a minute. This is this is not feeling as comfortable anymore. So yeah, we didn't get to bankrupt or we didn't have to miss payroll or anything like that.
We still have money in the bank, but it's less than our comfort Christian. And so we're like, okay, time to pull the break time to stop this train and figure out what's going on. Yeah, at the time, I was definitely freaking out. Were you freaking out? Yeah, I was totally freaking out. Yes. Because I was stressing. I was stressing because I looked at what we were doing. And if we didn't change what we were doing, then we would go to zero.
And about months, like we didn't have a year's worth of cash at the burn rate that we had. And that made me freak out. Yeah, for sure. So I think about that. And but then and then we spent some time. I think over those over several days, okay, what are we spending our money on? What can we cut? And if we how much do we need to cut to get us to a point where you know back in the black and that sort of thing.
And those conversations were good, but I think we did that for a couple of days. But I remember just one night thinking I still don't feel great. I don't feel like it's really settled yet. And I was still like really anxious. And yeah. And so I just sat down. I was like, okay, you know what? It's time to make a budget, right? Because this is not something that we've done before 100 badger. But I decided, you know what?
I just needed to take every expense and put them on a spreadsheet and then build up from zero. Okay. What are we actually going to spend money on? And what does it look like? And what does our profit margin look like after that exercise? And spend a few hours on that. And after that was done. And I chatted with you about the results of that. And I felt like, okay, I think this is under control. Then that's my anxiety level came down.
Yeah, I really appreciated you doing that because I think that for me too, that was like just not having a clear picture. That's one of the most the scariest parts about when there's crisis like that. I think the first thing we did, which was like gathering information. And like you were even like going line by line through the bank transactions.
So yeah, like it really helped us get a clear picture of like where we were and where we needed to go. And then we could like basically go down the line items and figure out how to make it work to basically stabilize our cash flow. Yeah. And this was the at the point where you said something on lines of, yeah, I guess this would buy this would be a point in which to be really helpful if we had a CFO.
Yeah, because yeah, that would be nice. Yeah, because that person would be looking at this probably more closely when we were we do have an accounting company that does our bookkeeping and does a revenue reporting and stuff like that. But we're not paying them to be a CFO. They're not. Yeah, they're not looking at our stuff and give it advice on a regular basis.
Looking at the numbers too on a regular basis. But it's like we're also like doing product development and we're doing marketing and we're managing like five different budgets for various like sub things in the business. And it's easy to lose track of the big picture sometimes when you're like just stuck in the minutia of the day to day running of the business. Yeah, yeah. But at least we do have a quarterly meetings where we get together and we do take a pause and we look at this stuff.
Yeah, I didn't go on for our time to. That's our time to review. So in the future, we'll have some sort of window into this new budget that we've created to make sure we don't end up back in that position. But in the meantime, like we've been busy responding to this and dealing with any fallout. So what have we been doing and what is the what's the impact figure we can talk about that for a little while.
Yeah, I think first thing to say is that our priority was to try to impact the people as little as possible. Like most companies, our number one expense is people salary and benefits and that sort of stuff. But you don't just go willy nilly and start firing people or whatever. That's just not right. So that was thing number one. Okay, we got it. Whatever we can do to preserve people is what we're going to do.
So I think the first thing we looked at is, okay, what are our big expenses outside of people that we can cut without impacting either the service that we're providing or you know, and also we want to preserve advertising because you can't grow if you don't spend there or it's very difficult, I should say.
So I think we looked at first, like, what are some of the big expenses we had in the past year and so some of them like were the consultants that we talked about that we brought in to help us with marketing and strategy and that sort of stuff. And that was easy. Okay, we cut that we don't do any more of that. Right. We've some of those projects we just finished some of the other projects we can just wind down pretty quickly and that was a thing step one.
Yeah, those were some big line items too. That was nice to at least nice to have those types of line items to to cut right off the bat. We did we do a lot of outsourcing last year for a software and even maintenance type things. And so we've cut down a lot of our contracting and we're planning to just do more in house for a little while.
