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Flight control works with any language or framework. It supports servers, static sites and database. Sign up at Flightcontrol.dev and use the code Software Social to get 20% off your first three months. Hey, Colleen.
Hey, Michelle. Good to hear your voice.
Yours too. I am so excited to hear about what's going on with your projects today.
Whew. So much. And it has been quite a while since we have talked. So I feel like there's so much going on in my business life right now.
But first, I feel like I have one thing I need to uh, say. So, thank you so much to everybody who gave us feedback on our business of the podcast episode. Um, I mean, we've been doing a lot of thinking and talking about that. We actually, like, you know, it's funny, we talked last week and didn't record it. It's possible.
It is true. We did
Started to feel like we weren't allowed to talk without recording it. And so what we decided to do for now, you know, always work in progress, selling individual ads for $250 each, there's now a form for it. You can just buy them on Stripe to make it more accessible for people to do it. So you don't have to buy a month or two months at a time. And then also doing sponsored episodes for basically when people pitch us guests.
And then if it's somebody we're interested in having, we'll tell them about that. We'll still do invited guests occasionally, but basically just what, like it was before, like when one of us is traveling or something. But on that episode, so we talked a little bit about how seeing the success the No More Mondays guys were having with selling ads kind of inspired this and made us think that we were undervaluing the podcast. And it turns out I got a little bit of that story wrong.
So it turns out they didn't actually sell any for, I believe it was 600 pounds. That was just the highest price. They, they did like a, like an auction style thing where they kept raising the price until people stopped buying them. And apparently that's the point where if people stopped buying some, so nobody actually bought them for $600, but they were selling them for that price, if that makes sense. And so that error is on me for not getting all of those details up front.
And I feel bad about messing that up. Yeah, so that's where we're at on all of that stuff. But, I feel like it's been forever since we have heard about Colleen's projects.
It has been a while since we've talked about it. Okay. Let's see where to start. So since we've last spoken, things have really picked up for Hammer stone. So for new listeners or for people who have forgotten, cause it's been a few months since I've talked about my side projects, I have two. I've Simple File upload, which is a file uploader. And with two other co-founders I have a company called Hammer stone and we are building development tools for developers.
And so things are really picking up with Hammer stone, which has been really exciting. Aaron, one of my co-founders who's the laravel guy gave a talk at Laracon and it went really, really well.
It was so good.
Right. Everyone is like so excited about his Laracon
We were watching it while we were making dinner. So like the whole family was watching it. We had it up on the iPad. And Sophie if he was like, this guy's really good.
Yeah, it went really well. And, I also have a podcast with them about that business and on it, I asked Aaron how long he spent on that talk, and he estimated like 80 hours. So yeah, I believe that is correct. Now I wanna go back and check, but it was some absurd amount of time, which just shows the amount of work that goes into giving such an amazing presentation, as he did. And that's, that was really exciting.
So we have a list of hundreds of people that are interested, and we are working on finishing up the front end for the laravel component. So what this is is our first component as a query builder. So, it's a drop in component, where you can configure the backend to show your users, whatever you want to allow them to query on. And it builds up the sequel. It allows you to, you know, plug in play different portions of the query. It's really powerful.
And, it's really mature because Erin has been using a version of this in production for years. So we have a really long list of people interested, but we are launching this product. As I said, it's gonna be very mature. Like we're launching it with three different front ends. So there's no MVP version of this product. There is like fully functional, everything is taken care of version of this product, which is different than what most people do.
And so that has been interesting because there's a lot that we're still trying to finish before we can launch and that's on the laravel side. So I'm a rails developer. So on the rail side, I have been working, I work for a client on this project, but we're keeping the IP. So, it's just been like crazy busy recently, but I have been deliberately trying to do a little more marketing.
I shouldn't even say marketing cause I'm not doing marketing, but like deliberately trying to get the word out there about this product. So I'm speaking at Sin City Ruby next week. I'll be down in Vegas, speaking at a conference there. And so my talk is gonna be about a arel, which is what our, it's like it private API and rails, but it's what our query builder on.
So stuff like that, I'm trying to do to kind of like mentally shift people to start thinking about like, what could this product be like? What's it gonna be like? And that kinda stuff.
