Brace yourself for the number one rated daytime bootstrap Sass Honey Badger themed podcast in the Pacific Northwest. This is FounderQuest. And we're back. We're live. I have something to read here. And it's hard to believe that it's been this long. But Andrew Mason on Twitter. It says, I can't say how badly I want this, which is found request to return without sounding weird, but it's been 699 days and I'm still subscribed, hoping it returns. Listing.
listen to it all multiple times and have highlights backed up in my notes. If I ambush you with a mic at a conf, can you just start again, please? So this is obviously we're doing this specifically for Andrew. And maybe just to avoid an ambush. But yeah, we'll see. Maybe he'll still ambush us sometime. That might be nice. Ambushes are always welcome. Yeah. Can you believe that? It's been 699 days and this is episode 100. Episode 100. Founder Quest 100.
In the 11th year of Honey Badger, we've been doing this 11 years. Can you believe that? I can't believe it. So we're long distance runners. Yeah, I think we look a little older than last time we recorded. I know. Yeah. What is that? Like a couple of years. I, it feels like it doesn't feel that long to me, but like looking back on what, everything we've been working on the past couple of years, like it's, yeah, it's been a blur, but yeah, time flies.
It really doesn't feel like that long. I guess we just had our heads down building stuff and living the dream that we just didn't notice time going by. You could say the same thing just for the business in general. It does not feel like we've been doing this 11 years, but you just think of that. We were a decade younger when we got together.
with star and started this thing. It's just, it's wild. You didn't, you didn't have kids when we started honey badger. I know such a different place. Yeah. Got a five and a seven year old. Yeah. Yep. Yes. Got kids in college. Yeah, my kids are now in college. It's crazy. I guess off the top, though, we got to talk about why it's just two of us and why Star isn't with us. Yeah, we're going to do kind of a recap State of the Union. Yeah.
This is the FounderQuest 100 episode, State of the Union at Honey Badger, and what we're doing moving forward. Yeah, we'll catch up on all the things that have happened in the past few years. Excruciating detail. We'll be here for six hours, so buckle up. We'll try to keep it.
Try to keep these quick. I know people like their 30 minute episodes. Try to keep it quick. Yeah. And as always, if anybody, if you're listening and you have questions about anything we talk about, you want us to go more in depth on something, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter. or wherever. However you can get in touch with us, we'd be happy to talk more about whatever that you find interesting.
The major news is Star is no longer with Honey Badger. So in March 2022, we bought out Star's portion of the business. Star decided that she wanted to move on to do some other things. And we decided that Josh and I decided that we were ready to take on the business and we could go ahead and move forward. We wanted to have things we still wanted to do. Yeah, we.
Even after 10 years, we still have big dreams, I think, of things we want to accomplish. And of course, our GitHub backlog is probably hundreds deep at this point. The real question is, who made the smart choice? Totally. Yeah. I think that the jury is still out on that, but we'll see if maybe we can get back together with star for like founder quest, like 400. And when we're all in rocking chairs and do the retrospective.
Yeah, because the terms of the deal, like we didn't have the cash on hand. Josh and I didn't have all that cash to be able to, because we evaluated the company, we valued the company based on typical multiples that were going on in the SaaS marketplace at the time.
We talked to people like FE International and others out there who know what's going on with acquisitions and that sort of thing. So we're not experts on that sort of stuff. So when we were starting to have conversations about the buyout.
We thought we got to find out how much the business is worth and basically use the guidance from those kinds of business brokers to find out what the typical range is. And I think we settled on Forex, if I remember correctly, four times revenue. Something like three, between three and four. Yeah. I can't remember. We haggled. It's always a negotiation. No matter how much you like someone, it's business makes everything a negotiation. Yeah. And when you're in the position that Josh and I were.
You're funding it yourself. We didn't have big investors backing us. We didn't have a whole bunch. We had to negotiate as much as we could down. And Sarah wanted to negotiate as much as she could up. And I think we came to a happy compromise in the end. Yeah, I think it worked. So the way that we're working it now is that we are working to pay off the debt that we have to Star. And someday we will be free of that. But it was kind of a rough transition.
I think there was a few months there where it was just like, wow, we had to do a bit of a reset, had to see what the business was going to run like without the third co-founder. Yeah, a lot was, everything was different. Yeah, yeah, there was a lot up in the air, but I think we got through it. I think we were definitely nervous about servicing that deck. That's a big check we cut every month.
