Developing Tools for Web Developers | Multithreaded Income Episode 29 with Kilian Valkhof

This is your first CodeMash. It is. Yes. Excellent. Uh, what are you going to be speaking on?

And then the second one is called Understanding CSS Layout. And it's all about Um, learning and understanding like the fundamentals and, uh, the basic concepts behind CSS as it is. Yeah. Because if you understand those, suddenly all the weird stuff in CSS suddenly starts to make sense. Mm hmm. Uh, that's the first, it's the first time I'm giving that talk, so it's going to be very interesting to see how it goes. Yeah. But I'm, I'm very excited for

Um, it's essentially this idea of what if your entire browser was a DevTool that's completely designed to help you build. Websites faster, better, catch errors before your users do, make sure that it works on all devices, make sure that it's accessible, and that it's easy for you to, to do all those things rather than having it feel like an additional thing you have to do. Gotcha.

Like everyone has art boards, but back then like sketch really introduced the concept of you have a large canvas and then you have different art boards on that canvas. Whereas Photoshop, it was just like one. Design is one file. Yeah. Uh, and what that enabled me to do in Sketch was to have all the responsive variants of a website. So the mobile design and the tablet design and the desktop design side by side in one overview. And that really sped up my design time.

Because I could very quickly like compare, contrast, change across all the sizes. And visually see. That I did it correctly, that it, that will work that I didn't miss anything that, you know, what, what tended to happen in that time during that time was designers would like design the desktop view and then the mobile view, and then they needed to update the desktop view for something. And then an entire section would just be missing on mobile. Yeah. Um, and that really slowed down.

The process and suddenly with sketch, you had this right in your face. Like if there was a content block missing, you would instantly see it. So that was a really great way of working. Uh, but then when it came to implementing those designs, I went back to the browser and suddenly I was back in like the Photoshop world. Like I could only see one page in a single size at. At once. Yeah. And I had to switch back and forth all the time.

And, uh, I had always been building like tools to make my own life better as a, as a web developer. Uh, so I came up with like, essentially like a, a, a dinky electron app that showed a webpage at three different sizes. Mm-Hmm. uh, and like a, an unsal input bar at the top where I could put in the, the internet address and. And I started using that to build my websites because it would show me like mobile tablets and desktops side by side.

Yeah So I used that and it was nice, but I didn't really think much of it like it was just like a throwaway tool until I started comparing my hours and When using that tool I was 60 percent faster Uh, compared to not using that tool, I'm sure. Yeah. Uh, so, and that's when I realized like, you know, maybe this is a product, maybe this isn't just a dinky tool for me. Maybe this is a product. So I started developing it more and more and more and shared a beta out.

And then in 2019, I, uh, quit my agency or I sold my shares in the agency and went full time on. What was then known as polypane. Gotcha.

I'm always kind of interested in just, uh, income, lifestyle, cost of living fluctuations. Um, would you be comfortable kind of talking about the, the number where income wise, where it felt comfortable quitting your, your, your comfortable agency

Yeah. Like you, you either are a very large agency servicing very large customers or you sell very cheaply to very small customers and the middle just doesn't exist anymore. Yeah. And I, I saw that writing on the wall. So I, I, I wanted to get out. I also, I had always wanted to do a product company and we could never get it to work. Uh, so I figured, you know. Now's the time to just go for it. So this is probably very poor financial advice, but I, like I sold my shares.

So I had, uh, I money in the bank and I gave myself a year to just develop polypane, see where, where, where I could bring it, where I could take it in that year. And then after a year, I. I was going to decide, like, am I going to continue doing this or am I just going to go back to like advising, freelancing, all the stuff that I also have been doing, uh, during that time. Oh, you,

Um, and that, of course, you know, there's part of the product itself that That I felt needed more, or it needed to be better, or it needed to be streamlined in, in, in different ways. So I had some product work to do. Uh, once you start selling licenses or subscriptions, you're going to need something to manage that stuff. Uh, so I, I wrote my own like license checking surfer and subscription management dashboards for that.

Um, hooking up like payment processors and databases and, you know, making sure all of that works. And then coming up with the marketing plan and like, how am I going to announce this to the world to make sure that people can try it and how am I going to run trials? Because you know, I want people to try it before they have to commit, uh, so I had to set that up. Uh, and then. Um, I ended up launching in May, the 14th of May, 2019, um, with a bit of a run up.

So I had about 3000 people on the beta list. Um, so in the days before launching, I emailed them like, you know, I'm going to launch this in this date, there's going to be a product hunts page because that, that was the thing to do. That was the thing you do. Like, please vote for me, but then, you know, you can't say please vote for me, but you have to be like, you know, if you enjoy polypane, then please consider, et cetera.