That's pretty exciting.
It is. It's, I think something we've talked about before, it's gonna be interesting to try to sell this product because the rails ecosystem system is just more mature than not, I don't know if that's fair. But like, like I joked with Aaron, but it wasn't a joke. If you go on the Laracon website, everyone just for funsies, go on the Laracon website, then go the rails website and like the differences in those websites, Laracon is like cool and hip and they have animations and graphics.
Rails conf looks like, you know, someone didn't really, they, they took a WordPress theme, and they just like threw some stuff into it. Not because, and, and I know it's so bad.
Bringing the heat today. I was, I was nervous. I was like, where is she going with this? And is it going to be a Laravel insult? Because if so, girl, I love you, but we're not doing that.
So, I just think that rails, I love it. I love everything about it, but we don't have that like cool hip vibe anymore. Right. So rail's been around for quite
kind of got the like drama vibe. I'm
Oh gosh. Do we have the drama vibe ever right now, Michelle? Geez. So I think it'll be interesting, like it just from our interactions with developers, it seems like the Laravel L developers are all like, really excited. They're like rails 10 years ago. And the rails developers are tech tend to work on more mature products. They have just like bigger teams and this is not true across the board, but it will just be interesting.
I feel like if the sales cycle's gonna be a little bit longer, it's gonna be a longer sales cycle. Truly communicating to people what this thing does and how powerful it is, is gonna really be a challenge and a really important one. So that's something I've started to think about.
It's really interesting because from the interview you did with Nate a couple of weeks ago, he was talking about sort of like this almost like history of rails, and how it has evolved into being a more, I don't know the word I'm looking for here is, but like, you know a, a word that like people use at scale. Right. And, that now it's that like rails is the language of sort of like stodgy or older products and websites. And like the Laravel ones are the cool ones.
And it's like, but like, wait, PHP is the cool kid on this block. Like, that's just really interesting. Just looking at like the perspective of that dynamic. I think if you told someone that 10 years ago, they would be very surprised.
I totally agree. And it's interesting too, because PHP is way worse than Ruby. Like Ruby is
Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hold on. This is not, this is not a debate we're having on this podcast. Look, we are, whatever you wanna use is fine, but thou shall not insult Laravel on this podcast or PHP.
It is really interesting. How, and, and I feel like I've been talking about this a lot recently with the drama with DHH. A lot of people have been coming to me and talking to me about like, what's the future of rails. And Aaron said something once he said, do you know any rails developers under 35? And I was like,
Oh, wow.
But, but I don't. Like, I don't. Do you know any rails developers under 30, please send me a Twitter message if you're a rails developer under 30. Okay.
I can't, I can't think of anyone either.
Not that age matters. I don't like to use the term
Right. But it's like, what what are the people who are coming up? What are they learning? What are they using? What are they I mean, it's also like something JavaScript too, quite frankly.
Well, that's what I, so I don't do these mentorship calls anymore, but I used to do a lot of mentorship calls, and I still believe, like if you wanna get a job quickly, like JavaScript is your path these days.
Yeah, I would I would say I've seen that too. Okay. Wait on before we got into like
We're so off topic. We're so off topic. We're wait, wait, wait. Let's back up.
Wait, we were talking about Hammer stone and the three different front ends it has. And, oh, you were talking about how you were doing marketing, but you didn't wanna call it marketing. But you were doing marketing.
Right. So here's something that has been an interesting challenge for me. I have two projects and I love them both, but for a long time, it, but it's hard, like a public persona, it's hard to be both. So, people think of me as like Colleen of Simple File Upload, which is how I want them to think of me. But I would also like to think of me as like Colleen of Hammer stone, and I don't know how to be both of those things.
So just this as it is a little like side experiment just last month I did all Hammer stone stuff. I only tweeted about Hammer stone. I wrote this talk, which is super Hammer stone specific. I submitted talks to rails conf that are all super Hammer stone specific. So I went like all in Hammer stone this last month to just see what that felt like. And I think that was good. But I want to be able to do both. And, I don't know if I I'm a little worried.