At the time, it was scary. We're signing up, signing back on to this business. And on top of it, we have to consider that we have this extra whatever chunk of the balance sheet that isn't available. In hindsight, I think our fears were a little bit unfounded, at least luckily.
It doesn't feel like too much has changed in terms of just our day-to-day being able to work on the business and make money, pay our employees, have some, a nice profit margin. Like it's, I think it's worked out as well as it could for everyone, someone in our. the situation that the three of us were in. Yeah, I agree. I think one of the things you said made me think that, yeah, it really was a gut check. I think all three of us were sitting there thinking, do we want to continue?
doing this do we want to keep we've been at it for 10 years do we want to invest another whatever years our lives in this and uh yeah yeah but uh i agree i'm with you like enjoying what we're doing it's
Since then, I haven't thought, oh, that was a really bad decision. Yeah, I've been really happy with continuing to work with you. We have a business and business is capable of... paying paying large loans and yeah we just can't just just another thing you think about yeah yeah so that was definitely a big transition i think another big personnel change fast forward to we'll jump around a bit so we'll fast forward to 2023
About six months ago, we brought on another employee. So Roel has joined us from the great white north of Canada and started, yeah, about six months ago. And it's awesome to have him join us. He also has a couple of kids or three kids. And so we were continuing the tradition of everyone at Honey Badger happens to have some little kiddos running around. And, but to said, well, we're all as developer.
does a bunch of Rails stuff, has been diving in. He's done a fantastic job. Love having him here. So that makes a grand total of five, again. Three, we got, what, Josh, you and I are, I guess we're still developers, right? We still write some code from time to time? Yeah, we still write some code.
We got Ben, who's doing marketing for us, Ben Finley. And we got Kevin and Roel, who are also doing development. And it's been fun. It's been a lot of fun having us all working together. Yeah. And then our extended contracting. team is a little bit larger it's fluctuated a little bit but we have some long-term long-term folks that have worked with us that we like like working with and gradios and bethany until recently uh shelva um so it's it's nice to have you know we have a little
community of people yeah and on the ios side i was just talking about this yesterday like we still have andre working with us he does our mobile apps oh yeah i can't forget andre he's been with us like what eight years or something part-time as we need it and everyone else we're forgetting by the way
Not mentioning everyone, but that's true. Yeah. So that's yeah. So yeah, Roel actually joined us in Atlanta earlier this year for RailsConf. And it was cool to get the team, some of the team together. and get some face-to-face time. That was our first time meeting Roel in person, so we had some good dinners and time to hang out.
but I don't want to jump too far ahead because actually RailsConf 2020 was a pretty epic RailsConf for us and probably for FounderQuest as well because I forget where we left. We talked about this forever back in the pandemic, but at one point I didn't look up the episode number, so I can't be cool and drop the episode number, but you can go like search. But we were planning the RailsConf that got canceled.
I think it was, right? Was it RailsConf 2021 that got canceled or was it 2020? I can't remember. Forever ago again. This is probably 2020. The first one that got canceled because of COVID. Yeah, we had this big, this like grand scheme to have a what I think we were going to do have a lounge at the conference. I think we're calling it the Indie Lounge.
for, you know, kind of make a group thing for like indie creators. And then we were planning to rent Ground Control, a local arcade in Portland here that we really like to have a Honey Badger bash. And we were very sad that that all fell through when the pandemic made, you know, all the conferences were canceled. 2022 was the year that RailsConf finally made it to Portland after all that heartbreak. And we were able to do all of that.
That was cool to see that come get some closure on that. And it was a lot of fun. Like it was really cool having like a central place in the conference exhibit hall with the lounge. It became like a hub for people. People still mention it to me. and and then the party was awesome arcade games and yeah great turnout yeah ground control i love it i love it it's fun to have an excuse to have a deductible party at ground right yeah
So I feel like we did pretty well. We did pretty well at Rails. We did my hometown justice for representing. Yeah, when it's on your home turf, you got to go all out, right? Yeah, that's right. So yeah, RailsConf, this year it was in Atlanta and we decided to be the lounge sponsor again. We didn't do a big party, but the lounge has been fun to get to meet a lot of people there. And it fits our style. We're not very salesy people in person.
It's nice just to have a place where you can kind of talk, meet people and then the things work comes up more naturally and you can still talk about that stuff. But there's not you're not like pressuring people into demos or that sort of thing, which is just not my jam. Yeah, we are definitely not salespeople who are at the booth trying to get your business card. Maybe we should be. I don't know.
