Welcome back to Software Social. I'm super excited to have a special guest today, Zach Goldie. Zach is a positioning consultant. Zach, can you please tell us what a positioning consultant. All right.
Yeah. I, so positioning consultant is partly a term I made up for myself because it sounded fun. Um, which is so all of my work is with so B2B tech companies, and it's a lot about helping them refine the pitch so that it's like clear how it helps, like decide who it's for. They. They are up to what they've tried already, what the product is, how that fits into that kind of their stories so far and building the pitch for the company.
So kind of much more than writing nice words or pretty pitch, just like, okay, how do we pitch this? What's the positioning of the product. And that is what I do for.
Awesome. So I asked you on today because you've actually done some work for hammer stone, one of my startups, and we're in the midst of working on that. And I also wanted to get your take on simple file upload because I feel I've pushed out a ton of product features and I feel a little. I dunno, lost, I guess in clarifying my message in terms of what I do. I feel like I'm all over the place. I'm kind of scatterbrained. And so I'd love to get your take on that.
Yeah. Yeah. That sounds like pretty much every startup entrepreneur where like you build all of these things and you're like, but there's so many things that are cool about, then you kind of get lost in trying to say any of them. You're like, oh, now I'm not saying any of them. That becomes a little bit like, yeah.
Exactly. That's exactly where I am right now.
So the things and how do I summarize them all in one pithy sentence? Like, yeah. That's
exactly. Okay. So my thought, oh, I have a couple of thoughts of how to approach this and I want to talk to you about this. So this is predominantly a Heroku add-on. And so my thought was we obviously don't have hours and hours. We have a period of time today to work on this. My thought was to focus on the Heroku entry points. Since most people find me through.
Yes, that sounds sensible to me. And I imagine so I don't know, probably main sessions that people either searching upload or S3 something
along those lines. That's my guess is people come in here. So this is, this was upload, but they come in here to this, you know, main all elements page and they search. I dunno what they search, but I assume they're searching file uploads or storage or S3 or something.
Yes, it might be worth it. Honestly, our listeners would like to admit that we have talked through this a little bit and I've done some amounts of poking around and research. So I'm not just coming into this completely cold.
That's true. We did do a little pre pre podcast chat.
Yeah. Work out what this product is. Um, so yeah, so. I think part of the challenges, partly that you're not the only one, which is fine. It's kind of a good position to be in because if you're the only one doing something, it's like, why am I the only one day this is this. Cause now once it all, so like competition is good. And would it be scared of that? Yeah. So I tried three as a search term. And if to that, like you can see quite a lot, a bunch of other files uploading to S3.
Cause if I'm not mistaken, news is based around that
as well. It is. And I noticed mine does actually not come up. Oh, it
did. Yeah. But I think I might've been in a different window. Oh,
okay. S three.
I think I was searching specifically, the ad-ons not the all elements or something.
So, yeah, yeah, yeah, there we go. There we go.
Okay. But in this list, I think then the only one that doesn't mention S3 in the little title, right?
Wait, this is data stores. Interesting. And then my. As in data store utilities. So here's the deal you have to pick. If I recall correctly, I had to pick one, like you can, I'll double check that, but I don't think I can be in both of these categories when I submit the add on, I had to pick just one category to be in. So I went data store utilities, although mine is technically a data store and a data store.
Why say, can you explain the difference quickly?
So I believe when they're saying data stores are just showing you like this, this bucket here, that's just an S3 bucket. This add on just spins up buckets for you and provides you with your IAM credentials. And I think a lot of these are in that space where they're. Storage and an interface to storage. Whereas I consider mine a data store utility because I provide the data store, but I also provide all of the architecture around using the data store. I don't just dump you some IAS.
You know, credentials, I give you the whole widget. I serve the files. So
for my sake, since I work a lot of dev tools, but I'm not a developer myself. So I ended up asking all the questions. I'm like, oh yeah, that is a good question. So if someone were to set up one of those, just kind of S3 buckets, what work would you see? What would be the kind of a typical workflow that comes after that? Could you tell me about that?
So for the S3 only. Um, I've used this one. So that's why I'm going to speak to this one specifically. You just provision this, add on, and then it literally gives you credentials to access an S3 bucket. So you, as the developer have to know how to use S3. If you want to drop zone, like what I provide, like a file drop. You have to build all of that out with JavaScript and you have to build all of the server side stuff like this. Literally just gives you keys to access it.
