All things in this mortal realm are destined to eventually fade into dust. Brace yourself for the number one rated daytime bootstrap Sass Honey Badger themed podcast in the Pacific Northwest. This is Founder Quest. I just moved back into my office after being away for six months because COVID and I see that.
In the meantime, though, like while I had all my stuff at home, so I had my podcast set up, I had my monitor, my chair, you know, everything. And while I was at home, I bought these new roller wheels for my chair, you know, the ones that look like I have roller blade wheels. The ball bearing ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And at home I have normal carpet. You know, it's not shag. It's just standard kind of carpet. But here I have, you know, those plastic things you put down so you can roll easier.
Yeah. And so at home, I didn't really notice much difference on those wheels on my carpet. But here, it's really slippery. So now I'm like sliding back and forth and all around. It's kind of fun. If you want something to entertain yourself, get some of those roller blade wheels for your chair and then make sure you're on a smooth surface. It's hilarious. Yeah, that's on my list. I totally want to do that.
It would just be, I mean, like I have wheels on my chair now, but it would just be a smoother ride. You know, I feel like I could do some, uh, have some fun. What are y'all doing in your, are you riding in your chairs? Like what, what are you doing in your chairs? You don't like something while you're running all those tests. Yeah. You can do spins and... I must have much more space than I do. Bounce off the walls. Next month, I'm going to install a half pipe for you. Right.
well now i'm like moving my chair around and i'm wondering like is it moving easy enough like do i need like a smoother action on that you need a performance chair That's right. All right. Well, before we get started, I should make a little announcement. This will be our last episode for a little while. I know I just... Are you trying to put people on edge?
Yeah. For a little while. Cause yeah, a bunch of us have leave coming up and it's just going to be impossible to make it all work. Yeah. And we don't record podcasts while we're on vacation because that's just. And breaks are, breaks are nice, right? Breaks are important. Yeah. It's good to take a break. Yeah. Oh, it'll let our listeners like, like not be tired of us anymore. Yeah. They'll forget all the things we repeat all the time.
Yeah. When we come back, you'll have forgotten everything we say and we'll just start from the beginning. I think our plan is to come back with some fresh topics and fresh attitudes. Oh, really? Okay, well. We'll see. We'll see how the vacation goes. That's one of the benefits of going on vacation, right? You get that fresh attitude. Well, I think we'll see. This will be after November 4th or whatever. It's 4th, right? Yeah, so we'll see how our attitudes are.
You know, that's not the reason for this little break, but it is going to be a benefit that we just don't have to like be on the record. Listen to our own cynicism in like 10 years. Yeah, it's like live covering this. This terrible last month. Can I just chip in on that for a second? Mike, we've tried being overtly political and stuff, but that made me think again about the stay in your lane.
comment that some people like to throw at other people like, oh, you're a tech guy. You should stay in your lane. We talked about this before, but that's just hogwash. Like we're all people, right? And we all have opinions and we should all be able to share them. and ways that are helpful and ways that are critical and ways that are always kind. I don't buy this whole stay in your lane. You should only talk about X thing. I think we all have opinions about stuff and feel free to share them.
For that to be true, it's like the sum of your humanity would be tech guy, which would be pretty sad. Right? You know, it's like all of us are more than like tech person. Anyway. Agreed. Sorry, Soapbox. Well, I think what we're saying is vote. Please vote. Please vote. There you go. Yeah. I mean, we got to get it in. We're all just terrified. We're just doing our part.
We're going to be spending the next, I don't know, six weeks, like just in our closets. Okay. Well, we just did our Q, what is this? Q4? Q4 Conclave? Yeah. That's where we... Yeah, normally, in normal times, we get together in an undisclosed location in a meeting room called the bunker. I'm being serious. And we, you know, have a big, long all-day meeting in which we sort of hash out what's going to happen with Honey Badger.
for the next quarter and so since pandemic started we've been doing this on zoom and sort of spreading out over days because like an all-day zoom meeting would just be like hell on earth and yeah so here we are and we are So that one went pretty smooth. There were no big changes. We got it done pretty quickly. We got it done two days under schedule, which made me really happy. My wife asked me about that. She's like, so you do another day of Conclave? I'm like, no, we're done. She's like, what?