I think it's all right. I could try something different if I want to. It's fine. And then Rails World is going to be in Toronto next year, right? Toronto, yeah. And that is Rawell's hometown. So I guess we'll have to pull out all the stops again for that one. Yeah, we'll have to make it to...
to toronto yeah yeah i haven't been to toronto i've been to let's see vancouver oh yeah i went to vancouver with the first international rails conference pretty sure that was the official name of the conference that was in vancouver Was that 2015 or 2016? I don't know. It was before the first RailsConf that was done by O'Reilly, which was in Chicago. Was that Chicago? Yeah. So that was in Vancouver. Vancouver. It was a lot of fun. And I remember it was over Easter weekend.
or right up to because I was there and went out for like breakfast on Good Friday and everything was shut down on Good Friday. I'm like, what's going on? I knew it was Good Friday, but I wasn't used to things shutting down for that. But that's the way it is in Vancouver.
Really? I didn't realize that. I shut down for a good Friday. So that was fun. Okay. So did you get breakfast or didn't you? I didn't. I don't remember now. Yeah. Yeah. People are dying to know right now. Everyone's on the edge of their seat. So, yeah. So that was fun. RailsConf 2022. Yeah. Love Ground Control. We should do a team building activity there. We should block out the night again like we did there and just have just the five of us hanging out. That would be cool.
Yeah, that would be fun. I guess we can talk about some of the building stuff that we did, some of the business things, things that we launched. We did ship some things in 2022 as well with all that going on. It wasn't just all, yeah, it wasn't all heartbreaking parties. We had a big update to status pages. You want to talk about that? Yeah, so I think that was the big thing we did feature-wise that year, which was status pages, which...
In the past, we had a feature because we do uptime monitoring at Honey Badger. And... you know common thing that people want to do with uptime monitoring is like relay that status are things up or down to their customers and so in the past we've had some requests can we can we have a status page where it shows like if my sites are up or down
And we had this kind of limited feature where you could enable a, it was, I don't know, a very simple status page for a specific uptime check that it would show. I don't remember if it was a, was it a group or was it just individuals? I think it was just one. It would show. the status and like the historical performance of that check. And that was okay, but it was nothing like, like status page. What is it? Status page IO that was acquired by Atlassian.
or some of the other like more full featured status pages where you can get pretty complicated with them like showing all of your like your infrastructure and that sort of thing so this is a feature that we've had people multiple people have requested over the years is like a
actual like status page feature so that's what we built we built a very simple version to start out which was like you could basically like customize some of the theme add a logo and add some change some some of the colors on the page And of course, show multiple checks, which was I think that's like what version one of this was or version one of the new status page feature. And then since then, we've added some.
We've added some additional things. You can also show your check-ins. So if you've got jobs that should be running, you can communicate if they have been running on time. Say you have a billing task that is supposed to run or have you sent out.
the email the email notifications for the day that sort of thing so we've been adding additional types of statuses that you can display and then yeah and some other i know we've been this year we've been adding even more so you probably got a better list of that in your head yeah when when royal joined us getting him into the app and we decided to take a look at status pages again
And to see, again, I mentioned earlier, we have hundreds of items in our backlog. And a lot of those items are feature requests that come in from time to time. And we had a number of feature requests for status pages, like various features to roll up into that bigger feature.
And so we got Roel started on that and pushed out some of those things, like some more customization options. Shava did some work on that as well, like being able to tweak the styles of the page and that sort of thing. But also we have features like requests, like... Being able to have subscribers to your status page, to be able to get updates via email and that sort of thing. To have password protection.
There are a few other things, and those are coming out pretty soon. I think we're just about wrapping up kind of a bundle of features for that. You'll see in the next few months more and more features coming out for that that will... Get us closer, I think, to what Atlassian, the status page, offers you so that you don't have to go to a third party to have your status page. You can just have that hosted with Tiny Badger. Simplify things a bit.
So we may not, I don't know that we'll get to the point where we're like feature parity. That's not really our goal. Our goal is more to give what our customers want and not necessarily asking for all those features that Atlassian has. But yeah, so we'll see more to come on that. I'm really looking forward to being able to like...
do email subscriptions and some of those other channels outside of just notifying Twitter or whatever. One of the other features that we added pretty quickly after in 2022, after we launched the initial version of Status Pages was incidents. So you can, in addition to like just automated, if your checks are up or down, you can add specific updates about either outages, like incidents, or if you have like scheduled planned maintenance, for example.
you could schedule an incident that it would then like pre-announce that you're going to be like say updating your database or moving your database or something and then at the time that you have that scheduled it would start to go into like you know this is the This is the planned outage. And then if you have additional updates, if it doesn't go according to plan, as those things sometimes do not, you can, of course, you could, of course, add additional updates.
to keep everyone in the loop since maybe your official channels are not not up at the moment Yeah, I love that feature. I love being able to post updates. That's probably the most. So we have our status page hosted with Atlassian status page because, of course, if all of our stuff is down, we don't want to have our own status page hosted on our stuff, which might be down. So we use the third.