I think that my optimistic spin on that is that I think it's going to be good for us because it's allowing us to get back into the hands on work ourselves and optimize some of these things that I think it's easy to like you automate or you create a process for something once and then you hand it off to some external like a contractor or something. And it's easy to like for that stuff to get a little like crafty or something.
So I think there's some opportunity here for us like getting back into the day to day parts of the business. Yeah, yeah, and you reminded me that I should probably put an asterisk on that whole the people thing because yes, we did cut contractors. Now we did try to do it and they and it's kind of ways we possibly could because it was right around Thanksgiving time when we started making these changes.
And we didn't just want to unload on people like right then and especially going into Christmas. So what we did is we had some contractors who were already like winding down their stuff for us or added a natural pause point or whatever. And so for them, we just said, hey, we're done or they're already gone. So we didn't say anything.
But for others who are more ongoing, we said, hey, this is what we're doing. This is what's going on like we shared in some level of detail like what was happening and and that hey either we need you to only work on stuff that we preview for for the next little while. Or hey, starting in January 1st, we're just not going to send any more work your way will continue this work through December at that point.
We're not planning on doing anymore. And so that gave us a way to real you know, no one our cost could start getting back in control, but also gave them some cushion like they didn't have to scramble to get a new client. Right before Christmas kind of thing. So obviously still not ideal to have to let a contractor lapse on their contract. But at least we could soften blow a little bit by saying, hey, we can we got you through the end of December.
Yeah. And I think most of our contractors were on more of an ongoing retainer style basis as opposed to like large in progress. Right. So it was it's really more just like scaling back on that type of ongoing work, which does make it a little easier. It would be much harder if we had like large projects in progress or something that we had to like basically cancel or or shelf for a while. So I'm glad that that's we're not in that position.
Yeah. And the other people thing I forgot to mention this, but was Josh and I of course took pickets like we're or the owners of the business we can for hopefully afford to take a picket in order to help preserve the other people in the business. So we did that. And of course that's not fun and our wives didn't love the idea that's part of running a small business. Sometimes you have the good years and sometimes you have the not so good years.
Yeah, and we really don't want we really don't want to have to cut people that's I think that's our our that's our main priority here is stabilizing our team because we built a great team. And these kind of fluctuations in the business are going to happen and we need to be able to weather that storm because if we can't like build up the team every time this happens from scratch is so much work and like knowledge that has been built up and just.
Yeah, it would it's just it would be really hard to lose anyone really I think at this point. We would we totally would and there's so awesome. And then we did what all of our customers were doing we went back and look at our expenses and we saw we OK, where are we spending too much where can we just cut this to zero.
And we went to some of our providers and we said hey we're having a rough issue with some revenue stuff here so we need to cut our spend with you can we make a deal and some of our providers were very generous and giving us a deal on some stuff that we were probably spending too much on.
And then other things with which is more essential we said we were going to cut that even if they were small expenses was saying there's just no point in spending money on this thing that's not essential so we're just not.
This is a kind of let's how we started with the mentality that we're going to like you know we're pretty scrappy and frugal and we're going to DIY things and over the years as we've made more money and I think it's completely it's good that we did we decided to be OK with spending more on nice things that just kind of solve that you know check that box.
Maybe it's costing more than if you like through something together yourself on a weekend but it's worth it I think we're returning to the scrappy mindset at least for a little while like I think when money's good it makes sense to just pay a little extra for some things just so you don't have to worry about them.
But I think we're pretty good at doing both of those yeah and we're certainly not going back to the same levels of scrappy that we went back to in the original days like for example at some point along the way we decided you know what we really don't want to be run.
We really don't want to be running our own database anymore we really like to have a service provider doing that for us so that we don't worry about managing that and recovery and that sort of thing even though I really enjoy that kind of stuff and we had a pretty good setup before we decided hey we'll spend some more and we'll have a third party do that.