You're already done. I'm like, well, yeah, this was shorter than they have been in the past. And I was thinking about why is that? I was like, well. Our Q4, our plan basically is to try and wrap up stuff, like nail down some of the things we've been working on. There wasn't really any big new initiative or big decisions we had to make. It's like, oh, we'll just do that in Q1, right?
Right now, it's just kind of like coasting through the end of the year, I think. Well, let's be honest, like October is basically over. Like it's basically already November. So we're already like halfway through the quarter.
Is that pandemic time? I think so. Yeah. But I mean, on it, like, honestly, we are like, we're taking a lot of us are taking time off in October and like, you know, we're, we're also probably going to take a lot of time off in December. Like we always do. So. like realistically there's we're not making major plans i don't think for any like huge initiatives true
And you know what? It was really nice to finish something for the year. Let me just, can I just say that? Like, it was nice to say like, that's the last, you know, this is the last before the new year. That was just a... I think that we're going to start to get more of those building up and looking forward to it. What do you mean exactly? You mean having this cycle where...
Like you start new things, then you work on it and then you kind of wrap it up. No, I mean like it's, it's nice to have something of 2020 wrapped up. Like it's, it's nice that something in the year is finally over.
which is our, you know, like we're starting to, uh, we're, it's like, you know, we're heading towards the finish line. Yeah. And we brought a little bit of order into the chaos of the world. Yeah. I need to start on my, uh, my new year's resolutions i really like the idea of like a um like a wrapping up loose ends quarter because like it always seems like there's some task on the um the action items thing that we make where
It's important, but it's not really crucial. It would be very good to do, but the world isn't going to explode if you don't do it. So for me, that's been, for the past year, that's been... I want to go in and look at our numbers around our conversion rates and see if I can find any patterns there and just do some analysis. And that's the sort of thing where nobody's on my case if I don't do that next week.
But I've been saying I was going to do this literally all year. And so it gets kind of embarrassing to just like roll over the same action item like every quarter. So it's going to be nice to have some time that's just set aside to kind of work on that. That's a good fall. task you know it is yeah it's cozy get some tea and yeah get some tea get a nice fire going fire spreadsheets
Crack open the spreadsheets like you're joking, but this is no, I know this is this is I love it. Yeah, yeah. So that's good. And my wrap up task we talked about on our last episode about doing the accounts, redoing how we have the. the billing relationship to our users. And that's been something, you know, you talked about having yours on the list for quarters. Mine's been on the list for years. I know. And that's not cozy, Ben. That's like Thunderdome.
Yeah, it's going to be a knockdown fight at the end to get that launch. But yeah, that will happen. It is going to happen in October or else I will die trying.
How long was that pull request? You just did like 10,000 lines or something? Ben's pull request was... insane it's about six thousand i think yeah it broke my browser i had to like switch to the native app to review it yeah like github can't display that much code in the browser code climate added comments like i gave up and i can't even review this thing it's too long
I almost did that, but I was like, I can't do that to Ben. I would have understood. I suffered through. Yeah. Like start this over, do it in smaller chunks. I think this is the third restart attempt, actually. I think I have two. One that just didn't get anywhere. We had Kevin start on it. So it's going to happen.
i think once it does i was talking to star right before i started recording i think once it happens that's when i'll take my vacation there you go as a kind of reward for all that all that blood sweat and tears Let's wait a couple weeks till after you deploy it before you take your vacation. Yeah. There won't be any bugs, right? Yeah. So Josh, what's your wrap up task for the year? Oh, I was, yeah, JavaScript. And I can't say that this is like.
The sad part for me is it's probably never going to be off my list. I'm just wrapping up some things, though, that I've been working on this year. Yeah, related to our... packages and stuff and i'm not going to go into it in depth because i feel like i've already done that and i would just end up ranting again so we're crying yeah but um yeah we'll hopefully make some progress on that
i'm actually i have made some uh this this stuff i've been working on this week with some again some improvements to our source map system I think I've actually made some progress that should be a big breakthrough, actually, specifically for people who are using source maps with their JavaScript. I found some ways that we weren't. We weren't really fingerprinting in the optimal way in some cases. So I'm pretty optimistic about that right now, at least for this Friday.