We use somebody else for that. And the biggest feature that I use from Atlassian's status page is that incident thing. Something's going wrong. I love being able to communicate to customers that, hey, there's a problem. It solves the problem of having a bunch of people emailing us saying, hey, I think something's broken. That's sad. You can see the status page. It is broken. Or the maintenance thing is also really cool. I love being able to say, oh.
We're going to do a database maintenance this weekend. You can expect there's going to be 15 minutes of downtime or whatever. So it gives people a heads up that, yeah, I need to plan my usage of the app around this outage, which we know about ahead of time. So I love that feature. So glad we have that in our status pages product.
Users and customers love it too. I think people really appreciate that transparency. And yeah, even when that's unplanned outages, it's never good to have downtime, but how you respond to it. can really make it, you know, it can kind of spin a bad situation into a positive in some cases where if you handle it the right way. So if you don't handle it the right way, then it's just two terrible situations. Yep.
And let's see other big developments. We started working last year on a project that's pretty big, but not ready to chat about that just yet. Maybe later on in the episode. Maybe later in the podcast. You have to keep listening. for the next couple of minutes and we might get there. We'll see. But just, we have been working on it for most of this year. Yeah, I think it's been about a year.
yeah but we did do a lot of work on not necessarily the the product per se but on the business the marketing side the website we've done a lot of work with that and we worked with some vendors conversory experts was one of them and we're continuing some work there
Really helping us nail down our messaging and make improvements to the site so that people actually know what we're about when they land there. We're not marketing experts. And so bringing in some consultants was really helpful for there.
And one of the things I loved about the process was that they would interview our customers. And so we had a number of rounds of having people sit down with them and say, okay, let's take a look at this webpage and how does it hit you? And what do you understand about it? And what do you think? And that was just so illuminating.
to be able to get some third-party perspective on, does it make sense at all? Or I don't know what you're talking about here or that sort of stuff. Super, super helpful. Yeah, you reminded me. That's one of the things I would like to, I'd like to resume at some point here is, and I'd like to like... and work be able to do that into more internally i think we should do more customer interviews and research and yeah we did a lot like
at the start around the start of 2023. I think it's one of those things that you don't necessarily need to be doing it all the time. Of course, like you don't want to be like asking people too often to sit down with you, especially since we found.
that and this is great in our case we have like this this group of people in our customer out of our customers that are extremely willing to give us feedback and sit down with us but at the same time you want to like value their time and everything so i think periodically though it's good to do a round of research and kind of sit down and see where people are where their head is and that's i think
working with conversion rate experts was really really great in that respect too just because you mentioned we aren't we aren't marketers and so Being able to see their process, which is very, they try to take a very like scientific approach to things where everything is backed by data and as you know, to the, as best as it can be. And we're not just making.
blind decisions or just based on what we're feeling at the moment. But we have actual kind of research and data to back that up. That's not always been our strong point. We're much more gut people. And I think we continue to be.
bringing a little science into the into the process is never a bad thing so we're trying to we're trying to get a little bit better at that and and also just like they're admittedly like crazy expensive like consultants are not cheap people if small bootstrap company like we're not we're not working with this sort of consulting thing like all the time but it's when we are it's a great
opportunity to learn like how they do what they do and then hopefully we can internalize some of their some of their processes in the company like in our marketing that we do so that's been like my What I've been working on for some of this year is trying to replicate some of that ongoing, like just experimentation and doing some research and trying, having an idea and trying to see if you can validate.
little ideas that might move the needle um in small small directions yeah i think one of the one of the things that we love about honey badger is that the churn that has always been super low like customers who join with us and start Using us, they stick around forever. But we've always felt like we could do better on the acquisition of customers and the activation of customers. Getting people in the door, checking out the site.
and getting people actually signed up and actually using it, getting over the hurdle of actually installing the gem and sending errors and really fully activating. And so you did a big chunk of work around onboarding and helping improve that process. And that's been, I think that's been really useful.