And so we're still doing that like we're not bringing that back in house because just a quality of life improvement of having someone else's op steam worrying about that particular aspect is great and yes worth the money so we're not going back to the
bear bones stuff that we did in the early early days but yeah cutting back on the things that just are nice to have but not necessarily have so aside from really focusing on wanting to support our employees and contractors as we also wanted to of course support our customers right we're not going to make any changes that impact the quality of the service or put us at risk of reliability so like I say that because hosting of course is one of our big expenses we had where 100% AWS and if you've ever had a
service and if you've read maybe a DHH is a blog post about moving away from the cloud and how he's going to save millions of dollars whatever yes these things are true in that you typically will spend more with AWS then you would if ran your own box is in a
cool facility and we could do that we could save some money that way but we have such a good system in place we have such good automation that handles the spikes in our traffic and it's so reliable like we're in an active setup right we're in multiple a Z's with Amazon so that if one entire data center goes away we're going to automatically fail over to the other one all that is there and there's no reason to unwind that and it would take us a lot of time and you know effort to do that so
that we're not really going to seriously consider dramatically changing our setup to save a few bucks right we're going to spend money where it makes sense I think that's that's probably to your credit that there's not as much to cut there is because it's already is such a well optimized system and I don't think we'd want to lose any of the like managed aspects that we've set up yeah a good news is that over the years we've maintained a pretty
frugal mindset when it comes to that stuff and so we haven't been exorbitant and how are you that architecture stuff and yeah that's one of the that's one thing that you really have to with AWS in particular because if you don't maintain a frugal mindset like they're very good at just like letting your costs get away from you for sure yeah there's all kinds of fun toys you can play with and
and the AWS that costs a fair amount of money yeah yeah so we've done all the usual things to like quote unquote optimize costs but the other thing that we are doing is hopefully we're making some money next year one of the interesting things about this is that because we've spent so much in 2023 investing in the business a lot of this work is basically ready to ship which is great so I think that money was well spent and the signals
that we're getting from beta testers and early customers that are using insights for example have been really positive and I feel I don't know about you but I feel like maybe the most optimistic I've been in in a while about the opportunity here in the business and that's been pretty exciting yeah when it comes to finances you can only cut so much right you have certain expenses you can't can't go to zero on that and so you do have to
look at okay how are you going to grow your revenues that's where you can really make a difference and having insights coming up soon and like you said having the good feedback that we've gotten like everyone who's had a chance to play with it and really dive into it they just love it like the
feedback that we're getting is overwhelmingly positive and we've had suggestions on how to improve it and all of them are like that that's exactly what I do like and so everyone who is making comments is like they're on board with the direction we're going it seems like we have a thing ahead of us and it's going to be great expansion revenue for our existing customer base right this is not going to be something that we're going to give away for free this is going
to be something that is going to have an additional cost to it and for our customers who don't care about it is be fine it's not going to be not be forced upon them but we do think a lot of our customers will love it and we'll opt into
spending a bit more money with us and if we can get the the average take per customer to double like that would be fantastic so you know who knows it will probably end up being double but if it did be amazing but anyway we know it's going to be it's going to be some growth it's going to be some
growth it's going to be some lift because we know that our customers that we have today you are giving us money today are interested in this sort of thing and the people have access today now are saying yes I'll be happy to spend on this when it's ready when you're ready to build me so yeah I'm with you I'm more optimistic now than I have then in quite a while because
we have this big new thing and we have other big things that we're thinking about in 2024 that I think we'll make a big lift on the business yeah yeah in the meantime this is also not just for like people who are excited about the new thing but this is really improving and it will improve the product overall I think is a whole like honey badger overall I think that will whether people are going to be heavily using this or not it's going to make the entire product better so I think
that's really cool that we can do both things and then hopefully also the extra things that we want to do with like new products in 2024 we have lots of ideas yeah what one of the things that was neat so we send out an email let's see you send it out what a week or two ago now that basically our periodic here's what we've been working on email and in that email you talked about insights and you encourage people to get in touch if they wanted to get access to the limited preview
and I can't use that yeah and we had a good response to that I can't remember exactly now how many people responded but I was watching as they're coming in because I was enabling each of those customers into the preview and I was watching what subscription level they're on and I noticed that most of the people who got in touch are on either our free or cheap as plan which to me is very exciting
well I'm one hand you could say other freebies and they're just going to just want to check out something new and they'll never pay you or you could look at it and I choose the optimistic so the way I look at it is these are people who today aren't this place meaning so much on us but tomorrow once insights is there that might actually use it and you know again expansion of do actually give us some more business so yeah I was excited about that
I was really I think it was a great response one of the best responses we've had to a product update email we try to send like at least one per quarter basically like here's a roundup of everything we've worked on and my company news and of course we let everyone know that founder quest is back which I don't know if we've actually we had ever really marketed founder quest heavily till our entire honey badger user base so I think it'll be interesting to see if we pick up any new listeners if we cross promote it a little bit
