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Developers building a software business on our own terms.
Josh: So we are here with JP Boiley, who's a longtime friend of Honeybadger, and we were just talking about when we actually met. I think it was, like, 2013 or 14 at a RubyConf. I almost want to say I know I ran into you guys, like, a a few places. One of them I want to say was Ruby on Ales.
JP Boily: And I was not there.
Josh: Were you not there? I mean, some other people from Rainforest.
JP Boily: Yeah. Exactly. Russ from Rainforest was there. And I think he was the first one to like, they made they made to go up on the stage, and he didn't know why, because he was the first get a beer at 10 AM or something like that. So, yeah, he was there, but I was not there. Definitely, it was great. I think we've met probably at RubyConf in 2013.
Josh: And you were working at Rainforest, though, I believe, at the time, maybe, or—
JP Boily: Not yet.
Josh: Was it not yet? Okay.
JP Boily: Not yet, but it—but I've met the guys there actually. And that's a that's an interesting conversation about, like, how conferences can have a major impact.
I have met Russ from Rainforest, and Simon who was there back then too, at a RubyConf. And it was like—we had a great time and they were hiring back then, but, like, in SF. So I was like, that's fine. We just like we hung out. We had fun.
It was great. And a few months later, I did TechCrunch, and I'm like, hey, guys, when you are hiring remote, let me know. I would be interested in blah blah blah. He's like, yeah, I will think about you. I was like, yeah. I'm like, just being polite. And then 2 hours later, he's like, Yeah. Let's do it. And then took a few months before I actually onboarded. But yeah.
Josh: Okay. Man, so we've known you, like, a really long time, pretty much since we started going to conferences with Honeybadger because we started Honeybadger in 2012. And I know Rainforest was a customer of Honeybadger, I believe.
JP Boily: That's possible. I don't remember. Okay. I'm trying to remember. I think so. I think so.
Josh: Okay. If they were, I don’t—maybe that was your doing. I'm not sure if it was. Thank you for that.
JP Boily: Gladly.
Josh: But, yeah, it's been a while, yeah.
JP Boily: Yeah. And we've met at a few conferences.
Josh: Yeah. And MicroConf. MicroConf. Yeah.
JP Boily: A couple of times for sure.
Josh: Yeah. And I remember that. I think the last time we saw each other at the Tropicana there in the room with the whiskey and all, that was yeah.
JP Boily: Yeah. Always travel with some whiskey. Yeah. We were, like, maybe at 10 people or something. It was it was great.
Really great. And, yeah, I didn't go to Ruby, to, MicroComp since then. Have you done?
Josh: No. I I don't think I've been since 2019, maybe. That might have been my last. Then 2020 happened, and then we all stopped going to conferences. But I'm, like, thinking that there's a really good chance I'll be there, next year.
Like, I heard I was really regretting not going this year. There's a lot of FOMO.
JP Boily: Yeah. Same. I really wish I was there. But, like, they moved today, and now it's so close to my daughter's birthday. Like, it just doesn't fit.
It's, like, 3 days before or something. But I don't want to leave my wife with all the organization and all that stuff. Just a couple days before. But it like, yeah. That was a great conference.
So looking forward to it.
Josh: We did go to Minneapolis one time. That must have been after that was after the Vegas move, obviously. So that must have been
Ben: I think that's 2019.
Josh: Was that 2019?
Ben: I'm I'm pretty sure.
Josh: Okay. So it might have been 2018 that we saw you that I saw you last.
JP Boily: My memory is too fuzzy for that.
Josh: I know. In any case, at the time—that you were building Metrics Watch at that time, I believe, your company that you recently sold. How long were you building Metrics Watch—like 9, 10 years or something like that?
JP Boily: I think it was around eight, nine years. Not exactly 10 or—but close to it. But it was, like, super part time for the first few years, like a few—a few hours here and there per week and things like that. And I struggled to make it to full time, because when I started—if we take a step back to when I started Metrics Watch, it was originally on a very bad premise. Like many businesses I'm assuming, and I was like, yeah—we at Rainforest, like, we were putting out blog posts and things like that.
And sometimes they were picking up like on Hacker News and things like that, like 50,000 people were reading it in the first 24 hours, but then we realized only the day after sometimes. And I was like, yeah, this would have been a great time to interact with the community. What a missed opportunity. So I was like, let’s have some Google Analytics adverts around it so that we know when we have spikes in the traffic or something like that.
So I was like, this is a use case for us. And at that time my daughter was like a baby. She was not sleeping. So I was not sleeping. So I was like, just—let’s start something. what a great idea. During the night.
Josh: Yeah.
JP Boily: Yeah, I started that and I was like, yeah, agencies will for sure want that to send out to your clients when they have a spike of traffic. And, uh spoiler alert, they don't care at all.
Josh: You mean they're not watching Hacker News.
JP Boily: Yeah, no and they don't care about spiking traffic in general—even clients, they generally don't care. But what happened over a few months after I launched it, because I had a client and like really quickly, a few ones—but what I realized was the agencies were having a different problem, basically.
Their reporting was an issue. So they were spending a lot of time copy pasting stuff from Google Analytics and various platforms to a report that looked shitty to send to their client as a xlsx file or a PDF at best, or something like that. And there were, of course, already reporting platforms.