Um, and then, you know, figuring out what are all the other places I can, I can, you know, share the news with, uh, I made some way over the top press release, like Dutch companies taking on Google and it got picked up by like a few Dutch. Dutch websites. So that that was fun. Um, and then also what I did, um, Um, I'm using paddle as a payment processor, uh, because there are a merchant of records and that means they handle all the tech stuff.

So then I don't have to calculate VAT for all the companies in the world and remit that. Do a VAT most like every quarter and fill in numbers for each European. That's not what I want to be doing in my company. So I just, you know, let someone else deal with that. Uh,

And I'm sure there's even a complexity where if you want to be a large legitimate company in, In Europe, you have to pay, uh, taxes in the United States and the, the fundamental problem in the United States is they kind of pass the laws like, Oh, you have to pay the state tax and the locality tax, like in the cities that you're in, but none of the infrastructures are set up for that.

Um, there are some cases, and I have a really good friend who lives in, um, Denmark who's She's a U. S. citizen who lives in Denmark now. And she went very deep into there's counties where you can't pay your taxes unless you're in person. Like there's no online method to do it. And it's just so hard to be, be correct to be up to date. If you want to be a good. Taxpaying citizen. It's just very difficult to do that. Uh, but the, the merchant record, it's like going through paddle.

You don't have to worry about any of that, which

I'm going to get distracted like at the 10th digit I have to fill in and it's then my accountant is going to be mad at me and the IRS is going to be mad at me and I just don't want a deal.

Uh, but that also proved like, okay, all the, everything works correctly. So I can, I can launch there's, there's no scary parts. There, like there's no systems that are going to blow up. There's no like emails that are not going to get sent. Like everything works and I can just, you know, put the website online and, and hope. Um, so that was really nice. I'm very happy that I did it that way. Um, and then I launched and, you know, all my friends voted, voted for it.

I don't think it ended up at number one, uh,

Um, it doesn't always work because, you know, I am a developer, so if I can work on the product, I'm going to always prefer doing that. Uh, which is, it is a trap. Um, I've seen other people. Um, deal with that by having like very strict, like this is product week where this is marketing week. Yep. That doesn't work for me. Uh, because you know, if, if there's a product thing that, you know, that is, that is running as like a background task in my head.

So if that has to run as a background task for entire week, that's going to be an issue. Yeah. So I, I usually do. I switch it up like halfway through the day.

I had a freelancer do some like SEO research. Um,

I do it every week and very diligent about that. And then it's just always up to date and it's no work at all. And you don't have to stress at like 11 PM on tax day, like getting all the receipts. Yeah. In order to make sure that you can submit your stuff to the IRS. Like that never happens, happens for me. If I have to pay VAT, it's like, Oh, it's, it's a VAT mom. Yeah. Click, click, send and it's done.

So, so that's also not something I need to hire someone for, uh, because, you know, because of systems.

Like in that first year, I tried essentially everything you can try in terms of marketing, like calls outreach, um, email campaigns, uh, ads, um, you know, almost everything you can imagine. So, and, and, and I kept notes on that. So I knew what worked, what didn't work. If I could figure out why it didn't work. Uh, so whenever I would talk to like a marketing expert and we're like, have you considered doing blah? And we're like, yep, that doesn't work for this and this and this reason.

Uh, and you know, almost always I'd end up exhausting their suggestions. Um, so yeah. And, and then what, like the only thing that really works for developers is word of mouth. Yeah. And that's not really something you can. Um, like guides, you can only stimulate it and you can only stimulate it by having a good products and by making it easy for people to try it out and making it easy for people to, to share that.

Um, and coincidentally, that's also the work you need to do to make the product goods. Yeah. So that overlaps really well. Uh, but that also means that, you know, where other. companies might be like, yeah, we're just gonna do a marketing or an email campaign to 20,000 companies in the next month, and that's gonna give us, uh, 10% return. Yep. Like, yeah, that, that's just not going to happen for me. It's going to be much slower. And, and that's okay.

Follow us, follow us up, maybe eventually ends up a sale and a customer for life.

Yeah. And it's very easy to think like, yeah, this is it. Obviously everyone's here. Yeah. But obviously that's not the case. And it's, it's at conferences like this where you meet so much more diverse people. Yeah.

So it's better if I, if I don't, uh, and, um, you know, I work from home. I have two young children. Uh, if anything, I work less now because, you know, I, I don't have to be in office managing people. Uh, if one of my kids is, is ill, then, you know, then I don't work that day. Yeah. Um. Um, and that's, that's a really easy decision. Uh, it's not always something I, I enjoy, uh, because, you know, it is still lost time that I could have, you know, develop things faster.