Okay. I guess then there's a bit of an awareness level of, so always think about where a potential customer is in terms of what they thought about so far. How familiar are they with this? If we a detour by a hammer stone for a moment, because that'd be fun. So, yeah. When I talked to your colleague, Sean, about Hammerstone, one of my first questions on here is like, so it's a query builder like, building like great. Would anyone know what a query builder is?
Because it's like, kind of, they know what a query is. I'm like, yeah. But like, so there's, there's a great book made to stick by Chip and Dan Heath. Which is all about kind of communicating big ideas.
And there's a great concept in there, which I think they'd take them somewhere else called the curse of knowledge, which is when you know, a whole load about a subject, you can say one phrase and you know, all the implications of what you mean by that phrase, you know, like that you don't have to do any setup, you know, all the different steps of setup that someone doesn't have to do where someone who's not familiar with that. I don't have to do set up on the go. Okay. They're set up in both.
I don't have to do, and that's about it. So it's that kind of, even if you say, oh, there's this as a bucket, does that mean as much to them as it does to you? And it's these kinds of questions that I think trap a lot of founders where they know what they mean by a short phrase, whereas it's quite hard to like take the step back and go, oh yeah, everyone knows. They might know what I mean, but not like fully appreciate, like with state.
One of my follow-up questions was so what's the main alternative. And Sean said they would kind of make a DIY version and like, so then we had to talk through like the fact that people probably think it's a week project, but actually it ends up turning into three months and why it turns into a three month project and having to spell it. Exactly. Why just buying something off the shelf is a bad idea than DIY.
Cause he can say building, it was a bad idea, but they don't know exactly all the details of, you know, about why it's a terrible idea to build here in QueryBuilder.
Okay. Yeah. So I do have, I think I'd absolutely have that problem. Having lived through, having lived through building this and dealing with this. That's
fine.
So what would you recommend?
So if we take a step back and think about it from your prospect's point of view, so it's someone I know you said it's kind of fairly, maybe new piece of software, small business, and you're not looking at massive enterprises at this point. Correct. Is that about right. So then there's a question of how much would that develop her? Would they be experienced? Do you think they've tried doing, setting up SV before? Or is that not something they've probably done?
Hmm. I would think they had tried to set up S3 before and. Either succeeded, but realized how painful it was or got frustrated or kind of another thing you see is you see, like they have, they don't have set it up, but they do this thing where, what they really want is a drop file box. That'll resize their images, but they get halfway there and they end up just with a normal. And they get frustrated and don't finish that job.
Okay. I guess that might be an issue if they've done it before, it might be so long ago that they've forgotten how good the pain that was to
do. Yeah. I think the people who want this, you know, they're the people that want to move quickly. So I think it's, like I said, I do see a lot of like hobbyists and students, but also people, you know, getting. You know, with small, like small businesses getting that off the ground, they want to add file uploading, you know? Um, but it's not as well,
which is always a good thing for
businesses. Yeah. Like when I think about the people who are using it now, I've got like a nail salon, a real estate company, a form company, couple of people using it for forms. It's pretty popular for forms. So yeah. So those people, I think they are developers. They're trying to do a lot with, with a small team. And so doing things like setting up as three, whether they've done it before and they've forgotten how to do it, or they just kinda know it's going to be a pain.
So I think that's kind of the people based on my current customers.
So we can assume that there's that kind of awareness level of that they know that they probably need to use a fee, but don't necessarily want to use a FICO. It's a pain.
Yes. I feel like that is accurate.
Okay. So I guess. There's like a couple of ways of approaching it. You can talk through. The steps that they want to avoid. Like you don't have to do general setup, step a, B, and C. You just get the finished results. That'd be quite a nice way of talking about it. Or you can talk about just jumping straight to the results of like it's a pre-configured file upload the builder, which already has set up file resizing, something else and something else.
Okay. So my first, my first question would be, I mean, both of those sound good. I only get like one sentence here. So this, we had kind of pre talked about how many. Fixing this, or making this more descriptive would be, would be a great win from this conversation. Um, and then I could, I could flush that out, but I, and I know.
Okay. So I want to tell you what it does, even though you, you know, I mean, I think I have the curse of knowledge and I'm like, it does all these things, but what it does, why it's. Okay. That's better than the competing alternatives, because it's easier. It does browser size file resizing. It does on-demand file resizing. It allows you to limit the type of files you accept. It allows you to limit the size of it. Does all of these things. I'm like, I don't know how to get that in one sentence.