Yeah, there's never-ending work there. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit. But yeah, we've tried a bunch of things this year in the spirit of experimenting with... different marketing ideas we recently just took away having a free plan like we we were like we've had a free plan for i forget like years a really long time i couldn't remember that when we
had not had one so i was like it might be a good why don't we just see what it does to the numbers if we don't have if we don't offer a free plan like maybe i've heard people being of people being surprised They've been doing this one thing all along that has been cannibalizing sales. It's easy to make a decision five years ago, especially when you're this small and there's so many things to think about.
So you make a decision and then just don't think about it for five years. So it's good to revisit those things periodically and just like start from the beginning and see if things are different. so we tried we tried that and we actually we had i think we had some movement there in terms of converting trials like it's a lot easier to convert trials for example when you don't have the longer sales cycle of a freemium
type funnel we confirmed i think we we knew this in the past but it's just it's good to remember these are two funnels that we can't treat the same way so we're going to have a free plan which we do we just actually recently just brought it back but we're bringing it back in a
different way than we did before we want to like actually treat it like a real like a real channel for for converting people but it's very different from trial activation we're trying to be more systematic about about that sort of thing so i think those two experiments have been
pretty successful so far. Yeah, it was eye-opening to me. Maybe I just should have realized this, but I don't know, I haven't just done. But seeing that the freemium path is really... different than the trial path right it really is a different activation thing and we we've tried different incentives to get those people in those two two different channels basically moving through the funnel
So yeah, it was really eye-opening to me to see how different those two use cases are. Yeah, if we're talking mistakes that we've made, I think that one of them, if we've ever made a mistake, I don't know, the jury's still out. But if we have one candidate would be just not treating the, just ignoring the free users too much and not really having a good visibility into like how they like this, how they think.
The psychology is different of someone who's not willing to pay when they start, but maybe they are down the road and all the inflection points are different. And I still don't.
fully understand that as well as I'd like to but that's part of this process is like we want to understand if we're going to have a free plan we want to understand those people as well as we do our normal like more business like trial customers who are like looking for a solution like now and have a business they want to monitor or whatever yeah so yeah lots to talk about there maybe we can we can revisit this as we learn more in the future yeah you bet yeah
on my end i've been doing a lot of work on product keeping keeping kevin kevin's been working a lot on this super secret project which we'll talk about in a few minutes and royal's i've mentioned talking about adding features and getting familiar with the app and from
In addition to that, I've been looking at the ops situation. So we're always making improvements on the back end of Honey Badger. I'm an old sysadmin. I'm a tinkerer. I can't let things just be, right? Even though it's working, I want it to be working better. I always got to be optimizing your bash scripts. That's right. So we completed this year, completed a migration from Amazon's EC2 to Amazon's ECS.
Super late to the Docker game. Containers, yeah, for real. Like, you know, I'm old school. Like, I believe in servers and, you know, blinking lights and stuff. And so when we moved to Amazon back in 2007. a long time ago. We just moved to VMs. That was fine. And I didn't really want to get into the whole container thing. I just didn't love Docker. I wanted to not give up my VMs. But eventually...
Over time, I think I've been one over and I'm more of a fan now of Docker than I was back then. And so now we're at the point where we're running everything on ECS and love it. Should have done it years earlier, but it is great. A big part of it is our sidekick processing, right? That's where most of our magic happens. And spinning up a container, obviously, is faster than spinning up a new VC2 instance, right?
It's just great. We have seen our latency go down. We've seen the backlog spikes go down. We've handled traffic spikes of 5x, 10x, 20x. Maybe even more. I can't remember. Without even... Yeah, we had a really big one recently. And you're just like, yeah, it's just... I forget what it was, but it was an eye-popping multiple.
Yeah, I think it was like 20 or 50x or something. And that happened within a course of minutes, right? Two minutes later, we're doing a heck of a lot more traffic. And then 10 minutes later, it shuts off again. And ECS is great for that. It just scales basically infinitely as far as we're concerned.
And we have the, we know we're watching all of our backlogs and it's just automatic. And every now and then we see an alert pop on our Slack channel and we're like, oh, CPU is high and go and take a look. And oh yeah, it's scaling. It's doing what it's supposed to do. That's been fantastic. Highly recommend. A plus would do again. It was cool. Recently, I had a project that involved adding a new like named sidekick cue.
and which is not something we do frequently you usually want to keep your keep the queue names or the queues you're working to a handful i'd say but we had a new one to add and we uh like getting it getting like something working it was much much easier than it would have been with EC2 because you were able to just create like a new task that would just work that specific queue. And it didn't even affect like the rest of our infrastructure.