I'm just worried that splitting my focus is going to cause nothing, nothing will be successful if I don't go all in on something. But then, I know people who have lots of side projects that are successful too, so maybe I'm overthinking it, but I've been kind of like consi, like trying to be very deliberate in like tweeting. I haven't tweeted a lot, but like very deliberate in my public persona. So I've been tweeting about it.
I've been having calls with rails developers, to, you know, customer interviews essentially to find out where they stand, and what their pain points are and all that kind of stuff.
Well, I mean, it basically sounds like Hammer stone is now your full-time job, and you have Simple File Upload as your side project. And the difference there is that usually when people have a full-time job and a side project, it's usually like they're an employee of something, like not something that they're a founder of.
And, like, oftentimes I feel like side projects, like emotionally come out of a place of like, feeling under challenged in your day job, but still liking your day job, but like wanting to have a place to explore and like a playground and learn things and like, I don't see that as you know, I see that as a coherent identity. I think for you, the difference is that you're excited, really excited about both of those things. And it's like, where do you split your enthusiasm?
But also like both of them are so early stage that for you to, to try to decide, okay, which one of these is the thing I wanna be doing two years from now, or five years from now, which, you know, most people who have a side project and work fulltime, that's a pretty common thing is like, okay, like, do I wanna go full time on my side project? How do I go full time on it sooner?
Or like, no, do I really just, you know, be patient and you know, this, the, the full-time job and the health insurance, like, I need that. And this is just my playpen on the side, but like, you're really excited about both of them. And you're also the like leader of both of them. And like, I could see how that creates this, you feel like you're supposed to have conflict between them. And I think you are not Colleen of Simple File Upload or Colleen of Hammer stone.
You are Colleen of Hammer stone and Simple File Upload. Right. We're talking about you as if you're some like British uh, Pier or something that is Colleen of Susic and Whims, or I'm sorry, the British listeners that's Whims bury is pro probably not a real place, but you know, it's like, you are of both places, strongly and proudly.
Yeah, and I really want to do both. So a couple things I learned on that month I spent this was last month. What this February-ish I spent just doing Hammer stone, one really cool thing. I mean, I did customer support for SImple File Upload, but I don't get a lot of request because the product is so awesome by the way. If anyone needs file up uploader. The cool thing about SAS is you can not work on it for a month and it still works. That's fun.
You can't like not work on it for like six months and then
no, no, but I'm
there's a limit to yeah.
Here's what I noticed about this. So this was like an experiment. And the reason I did this experiment was cuz I felt like my, my heart wasn't super into the Hammer stone product and I couldn't quite figure out why. And. I think the reason my heart wasn't really into it was cuz I hadn't really fully immersed myself in it. And so that month I spent last month I spent just like fully immersed in it. My whole self is now in, oh my gosh, I sound so cheesy.
But like my whole self is like now in Hammer stone, like I am all in. I am super pumped, and think I wasn't before cuz we were, I was such in that grind stage because it's a ton of work, and when I wasn't talking to people like developers who might buy it, I couldn't see the end goal. And so spending a month doing the grind work still, but also talking to people and interacting with people really got me excited about it. But what I noticed about this is I missed working on Simple File Upload.
I love working on SImple File Upload. I love it. It's got a tight feedback loop. I am an expert in that. Like I'm really not yet, I'm not a sequel expert yet. Okay. Hammer stone is a sequel. We write sequel for you is basically what it does, whereas file uploading, I'm a freaking expert at that. So I can move really, really quickly. I can get into a flow state on that project really, really quickly. So I love working on it.
But it was nice to know that like if I spend a month not improving the product and just letting it ride, answering emails, everything is still good.
So a couple months ago, we had talked about like your work life balance, work, work, life balance. However we wanna call this. Right. And like you were saying that you were ready to push again, like for a long time, like you had not like, or I don't know for a long time you had really healthy boundaries, and you were ready to not have healthy boundaries again.
That's. So.
But like, you, you know, you didn't work at night, you didn't work on weekends. I've always respected how like healthy your work boundaries are and how you prioritize your personal health and your family life above work, which I think is really commendable. And it's something I don't do or used to not do. And now I'm trying to do it better, whatever. Okay. Whole nother topic. but like
hours.
which is actually better, by the way people have asked me about the burnout stuff I'm actually doing better. We'll do an episode on it. I just,
Good.