But what I thought was like, even those reporting platforms do have a lot of friction. Why is it not in their inbox when they need it, instead of—yeah, if you set up some reports or dashboards to your clients, and they use it for a month or two and then stopped using it. So that's when Metrics Watch basically pivoted to a reporting platform.
So that's what the last few years were. Metrics Watch was like an email-based marketing reporting platform. So, sending all the key metrics to your clients, , all white label. And it still exists. I say what it was, but it's still that it's just not me anymore. And during that time at the beginning, I did the pivot. But I wasn't fully sure of that because I started to discover what the AdWords were useful for. The AdWords product is still alive and still as enterprise science. And if you go on the website, there's, like, big logos, like editor and cards, Spotify, and, like, big companies like that who were using it. And in general, it's not that there's a spike in traffic, but just know, hey.
Things are going south. Your conversion rate is super low, or you didn't have any sales in, like, the last x minutes, where this makes a lot more sense. So for example, we had a French company who were selling shoes for a ton of money per year, and their shopping cart went down for a few year a few hours, before even realizing it, and they lost tens of thousands of euros without even knowing it was down. So it was just like a small chunk of their checkout or something like that. So there was no monitoring around that.
So the closest to—because ideally, it would be monitoring your bank account or your Stripe account knowing there's no money in. But, like, the closest that we had was, like, Google Analytics and, like purchase there and things like that. So.
Josh: Yeah. That's cool. So when you first launched, you're not getting the results you initially thought. I'm just curious how you got in front of—so, I guess, like, agencies started, like, seeing this and identifying I can use this for something else, or did you go and do research to figure out, like, what to pivot to?
JP Boily: Yeah. It was conversation about, like what agencies were needing around that space. It was like—yeah. I already have something at—people in my network who might use that. So I started to have some conversation with, like, potential clients and people I reached out to viax` cold emails and things like that.
And it turned out, like, reporting was an issue, but I made a bunch of mistakes, of course. And, like, at the beginning, I was just like, yeah. It's just going to be Google Analytics. It's going to be just numbers and lists, no graphs at all because, yeah, you don't need graphs. Right?
Josh: Yeah. People people hate graphs and any anything visual. They just want to read.
JP Boily: Of course. So I didn't listen to them, and I was just like, yeah. I'll do what I think is best for you guys. So it took me a little while to realize that, like, I was wrong. But, yeah, I eventually made it up to you.
It's also, like—technically, like, putting graphs in email is not something fully solved because, yeah, you have, like, Charge JS and all those MyJS libraries, but JS in emails doesn't work. So I had a couple of versions over years. So, there was, like, a Ruby library that did generate images. I think it was called Gruff.
Ben: Gruff. Yep. Yeah.
JP Boily: It was good for what I needed to start with. And then at some point, it was just too limited for my needs and I think not super maintained or something. So I was like, I need something different and something nicer also. No offense to the Gruff author. So I was just like, there must be a way.
So, yeah, I build up an app that was basically running Charge.JS Atlas, like, adding API calls, generate, return a blob, or something like that. I don't remember the exact details, but it ended up being that. So, yeah, when I started to listen to people a little bit more, it helped for sure. When people are just at you with their credit card and asking questions, sometimes it's interesting to listen to them.
Josh: Yeah. I remember this was, like, the topic back at like, during Micro Conf back then too. And it was just—it’s, like, a common story. Like, you start with one thing and then you realize you were wrong. And you have to pivot. I could think, like, Rob Walling had similar—a little bit of a similar experience in early Drip, which think was around those that time. Yeah.
JP Boily: It's a pretty common mistake. Hopefully, I won't do it again. But, yeah, of course, other people will do it.
Josh: Unless you just take the lazy option and just copy a competitor right out of the gate, like Honeybadger, you know?
JP Boily: But even then, like, no, yeah. It's tricky because it's finding the right balance. Because at Rainforest QA, for instance, we have a lot more people and a lot more clients and all that stuff. So we cannot listen to everything.
So we said no to a bunch of things. And maybe it made sense or not, it doesn't really matter here. What I'm going for here is that, like, sometimes you don't want to listen to everything because you'll end up with the Homer Simpson car. I don't know.
Josh: Yeah. I just—
JP Boily: I don’t remember that. So the Homer mobile or something like that—which is, like, just weird. And you don't want to add all sorts of features that are notused because anyway, like, there—you will have feature that will not be that used, but you don't don't want to have too many of those.
Josh: Yeah.
JP Boily: Yeah. So that was just finding the right balance, and it took me a while. I'm not sure I found it exactly. But, yeah, I found some spot that worked and where okay. This line might be worth listening to—like this small little options here that's just like a boolean that will change things for him and make make us a few grand per year.
Josh: What's the—what was, like, the growth? Because you said it was, like, more part time in the beginning, and then it started to pick up and you went full time on it at some point. What was the growth trajectory, like, I guess, over the life of the business?
JP Boily: Slow. Very slow. So it took me a few years before going full time. I don't remember exactly when. And then I hired my first employees and was early pandemic when I hired my first employees. Before that, I was alone.