My thing is better than. Can that be my sentence, but, but when I list the features, when I really think about what it does and what you're replacing, cause you were talking about, you just said, I wrote a note, you know, make a list of what you don't have to do. If you use my thing. It's a lot, it's like 10 things.
Could you abbreviate that down to like three things of like three big chunks of you don't have to do configurations something. I don't know enough about S3 to come up with three
ideas. Yep. I think so. If I had to pick three things that are the most impressive or the most annoying, the most annoying it would be. And I'm just speaking, then this isn't what we'd have them as, but like, you don't have to set up a AWS and you don't have to use AWS console. You don't have to build out the client and server, so you don't have to build out the drop, like a file drop. You don't have to build out the server. You don't have to build out all of that.
That sounds like all of the architecture around using AWS. You don't have to build that out. I already do that for you. And then. Then the last one would be, and I do all the file resizing and optimization for you. Should you want it?
Yeah, I mean, so there's a few ways of you. Okay. There's two paths you could do this, that I'm thinking of. You can either go for like the end you found uploading, or you could double down on that resizing aspect. That's quite a popular thing and make that like a core part of that tagline pre-configured setup. Including file resizing and hosting or something
else. I think that's a big thing. I think I should double down on images because like, I take all kinds of files, but people are 80, 90% of people use it just for images. So I feel good about double down and doubling down on the image aspects. That'd
be good then that already makes it a bit more like image optimized as,
Ooh, that's a nice, it's a nice word. A nice phrase.
already too. Yeah. So that's. The space is a limit. Do you know? You've got most of the, I'm just looking at the other like line length of the other ones. You don't get much more attendee about 20 words or something like that.
It's not a
lot, not a lot. So one medium length sentence is all we have to play. Has anyone listening, FYI really have a short sentence that we're trying to squeeze. We have
to turn all of that. I just said into one sentence that can't be too long.
Yes. I think narrowing it down to images. If that's what people are mostly after, like using it for could be a good tactic. There's one of those things where narrowing it down is always scary because you feel like you're alienating some potential customers. Right? If it's sacrificing the few for the many of them, that's fine.
Like, if you're more, a little bit, like if you're going to see if it will make you that much more appealing to the majority of your customers and isn't that obviously good to like the 20% that's like, it's only a small minority. It's like, well, why not just double down on being more appealing to the majority of your customers.
Okay. Um, I'm comfortable with that. Like I think I'm willing to make that change. That seems reasonable. Cool.
So then simple file. Upload could be something about pre-configured S3, uploading, optimize the file. Resizing file. I'm losing technical terms
here. There's a lot of words. Um, I liked the pre-configured S three because I should be showing up for S three search results and okay. Pre-configured S3. You said pre-configured S3, uploading, optimizing file resizing.
Okay. Pre-configured or like already set up as quite a big part of it. It's not just that it's ready to go with the Roku. It's already like that. The S3 side of things is done. Like you'll never have to touch S3. It's fine
guys. Oh my gosh. I'm going to add that on the other
page. That's pretty much your like main statements of like, you don't have to touch us three. It's fine.
That's amazing. So let me, okay. So I do want to, yeah, I'm adding that on my main page. That might be my bold tagline. Um, okay. So yes, I agree. I think. You never have to touch S3 is a huge selling point. The whole optimizing file resizing is a huge selling point. And like all of the stuff around that is done. I mean, cause if you look at this right now, I have the fastest way to add file uploads to your Heroku application that doesn't tell you anything. The
fastest is good, but you know why it's the fastest to read. Right. Okay. So this is where that like curse knowledge then comes from, like, why is it the fastest to be more specific? It's mostly that S3 side of things that they don't have to deal with configuration configurating this, that and the other. Okay.
So I said
configurated which just brush
past that positioning consultants, do they. That's gotta
be a thing. Okay. Let's make it sound like, uh, writing now.
Okay. So what I have is pre-configured S3. I like that. I like that. Pre-configure S3 for, let's see S three for uploading uploading images and resizing and resizing images. Easily.
I mean, easily bit. It's already implied by the fact it's pre-configured
with. Okay. pre-K you're right. You're right. And I don't have a lot of words. So this is like a word count thing pre-configured S3 for uploading and resizing images. With an upload widget provided by an upload widget by a customizable upload widget. Is that too many buzzwords? Is
that, is that a big factor? Do you think that widgets? I
think it is because I think like you get a lot of, I don't know. I think. Okay.