We haven't been talking so much lately. We've had so many guests on it. Like haven't talked to you. I, okay, so you were saying you were ready to push again, and I'm wondering, it can be really valuable to have that time during the day when you've said, okay, like my daytime is devoted to Hammer stone, and I don't have anything to do right now. Let me go, like figure out some marketing thing.
Let me go interview somebody like having that space where you don't necessarily have a task in front of you. And instead of switching over to Simplify Upload, because you're like, oh, I could just do this thing. And like, it's really easy. Instead finding something else to work on Hammer stone, like I wonder if at a point now where you could do Hammer stone, you know, six, eight hours a day. And then Simple File Upload is just an evening project.
I think it depends on what I want. I feel like Simplify Upload has so much potential. And so for me, I'm not ready to do that yet, but I think what you say is very valid in that when you're focused is aligned, you know, six to eight hours a day with one task, one project. That's good because it helps move it forward, but I, I'm not ready to reg relegate Simplify Upload to like just two hours a night, three times a week. There's still so many things I wanna do on it.
And I just feel like it is so much potential. So what I'm trying to do, the way it's worked with Hammer stone is because we're doing client work, so basically like I have my client, which is my full-time job. Then I have, but it's also kind of Hammer stoney stuff, and then I have Simplify Upload.
So with Hammer stone, I remember you saying you guys are funded for, is it a year by this client until August?
Yes.
So you kind of have a, I think there's the existential question of like what you want to work on in the future, and what's important to you and all of that, but there's also this sort of like very real financial deadline coming up of like what happens in August when this client project for Hammer stone ends. What are you gonna do that? Like, there's also like a pressure to like start selling this thing too.
Yes. And I think, you know, it's tricky. I mean, it's tricky because yes. So I, I, we have until August and what I want to do, let's say I was independently wealthy. I'm not, but if I was what I'd want to do was in August, just work on Hammer stone and Simplify Upload and not to any client work. Cause the client work, it's building the Hammer stone component, but it's also like tightly grading with the client, it's consulting.
So a lot of the work I do for them or a decent amount isn't Hammer stone specific, it's client specific. So what I'd like to do is have just be able to do my own side projects. Can I afford to do that? That's the problem we don't know because we're not selling that many licenses yet cuz we aren't done with all of our front ends. So that's the conflict I think. And then, you know, I have three co-founders and we're all very close and we have a good relationship, but they both have full-time jobs.
Both of my co-founders. And so they're, and when I've talked to them about this, so this isn't the first time anyone's hearing this, but it's important for the three of us to be on the same page in terms of like the speed at which we wanna move.
And I guess you are uniquely exposed if you are the only one who is
am.
working on this full time. But like, if I was in this situation, first of all, I would be freaking out. Second of all, like , Colleen: Thanks. just,
Babe
you're than I am. You are like, you are so much calmer than I am. Dude. I went to Ikea today, and I tried to pick out three cabinets for our new shed quarter, and I was like completely overwhelmed, like, okay. So yeah. I just like, okay. We're in March right now. The middle of March.
Yeah.
The funding for Hammer stone for you for this client runs out, is it August 1st or August
Mid August I it's, I don't
August 15th. Okay. So, and we are in the middle of March. So then you basically have five months left.
Yeah.
To get this thing to a point where to prevent you from having to go back to other client work or whatever that may be to get this to the point where it could sustain you working on it full time. That's not a lot of time to get to that point. And so if this was me, I would be putting all of my eggs in that basket right now.
And just saying like, you know what, Simplify Up is awesome, thousand dollars a month coming in that you can basically rely on at this point, like the people who are using it are happy with it.
That's personally what I would do, because I feel like the goal here is not like, figure out which product you wanna do, the decision here is not, which product do you work on or which one is your heart, the most in the goal here is really not have to go back to more client work or get another whole time job. I feel like.
I agree with that. That is interesting. And, I, I hear what you're saying. I do. Hmm. I mean, but
Interesting. It's not like you're very surprised by that.
I am surprised. I think I'm surprised for two reasons. One, so simple file upload, like already makes money. So what if I put two days, I don't have two days a week,
Well, how much does it make?
