hello friends , welcome to the special edition of friendly show . Today we are all in the belgians . We are in sofia , bulgaria , on the belgium ruby conference , and today I have two speakers . Listen , come on .
I got adrian , who just gave a talk , and I put irina from evil martians evil martians hello , hey , hey guys , yeah , excited to be with you , as as always .
So welcome , so okay , so we're a balkan ruby , we uh , which is the ? The slogan is back in , back in business , because the balkan ruby conference is back in business and the whole theme is about business . So we have a lot of different , a lot of people that are having businesses with ruby and with the development , telling , sharing their stories .
Right , uh , you shared , you opened a conference and shared about how you can do it with consulting and you can . You know , we spun off any cable and you're doing business there with , like an open core business . I spoke about my business with Avvo .
What do you think about the other talks as well , like how , what do you think about , like , the different approaches that all of us kind of have ?
Yeah , I really like the idea of conferences specializing on something not just Ruby , right . We now have , for example , balcon will be specializing on um the business side of things . We also also had rail sas well , right , which was also sort of more about business and like sas , products built with rails .
But this , this one is , but we don't have that this year , first of all , and then , like , I like , I like the idea that we can be here talk about consulting or products . So many people do this .
Yeah , yourself is uh , consulting right , and , and eddie , so yourself , you are an educator and consultant , right uh , yes , so uh , I've got to the super real youtube channel .
I've previously created a few courses on udemy and on gumroad , and I do consulting for clients yeah , so , and and this somebody recently told me that there's something entrepreneurial about rubyists , that rubyists in general are . Yeah , this is cool .
I like sharing , I like sharing and yeah well , maybe because it's easier to create a startup and we'll be in the rails that in some java stuff yeah , that's true , that's true .
Yeah , and I quite like um , I quite like the uh . The talk about like monetizing open source , which was like super , like distilled , like every type of open source , you know kind of uh monetization that you can think of .
Is we started from uh , you know tips like uh , about like tips and how you can , you know , sponsor a project all the way to like enterprise , kind of like companies that do it and um , yeah , it was .
That was quite cool that that , yeah , I agree that was a great talk and what was ?
I think the takeaway from Bozidar's standpoint , the way I understood him for himself is like he was trying to say , look , I'm not really commercializing this project but kind of I will , you know , create my own limits right to the level of my involvement , and to try to gonna stay sane makes sense because Rubik's is so popular .
The fact that that it cannot , it cannot gonna survive in donations at all , like donations are not cutting it at all for Robocop , something as popular as Robocop that's , that's crazy . But I mean , we've , we've known that before .
But it's refreshing to kind of hear yeah , hear those stories again and another thing , like from your talk about the , the fact that you should be like a node for , like an engine for like helping your customers meet other customers and , you know , introducing people . I think this is what's happening here right now .
Like you know , people are asking me like oh , how hard it was , like what did you do then , what did you do now ?
Because I did this and I did that , and I think this is such a nice cross-pollination of like ideas and like experience , right that , yeah , you don't get like any yeah , actually I wrote down my uh three like summary bullet points from your talk so they will uh create opportunities to customers and people around you .
Uh , number one priority be useful . Number two priority make a deal and make your customers be irrational towards you yeah , yeah , that's they .
Yeah , that pretty much summarizes it .
But yeah , the idea was that you kind of , uh , you want to have this really good foundation of your business by being able to build relationships around you , like with your clients and for beyond , because so many people they they finish the deal or they can assign the contract to finish the contract and then there's no continuation because they're not building a
relationship with the customers . And also , like , if you think about relationship with the customers and also if you think about , um , adrian , you remember how we first met .
Do you remember our first call ? Yes , I was in Vilnius quite long . When was that ? Uh , it was last year , I think .
No , it's not the last year , adrian . Our first , our very first zoom call . You don't remember . I remember it . Okay , you forgot , you were pitching Alva to me , to evil Martians not , not , I was that you look about . I wasn't very new , sudden meetup , yeah yeah , it was 2001 , I didn't know , okay , I think years ago .
Seriously , I remember I remember thinking you know what I thought back then ? I thought , first of all , of course , I didn't know that much about you and your business , um , and but second of all , I thought you are not charging enough , that I thought you say that your product is gonna save days , maybe weeks of work , maybe months .