And I was like, yeah. It's probably a good idea. And I started to think about, like, how can I make it a bigger business also? Before that, it was like, I'm fine alone. But, yeah, I will start to think about what if I could make it just a little—just a little bit bigger?
I don't want to IPO or anything like that. That's not the point. But what if we could go from 1 to 5 or 10 or 15? And then eventually, maybe sell the business for x millions and things like that. So, started to think about it and hire some people, some were friends before, some became friends, like the biggest we were was four, so it was never a big business. I think it was in 2020 or 2021 that I hired my first employee, which was an interesting one.
Josh: Yeah. What were the roles? Like, who—what—who did you hire first?
JP Boily: The first role was marketing because I suck at marketing. Especially at marketing to marketers. That's not my thing. I live in Quebec, which explains explains the French Canadian accent, and I wanted to do just English marketing.
So hiring someone here didn't make much sense for the most part just because, yeah, not being native in English will maybe translate badly in blog posts and things like that. That's not fluent for the most part. And I was lucky, like, a friend of mine reached out to me and she was, “Yeah, my boyfriend who just moved off, from Scotland, he's a marketer”. I'm like, holy cow.
Okay, let’s talk. And, yeah, great guy. And I started to work with him, like, a few weeks after that. So that was a great fit. And then I hired a developer a few months later, I think. And then it was good. We had a good vibe. It was really fun, at least on my end of things. Hopefully, they would say the same—the same thing, but, yeah, I’ll ask them. I think it was good. I'm still friends. I'm still friends with them.
Josh: We'll get them on the show next week.
JP Boily: Yeah. Yeah. It was good until it started to go south a little bit in late 2022, early 2023. I realized that early 2023, I was going into a wall in terms of numbers. It was like this potential financial crisis that was slowly—they were we started to see. And Metrics Watch was not a core tool. Like, if the reporting is like some not something you need to run your business. Honeybadger is something you need to run your business—well, at least if you want to do it right.
So some people were like, yeah. We need to cut costs just in case because our clients are cutting costs just in case. There was quite a bit of churn and I had to let go of my friend at the marketing role and to do some hard decisions on salary too. And, yeah, the developer left a few months later. So I ended up alone, basically, in the space of—in the span of 6 months or something.
So going from it all goes well, to I'm back alone, to losing one of our biggest client during the summer after that. And, yeah, late 2023, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine. I was like, yeah. I'll put the business for sale, like, in a year or two. I just need to put the numbers back to something that makes sense or and whatnot. And during the conversation, he's like, well, what if you sold right now? How much would you sell? I'm like, I have no idea. And how much you would you sell in, like, a year from now?
I have no idea. Do you want to work for that delta? That's an amazing question. Yeah. So a week later, the business was on sale on acquire.com. Did some back of the napkin maths, and I was like, yeah. I think I'm done with reporting. Like, that that was not a passion to start with, so yeah. That was just like, I'm in my forties now.
Do I want to do another 10 years of reporting and and then it ticks? No. That's a clear no. So, yeah, I was just due to move to something else. So, yeah, I put the business on sale on acquire.com, which is a platform, I don't know if you know guys, which is just like the Facebook marketplace of businesses.
Josh: You think it was like, Micro Acquire before the rebrand? I remember so it's the founder's name is Andrew Gazzdekki, I believe. And the reason that name is burned into my brain is because he went on Cameo, like the site where you can get, like, celebrities to record, like, video messages for us. But he went and was having—I don't know if you ever watched Silicon Valley, but Russ Hanuman, the whatever, the trace commas billionaire from Silicon Valley, he had him, like, basically do these messages for a while.
And there's just the way he said the name, it's like, you can't forget it. So it was a genius marketing tip there. Get Russ Hanuman to tell repeat your name like 50 times. But yeah. But yeah. Micro or acquire.com now. I'm curious to hear how the experience with them was too. I don't think we've ever talked to anyone who actually sold a business through there.
JP Boily: It was a really smooth process for the most part. The platform was a really smooth process. Like, you just create a profile there. You list a bunch of, like, business metrics. It's mostly anonymized.
But, of course, when you say, who are your competitors and your email based reporting tool, well, that's not anonymous. So, yeah, I had, like, a friend, like I said, reaching out to me just a day after. Like, hey. You're sending Metrics Watch? Yes.
But that was fine. He was looking for a business on aquire.com, so that's why he got the email. And, yeah, you just list the business there, the price you want, like the multiples and all that stuff. You explain your story. You put P&L statements and things like that—as much detail as you can.
And when you press publish, I think they send an email the day after or something like that, like, with the new listings and things like that. So, there was quite a bit of interest few days after that. I was like, yeah. I'll sell the business in a week or 2. It sounds amazing.
Spoiler alert, it took more time than that. So it was, like, in late November or early December 20 like, last year, basically. And, yeah, things didn't move that much. And then in January, I had a guy reaching out, whom we have a few friends in common. So I didn't know him at all, but, like, I have friends who work with him and things like that.
So it was like, huh, interesting. And we have, like, similar backgrounds in Ruby. So he was a really good fit. So I was like, this sounds pretty promising. So we went back and forth until he made an offer, and we figured out, like, a number that would work for both of us.