14 right now? It's at 1400. So I guess Heroku takes some, so I don't know, $1,200 a month.
That's pretty stable from.
Yeah. From last time we talked, it is not
From even, but like six months ago, that's pretty like, like, so it's nothing to sneeze at, but it's also, it's not appreciably growing. It's not on the trajectory. Meanwhile, I know you guys have started selling some licenses for Hammer stone. You've got a little bit of stranger money going on, right.
Yes. We've sold a few licenses.
So, and people are super pumped about it. It has wind in its sail.
It does. It really does. The problem is our 300 ish people who have signed up have not signed up for the rails product. Most of them have signed up for the Laravel product. That is not something I can move forward. And so we, as a team, Aaron, Sean and I are doing everything we can to move that forward, But they are constrained by their full-time jobs. So we're gonna hire someone to help us, but now we have to onboard, you know, a new guy. So he's gonna take a month or whatever.
I guess what I'm saying is I feel like that side of it is kind of out of my hands. I don't know if I can actually help a lot since it's not. I don't know,
But you can do more than just coding rails.
talk to me. Yeah. Theoretically, I just, yes.
You, like like you were just saying, well, I was doing some marketing, but it wasn't actually marketing. And I was like, where is this? Where like, this is interesting. Where is this going? And like, even if you aren't a Laravel developer, like there's no reason why you can't be talking this up to people.
Yes.
You could be doing stuff like I mean, just taking like a, an example, you could be going on podcast, talking about Hammer stone, and what it does. Like, I feel like I know all of you guys, and I still feel like I don't even know what it does. It's something about SQL and queries and like extremely unclear. And I talk to you guys all the time and like, have known about this from the very,
yeah.
um, you could be out promoting it or figuring out like all this stuff you've learned about marketing and documentation and the power of, like, you know, like developer, like videos and stuff on YouTube, like demos of stuff. You could be doing marketing work to sell it and like dealing with figuring out payment flows and like. you said there's licenses. I'm sure you've got a contract. What does that look like.
Like all of the like biz ops type stuff, plus the marketing side, there is so much you can do to sell this thing that people already have shown that they want to buy, even though it barely exists.
It's true. Yeah, no, you're right now that you say that, I mean, there's tons of things I can think of that I could do to get us. Yeah. Yeah. To get us Businessy stuff. There's a lot of business business.
Like the, the lot of Cody stuff, you know, is basically, it sounds like it's, you're basically done. like There's some more front end stuff that needs to be done, and you'll have some work to do related to wiring that up or, or whatnot, but like, the business E stuff, the sale, like the, I said the sailing stuff, the selling stuff, , Colleen: Yeah. we're all talking about. You have wind in the sales, right?
There's a lot of that to be done and you have five months, like just speaking as me as somebody who does really well with like drop dead deadlines like that. That is where I would be spending my energy. Now, it may not be your favorite place to spend energy. And you love going all in on, you know, file uploading and getting in the zone on that. But like, girl, if you wanna be a founder, you've gotta learn the BI op stuff. You've gotta learn marketing. You've gotta do sales.
You've gotta do all of that. If you wanna be, you are a founder. So those are responsibilities. Now it is your job to figure out what needs to be done and figure out how to do it. Even if it's not your favorite thing in the world. Sorry. That was
that.
there.
No, no, I okay. First of all, I love tough love. This is my favorite kind of yes. Feedback is to be like, okay, Colleen, get up and just stop whining and do the
Well, you're not whining. It's just, you're limiting yourself. Right? You're looking at this project and you're like, okay, well, I can't write laravel code for this. So I guess I can't do anything. And it's like, no, you are a found of this company and the responsibilities of a founder is to figure out what needs to be done in order to move this business forward.
I spend such a small percentage of my time doing my core competence, like I spend on an entire year, I probably spend less than 50, 15% of my time doing like product development work. That is my functional expertise. I spend so much more time like dealing with accountants and contracts and like, you know, content and all of this other stuff that is not my functional expertise and learning new things that I didn't know how to do that.
You know, and if they're not the most exciting thing, or I don't know how to do it, like figuring out who I need to, like what kind of freelancer or whatever I need to hire to get that done. Right. But like, as a founder, nobody's gonna give you a list of, of what to do, and they're not gonna tailor that list for what you're good at. It's up for you to figure it out.
