Software As An Art | Multithreaded Income Episode 36 with Jamie Wright

And, uh, but let's, I guess you're supposed to start with what you're doing now.

Uh, so like right out of college I was, um, you know, I worked in various, uh, jobs that were, that had software departments, software development departments, um, yeah, and I just, I've always kind of. Not been employable, I think. Um, and it's just my personality. It's just like, I just get so annoyed with what I view are bad decisions and they could be bad decisions or not bad decisions. It's just sometimes the things that people do with their businesses just really annoys me.

Um, so the fact where I knew I, I wouldn't be able to stay there, you know? Um, yeah, that's just, that's just my personality. So I've kind of just always done my own thing.

Um, and I do admit that's a different kind of, uh, relationship than being an employee, so there may be. Some other stuff that I don't know about, um, around like sort of that teamwork and, um, those kinds of relationships. But, um, yeah, I just, I just know I'm just not employable. I also feel like I need to own in order for me to be very engaged. I have to have, um, a lot of, uh, risk, not risk, but I have to have a lot of say in the thing that's produced. It's just.

I just want to have that ownership so that I can control with the outcome a little more, um, and just, you don't have that a lot of companies. So, so I've been kind of

Um, kind of the owner of the company and then us too. And we would, like you said, we would just move at super fast pace. Um, I had a lot of say in the, uh, the design, the, the, the product, the UX. Um, and it was just great. You know, it worked out great. Um, yeah, that's kind of my favorite. The, the traits of kind of the companies that I don't like to work with are the companies that have like a lot of process.

Um, know, of getting just code or, or the end product out to customers and also not being able to, a lot of those companies, you don't get to interact with the customers themselves, which I find not that satisfying, right? I like to hear from the users, um, themselves, um, not only, you know, I like to hear the good and the bad because it, it helps me become better. Product person and it also makes for a better product. So

I work a lot with them as a subcontractor and just, they are what they say they are. Like they let you do your work. You're very autonomous. They count on you to just get the job done. They don't treat you like a child. And, um, and you can tell that that I could tell that that was going to happen just based on the emails that were sent before the project happened, you know, like, Hey, don't worry about this.

Here's this, you know, and and things were thought of and, um, things were were made so that you could get up and running, you know, first day and contribute. So those are kind of the companies I like. And, uh, those are the people and the companies I steer away from are the companies that. All right. You can tell there's a lot of process. Um, and, uh, and they may not. They may not know the person that you're working with.

A lot of times, um, if I have a direct relationship with the person I'm working with, like I met them on a conference, um, I'm friends with them in the community, those relationships work out a ton better than somebody that, you know, you were introduced to on this side of the company over here, like those types of relationships, those people don't trust you, which, you know, they don't know you.

Um, and so, Yeah. So there, when there's a lot, when there's a lack of trust, um, that can also, um, be an indication of probably you don't wanna work with that company. Um, yeah. And then good, a good way to build up trust, actually, I found out through the years, is just put yourself out there. Um, whether it's videos, podcasting, writing. Just showing your views and showing that you've been doing this for, you know, a long time.

And it's all about how you present yourself through just minor interactions. Um, and it helps so much and you can usually tell it's a red flag. If someone tries to override that with their own processes, it's like, okay, this might not work out the way that I want it to.

Um, this was kind of before Slack, but like, uh, remember HueBot

And obviously it was like a forethought in Slack. And so, um, after I found out about Slack, I've created a, a bot for Slack that allows you to do standup meetings inside Slack. And that was like the first that did that, by the way. Um, And, uh, anyway, got invited out to the Slack, um, launch event when they did their app store really kind of fell in love with the community people at Slack. Um, who are mostly no longer there, but, um, just kind of fell in love with that community.

And so I've kind of, since then just kind of been. All in on the chat bot Slack bot sort of, um, uh, work, um, and developed, like I said, tattoo, and then a client came along, um, and I described them. It was called Kyber, but I described them as kind of base camp inside Slack and creates messages, tasks, um, meetings inside Slack and kind of coordinate all your work inside Slack. Like there's nothing outside. Of Slack. It's like all, which is kind of unique in the Slack world.

Like a lot of them are services, their web services, they have like a Slack. So anyway, and like I mentioned, that was like a really good client. We worked together for three years. Um, and they were a venture backed company. And, uh, so they were pouring in like millions into this. Project product. And they were getting like, they were getting up to like 40 K 50 K a month in subscriptions.