Right , um , because if you dedicate , you know , dedicate work on building the same functionality , yeah , it's gonna take repetitive yeah , a lot , um , but then you're only charging . We were charging something like a few hundreds or something .
Yeah , yeah , it was like doesn't , doesn't kind of make sense , yeah , yeah .
Yeah , I got that feedback and you can learn the lesson from charging a good price . From Andrew Culver yes , like a bullet train . Five years ago it was already charging , I assume , a thousand and a half . Yeah , so like I'm giving you value , yeah , and the price shows that I , that you , will get value .
Yeah , yes , it's true , right that this .
They claim this sort of true , they claim this and I got this feedback before that it has to pass to be some correlation between like the value and the price it does . Like people don't believe , like it's too much . It like what you say me that much I'm in charge of this little .
What's the catch here is that , yeah , and we learned that lesson and we you know , yeah , yeah , but also what budget are said about commercialization , that people gets a lot of sort of heat outlash yeah for releasing commercial versions . Is it your experience ?
yes , like I , I uh , there's this , whatever . There's this community where it's very big , with with rails I won't name it and when I started out I didn't know anyone . So my thought was I'm gonna go to the big community and I said they're like hey , I have this thing which is like you know , I don't know it's .
It has a free version , it has paid version , and immediately like , oh my god , this is promotion , get out of here . Put it in like they have a special promotion channel , like sounds like yeah , and somebody like really like told me things like oh , but how do others do it for free and why do you charge ? You're stealing from us and whatever .
And like andrew culver yeah , top one , because they mentioned him and he popped up and said like hey , it's okay if you charge , like we couldn't make it for free if we didn't charge all this time .
So , yeah , it's like I think we need a little bit of education around this thing that hey , it's okay to to charge something for somebody I agree I think there's almost like a stigma in some communities , including maybe rails community I hope it's actually sidekick is doing a lot to for for the community community in normalizing the idea that the product is a
commercial product but it kind of solves so many problems for you . I think the way I think about this is like open source has two sides .
One side is freedom , freedom of expression , freedom of doing what you want , right and sort of so this free , when you're doing something like open source without expectations , for free , for fun , out of passion , this is great . But also people around you shouldn't should kind of not expect you to fix older problems , to kind of stop being free .
You know , yeah , you do something like bajidar says , says I will fix the issue if it concerns me , if I , if I'm if I want the same , the same thing , yeah , yeah , if I want .
If I need to right , yeah , but then I'm not .
There's no obligation , yeah , there's no obligation to to do work for other people but then there is a sort of commercial dual licensing , commercial open source and it's different . It's where we build things for other people , right ?
we kind of follow their lead but I think you should be also uh right with the messaging .
You shouldn't be like , uh , read this like pulling the plug that's , that's the , that's actually , that's the worst , right , when you sort of I don't know , I don't want to say bad things , but let's say , change your mind in in the middle of yeah , so , we all like .
Redis is super hot right now when they think about them changing everything hashing hashing yeah , but it kind of like you kind of see , like how others you know , like amazon and other services , they kind of like stealing it or something you know they , they try to , um , you know , create services based on that .
And so basically now it means that I were whatever red is that I cannot make money out of my project . So , uh , you know there , there should be some protection there .
I mean , what if , tomorrow , uh , amazon , uh , opens a new service , amazon avo , yes , and it lets people build the apps based on our exactly , exactly , but that's our house .
Uh , extended features in our pro exactly , yeah as a like any cable , any cables . Also , we with any people , we're trying to keep everything that is kind of for a single node usage in an open source version .
Yeah , and then if when you have a cluster , this means you are a bigger organization and this is a pro version , this kind of you're definitely building for something bigger , for a team or for a customer or somebody with that need that has , you know , money , so it's okay to monetize .
So you , you've reached that threshold and it's it's kind of huge , as it actually has to be pretty huge for you to need a cluster of any cables yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah .
So it makes sense .
Yeah for a bunch of stuff that's cool yeah but something I was also thinking is I actually wrote a tweet about it that that you know that open source doesn't need your donations yeah yeah , what it meant is they're never enough . I mean , of course , it's a good thing to have donations .
The problem is when people hope that the nations will be , around right for them . It never happens and it's um , so what ? I think what , what ? And marco commented , shanghai commented , like there was some discussion and um , they said , and they said and what I proposed is that I want companies to to , I want to know who's using the open source .