But then things were—got a little bit complicated in terms of, like, Canadian IP—when you add some grants from the government and things like that. So we had to navigate that for a while. I'll leave the details for another episode, but, yeah, it took, like, maybe a month after that until we finalized things. It should have been massively faster, but it's just the IP stuff took. And then we, yeah.
We settled on the price and all, and it just happened. So acquire—acquire.com takes 5, 4%, but they are very helpful on that. I'll say you don't need a lawyer. Maybe it's not true, but I didn't take a lawyer. Yeah. They have all this paperwork and people helping them and, like, probably lawyers working with them and all that stuff. So and—
Josh: So they offload some of that, it sounds like. Okay.
JP Boily: Yeah. And there's an escrow—an escrow service. So when the buyer puts the money, on the escrow service, it's there, it's safe, And then you can transfer your assets, which for a digital business is basically credentials. So we spent the whole day changing credentials, disabling 2FA, reenabling 2FA, like, 7 hours straight. Was fun. Turns out no one does it the same way.
So, it was interesting. And then after that, there is, like, I don't remember how it's called exactly, but, like, basically a period where the buyer has time to look at the assets and make sure that, like, he has everything he's supposed to. And during that time, I was a little bit stressed. I was like, I don't have access to it anything anymore, and I don't have the money.
Yes, Ii’s on nestro.com, but do I want to learn—want to learn how to get that money? Like, no. But, yeah, like, a couple days later, you believe that maybe not even a couple days, just 24, 48 hours. I don't remember. But yeah. And then I was, like, mostly done with Metrics Watch. It was, like, mid March. So, we’re—we're still having monthly calls for the 1st year. So if there's, like, stuff logged and, like, things like that.
Josh: Yeah. Nice. So it sounds like 3, 4 months was the total?
JP Boily: I would—yeah. 4 months something. And, like, maybe 2 months between the first offer—between the first contact and the final release of the funds. Yeah. That was a very interesting but also very stressful period.
I have more white hairs than I had before.
Josh: I'm sure. Sounds like it. Man, when you were talking about just like 22 to 23, though, I don't know about you, Ben. That was taking me back a little bit because, like, just we to a lesser extent, but we definitely felt that. Like, yeah, people were evaluating costs and looking for places to cut. I know a lot of people were in that position and some worse than others, yeah.
JP Boily: And even big businesses. It's just that the impact was different. Like, I would not name names, but huge companies who hire like 30,000 engineers during the pandemic, but then had to let go 10,000 of them, like in 2022 or 2023, which is a bummer, of course, for those people. But they still have more employees than before. So everyone, like—were like, oh, pandemic. All the numbers are through. We can hire and grow, and it's, like, going to be amazing forever, but forever didn't last long. So
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. And then the interest rates started rising in the US too. That I know that probably didn't help things here. Yeah.
JP Boily: Yeah. Same here in Canada. Yeah. But it was fine. I mean, I'm in peace with that.
Of course, setting it a year later would have been better, but that's fine. I'm ready for a new page. See, what I did after selling was—basically, I had some things to wrap up until late April or something like that or early May. And then once I wrapped that up, I was like, I'm just going to take a break. My daughter is 10, so I was just going to spend the summer with her and take no decisions until the summer is done—is done, is wrapped up. So that's mostly what I've done.
Josh: You didn't go—you didn't weren't hacking on another app on the side?
JP Boily: I almost did, but then stopped myself. I wanted to take the full step back. I actually wanted to—
Josh: I don't think Ben would have resisted that urge.
Ben: No. I think.
JP Boily: Not exactly true because I actually started a new tool late 2023, but barely just scratched the surface during the Christmas break because what do you do during Christmas break? Of course, you started a new—you start a new SaaS business. Of course. So I bought a license of Jumpstart Rails, which is like basically a SaaS in a box from, what is it, Chris Oliver from Go Rails. It's an amazing product.
You spend a few $100 and basically, you have all the base for a SaaS business, including, teams, roles, billing, and all that stuff. Great stuff. So probably to work on a—on a product there, but barely. Didn't make it to functional. So yeah. I still kinda wish I did it. But so I'll tell you about the idea and the bad premise. So the bad premise was like the all the cool SaaS businesses have change logs. Right? Well, that's not true, but let's assume it's true.
And I used change log tool to just publish to my customers what are the new features, integrations, and bug fixes, and things like that. But it was shitty. I won't name the tool, but it was just shitty. And I was like, there must be a better way for me not to have to maintain that or barely. So I was like, AI, of course.
So the idea was to just like, okay. That’s—Metrics Watch was a monolith or mostly. So it could just be a change log dot MD file that you have to commit new stuff with every PR. So if there's no commit in the—if if there are no change there's no change in the change log file, then the build should fail.
And it should propose you what should be the change log items from your commits, if you didn't make any. And, like, basically, mostly automating that with some approval process to go to an email, to clients and things like that. But, yeah, I didn't make it to prod. The reason being, I started to think about, like, let's take a step back. Because, like, there was a fast forward, like, there was a couple of months, of pause between I started that in December, and I basically didn't do anything in 2024.