And that was, that's a lot, you know, for me, for one individual, but for a venture backed company, it didn't really make sense. Um, they were trying a lot of different things. Um, and, and then, you know, they, one of the developers left, went to Amazon. And so I was like the only developer on the thing for maybe a year. And I could kind of slowly see the interest weighing from them.

Um, and anyway, last year, yeah, 2023, they, they told me at the beginning of the year, they're, they're like, Hey, we're going to stop development. It's not really moving the needle. Um, and I said, okay. And then, you know, went on to other things. And then about six months later, they reached back out and said, Hey, do you want this? Um, and I was, uh, and at first I was like, nah, I don't, you know, cause I got my own tattoo thing going on here. And then I started thinking about it.

I was like, wait, what, what am I doing here? Um, they have like all these customers, um, they kind of made their relationship with Slack a little sour, which caused some issues. Um, so all of these, I noticed like, these are kind of good issues to have. Cause these are fixable things that I can fix.

And so, long story long, I, I took over the application at the beginning of the year, um, and I just got, it's kind of changed my direction of where I was going and, and all that kind of stuff, but that's kind of where, where I'm at right now with kind of the SAS, uh, side of, side of my business.

And it goes to like, you know, whatever those, and we figured it out, you know, it's up to like, you know, I own 70 percent or something. And then we're like, well, then we'll figure something else out. You know, like there's a lot of opportunities, like, do I sell it? Can I, you know, so, um, yeah, there was a lot of opportunity there. Um, you know, I knew I could get the revenue back up to where it was. I'm pretty. Um, I can fix the relationship with Slack.

I know a lot of people there and, um, and they have a lot of customers, like hundreds of thousands of customers. So, uh, not active customers, but you know, I have a database of former customers. So, um, yeah, my plan is now is to merge both my products, Tetsu and Kyber. I hate to name Kyber, so I'm renaming everything to Tetsu and, um, kind of going from there now I've got kind of a roadmap and a plan and, um, kind of a marketing plan as well.

So, yeah, I'm kind of going all in on the SaaS side of things this year. I decided,

So my plan this time, um, starting in May is to just actually take a week off, um, and totally focus on the product. And then kind of move up from there. Um, I'm, I'm a real big believer of not like throwing out everything, um, to, you know, work on your thing that you hope makes money. Um, like that's just so much more stressful and not as fun. And, um, that's the other thing I started doing is like just enjoying the journey. Like, like.

Yeah, just enjoying the journey, um, enjoying the actual craft of creating the software, um, not listening to, you know, all, um, I've been treating software a little more like art, if that makes a lot less, like, here's a formula that you can get 100, 000 users, here's seven tips that you can use to, you know, um, You know, I've, I've listened to all those communities and all those things. And I just, it, it makes, it makes it feel like a job and I don't, I don't want a job, man. I want to,

Bye. We're going to forget about the months of effort I had to put into building the system so I could eventually do it for 20 minutes a day.

Just want to solve problems for customers and my, my, my buddy's been working in the communication industry kind of working, um, alongside all these different companies, just, you know, so he's got all these contacts and all these companies that use. Productivity software, and he has some really good ideas on like packaging the software so that some of these companies will use. Um, and so I'm kind of going to lean on him to kind of do the enterprise type sales stuff.

Um, he's really excited about it. So that's, that's the other kind of marketing channel I'm going. It's kind of offsetting all that crap that I don't want to do on to somebody. That A, knows what the hell they're doing. Um, not slimy, represents the product well. Um, and can just, he knows how to talk to people, man. He knows how to like, I don't know how to talk to people. I'm a software developer. It spends. 90 percent of my time in my basement. So I don't know how to talk to people.

So I'm willing to pay someone with this skillset to build the business from, from that aspect. I think that makes a ton of sense.

The reason I'm pursuing the SAS angle is to allow myself to give myself more freedom of time. So, cause. I don't want to create software my whole life. Like it's don't want to do it. I have other interests. Uh, I want to create physical products. There's things I want to, you know, I want to open store, like physical stores, like coffee shops, like there's just stuff I want to do. That's outside of, of, uh, software.