That would have been a major change in the past, I feel like, or it would have felt much more major, but this made it feel more of like, well, you know. it's isolated and we think we can optimize it from there but like it's not going to affect the rest of our pipeline which is i think that's the big one it's just like you don't want to introduce like a new queue that like blocks the other important things that are happening yeah that was fun
That was fun. And one of the experiments we were able to do also was adding Kafka into the mix. So we love Sidekick, and I don't think you'll ever be able to pry it out of our cold dead hands, but... We also use Kafka for sending a bunch of messages around.
changed some of our pipeline to accommodate that. And we've just been able to also experiment with some more event-driven programming, which has been fun. Being able to add that to the mix without having to worry about interrupting what's already working has been pretty fun.
yeah that's cool so we also are no longer using hamil which is a complete departure because we're talking like heavy ops stuff and this we're talking this like whatever a template language but this was a big deal for us because we have been I don't know what the word is, but we have hated Hamill for...
for years it was a love-hate relationship right it was a love-hate relationship but it's over the years as we've as we've scaled with it as we've added more views to our rails app and had to edit old ones and and also i think there's been like some performance things have been faster since we switched to erb but we had been kind of like gradually switching over to erb for a number of years and that that also was just
annoying because every time you'd have to go edit one of the old views you'd have to switch back into like camel brain right which is now a thing now a term i'm going to use And yeah, this is like a small, like one of those minor like maintenance things or tech debt things. But we've done a few of those this year as well. So that was a lot. We had over, I think we had over 300 views remaining that we converted.
I did most of the reviews. We had one of our contractors worked on the actual conversion with a mix of automated and just file-by-file migration. But reviewing it is also a little bit of a mind numbing. Like my eyes were crossing every day, like after reviewing like Hamill side by side diffs basically. So I like lived and breathed Hamill diffs for.
few weeks and then yeah with some other little like tech debt repayments like we might we upgraded our bootstrap which we still use and i don't know if we'll ever get to use tailwind or any anything cool on the front end But it's modernized bootstrap and it's working pretty well. Yeah, it's been fun to see getting all those updates out there and making things just a little nicer for the dev experience.
internally in fact i saw in the microcom community yesterday this morning something i saw someone talking about there's a question about what do you do in december and in the year when it gets really slow and people on vacation and how do you handle The response was keeping lights on and without overloading people that are still around and things like that. And one of the answers to that question was, is a person running a Shopify app?
And so their Q4 is typically pretty quiet because in general, e-commerce people don't want to make changes in Q4. You got Black Friday, you got Christmas. So I just want things to... Be the same. Don't break anything. And so since their business is so quiet at that time, he said what they do is they. do a lot of maintenance tasks. So they'll go in and just focus on polish, focus on quality and pick some things that have been bugging them or that they, some tech debts they want to get rid of.
And they'll just go to the nth degree on getting that thing done, but at a high quality solution. So I thought that was pretty cool. We do something like that in December. We have what we call a hack week. So the first couple of weeks of December, we just... Instead of focusing on a tech debt, but we do spend some time on that, but instead of restricting it to that, we basically encourage everyone to work on something fun.
So just like a hack week, you pick a project and you go and work on it. And maybe it's learning a new programming language. Maybe it's doing advent of code in a language that you're not familiar with. And sometimes it works out that we have work on work projects as well. I was going to say, I have a feeling we'll be working on work projects. I don't think we'll be able to convince people not to work on work projects this year because we're excited about what we're working on.
Yeah. I suppose we should talk about that. We've been building up this whole time. Yeah. In any case, our approach to holidays sounds much better than tech just doing bug bashes. Just doing maintenance work at the holidays. not the most exciting thing. So yeah, Hack Week, I always appreciate. Well, you know, what we have reminds me, we have experimented this year with our on-call rotation and using that.
So what we do at Honey Badger is every developer is on rotation, is on call for one week, and then we rotate that every week. And so now there's four of us on call. So that kind of works out pretty well. Once a month, we can expect to be doing that. And part of our on-call rotation is doing customer support.
We don't do much phone support, but we do a fair amount of email support. And so one person, that person who is on call is tasked with handling those emails as they come in, doing the triage and handling it if you can, or passing it off to someone else if you can't.
And one of the experiments that we've done this year with that is to also treat that time as a time where you can set aside some of your project work because you might be distracted by customer support requests coming in and just focus on the low-hanging fruit, the little bugs or whatever.
fixes that you feel like have been annoying you for the past little while. And I think that's worked out pretty well. I've enjoyed that freedom to just set aside my normal work and look at a maintenance task or a little ops thing that's bugging me or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. It's not a bad approach to that maintenance stuff. Since you're already distracted and juggling things. Right. Yeah.