It was just like, I was focused on Metrics Watch and selling the business. And when I sold that, I was like, okay. What do I do with that now? So I took a step back. What do I want to do with Metrics Watch—after Metrics Watch? So I was like, maybe starting a new SaaS, of course. That sounds fun. What kind of SaaS do I want to do? Or what kind of SaaS do I don't want to do?
So there was, like, a few crackers that were pretty obvious to me. I don't want to be business critical, as in, like, if I'm down for 5 seconds since the end of the world, we need to talk about SLAs. I don't want that. I don't want to be down, but I don't want to talk about SLAs for 5 seconds.
Josh: Good. Good choice.
JP Boily: So it was that. I wanted to have developers or SaaS founders or product people as clients. There was like a few criterias. I don't want to be business critical, but I don't want to be too unimportant to run the business. And that's where I think a change log tool felt a little bit too risky for me because it's easy to niche.
You just send an email. It's very easy to replace. And I'm sure there's like great businesses. I've discovered a bunch of great businesses that do that. Great for them. It's just not for me. At least yeah. And that's where I decided to spend the summer thinking about nothing and doing nothing. Before the summer, I had a bunch of conversation with a lot of people who are willing to start new businesses, either agencies, SaaS businesses, hire me as a full time employee, hire me as a freelancer. And I told—I didn't tell yes to anyone was my motto.
I don't want I didn't say no to a lot of people, but I didn't say yes to anything. But now I did say yes to someone. Right now, I'm working as a consultant for a Canadian business called OudQ, where some friends of mine were working. Rob Yerkowski, that maybe you know, and Dave Sullivan that you sure know who built, I think, the Python library for you guys or worked on it. So they reached out to me, and they knew I would be work, like, looking for something possibly.
So I'm working 3 days a week for them right now. It's fun. It's, like, it's great to be just a developer, quote, unquote, not having think about all the business, all the stress about, like, the financial and all that stuff, and having my hands full time in the code. So that's fun times for now.
Josh: Yeah. What what do you think that would be like Ben?
Ben: Well, I was just saying this this morning or yesterday or something. Oh, it was this morning. I was on Blue Sky, and I was, who was it? It was our friend, Alex, over on the East Coast. And he was talking about how you can get so much good feedback when you're doing consulting, quickly.
Like, you get to learn about business problems quickly versus building the SaaS and are people actually gonna like this? Are they gonna use it? And so on. You can go and drop parachute into a business, see what their problems are, help them fix that problem, get paid for it while you're doing it, and get exposure to their problems and come up with ideas. And so as I was reading his post, I was just thinking back to the days when we were doing consulting and building apps for clients.
And it's like, maybe we should do that, Josh. Maybe we should take a summer or something like like JP to take some broth for Honeybadger and just go do some consulting, parachute into some companies, and, get some juices flowing that way. I don't know.
Josh: Yeah. That'd be fun. I haven't done consulting in so long. Yeah.
JP Boily: Yep. For me, like, what it ended up being also is I didn't want to do consulting on small gigs, because I had some smaller gigs before the summer, to help people in my network, like, help with app upgrades or helping juniors and things like that. And it's great. It's amazing, but I don't want to have too much context switching. So having smaller clients like you, like, run 3 or 4 clients at the same time, it's hard.
And I it's going to have, like, quite a mental impact on, like, my energy, my focus on things. So I was like, I think I need to focus just on one thing. So just one client for me right now is ideal, and I have so much fun. I don't see that changing the foreseeable future. Who knows? Maybe in a year or 2 from now, maybe I'll change my mind. But for now, it's just—stress is so low compared to where what it was a year ago and 6 months ago. It's it's great.
Josh: Yeah. It seems like a good idea to ride that, at least for a little while. I'm sure you'll get the bug, but maybe delay it as long as you can.
JP Boily: Yeah. There's that. That's also why I've been thinking about going back to conferences. I didn't go to RubyConf for years and years. And I was like, I want to go to a RubyConf. And Rails World, my wife was out of town, so 2 parents out of town at the same time. Not great. So RubyConf in I think it's Chicago. It's here. I was like, this is great. And then realized my daughter is off of school the same day. I'm like, yeah.
Josh: Oh, yeah.
JP Boily: Not not that one either. That's right. Yep. So I'll find one. I'll find one.
Ben: Well, there's a MicroConf happening in, March in New Orleans.
JP Boily: Oh, oh my god. Are you serious? Great timing. Great city?
Josh: Yeah. Are we going to that, Ben?
Ben: Oh, I'm definitely going. Yeah. I'll be there.
Josh: We're we'll be there. So Yeah. Yeah.
JP Boily: Okay. I'm likely to be there. I didn't know until a minute ago, but I'm likely to be there.
Josh: I think I might actually book my—I don't think they've released the tickets yet, but I saw someone had already booked, like, their lodging there, which seems like a really smart idea because you could get, like, I'm sure there's a lot of cool places to stay right now.
Ben: I have family nearby, so I'll probably make a vacation out of it after afterwards. And I thought, you know, if 2 of us are gonna be there, there's no reason why 4 of us can't be there. So maybe we make that a a Honeybadger get together there in—in the—
Josh: It's a great location.
Ben: It is.
Josh: I love yeah. I've been once, and I've wanted to go back ever since.