Let's dive into that then. Like, what's good about having a customizable workflow, which it sounds like a silly question to you, but
no, no, you don't have to write JavaScript. That's what's good about it. No JavaScript required. That's what I should say. No JavaScript required. Oh my gosh. This is so fun.
I just said to my job is asking the right questions. That's fine.
So how about pre-configured S3 for uploading and resizing images, period? No JavaScript required. No, no, no. Wait that doesn't tell them what it is though. Pre-configured S3 for uploading and resize images. With a customizable upload widget, no JavaScript required is that too many words let's do it. And we can do it in real time, which is fine. Um, okay, so it's ad-ons next. And then simple file upload and then marketplace listing. I think here it is.
So I can like do it in real time, which is fun. Okay. So this is what I had before the fastest way to add files to your Heroku application. So let's riff on this pre configured. Three for uploading and resizing images with a, a snazzy. I want to say snazzy. That's not, I want to say, I don't know why it came to me with a easy to configure upload widget, no Java script or server side code required.
Well, it let's see if it gives the length error, maximum 80 characters.
I have to move our video. What did it say? 80 characters. How many CA uh,
um, it's annoying. It doesn't give you character count underneath the road. Come on, Heroku.
This is great.
Yeah, you might want to rearrange it a bit saying, um, image uploading using pretty conservative. That's three. I don't know if you want to open up the image a bit and then say us three
image uploading using pre config. You're
a pre-configured set up,
but no, I like set up
say a pre-configured, but yes, um, Is your easy to configure upload, which at the same as a JavaScript free upload widget is so easy to configure and JavaScript free are pretty much saying the same thing. So you could probably get rid of one or the other. So
you say lean into the JavaScript.
Great. No S3, no JavaScript. Those are the main two selling points.
Oh, I'm writing that down. Hold on. That's another one. No S3, no Java. Yeah. Okay,
cool. So how do they configure
it's? I mean, they have to add a script tag, they add a script tag and then they have to add a class of simple file upload to wherever they want the file drop zone to appear. And I
guess they do something on the front end to change that into a button that actually exists on the form or whatever.
So what they do is they actually do a hidden input and then I hook into their hidden input and provide them the dry. So they don't even need to make a button. They can, if they want it to be like a modal, but most people actually, almost all people are not doing that. They're just putting a hidden input and turning it right into a here I'll show you on the homepage.
Okay. So like, this is what they're doing and all they had to do to add this would be the hidden input with the class, a simple file upload. Then I hook into that class, replace their hidden input with this drug.
Okay. So could you almost, instead of saying about a customizable widget, say with one hidden inputs or something like that, would that be synonymous like
equivalent? So what I, what met my customizables, I meant they could change the colors and stuff, but I don't know if that's a huge deal and that's pretty obvious, I think once they get into it. So I don't know if that needs to be on this front page. I don't think that's as big of a selling point as this other stuff. Image uploading use of pre-configured S3 set. Add one hidden. I'm not going to have enough characters to tell him what
to do. I want to mention still with the imagery sizing
image, resizing and serving included or image.
That sounds good
sizing and serving included
no JavaScript, JavaScript
image uploading using a preconfigured S3 setup, imagery, sizing, and serving includes. I need to say something about a widget, because I feel like it's still kind of unclear that there's a widget
tips. Yeah,
they do. And you know, it'd be interesting just for fun. Let's see what the other big, like the big enterprise level players here are like Cloudinary and there
is a factor we don't have to completely sell it with the sentence really to give them a reason to click through, into the main. Which is easy
to forget. Right, right, right. Everything doesn't need to be in the sentence. Okay. So for context, Cloudinary does the same thing at an enterprise level there's is manage, optimize and deliver high performance image and video experiences. That's interesting. So they don't talk about storage and they don't talk about their widget upload Karen. So
it doesn't make it clear how much work that requests me.
Which file stack the complete file infrastructure. Now see these don't tell me anything. I don't really like these other two. Um,
I assume the enterprise marketing is any better than anyone. Else's mark.
There's a quote. I think that's going to be the quote that the title of the oh, okay, cool. Yeah. So I don't know that they're I don't, I don't really like there's image uploading. Okay. So let's go back to this and you're right. I just want them to click.