Uh, but you know, family comes first, that's, that's a very easy choice to make. Uh, so yeah, so I, it. It, I, I get that it really depends on your personality, like I'm there, there are many people that enjoy very much to work until very late and they get a lot of energy from that. I don't. But yeah, but I'm, I'm not that person. Um, so it's, it's better if I don't for, for me, for the products, uh, for the speed with which I can release stuff. So I don't.

So one of the things PolyPaint does is it makes it really easy to figure out, like, what are the accessibility issues of the particular page that I'm looking at. And More importantly, how do I fix them? How do I improve it? Um, because like there's a lot of tools that will tell you everything you did wrong with your website.

But if you're a developer, and I know this from agency experience, if you're a developer and you encounter, like, a tool telling you you did it wrong, then you have a choice to make. And the choice is, am I going to figure out what the right thing, right way is, and figure out which of the five Uh, like different answers I can find is the actual correct one or am I going to move this ticket to done and make my PM happy?

And then the, that second choice is always going to be the choice they make because you know, websites get built by the deadline. Um, and making that deadline is always going to be more important. So one thing that I, I feel very strongly about in polypane is that I want that choice to not exist. I want the developer to be working on a website and polypane saying, Hey, you know, this is wrong, do this instead. And because they're then working on it, it's, it takes no effort.

It takes no additional efforts to fix the thing and, and carry on with your task rather than, you know, having go to go out of that development flow and into research mode. Um, but polypane is a browser and one characteristic of a browser is that it shows a web page and not a website. So a lot of people have been asking me for the past few years, like, you know, all this tooling is great, but I just want to scan my entire website and have you tell me what I should fix.

So that's what I've been building, like essentially all the tooling that I have in polypane. Uh, that's all, it's all JavaScript polypane. So, uh, all the tests and checks, et cetera, that I have, they're all little scripts. Um, I've been building this website scanner that, you know, goes through your websites, opens every webpage, uh, does all the checks that I already have.

Um, and then creates a report for that, uh, based on an accessibility standard so that it's interoperable and you can like generate an HTML reports and a PDF reports like in one go. Um, so that's what I've been working on. And I, uh, I also work with a freelancer for that because backend development isn't my thing. Yeah. Um, like I can do it, but I don't enjoy it. Uh, and I know other people. Do enjoy it. And they do a much better job than me because of that.

Uh, so I've been working with a freelancer where, you know, they do all the stuff I find boring and then I come in and, and do the UI stuff and the logic, uh, or the, like the business logic, the, the interaction, et cetera. Uh, and that's been going really well. Uh, that's in beta now. Few companies using it. I'm just iterating, iterating on that. And it's a, it's a very nice product to sit alongside polypane because you know, it, it shares a lot of like those checks.

Uh, it takes me half an hour to move a check from polypane to polypane cloud. Okay. Uh, and that includes like a database migration and a visualization because There's a bunch of stuff shared between them. So I can, it's essentially just copy and pasting and then making sure that I store the right thing in the right place. Uh, so that's been, I I've very happy with the technology choices that I made there that have enabled that. Um, but hopefully that also means that I can iterate really fast.

Uh, and I, you know, I hope to be able to sell that to. Larger companies and larger, uh, accessibility testing agencies. Uh, whereas polypane is much more on an individual product, like a single developer buys it or a single team buys it for their team. And polypane cloud is more something that the entire company can use. So I hope that that makes it easier to grow.

Um, and then, you know, validate that other people also have a similar needs and you can do that very simply by. You know, what I did with PolyPay initially was, you know, everyone can get the beta, but they have to give me their email address. Yeah. Uh, and that's, it's low effort, but it also gives you the ability to send them updates because, you know, I, I didn't have an auto updating mechanism for the beta, uh, because that's a pain to set up as well.

Um. And, you know, you, you can learn so much from that process and by just being like very candid with the people that are trying your tools. Um, so yeah, that's, that's to me the way to get started and that's how I would do it again as well. Like get, get people in and then work with them on like, what do you need? Does this work for you? And that can be very low efforts. Um, like an, an email doesn't take a lot of time now, uh, reading their reply also doesn't take a lot of time.

Um, and, and yeah, go, go from there. Like at some points for me, at least I could feel like, okay, this is now viable in some way. Like I can see this going somewhere. Like. What I have now definitely isn't good yet, but it has potential. Um, and there, there's that moment where like probably when people start to proactively tell you stuff like where, where it's no longer pool, like you're not pulling for, for replies, you're not.

Like, please give me feedback, but they're, they're sending you feedback, whether you want to or not. Yeah. Like, I think that's the point where like people are motivated enough that they see this tool and they, they want to use it and they want it to be better because they want to use it. Yeah. And then that's the point where you can be like, okay, now I'm going to spend more time on that and, you know, be, be more structured about that.

So, all right, everyone, we'll see you next week on the multi threaded income podcast. Take care.