We'll have to. I think there's a lot of things where we'll be able to pull out of here and focus a little bit more on them in future episodes. That's always exciting that we have new things to talk about on the podcast if we're going to keep doing this, which...
I think we want to, and maybe that's a good, we can talk about what's next for Honey Badger, what's next for FounderQuest. We probably should not keep people waiting too long on this new effort we're working on. You want to talk about that? Yeah, I'll take it away. So we're working on a big new enhancement to Honey Badger. We're calling it Insights. And it's a structured logging slash event logging addition to Honey Badger that allows you to track.
Whatever kind of event you want. Now, most developers are going to look at this and say, oh, structured logging. I will send my application logs. And that's cool. And yes, that's cool. You can do that. But it's not just about logging. It's about sending in your events as well.
The first thing we've done is we've put in all the honey badger events. It's going into this new database. We're using ClickHouse, which is freaking awesome. You should definitely take a look at it if you haven't ever played with it. But we're using Clickhouse to make it really easy to query a whole bunch of data. So let's say all of your honey badger errors, all of your uptime checks, all your check-ins.
So you can query across that data and your application logs and whatever events you want to send in. I don't know, maybe you're tracking the number of user signups or how long it takes someone to activate from a free plan to a paid plan like we do.
right right and having all of that data in one place where you can query it and you can build dashboards around it you can build metrics from your logs let's say you want to track the page serve time and that's in your logs you can run some aggregations that show you
how that changes over time. Do all kinds of cool stuff. We're calling that Insights and that is coming pretty soon now. We've been working on it, like we said, for about a year. The backend, in our defense, the backend is kind of insane. And the scale that we're anticipating is orders of magnitude different. Yeah. Yeah. And to be honest.
but a little sneaky. In fact, it didn't really take us a whole year to build and add this into Honey Badger. We actually started off on a different path, and we had to make a pivot, which is why it took us as long as it did. But we're going to be able to use that. original work that we did later. And we'll talk about that more later. I'm not going to talk about that today. We got to give people a reason to tune in for the next episode.
But the short story is while we were on that path doing that thing, we decided, oh, you know what? We need to bring this on the honey badger. We need to have this feature because it would be so freaking cool to be able to query our error data or.
to be able to see these kind of charts on the fly. We give you some charts inside of Honey Badgers today, but we probably don't give you everything that you'd like to see or exactly the way you'd like to see it. So Insights is going to be that. And we're pretty, pretty excited.
Yeah, in hindsight, it's something we had to bring into Honey Badger. Just because if you want a holistic monitoring platform, this is kind of, I think it has potential to become the central hub of everything in Honey Badger. And it will, like you said, it's going to let us do some really cool things. Like even going back to status pages, for example, we can imagine being able to set alerts on like metrics going over thresholds or that sort of thing. And you can add that to your status page.
Whereas, yeah, if you're using Honey Badger for most of your monitoring, it's just going to make everything so much simpler. Then say you're using like CloudWatch and AWS and like a third party status page, like status pages IO. It's just going to, it's going to make, it's going to make, give everything the honey badger treatment, basically make it. dead simple to use and integrated. So I'm pretty excited about that.
Yeah. And as we've gotten into it, at first we thought, oh, we'll add this feature, right? And then we realized, you know what? Oh, this is actually changing the whole product. Like we can really centralize everything around this kind of thing. So yeah, you'll be seeing some big changes pretty soon, both to the product and to the marketing side.
as we try to figure out exactly what this means for our customers. And I'm sure we'll learn along the way some new things that we're not even considering today. But yeah. We love using this like internally. We've been using it for a while and it just every time I use it, I just get a smile on my face. It's awesome. Again, like Kevin was the main one behind a lot of this work and he just knocked it out of the park. We'll have him. We'll be doing a full episode on this or.
Multiple cool episodes. I think there's a lot of cool stuff we can talk about here. Maybe we'll even talk Kevin into joining us for some of that. We'll see. I've been working on him. but i wanted to say one one of the i think unique there's a lot about this that is unique from what like the competitive landscape but one of the things that we landed on kind of as we've been working on like how are we going to position market this feature
is like you you kind of hinted at the fact that you this isn't just an engineering tool necessarily like you you're obviously like it's going to be pretty like heavy engineering use with our customers like you're going to send your logs your request you're going to have like performance dashboards for your request data and that sort of thing but i'm excited about sending like uh like marketing data to it or like events from the application like customer data for example
because then we can basically like use it as a tool to query if we're if we need to look something up for like a customer support request we can go and query like what we're you know what was this person doing or like what's their usage for a specific feature, that sort of thing. So I think there's like all kinds of use cases that aren't limited to just engineering, which is...