JP Boily: I really want to go there, and my wife is not that interested. So that sounds like a great timing to do it for me. So, yeah, I have the tab open now, so I'll look it up. So what are other conferences that you guys really like, or would suggest me to go?
Josh: Well, the regional Ruby conferences that have been popping up have been a lot of fun. I've been to several of those this year. I think they're mostly they're mostly done at least in the US for the year. I don't know. I think RubyConf is the last one on my radar.
But I went to Madison Ruby in Madison, Wisconsin. I went to Blue Ridge Ruby in Asheville. And let's see, where, Rocky Mountain Ruby was in Boulder just last month. And—or maybe it was this month. The months are bleeding together.
But, yeah, those were a lot of fun. There's a lot of, like, regional Ruby conferences popping up that have been cool, and I'm sure there will be more next year. We're actually—maybe we're trying to start one up here in the Pacific Northwest again, because there's there hasn't been one. So we'll see. Maybe next year there will be another option on the West Coast if you want to come visit us in the Portland area.
JP Boily: That would be amazing. Another place I've never went to.
Josh: It's a nice place to visit, especially in the summer.
JP Boily: Yeah. Just like Quebec. Great place to visit mainly in the summer.
Ben: Another business conference that you might like is the Business of Software Conference. That happens twice a year, and they just had the US one in October, I think it was. So the next one's gonna be in—I think they usually have it in Cambridge in the UK in the spring. So I've been to that one a few times. Love it every time I go.
It's fantastic. It's kind of like to me, it felt kinda like a grown up MicroConf. You know, people who are maybe farther down the road in the business of software.
JP Boily: Okay. Interesting. That's what I was going to ask. Like, what's the vibe versus MicroConf? I'm assuming it's bigger, is it?
Ben: It's actually they keep it pretty small. So it's I'd say about a 150, 200 people ish. So about I think about the same size as MicroConf was back in last time you and I were there.
JP Boily: Yeah. That's a nice size for a conference. My like—we like, I started to meet up 10 years well, even well, we—about around 10 years ago here. Meet up not for a specific language just like bunch of languages because it's too small. So just one dev meet up.
And we did a conference in 2019, and basically, we—it was supposed to be annual, but then pandemic happened. And then we never returned. But, yeah, I guess, I really like small conferences with, like, 100, 150, 200 people, just one track. Everyone's at the same place and pretty chill. I remember, like, I think one of my favorite one was Burlington RubyConf.
I don't know if you've ever been to Burlington, Vermont, but it's a pretty small town, but really nice. And the the downtown is kinda small, so it's like basically just a handful of streets. So, you were just hanging up in this the city and meeting up with other Rubyists. So it was really good vibe. Yeah.
What were your favorite conferences ever?
Josh: Oh, man. I know like, Rocky Mountain Ruby is one of my favorites. It was my second time, I think. The first was back in like 2014 or 15 maybe. And then it went away for a number of years and came back.
But Boulder, Colorado is a great kind of like, I don't know, high desert mountain, western style town. It's just, yeah, great vibe. And I mean, it's not a small town anymore, but it's, like, not a huge city either. And, yeah, just that's pretty cool.
JP Boily: When in on the conference level, what sets it—what sets it aside from the other ones?
Josh: That's a good question. I like, there's a great vibrant Ruby community in Boulder as far as I can tell. Partially, I think that is because it's been—it’s been kind of a magnet for like, they have a good tech culture there. There's a lot of tech companies that have moved to Boulder over the years or opened offices. So there's a large number of developers.
But then there's also they have like a Boulder Ruby meetup group that meets regularly that the conference came out of, as I understand it. So I think that's a great model for conferences to follow. Like if they have a core of regular people in the area, you can start a conference out of that. But yeah, I think it's just the existing community in Boulder. And then of course, the organizers are great and they select good talks.
And yeah. I don't know. The format is, like, pretty much what you said. A couple hundred people, single track. So everyone's watching the same thing—that really helps with meeting people. You have a chance to pretty much talk to everyone, and everyone's on the same page, which makes it easier than, like, at a like, a bigger multitrack conference where you have to compare notes on what you did the last hour or whatever.
JP Boily: Yeah. I remember that now. Yeah. Yeah. I really like smaller conferences. What about you, Ben?
Ben: Yeah. It's hard. Really hard to pick a favorite. I really liked Rocky Mountain Ruby because Boulder. Yeah. Like you said, it's a great town. I've really enjoyed RubyConf because you tend to get some really deep stuff at RubyConf and stuff that kinda opens your brain. You know? I did OzCon back in the day, sponsored by O'Reilly and all that open source. And that's really cool because if RubyConf is very deep, OzCon is very broad.
There's all kind of projects you can learn about and things you can get exposed to. But I think, like, overall, if I really was forced to pick, it would come—probably actually Business Software just because the material—because I love the business side so much, And it's just really excellent, excellent material at business software. And the people there are also fan—well, every conference are fantastic. Just the crowd is great. So, yeah, I guess if you really put me to it, I'd had to pick that one.
Josh: I've haven't been to a Business of Software still. You always go to that one. Maybe I gotta I'll have to tag along next time or or something.