Yeah. Talk to me next week. I don't, I have discovered, but yeah, I'm feeling good. Well, you know, Josh, like yesterday's history and tomorrow's a mystery, but today this moment is all you have. It's a gift. And that's why they call it the present. That's beautiful. I'm going to tattoo that on my forearm. Yeah, that's a quote from Kung Fu Panda. It's more just a paraphrase from Kung Fu Panda. I love that movie. That would just be the greatest...
Tattoo response when someone like, you know, in the store asks you, oh, what's your tattoo? What's the inspiration for your tattoo? It's something they said in Kung Fu Panda. You know, based on the tattoo artists I've known, that would not faze them. No, yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah, in Portland, I'm sure it would be pretty tame. Well, speaking of JavaScript stuff.
We had a new message in Basecamp this morning that just got me so excited for next year. I don't think it's going to happen this quarter, but it's JavaScript related, loosely, and it's going to be awesome. So stay tuned. What?
I've got to look at Basecamp. Are you just teasing the audience now? Yes. Yes, I am. Okay. I'm going to go look at it now. I need to respond to Basecamp. It's going to be awesome. Can't wait. And I'm so excited about... that message showing up right now because the goal was to have something done by the end of this year yeah and we just kind of like
left it. Just kind of like, hey, hands off, we're going to delegate and we're just going to see how it goes. And sure enough, it's showing up before the end of the year. Oh, I know what you're talking about now. It's amazing. Is this going to be our thing? This is the reason you come back, right? after our break this is this is why you can't like hit unsubscribe at the end of this so they have to come back for this yeah yeah it's gonna be game changing game changing
If you write games in a certain platform, that's going to be awesome. Yeah. I guess one of the other reasons probably that are, uh, Like our conclave was not super long this year is we also have like our other major effort is launching hook relay still. So that's going to happen. Right. You know, not like a huge, it's not going to be like block party launch, but I think it's. going to be out there.
Yeah, that's going to happen. Are the rumors correct? Is it going to be ready in time for Christmas? It's going to be ready in time for Christmas. Yeah, all right. No, you know what the real race, though? The real race is to see whether the hook relay is going to launch or my bathroom is going to be done remodeling before.
Okay. I thought you were going to say we're going to have it ready by Black Friday and I was just going to kiss you. Yeah. Black Friday. Oh, well, you know, hey, that's a good goal. Yeah. We had a product update meeting this week and I got to trot out one of my favorite lines because we've had a few dates kind of just like, hey, it'd be nice if we launched a great day by this date. We've had a few of those come and go.
And so I set another date and I said, yeah, I'm planting my flag in the quicksand. Again. Yeah, again. Yeah, we don't believe in strict hard deadlines here at Honey Badger. We just smile at them as they go by. My time is a construct. The present is a gift. Yes. You know, what I also love from that Kung Fu Panda scene where he talks about that, where Oogway is giving him that enlightenment. Oh, yeah. I also love the bit about the peach. And he's like...
The peach seed is going to become a peach tree. There's nothing you can do about that. Oh, yeah. And then the other guy, Shifu, he's like, well, I can choose where I plant the peach. So are you saying that hook relay is our peach tree? Y'all know way too much about Kung Fu Panda, by the way.
it is one of the top. It is a great movie. I have to admit it's a really good movie. So I don't know. My kid went through a phase. My kid went through a Kung Fu Panda phase where, so I've seen it five times in the recent past. Yeah. I know how that goes. It's right up there with Emperor's New Groove. I haven't watched that one yet. Oh. Oh. You have to watch that one. Yeah? Oh, yes. You must. Like, that is the most quoted movie in the Curtis household.