I think it's an interesting approach in a monitoring tool like ours. I haven't really seen anyone else speak to that use case. And I think there's... potentially some opportunity there for us to kind of stand out differentiate ourselves a little bit it's like you know honey badger does not just have to be only used by developers for example like you could give maybe this is an opportunity to give
someone else like a technical user on the on the marketing team access to to honey badger so we'll see where that goes but it's just an interesting thing that we've landed on and it'll be fun to explore Yeah. And even if David recently had his keynote, we were talking about the single developer framework.
or making that one developer more productive. And even in the case when you're solo, having all this stuff in one place where everything that you care about in your web app is in one place where you can query and chart. Yeah, I think that's going to be awesome. Maybe that's why I really like it. that jumps out at me as a founder like yeah you are all of those roles yeah exactly and um and as a i think develop like technical or like developer founders will really appreciate that because
I like, I don't know about you, but I've tried to use pretty much every marketing tool on the planet and none of them have ever been able to quite satisfy what I'm looking for. I always appreciate more like developer oriented tools and tooling that I can use to.
cobbled together my own solutions, which whether it's to my detriment or not, we like to build our own marketing tools. But this gives you another option for another way to query events and have dashboards and stuff like that for customer data. Yeah, you can be tracking page views. Like you said, you can be tracking product usage. Oh yeah, analytics. We could type our analytics in here.
Yeah. Clickstream analytics, you name it. Like any event that can happen in your app, you can shove into insights and query it, see it right along with all the rest of your data that you care about for your app. Yeah. Exciting. Yeah. And then for the FounderQuest, what's the future for FounderQuest? We talked about the future for HoneyBadger. FounderQuest, we are definitely going to keep going. This is not a grand finale departure episode. No, this is a reboot episode.
We don't really know exactly yet what our schedule is going to be. It might be that we just can't keep up the weekly thing. So maybe it's going to be, I don't know, biweekly. Maybe it's going to be monthly. We'll figure it out. We'll keep you posted and we'll see what makes sense. But yes, we're going to be around. We're not going to leave you hanging for the other 700 days waiting for the next episode.
Yeah, I think we have a lot of things that we could try with the podcast. And yeah, it's good to get back in the podcast chair. I'm enjoying this. I think one thing that could be cool is an idea I just had. We've had interview style episodes in the past, right? We've brought on some people. You know, it'd be kind of cool is to bring on people who want to interview us, right? Who want to ask us about.
something particular at honey badger or whatever that would be fun so if you're interested in that kind of thing feel free to reach out and let us know yeah of course any we're open to any and all ideas questions things to talk about yeah etc hit us up
I think overall, our plan is just to keep the same chitchat format where we're going to talk about the stuff we've been working on, the stuff that we're coming out soon and experiences, things we've learned. That course is basically more of the same. Yeah. Why change if it's working?
So where can people, I guess we got to do the whole, we always do this at the end of every episode. We're like, I don't know. How do we end this thing? We're going to, we're going to keep the, we're keeping the format. So where can people find us? So we're FounderQuest on Twitter. I'm not going to call it the other name.
it's twitter it's still twitter to us if you're on twitter you can find us at found request i think you can also find ben and i on twitter through there it's at stimpy and at hey josh wood on Twitter. And then for all of the other socials, since there's like 50,000 of them now, you can find on founderquestpodcast.com. I'll make sure that I list all of our other links there.
Yeah, go follow us on social media. And please review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're listening. I think that will help us get new listeners. Hopefully some of our old listeners are still with us. So, yeah. Thank you for tuning in. And thank you for making it 699 days without a FounderQuest episode. At least, Andrew, we know one person's listening. Thank you, Andrew. And thank you all of our other listeners who have stuck with us over the years. It's good to be back.
Thank you so much for pinging us on a regular basis, asking us to resume our episodes. We do appreciate it. We love hanging out and love hearing that it's fun for you too. So thanks. FounderQuest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Ani 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 honeybadger.io. Want more from the founders?
Go to founderquestpodcast.com. That's one word, where you can access our huge back catalog of episodes. FounderQuest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.