yeah so I think I'm hopeful that the revenue decline that we've seen will be reversed by a revenue in client that we'll see as we get customers and their expansion revenue going with insights and the other things that we're doing with honey badger we added like part of your roundup email was highlighting some features that we added recently to honey badger status pages that are more interesting to people who want to have a bigger business so we limited those features to our business plans you know our higher tiers
things like being able to embed your status page in your own website and having a password protected that's page so you know we'll continue to do things like that as well we will always be looking for what kind of you know features or whatever can we bring to the product that would encourage people to upgrade
yeah that thing you said about it's easier to make money than to save money that reminded me of like the early days of back when we were starting honey badger and we were all like also consulting and my consulting business was starting to do better than it had in the past very much thanks to you and your referrals at many points so thank you but I just remember that being a thing when we would talk about back then I was like saving for a house and I was like just starting my family and all this all these things
I just remember that being a thing that was discussed just I think between you and me and star in passing was like yeah well you know you could always like you know have your type budget and and pinch pennies and save but making more money is always like the better option if you can I took that to heart back then and it worked out like I do make a lot more money than I did then and that has been a lot easier than for going my Starbucks or something in the morning or whatever
yeah yeah on the flip side I remember vividly this was back of 2007 eight summer in that time frame I had a I had a friend who's an entrepreneur and he was he started his own business and I think he went to white combinator and started getting investment and that sort of thing and at some point he wrote his blog post where it was talking about cutting your personal burn because we always talk about cutting your company's burn and so he's like I'm going to sell my car and he had a because he had a phone
and he had a because he had a fancy sports car and yeah I'm like okay sure if you're if you have expenses that are out of line like that sure I guess it makes sense to cut those in a versus trying to you know you can fit some pennies right
you're going to say it really depends on the car in that story the car completely changes that story one way or the other yeah cool yeah I think making more money but also focusing like one of the things that we've always come back to is focusing on our customers
keeping our customers happy building things that they like I really feel like that approach and strategy has never let us down and so long as we can continue to do that and we continue to have customers like I really I don't know I'm like yeah I freaked out I freaked out for a few days or weeks even but just once you kind of react
to the situation as it is today and knowing that we continue to have customers coming showing up loving the product and even the fact that you and I have been doing more work on the product than we have in a while personally I felt really good about that like being able to like just refocus our efforts on keeping our customers happy making the product better shipping all this work that we've done and that is continuing to develop
it's felt pretty good yeah yeah there's there's nothing like a good crisis to help you focus right to bring clarity to what you do how you spend your time and I think that's definitely been the case for me is and yes bit more time just working and focusing on the work stuff and 20 23 we looked at or we were we had we felt like we had this this extra and we thought yes we can say yes to more things we yes we can do this consultant thing and yes you and I personally we can take some time to do this
and I personally we can take some more time away from the business and we can do some other things yeah and yes we can build a pretty ambitious new product yeah in the business that we have not seen materialize and on the bottom line yet in terms of revenue that's a big bad
yeah and so at the end of that time now we're saying okay we have to stop saying yes to all the things and we have to start saying no to some things are just going to be distractions like no we're not going to take on a huge new product right now no we're not going to do this great customer service request that would turn into six months worth of work right now yeah no we're not going to like support that cool
trying to new framework or integration that like everyone's excited about but no one is actually using or whatever like maybe we can do that you know in six months from now versus like immediately yeah there was a great presentation by Steve Jobs
we'll put it in the show notes I was talking to you I think you talked to a bunch of employees at this point and the question came up what about he was open doc I think this I guess it was a project they're working on it and when Steve Jobs came back in 96 97 he just asked a whole bunch of stuff he's like no we're going to we're not going to do
that we're going to focus on some core stuff right when he really need to turn Apple around and so what he said in this presentation was focusing is about saying no basically yeah you know these are these might be great technologies but they're just not great for Apple the business and so we're just going to say no to them right now and I feel
like that's where we are like that's a positive kind of no right we're going to focus on getting this getting insights polished and ready and getting revenue from that versus being distracted by oh we could build this new API
or we could build this new client interface and yes those things would be great but right now the answer is no because we have to focus on this where we think it's most important yeah yeah and I think another example that is even on the marketing side where we've had a pretty large content operation for a content marketing
we've published two blog posts a week at least and we do we've done a lot of tutorials and all kinds all types of different content basically but I think the focus in 2024 is going to be less quantity but I want to really up the quality of our content and everything and I think there's trends happening in content marketing right now that kind of demand that as well just with LLM's and AI generated content and all that stuff it's really I think it's time for everyone to
up their game but I think in our case it would be it'll be good for us to pull back and just really focus on delivering like a well executed product regardless of what we're doing if that's like a blog article or if it's a new feature in the app or if it's making our application UI better for example like I just want to make the execution better and do less of it overall and I think that's what like refocusing means to me.