JP Boily: Are you guys sometimes going to conferences together or mostly you split up? Because I'm assuming you go to conferences as part of the of the business to shop and be seen and all that stuff.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. We I guess it's about half and half lately where we either split up or go together. The bigger ones we’ll go, both of us, because there's just more people to grab, and we want to make sure that we're talking to as many people as possible. The smaller ones, I think we typically just tend to do one of us because you can have too much Honeybadger, right? You can be over.
Josh: Unless we just want to hang out in that location. And Right. Yeah. Yeah.
JP Boily: Yeah. Makes sense.
Josh: But, yeah, we went to we went to RailsWorld a few months ago, and we took the like, all of Honeybadger was there, which was nice. Well, all 4 of us. But, yeah, we made it a, like, a team. Got, like, an Airbnb and made it like a team retreat slash conference.
JP Boily: Nice. Yeah.
Ben: That was an awesome experience.
Josh: It was fun.
JP Boily: I'm very curious. I want to dig on that if you have time. Like, how do you manage that? Because for me, conferences have been, like, an effort for me to go alone and meet new people. Like, when I was in in Burlington, my native language is French, and back then I was really shitty in English.
Well, worse than now. So I just made some goals. Like, I need to meet at least at least 10 people and have meaningful conversations with them, not spend more than, like, 5 minutes alone and things like that. You can't do that as a team. It's a totally different vibe, I'm assuming. How do you manage that? Like, the business side and the team side.
Ben: Yeah. Well, this was our first time doing it, so maybe we're not experts yet. But I think, you know, we had to actually—Josh and I had to come to grips with, like, we want to hang out together, all 4 of us all the time. But at the same time, like, Josh and I have people we can talk to. Kevin and Roel, they want to go see a a presentation.
But for us, it’s—it may be more important that we not go to that presentation and instead have some time in the hallway with a particular person that we want to talk to. And so we had to, like, come to grips with this idea. Like, we're actually not gonna spend all our time together. And so it was kinda kinda weird. Like, we didn't see, Kevin and Roel, like, the first entire day.
Ben: We had the Airbnb together, but then at the conference, we just we split and did our—our different things. So we actually planned time ahead of time. So, like, we got there a day early so that we could just hang out and let's spend some more time together. We went to a ball game the night before.
Josh: So much fun.
JP Boily: Nice.
Ben: It felt better than to be able to be, okay, now we can have some time apart, you know, kinda like in a marriage. Right? You have some time together.
You have some time apart to keep the relationship healthy. Right? Uh-huh.
Josh: It would have felt, yeah, it would have felt weird if we hadn't, like, had that first day, like, the so we did the team day. That was really smart to do that. That was Ben's idea.
JP Boily: Yeah. That's a really smart idea indeed. And I wish I'd done that with my team. We went to a conference, and we didn't do that. We spent a lot of time together, but, like, having that first day just as a team, I think it's smart. It's just like the small thing. But, yeah, you at least you're sure to spend that time with the team and it still have to hang out at the conference, so yeah. Great mix.
Josh: Then the next step for us, though, is we'd like to do a we want to we're gonna do, like, a team—an actual team retreat that is not not around a conference, hopefully. So I think that's important too. We have been really bad at doing those. Yeah.
Ben: Yeah. Well, the last time they were really planning on doing one, we were getting gearing up for it, and that was the end of 2023 time frame. And then I was like, oh, crud. Like, the revenue is not gonna support what we want to do for team building activity. So we had to change those plans.
Josh: I don't know if you listened to that episode, JP, but you—you might want to go back. And I think it was it's titled Cutting to the Bone or something like that. You might have some—there might be some commiseration there. We had a kind of a rough year last year as well and didn't go as that—you know, we're still here and things are better, but it was turbulent. So
JP Boily: Yeah. It happened to a lot of people last year, and things are getting better for most people now, slowly but surely. So that's a good part of it. So, yeah, team retreats are great. You should do it when you can.
Yeah. But, yeah, I really like, when I was working at Rainforest QA, we were doing 4 per year. It was not always retreats. It were it was a bit a mix of on sites where, like, everyone not in SF were flying to SF, and we were doing some off sites. And I found out, like, the good—I think the good number is, like, probably twice per year.
More than that is quite intense on the schedule for family and all that stuff. If you're all in your mid mid twenties with no kids, it's totally different, but that's not where I'm at. So, like, twice because when you leave for a week, it's quite intense for the family and all that stuff.
Josh: That's a big reason why it's been—like, another reason why we struggled to make it work in the past. It's just because, like, everyone, basically everyone who's worked at Honeybadger has had kids and even small children over the last whatever 7, 8 years. It's been the young kids. Like my kids are 6 and 8 now. But for a long time, it was like everyone had—had little kids.
It seemed it's hard to make that—make the schedules all work together to find one location and and place in time.
JP Boily: Yes. Yes. That's very hard. And then you need to factor in the cost. Are you all based in the US?
Ben: We have—Roel’s in Toronto, but, otherwise, the rest of us are in the Pacific Northwest. Yeah.
JP Boily: Okay. It's not too bad in terms of traveling. There's that too. Because, again, when I was at Rainforest QA, like, when you are all in North America, it's fine, but then suddenly, people in South America, in Europe, and all that stuff, and then there's a bunch of curveballs around that.