So the reason I want to go into SAS is because I'm not selling my time for money. Right. Obviously. Um, and so over the, that's just some background on your, your failure statement is yeah, they monetarily. Yeah. They, the, the reason they were shut down is because I was spending money on them and they were not making money, but, um, yeah, the, my first product actually that I released was, um, Something called morale, which allowed you to create to dues.

This was like in, this was like in 2007, six, this was in 2006. Cause I was just learning Ruby and this is how I learned. Ruby was creating this application. Um, yeah. And it just allowed you to create a to dues inside, uh, using natural language. So you could say like, you know, do tomorrow, you know, and do an at sign. Um, it was actually.

Probably before a lot of, it was, I always say this is kind of before it's time because, um, there's a lot of things that came on out after that, that that kind of worked, but it allowed you like inside code. You could write to do and write your to do statement. It would actually go into your task list and create a task for you and stuff like that. Um, that just failed just because of marketing. Probably. I never, you know, I didn't know how to market stuff. I just knew how to build stuff.

Um, uh, the, the, the chat chat, uh, application I talked about earlier. There's another, uh, slack killed that 1 for me. What are some other ones? Um, oh, yeah, several, several other chatbots. Um, that I'm probably still may do. Um, my biggest, my biggest regret is probably my Pomodoro app, though, that I made. Um, I just spent like 3 years on that thing. And I was just having a blast doing it. Like, yeah, Just creating the thing I was creating. It was a blast.

Um, and I was creating like a mobile app, Alexa app, uh, and a web app all at the same time, horrible idea, stupid idea for one person to do all that. Um, but it was a lot of fun. Um, that was chronic. That that still may become a product someday, but you know, yeah,

We held, um, one in person workshop, um, in Toledo and there was about 30, 30 people that came to that. It was me and, uh, my other employee at the time. And we created the whole Rails workshop. We created a whole new app, um. And people loved it. Actually, several people got jobs from that workshop, um, which was really exciting. And we tried to expand that into other areas. We liked the in person, uh, you know, in person workshop.

Um, it felt like People grasped it and got it a lot more and were more, uh, into it rather than the online ones. Um, and so we tried to go into other cities like Ann Arbor and, um, Detroit and Columbus, but not knowing the local community there, it was really hard to gain any sort of traction. So, um, but we did do like day, uh, some day ones, like one day ones. Uh, it was, it was really, really good.

I like that first class we made like 10 grand, I think, off of it, which was like, I mean, if we would have repeated it, that would have been a really nice side of the business. Um, we just never found a way to market that. So, um,

To a different group of people every couple of weeks, because ideally you would do one, do one like every two, three weeks and maybe in a different city, like travel around, keep your expenses super low, but then you just make bank on the money that comes in and it's just so hard to do. I had to get out of it just because I couldn't devote the time to the marketing. Yeah.

Uh, we did it, um, you know, over a course of like four weeks, like two nights a week, I think. And I love that it was cheap. I mean, it was like 800 bucks a person, something like that. So it was pretty cheap, but they were learning like a pretty. Valuable resource. So, um, I think it. Oh, the other thing that we did, though, too, was we would market to companies, which that is where actually more of the money is, is when you could get a whole company of 20 developers.

Learning some new technology, a company will pay Buku bucks for that. So we had, we were in talks. We were close to like, um, one workshop for 25 K for a week. Um, not even a week, I think it was four days. Um, and, uh, yeah, it's just, we, there's just so many hoops when you go to those companies, some of those companies. Like so many people that need to sign checks. It's, it was just, it wasn't worth, I would need like a full time person to, to kind of sell that stuff.

So, so yeah, we dabbled in, in training. I still do training, you know, at, at, uh, conferences and things like that. Um, so I still love training. I still love training people. I, I have an intern, uh, that I work with. So, um, yeah. Uh, so got into some training a little bit. And then the other thing, the thing that actually allowed the training to happen in Toledo was we opened a co working space, um, me and two other people opened Toledo's first co working space in 2013, 2012.

Yeah, 2015, 2016, I kind of got out, found a new partner, um, because I want to concentrate again on SAS and, uh, and co working. And I also found out that I hate co working. Uh, it took me opening a co working space to, uh, know that I hate co working. Um, and shout out, there's a, there's a person you should have on your podcast from Toledo. Uh, his name's Will Lucas. He, uh, he's into everything.