Yeah, you need to give them a good reason. I'm like, oh, this one sounds like a good one to read the details about. Right. And I think that's yeah, the pre-configured S3 and no JavaScript quad. That sounds like, oh, that's that sounds easy. Now. It sounds easy without you saying
it's easy. I like that. You're right now. It sounds easy without me saying it's easy.
It's a short enough amount of characters. If you delete our old. I think it is.
Oh my goodness. I got wait now I really have to, okay. I got to get a cash account. Hold on. I'm going to have to remember how to get a character
count. And actually it depends how fast through the process they are thinking at the moment they might have only been thinking about. Yeah, three aside, the things not about actually getting on their websites, they might not be thinking as far ahead as how do I implement this app? This watch, that browsing these listings, right? In which case you'll possibly jump in, like, would it be hurting, but you probably don't need to mention JavaScript if they're not thinking about it.
Yeah, I guess I see what you're saying. Geez. I can't believe that's too long. Sorry.
Uh, could do you need the serving as well as uploading? Could you say image uploading and resizing using the pre-configured specifi set setup. Delete that middle sentence of
image. Yep. Image uploading and resizing using a pre-configured S3 setup. No JavaScript required. Bam. That's got a be to characters.
What? No, that can't be
right. Hold on. Right. I'm going to cancel it. However, I mean, they're like interface here. Isn't that? Great. So this might just be a, I can't be 80
characters.
Okay. Hold on. Let me put this over in my pages document and get a word count. Okay, I'm back. I check the word count. It's 73 characters without spaces, 85. This is 85 characters. Wow. Okay. That's 84. I can't believe they count spaces. That's terrible. Um, image uploading and resizing using
a pre configured. This a very long word. Is there a shorter way that we could do pre-built?
Yes. Got it. All right. Cool. All right, let's go back to me. It might take a minute for it to,
okay. Should we summarize for our listeners? What the heck? What we've just been talking about? Okay. So we were talking about personal edge. When you say easy, no one else knows what you mean by easier. Why? It's easy to say, actually, it's more valuable to explain. Often the steps that are skipping, if you're all about skipping a bunch of steps. So in this case, it's mostly about pre the fact that S3 is pre-configured and they don't have to touch it, which is nice.
And then the other side of it is that it's also easy because they don't need. And this amount of JavaScript and turning it into something on the world website once they've done the backend.
Yes. And so my big takeaways today, Zach are, and I think this is for a lot of our listeners who are building businesses. This is going to be really helpful. Like my big takeaway is we have so much context. What did you call it? The curse of knowledge. Like we, as the person who built the thing, we have so much context on the thing that we just forget to tell them about. Yeah. Okay.
Well, you think you've told them about the thing and you've said like one summary statement that actually make that sounds good. What are the
details, right? Yeah. All right. I just want to see this. I want to see this live. It probably takes a minute to actually propagate image uploading. So what we started with to summarize, I had the fastest way to add file uploads to your Heroku application. And you pointed out that that doesn't really tell me much. What'd you say that's accurate? Yes. Okay. And so that's all right. That's fine. I'm here to learn. I'm here to, uh, you know, here to execute.
Okay. And so we just changed it to image uploading and resizing using a pre-built S3 setup. No JavaScript required. So,
so a upload it, ignoring everyone. Who's not doing image uploading cause that's most of your users.
Right. Right. And that's, uh, you know, like you said, that's a tactical decision we made to try and target those specific people. Since most people are using it that way anyway. And they can always click into it and see that it takes other files and then the no JavaScript required. And the prebuilt S3 infer the easy part. Yes. Tell them how it's easy.
I can connect through for the details of exactly how that means it's easy,
Right, so this is my first step in a long step of I'm updating my copy, I think, to teach them exactly what it does. So Zach, thank you so much for coming on today. It was, it was really fun. This is. You know, something I'm trying to get better at. It's kind of outside my sphere of, of expertise. And so I really appreciate having you here. If people want to find you or learn more about you, where can they find you?
They can find me at zachgoldie.com. You will tell me off, uh, still not particularly using Twitter. Oh man. There's only so many hours of the day, but yeah. So it was that zachgoldie.com is my website and people can find me there. Awesome. All right,
Zach. Might be starting a podcast soon, but Ooh. Yeah, that'll be great. And let us know when you do that. Cause we'll publish that in our feed. Yes. Um, awesome. Thank you so much, Zach. Really appreciate your time.
Bye bye.