I want the companies to be open and return to kind of say , yeah , by default , we will disclose that we're using the products and some of the funds are just going to go there . They're going to help the project yeah , and , and then they will reach out to the maintainers more often .
This is what it would be , but like should they disclose that I'm using the gem device ? Should they disclose that I'm using the other one ? Should I like have an open gem file and like list of services that my app is using ?
Yeah , that'd be actually cool . I mean , of course I understand , you know , even in cable pro we have one company that I mean we have many companies that are not disclosing , that are using us , but one company specifically they said for security reasons they cannot disclose their stack .
Of course I understand that for sure , but like by default most companies , they're not disclosing it because for this right , yeah , yeah and and you still , you're still disclosing your stack in job openings . Of course you say I'm looking for rails engineers , it's , it's kind of obvious that you've got experience in this and this , but you don't want to .
Yeah right also there could be some tooling to anonymize somewhere . Like you know , you don't have to disclose that publicly , but you could say would you like , like github , like , would you like to let any cable know that you are using them ? Because , okay , yes , of course , and that would be like a secret between you . You know , I guess , in usage also .
Yeah , maybe that , but but I'd want this to be by default , you know , and actually I've seen that checkbox in a few services that like when you sign up for the paid version , you agree to have your company like listed in the list of users .
Oh , it's true , yeah , I saw that that's nice .
You can add it to your terms of service yeah , I'm actually thinking about this so you can make it like opt out , yeah yeah but but you know what , when you have so the paid users , for some reason they give you much .
They are accustomed to the idea of uh telemetry , for example . Uh , you know , like analytics or something like sending you some usage data they're accustomed to and kind of getting your emails . They're accustomed to it . It's a little bit different .
Yeah , it's , and then , open source in open source , your profits it's uh , it should be open free and you know you should be using . Using it however , I want it and that's it . Never give credit never , yeah , exactly .
Which is this is , I think , right , it just , it can , I think , maybe even rebalancing the credit . I mean the idea that you at least say that you're using this product .
Yeah , maybe even I'd prefer public , but okay , um , maybe even that alone could , you know , change the yeah , the balance it's a one-way kind of like a one-way street today like uh , when you listed truby gems , use other , I was like , wow , yeah , exactly so , yeah , it's prestigious .
Yeah , yeah , yeah , I reached out to them , so everything was good but you don't know who else is using the open source version and maybe it's some cool , I remember maybe apple yeah , maybe I don't know I , I can't talk about I know .
I know about big , big clients that okay , everybody knows that I can't talk about .
I know that Apple has some services yeah yeah I . I met a guy in .
Brazil . That was at Apple at the tropical RV , so they do . They do have some rubies and rails .
I'm staying there , yeah yeah , in in our , at our um . So I met a recruiter , because recruiting people released for apple , so they do . She said they do like a logistics . They acquired a company that was doing logistics in there .
When you can trade in , yes , yes , this is the service , yes , so the iphone , then there's some logistics after you almost interviewed for that job . Seriously , yeah , attribution that was yeah , attribution , and maybe then I think I know people don't like like I don't know what you think . I think consulting helps .
What I'm trying to say is I sometimes see people who build a product and they never use it themselves . Yeah , you know , hopefully yeah and when you consult you know for the clients who are using the product . You see , like , like what we do with emotions a lot .
We see how the product has been used , how it's being kind of misused , how's being miscontinued anyway and that information is so powerful , so valuable because you get to improve your product yeah , yeah and and then you run into problems yourself using your product . Yes , so you immediately promise .
So I think consulting is it's not a bad thing , especially in I don't know . Imagine you are , uh , you have your products as a side project and you , you earn money with consulting . So better consult , you know , on something related to your product .
Yeah , sort of that's a good , that's a good , that's a win-win yeah , that's what ?
yeah , I also think . I think it's great , because people can specialize in something yeah , yeah , that's right okay so you're gonna have to solve this .
We solved the uh .
So we solved the position . We solved the sustainability of open source . Now it's up to just like this just like this . It's what's next . Yeah , thanks for joining us for this mini episode and let's go see the next talk .
Exactly , yeah , see you guys .
Thanks okay , so that was fun .