Really? It is amazing. Groovy. What was our topic that we wanted to talk about? Permanence. Permanence. Oh, this is the perfect time to talk about permanence. Permanence, yes. And the future, the uncertainty of the future. Man, we are really just hitting all the, doing all the hits. We're talking at the Conclave though about, I think a tweet that Justin Jackson wrote about how this idea of if you can make a deal with the devil and maintain your same sort of growth rate.
indefinitely over time like would you do it you know giving up obviously like you know the possibility of doing better and you know yeah i think he was saying he would make that that deal and so we were talking about it and we were talking about how this sort of ultimately comes down to like how stable do you feel in your business i guess like how sort of reasonably confident are you
Because that was something that we all felt very heavily earlier on. It's like, we've got this thing, it's taking off, it's doing well, and that's great. But I remember a time in the very recent past when it wasn't doing that. So this is probably all just going to come crashing to the ground and we'll be back to square one. I mean, that's the anxiety. It's not based on any sort of rational thing necessarily. I don't think it really goes away completely.
i think we've gotten more used to it like it's something i mean some that's like a recurring feeling that i've had but i think as the more times that i have that fear and then you know months go by and then things are still you know, trending along. I think that just, that kind of, uh, mutes it a little bit. Yeah. We've been fortunate in that like almost every month we've had positive revenue growth. Like we've had a few.
negative months and a couple of just like flat months but that to me is is reassuring right because i felt for the longest time like woke up every day like oh this could all end tomorrow and i don't remember exactly when that Kind of went away. May have been somewhere around 50,000 in MRR. I don't know. It took a while. It took a while. But now it's like, yeah, I think it's going to last. And the thing that surprises me...
was with the COVID stuff. And like when we saw our own revenue take a hit at the beginning of the pandemic and people were, you know, some of our customers' businesses just went away, right? And so like, well, we're going to cancel. And so we saw... a hit there. But even then, I wasn't all panicky, like, oh, it's going to end tomorrow. Still like, oh, man, we've made it this far. We're probably going to keep on going. But I remember the early days, that was...
really, really weighing on my mind. And I think that's the same thing that Justin was saying in a recent podcast episode that he did talking about this topic was that fear was just ever present and just gnawing. You know, I guess maybe the good news is if you give it a couple of years, it'll go away. If you want to go listen to that episode later, it's titled The Fear of the Build Your SaaS podcast.
Yeah, I'm trying to think of an inflection point there when that change. And it's like, I wonder if the switch to metered billing... and are sort of going through that together and like almost killing each other over it. And I wonder if that like...
sort of cemented our, I don't know, security a little bit because it's like, it was a super scary thing that we got. Do you mind if I explain this a little bit? So when we started out Honey Badger, we didn't have metered billing. We had all you can eat errors.
which at the beginning, I was like, okay, our people are freelancers, our customers are developers. And when you go to sign up for a plan, Airbrake before us, they had these plans where it's like, well, you sign up based on your air per minute rate. And, you know, I want, you know, 100 errors per minute. So I want the large plan or whatever. And my thinking was that, like, who the hell knows how many errors per minute they're going to have, right?
Ideally, you're going to have like none, but then you're going to have big spikes sometimes. And it's just like, yeah, that just seems so unintuitive to me. So like personally, I was... very in favor of the all you can eat plan so we did that for many years but eventually people started like eating too much We left the buffet unwatched and people were just sneaking in. The NFL football team walked in and started eating.
Yeah, exactly. We thought most of our customers were going to be little leaguers, but then we had some major league people show up. And suddenly, we were losing money. We were losing money on the amount. on how much it cost us to send email to people. We were sending so much email to these people that we were paying more than they were giving us every month.
Ben led the charge to move us to metered billing. And it's kind of an uncertain time. And we've been sort of on a long plateau in terms of growth. And so we're all like, okay, well, you know, we'll try it. Who knows if it'll work, but yeah, let's give it a shot. So like Ben flipped the switch and then immediately like our revenue just plunged down because everybody, because what happened is that we didn't force people onto new plans. And so the only people who moved
Onto the new meter plans were the people who were going to save money by doing that. Right. It was like a big realignment. Yeah, it was a big realignment. And I know I was just freaked the hell out about this. Ben was a bit calmer and we argued, but we hugged it out and made friends. I think Ben was sweating over there too. I was freaking out too, but in a different way.