Yeah, I like that. And the good news is that we're small, we're flexible if the world is dramatically different in three or six months and we can make changes to our plans right like just today the Fed announced are not going to raise rates and so everyone's like yes that means next year is going to be even better the economy is going to take off and ball that well.
Yeah, economists are wrong from time to time but maybe things will be looking better just naturally next year maybe the macro and why it will be better and we'll be like hey we can say yes to more things but yeah I think focusing for now is gets us the quality that we want. I think there's potentially some question about the economy like it's actual performance versus it's perceived performance over the past year or so regardless of what the economy was doing everyone felt like it was terrible.
And so maybe trends will be reversing in 2024 and of course interest rates always can help that. Yeah, so we seem to pull our strings that we have the Fed to make them cut their rates sooner than. One thing you said just now like I think we are in a really good position to whether these kinds of storms and that is a result of the decisions we've made in the past of how we constructed this business.
And the things to be honest the things we have said no to we've said no to a lot of things that would have put us in a worse position today to handle this sort of thing and I think like things can always be you know can always be good. Like there's going to be hard times for a business if you're running a long term like you're going to have challenges and and so I think we've I think we've done we've also done really well in some of the decisions we've made in terms of not.
Not taking on a lot of debt or not taking on like tons of funding that puts extra pressure on us and then even personal decisions like you and I have constructed our lives in a way that makes us flexible you know I think we both can take a pretty significant pay cut if we need to for a while or for however long. And it's not going to really it's going to hurt but it doesn't hurt like it would if we had that car in that house everything that you know and we're like super leveraged.
So I do feel like this whole like sustainable business thing is paying off right in this moment. Yeah yeah there's definitely less stress than there would have been if we had way overspent you know if higher to had a revenue by a 10X or whatever I don't know what those numbers are like because I've never done it. Yeah this is totally much more manageable for us than if we had gotten crazy agreed. I think that was well said I got I can't add anything to that.
Yeah well I'm looking forward to 2024 how about you. I am definitely looking forward to 2024. Yes. Cool I guess that's a wrap. Yeah between now and 2024 we have vacation we're going to enjoy some time to family have some food relax a bit think about how we're going to conquer the world in 2024. And of course continue bringing you fantastic new founder quest episodes as we detail the progress and the process. So thanks for listening.
I'm going to work on a list of things to say no to for my new years resolutions. Excellent. Cool. All right this has been founder quest if you like us you should go and rate us highly on Apple podcast or Spotify or wherever you listen and you can find us at the founder quest. And I guess we'll see you next year. Have a good one. Founder quest is a weekly podcast by the founders of honey badger zero instrumentation 360 degree coverage of errors outages and service degradations for your web apps.
If you have a web app you need it available at honey badger dot I.o. One more from the founders go to founder quest podcast dot com. That's one word where you can access our huge back catalog of episodes. Founder quest is available on iTunes, Spotify and other durveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.