And, but the key to that is believing that you are capable of figuring out whatever that is, that are capable of figuring out what needs to be figured out.
Yeah.
And you can.
great. That's great feedback. I mean, that absolutely is great. And it's almost like I have been okay. I haven't been sitting around, I've been working my butt off,
I I know you
it's, but, but this just occurred to me as you are speaking this. So we have this awesome team of people who are really, really good at what they do. And Sean is really, really good at marketing. So he was gonna do that, but he's swamped because he has all this development work and he has a full time job. And. I could be doing that. I mean, what, what you are saying, what I am thinking, as you're saying this, I'm almost using this as a, as an excuse to not do that.
Cause I'm like, well, he'll be better at it when he has time for it, but he doesn't have time for it.
And Sean can teach you how to do it. Sean came on this very podcast and taught me how to market a book like. I did not have Sean market. The book for me. I had Sean tell me how to market the book. And then I did it.
Right. There's no reason if I can't contribute, obviously I'm building the rail side up, but if I can't contribute to the laravel development work, that is what is the reason we haven't shipped yet. Or I guess it's view development, work, whatever, there's a lot to your point, like this is a business I need to do businessy things. And if I don't know how to do them, I'll learn. I've just kind of been waiting for someone else to do them. I think, which just occurred to me. So that's silly.
So I should definitely do them. That's a good, that's great feedback.
And I mean, the thing about the businessy stuff and like you're an engineer, right? You might be used to like getting a spec from somebody of how something should work and like what you're supposed to do. And like, It's so different than being an employee. Nobody's gonna hand you the list of, of how things gonna work, but like you basically, your spec right now is Hammer stone needs to be able to support your salary in five months. Go, go. That's that? That's the
right.
like and figure out however that needs to be done.
This is so good, Michelle, because this is funny, cuz I brought this up with the guys just last week. Cuz I, the same thing we were talking about, I was like, I'm gonna be down in August. Are we gonna be able to pay me? And it was, we didn't think like this though. They, we were thinking, oh, well the product's not done. So.
It's not about the product. It is about selling the.
It's not about the product. Geez. So weird. Yes. I love this. This is so good. Okay. I like my spec, my spec. I have to be able to pay myself in five months. It's a good spec.
Go sell the thing, stop coding the thing.
Stop coding the thing. Go sell the thing.
I mean, So I mean, my vote is for, you know, keep the lights on with simple file upload, like keep it running, but focus that the time and energy and whatever you wanna call that, I don't know. I don't know, like you, you experience Like you're sitting at your desk and you're like, okay. I actually don't really know what I have to work on right now. And you could go off and do some something else. You could go off on another project, right? You could like, or, you know, Further time away.
Right. But like using that, when you have that time, be like, okay, how can I use this time to promote hammer stone? Whether that's writing content, writing documentation, figuring out BI ops, pitching yourself to be on a podcast, pitching yourself to be on a panel, doing something that gets you toward that MRR that helps you. I guess it's not really like an, it's not a subscription product, right? It's like a license, right. It's like a,
a annual annual
okay. Okay. That a Arrr then that lets you work on this full time and not have to go back to client work.
I'm gonna write that on a sticky and put it on my computer. just
Maybe we should record this. So then you can come back to it.
maybe we should do that.
we should like do it every week and then you can like update us on your progress
what an idea.
all, all of this, not coding you're doing
what an idea.
I feel like we got a plan.
Yeah, I love it. I'm this is exciting. I'm I'm excited.
Next week or whenever actually. So we're not gonna, it's not gonna be the two of us because hypothetically I will see you soon.
You better. better.
yeah. In a couple weeks you will have an update for me, keep a journal, a log of all of the. BI ops marketing stuff. And then the thing is, is like, if you feel like you hit a snag on the, the non Cody stuff, we'll call it like talk to me, I do all of this stuff. I have an MBA. Like I am here to help you. Like, I, you like just, you know, point you in the right direction when you don't know where to go on something, right? We'll figure it out together.
Okay. I love it. Cool.
It's a plan. All right. I guess that's, I guess that's it for today,
end, the end.
the end.