Because I was so convinced that that was the right thing to do. The problem was that I had just finished this Herculean task of switching all that stuff. And I remember, Star, you were like... ah ah it's time to roll it back let's let's no let's stop this and i'm like oh no no no we've come too far we can't turn around now this is like this is like accounts like accounts yeah we'll see if accounts work out exactly let's roll those back
Yeah. So yeah, that was, that was some tense time for sure. But, but I forget, did we send an email? that like announced the new plans or did people just find it on their own because i mean i feel like this would have been even more drastic like plunge if we had because i remember talking about that we were i think we were like yeah let's not broadcast this one initially to like everyone we know just because yeah and yeah all the all the little guys
were switching downgrading like crazy and all the people that were using up you know that we were spending more than they were spending on us they of course did not switch and so we decided to go so we we realized that couldn't like persist forever, that would be bad. And so we came up with a plan to ask those customers who were costing us too much to upgrade to our new plans and did that over a period of
18 months or so. We just did a few at a time because we wanted to make sure that it was working for everyone. And it's a sensitive issue. If you're going to email a customer and say, by the way, we changed our pricing and you know what you need to switch and this is why and oh p.s it's going to be a heck of a lot more money because of our new pricing like a lot more in some cases yeah and uh yeah a lot more in some cases yeah
And those conversations, you know, they have to be handled very delicately because you don't, you know, just imagine how you feel on the receiving end of that. Oh, by the way. And props. I don't have to imagine like I've had Comcast. Exactly. Exactly. The response was really good. People really understood. I wrote up this huge email explaining how we got into where we were and why we're making this change. That was an awesome email. Thank you. Everyone was very nice.
I don't know, maybe one, maybe two people who were kind of upset. But we just explained it and like, well, okay, they get it, right? They don't like it, but they get it. I was really happy with how that went after it was all resolved. Going through it was difficult. We had a good track record of, like you said, we've never forced anyone. This was the first time we've ever asked anyone to switch to a new plan.
for any reason like we always let people keep their current plan forever if we change pricing and then it's just if you want to change or it's just new people coming into the business or you know on the new plans but Yeah. I think in this case, to go back to the Comcast comparison, if the CEO of Comcast personally emailed you or called you and it explains all the reasons why they're losing money...
you know, on your account or something. Um, you know, that's, that's a lot different than getting some sort of generic like broadcast email or like everyone has to, you know, we're, we're changing our pricing, what this means for you.
Which is always that it means you're going to pay more money. Pay more. Yeah. Just to take that a step further, this wasn't actually something that we just... It wasn't something we broadcasted. No. We basically like I went in and pulled numbers down for like all of our accounts and found the ones that were consuming substantially like more resources than they probably should have been on their existing accounts.
And they were basically getting a ton of service for pennies. And those were the people that we asked to upgrade. That's the other thing I was going to say, because those people were also much more likely to see. the inconsistency there and like appreciate it you know appreciate our position and we also like they didn't actually um since it's metered billing like they didn't actually have to upgrade they could have just like sent us fewer errors too right
Yeah, that's the alternative. When some did, I think did about like a combination, like they upgraded to a reasonable plan, but then they also cut back some of their unreasonable traffic that they were using. So you might say that. By politely asking them to upgrade, we actually made their apps more usable and more sustainable. I could say that.
We should force people to do stuff more often. I remember in the email, I gave four options for things that they could do. And the fourth option was fix your app. And I put a little smiley face on there, right? Because, yeah, all you got to do is not send us errors. It's like a little wink. Exactly. And some people did that. We had actually a couple. We were like, oh, you know, I had no idea because they never paid attention. They're like, ah.
It throws errors, but I don't care. And they're like, oh, I've been sending you millions of errors and we don't really need to, so we'll just stop that. I'm like, oh, cool, perfect. Like those $10, the $10 a month Heroku accounts that would send us like... You know, they would like be like on our, the top of our leaderboard for the month. Right. Yeah. Like they're probably paying Heroku more than $10 in CPU costs to like those errors. Seriously.