He's done everything, but he's opened, um, new type of coworking space, but he's done it in a much better way. And it's, it's more geared, uh, it's more marketed as a, um, entrepreneurial club, almost like a country club for entrepreneurs. And he's, yeah. And it's like, he's got like all these events and he's got a jazz bar. He's got a coffee house in there now, like he's doing it right. And, um, Yeah, if I were to do co working again, it would be, it would be like that.

Um, which is an idea that he got in bigger cities like New York and things like that, they all have these. So, um, you can charge much more higher fees for, uh, you know, a country club of entrepreneurs and you can, uh, a coworking space, but it's.

But, um, he, the way he did it, he's bought this big building and then he, he put in like a coffee shop and he had a coworking area and then want, you know, a couple months later, six months later, he added like a jazz club and then he added like a golf simulator and then he added like, so now he's got all these like little, just Like he's got a cigar bar in there. And so you can imagine doing all these things at once would be a horrible idea. It costs a lot of money.

You don't know if it's going to work. Costs would be skyrocketing in the beginning. Um, so anyway, uh, all that to say, like, he's done that very, very well. You should have him on.

It doesn't have a large support burden. Like I don't need to take a laptop with me on vacation. Um, so it can't be anything like, you know, your financial data or. You know, you're code running, uh, in a CI environment, so it can't be any of that stuff. And, um, and that will allow me the freedom, hopefully, to explore the other things I want to explore. Um, you know, like, my wife and I want to, um, open up a coffee shop. Uh, she's a teacher.

We want to Uh, we've talked about doing like, uh, a whole suite of like teacher, the teacher industry is like the education industry is poorly underserved with good stuff. And so I think there's a whole thing around that with good software for teachers and educators. Um, there's just, I have so many ideas. I just, I'm concentrating on the idea that will give me the freedom to explore those other ideas. Um, yeah, I just want to make stuff and put stuff out. That's really all I want to do.

That's what gives me, um, yeah, the biggest satisfaction is just creating stuff. Yeah, It's just having the freedom to explore things. That possibly could make me money. I don't know, but I want to be able to like going back to this whole like software's art thing. Like, I don't want to create a job. I don't want to. And that's that may be part of the reason why it's been so long for me on this journey is because. I'm really enjoying the journey.

Um, and at one point I just, I got to buckle down and say, I got to get this out by, you know, June or whatever. And, um, yeah, that's just, uh, that's, that's when like the consulting and the real world and the money stuff kind of come comes into play.

And that's kind of the thing I want to get rid of is I want to be able to work on cool stuff, fun stuff with the lifestyle I have now, I don't need anything else, I don't want anything else, um, and just enjoy more time with family and friends and things like that. So yeah,

We can't take the time off because we still have to feed our family stuff to put the roof over our head. So we end up doing the consulting and all the other stuff on the side. And it takes us away from the real thing that we want to do. I think the place I want to be is I have friends who are the single, single owner, SAS companies who worked a tireless job for 10 years and they put everything they had away in the bank.

They made, they put investments away and now they're in a position where they say, all right, I'm going to take. A chance on me and I'm going to take six months and just work on my thing. And if it works, it works. If it doesn't, the worst case scenario is I go back to a job. Um, it's a

Um, I, I don't think, yeah, I, I think that sounds amazing, but at the end, if you didn't get to where you want to be giving yourself just six months, actually a is for three months or a year is kind of, do things do not work that fast. If they work that fast, you're like a, you know, one in a billion company. Um,

And I think thankfully that half a dozen or so friends I know personally, who have done that have seen success at various degrees.

Um, yeah, so I'm, I'm, I'm anti VC as well, but going back to that little six month thing, like, that's the position I'm in right now. Like, I could use, like, three weeks.

You can't work on your, your thing that you're working on now, unless some, you know, unless it goes extremely well, that's kind of more of a situation I would love to be in, you know, anyway.

These people that just have one successful product, they believe, a lot of them, that you can just cookie cutter that, and that's how, bada bing, bada boom, you get money. Nobody knows the rules, man. Nobody knows the rules. Nobody, everybody tries stuff that's, um, out of the box, and then when it's not out of the box, then it becomes mainstream. Yeah, just try stuff and have fun with it. That's my, that's my main, uh, and the money will, will come, will come.

If you're diligent enough and you're, um, you keep working on the thing and you're passionate about it, the money, the money is going to come, as long as you're having fun.