Josh: We also have Pan—so, Pan is a a part time Honeybadger and he’s—but he's in Cyprus, which is further than Toronto. It's like, it would be cool to get, you know, like, our extended the—all of the extended Honeybadger together. But yeah.
Ben: Yeah. That would be cool.
JP Boily: Nice. Yeah. Food for thought.
Ben: Yeah. Well, you know, rails world next year is gonna be in Amsterdam. So we could potentially get all this over there, and then that's a little bit closer to Cyprus.
Josh: That's true. Yeah. I always wanted to visit Amsterdam.
JP Boily: Another a place that, yeah, I should visit. Yeah.
Josh: Yeah. The Europe conference circuit, there's a whole—there’s a, like, large Ruby world in Europe. And, I mean, and Asia, like Japan for that matter. There's Ruby Kaigi in Japan. But Europe has really been, like they've really been nailing it on the Ruby conference front.
Like, they've got seems like tons of Ruby events. Like you go to Ruby Conferences dot what is it?—dot com or dot org. I can't remember, but go search, like, Ruby Conferences. There's a website that lists them all too.
So that's a good place to check. But you do want to do some Europe travel I know people who it seems like they just spend their whole year going to Ruby conferences between the US and Europe. I haven't gotten over there yet but maybe someday.
JP Boily: It seems like the Ruby conference landscape changed quite a bit. There's a bunch of conferences disappeared. Then there's no Ruby conference in New York anymore, right? It was, Goruko?
Josh: Yeah. I don't think yeah. Right. Yep. Maybe it'll come.
JP Boily: It was great. But,
Ben: yeah, I know the Gusto team, they've been posting on Mastodon or Twitter lately asking about if anybody wants to get anything started in New York City. So maybe somebody come back.
Josh: Nice. Ben, you mentioned Blue Sky. Blue Sky has been having a resurgence this week with I guess the X is making—or Twitter—Twitter slash X is making more terrible decisions. And and there's been a bunch of people looking for alternatives again. But I just wanted to mention this.
We'll put in the show notes. But there are some startup people and bootstrappers beginning to land on Blue Sky. I think the difference between Blue Sky and Mastodon is they're both similar, like, technical, like, they're federated. You can go, like, research that if you want. But the gist is that Blue Sky feels more like 2009 Twitter in terms of the vibe and culture and just how the technology works. And some people prefer that to Mastodon for various reasons. We'll put the we have a list of that. You can find everyone in the bootstrapper scene on Blue Sky.
JP Boily: Yeah. I've seen that on Discord yesterday. How can people join your Discord?
Josh: They can join our discord. We'll put in the show notes for this. We did that once before. We should keep, yeah—we should keep mentioning that you can we have a secret discord not so secret. No no not I mean like it's not so secret like I tell everyone but we haven't put it on Honeybadger website for example it's kind of like you get the invite.
So, yeah, you should, like, go come over on Blue Sky, come join our Discord and hang out with us. I need to—for some reason, Ben, I just realized I don't think I have you in the starter pack for bootstrappers on Blue Sky.
Ben: I did notice that, yeah.
Josh: I searched for you. I searched for you, like, earlier today, and for some reason, I cannot find your account. Like, I need to like, I don't know if that's Blue Sky's failure, but I’m—just in my defense. Like, I've tried a few times. I'm going to figure it out because you should definitely be in there and the Ruby one for that matter. So maybe, like, send me your account so I can add you.
JP Boily: Sounds very easy to find people. That's great.
Josh: Yeah. No, I mean, like, it that's not. Yeah, it really is. I just don't know what's going on. Maybe I like I know it's not—your username is not stympy over there.
Ben: It is not. Yeah.
Josh: Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. But, yeah, come to Blue Sky. It's great. Twitter continues to feel more like truth social and Blue Sky feels more like Twitter.
JP Boily: I create an account right after this.
Josh: I'm really trying to sell it.
JP Boily: Yeah. But, yeah, that's interesting to see how many bad decisions can be done at X and still being around.
Josh: I'm sure it’s—it's not going—it’s probably not going anywhere, but it's good to have options. Right? Like, it's good to have lots of options. Well, this has been awesome, JP.
Ben: Yeah. It's been a lot of fun.
Josh: I don't like, you have much more of a beard than the last time. I think I saw you in 2018. It's just great to see you again in person.
JP Boily: The beard update in person.
Josh: Yeah. You just missed me on I had the beard a few years ago, so we're just missing each other.
JP Boily: Damn. We need to work on that.
Josh: Yeah. We gotta get that figured out. Cool.
JP Boily: It was really good to have you, to chat with you guys.
Josh: Is there anything you want in the show notes or where any social media or, like, anywhere—anything we people can do to help you out in what's next? We'll just—
JP Boily: Not really. Just follow me on my new Blue Sky account.
Josh: Got it.
JP Boily: In a few minutes.
Josh: Chat and join the discussion in the the Honeybadger, FoundersQuest Discord—I know you're in there too. All right, well, this has been a FounderQuest—you can find us at founderquestpodcast.com and please give us ratings and reviews on the—the websites and we will be back the next time we're back.