That did get us past that plateau. And that, yeah, to Zara's point, after a lot of that transition happened, it did make me feel a lot better about the viability of the business and seeing that continued revenue growth. Yeah. I mean, it also helped that it actually worked. and revenue growth like went up substantially it worked really really well yeah i mean actually i think like i don't think we can underestimate how much that actually like how big of a deal that was because like
I think the more we move into the future now, the more we appreciate the revenue growth from the upgrade cycle. And we did not have that with the feature-based plans where basically like... The incentives were interesting prior to this because one of the changes I think we made when we rolled out meter billing was before we had, one of the things we tiered on were number of projects, right? And I think like, so you had a plan that you like...
limit you to 10 projects or something. So if you're an agency, you could have 10 clients, essentially. That was one of the reasons a bunch of the people who were technically paying us more on the old plans switched to the new plans just because... they could remove that limit that upgrade cycle like people were not really hitting that limit as frequently as you hit like if you actually grow to the point of like having more much more significantly more traffic it just seems like that's a better
That's a better cycle. Yeah, that was one lesson sort of I personally really learned is that like if you're trying to drive upgrades in your business, the thing that causes the people to want to upgrade happens has to happen to them.
Like before we were on this thing where we were like, okay, we'll offer these different features and people will see that they need this feature and they'll upgrade or like, they'll see that they want to do another project and they'll like, you know, buy a new plan. And you know that I'm not saying that didn't work at all.
But that happens much less often than if suddenly they find themselves having used more resources than they intended to and, oh, they need to upgrade or cut down on their resource usage. that it also works in front of them a lot quicker it works better for everyone i think too because like i guess the the agency example is one is one example where you might like the project thing might actually work because you get more clients any more projects but
We have like an agency as one type of customer, then a lot of our customers are just like startups, which are only going to have like, they're not going to have probably the same like explosion. I mean, I guess unless they're building with microservices or something, the metered billing thing works.
it covers everyone a lot better because like if you're a startup and say you're just starting out your traffic is going to be low naturally but your traffic is going to increase over time as you as your business grows basically so i think it it's a little bit more equal across the different types of customers that we have. The other side effect that was nice was that we got to tie the revenue to our costs. We know that we can continue to scale out.
and pay for that because the reason why we would scale out is having more traffic and having more traffic means we would have more revenue. In our situation, having that straight metered billing makes a whole lot of sense on all those levels. And to Starr's point, yeah, if...
If you have this upgrade thing, you have to really keep in mind how your customers are using your product. Like Josh was saying with an agency, if your product is targeted at agencies, maybe it's number of clients, right? Or if for some reason...
like you have a lot of customer support well then maybe we really need to bill based on number of users because your users are going to be you know more users means more support which means more money out the door on support people so you have to find a way to you know recapture that cost yeah and you're gonna hate me for saying this but like seats right it's like you hire somebody well okay we need to buy another seat yeah i always wish we could make that work but i don't know
I just don't think that's our style. I remember when we decided on the original pricing, one of the reasons was we just wanted to differentiate ourselves. Star really hated the idea of limiting people. And that was something I also felt like the worst thing you could do when you're having a really bad day with a bunch of errors coming in is to limit all that error traffic because that's when you want it, right?
But we also felt like it was a way to stand apart from our competitors. Like, they're all doing this, but we're going to do that. And that didn't work out so well. We learned that it actually makes sense to do it like everybody else does it in this case.
So getting back to the topic of permanence. So Star, you're thinking that this whole episode was one of the things that kind of taught us that the world... doesn't end easily maybe or something like that like you can make a you can make a you know you can have a challenge that seems insurmountable. For us, I think this was one of our first plateaus in our SaaS business, which was a major deal. Thinking back to that, we could not see over the top of that.
I want to say this was kind of almost like a last ditch effort. Like we got to change something major to like break through this, which was what like, I'm assuming like you just didn't, you just didn't sign up to volunteer just like to, to change something this big, just. you know, for the hell of it. So there was like this thing that drove you to do this. But like at the time, I remember it being a major deal, like just like, how are we going to...
break through this and reach the level of growth that we wanted to, that we had envisioned for the business. That goes back to what I was saying earlier, where as your business grows and you do it long enough, you... have more of these points where you um like have a seemingly major challenge and then you overcome it or
you know, you break, you just keep going and it doesn't, it's not like the end of the world basically. And I think like over time for me, that's helped kind of reduce that fear of like something, you know, ending. tomorrow basically i mean it's always there like there's always like some you know there's always risk but i feel it a lot less these days i guess another way that i've felt this increased permanence feeling is actually related to competitors because i remember for a long time i
had one of these fears in the back of my head was that some big money competitor would come into the space and take all our customers away. And then Google released Stackdriver. I think they acquired this company. and then released Stackdriver. And it had error tracking as part of this huge suite of stuff, like monitoring and all those kind of things. And I was like, oh my God. That's kind of an oh shit moment. Yeah, exactly. I was like, here it is. I can remember. Boom, there goes the business.
And it had zero impact on the business. Zero. The other day we had someone sign up and they filled out our survey form and they mentioned something about... I really don't want to use... I think it was Stack Drive. I think it was Google. I really don't want to use Google Cloud Platform's off-the-shelf thing. It was either that or Amazon's. I can't remember.
I thought that was funny. When that happened and then that fear did not materialize, I was like, whew, okay, well, all right, I guess. And in thinking more about it, even if Amazon released an exact copy of our product tomorrow.
we'd still have a ton of customers stick around, even if some of them thought it was interesting because not everyone loves Amazon, right? And not everyone loves whatever Amazon does. And to be honest, a lot of people love... the way that honey badger does things right that's why our churn is so low because they just like the product and they stick around and yeah so even even if there was a big ecosphere kind of change like that still it wouldn't at this point sink the business which
It makes me feel better. Do you think that we're like the little mammals scurrying around that survive when the asteroid hits? I hadn't thought of that, but that's pretty good.
Yeah, like a little honey badger, a little proto badger. Yeah, because these big changes in the industry, and I'm not saying we're not affected by them, obviously, but... I can see them being a lot more impactful if you are a startup that has reduced a bunch of funding and is directly trying to compete in the same market that Amazon or Google find significant enough to invest in.
But in our little corner of it, it's a pretty small little cozy place, and it's not really big enough for Amazon to really worry about, I don't think. and i mean there's a reason i think a lot of our competitors who are pc funded have sort of pivoted away from a sort of pure error monitoring model and are going into like application performance metrics and okay now they're going to take on new relic or now they're gonna you know i like i think
There's probably a lot more money in those things, a lot more interesting to those businessy types. Yeah, it's one of the benefits of staying small. If there aren't a lot of mouths to feed, you don't have to have this unicorn success to come out winning. What does the payoff need to be? I just realized we haven't even said it. the biggest like um longevity booster is like positive cash flow like we've had positive cash flow for pretty much our whole existence so right like just yeah
It'd be a lot, you know, if you don't have a runway, like you're never going to reach the end of it. Sure. So feeling pretty good. So I guess the message is if you're in that boat that we were in and that Justin also described, you've got that gnawing fear that's making you crazy. Well, hey, you know, if you make it through that, it gets better.
If you don't make it through it, your business goes away and you have to do something else. I mean, worst case scenario, you find a new business to start or you find a job. Yeah, you're not dead. Probably not dead. Probably not. Well, should we wrap it up on that cheerful note? I like it. Well, we here at Founder Quest are glad that you're not dead. Again, we will be taking a little break for the next, I don't know, six weeks.
eight weeks? It just depends. We'll be back. We'll be back. Don't worry. Harass us on Twitter. You can always harass us on Twitter. I was going to say just like King Arthur, we come back when England most needs us. And yeah, if you like the show, review us on Apple Podcasts. If you want to write for us on the blog, well, actually, I'm going to be out. So you can go check out our Write for Us page.
at honeybadger.io forward slash blog, but it's got a big notice on there saying, hey, I'm going to be gone for a while, so don't worry if I don't get back to you. And if you have any podcast episode ideas, topics you'd like to hear about. feel free to hit us up on Twitter. Oh yeah. What are we at founder quest? Maybe. I think we are. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. It's one of the benefits of having like a marketing person is that you just like, don't have to keep all that in your head.
Just, yeah, just search that request. Just look for us. Yeah, it's okay. It's pretty obvious. All right. We'll see y'all later. Have a good one. 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.