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Developers building a software business on our own terms.
Ben: Woohoo!
Josh: We're back.
Ben: We're back.
Josh: been a few weeks, I think.
Ben: Yeah, you know, the end of the year, the beginning of the year is kind of a crazy time. Like, vacations and holidays and then you come back and for me, I'm like, I'm just diving in, ready to go, January 1st, let me, or maybe January 2nd. Dive in there and then, like, Martin Luther King Day, there's another holiday.
It's like, oh, come on. Can't we just go back to normal? So now we have our first normal full week of the year. I'm excited.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. I've been hearing from a lot of people that like, that's been slow January getting back into the swing of things, but I'm back from my vacation and, finally feeling like I'm getting into the year and been getting work done and it's all been, it's all been really great [00:01:00] these past couple of weeks, actually.
So
Ben: Nice.
Josh: be past the, whatever that first of the year terror is that some people deal with.
Ben: Yeah, I'm feeling pretty good, too. I dove into the, the Clickhouse search stuff, and that's, pretty close to being ready to unleash on production. so it's been feeling good to make progress on that, and Insights, of course, making some progress there. So, yeah, it's been a great, great month so far.
In fact, this morning I was looking at some stats, and I was like, I was looking at our AWS bill and, uh, just checking some stuff. I did a migration last week and I was checking the costs on that. And, uh, as an aside, being able to scale up your DynamoDB tables to have a super high throughput just for a little while and then turn that back down, that's pretty cool.
So anyway, I was checking the costs on that and I'm like, what, why is the bill so high? I'm like, oh, it's the 23rd? Like, where did the month go? Ah, I don't know. So I guess that's a
Josh: yeah, it's flying by, but, I feel like we've been getting a lot of work done,this month, even with the delays and weather. And did we even mention the ice storm here in Portland and the snow in [00:02:00] Seattle? I know everyone around the country has been dealing with weather, so I don't think we're unique, but, uh, yeah, just sheet of ice for, I was, we didn't leave our house for the past week.
maybe that's part of the productivity boost though.
Ben: you
Josh: but yeah, it's been good. And I feel like we had some pretty good momentum, like on, like building the new, UI design that we've been working, we're rolling out, in December.
I feel like we're moving a little bit better than we were say in November or the prior months, leading up to getting those things shipped, which is part of our new goal. We should probably mention, is a hundred customers spending a hundred dollars per month, by March 31st is our, is our big goal.
Ben: Yeah, for our new product, we
Josh: For our new product
Ben: that expansion revenue, sweet, sweet expansion revenue.
Josh: Yep. So those could be current customers. It could be new customers. Hopefully a mix of both. we have no idea, how realistic this is, but this is what we're shooting for.
Ben: Yeah, it's good to have, it's good to have big goals and to have a daring kind of adventures like that.
Josh: Yeah, we had one customer reach out to us who is actually using the insights beta and they're loving it so much. They're like, so what's the pricing like? And,I thought that was pretty exciting. And then we had another customer who I reached out to them and talk about pricing and they were on board with what we're planning.
Ben: So it's good signals on that. So I, we may not hit a hundred customers, but we'll get at least one.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. And we might get that, sooner rather than later. that's the current, like the mini milestone that we're really going for right now is to get that first dollar in the door for this,new big feature slash product that we're adding to Honeybadger. And,we're working on pricing now.
That's the, we kind of got excited and. Built all the cool stuff and didn't build pricing. So we'll get that shipped out, I think pretty quickly. And as soon as that happens, like we don't have to have everything completely polished to start like onboarding the first couple customers who are already using the product, as is.
And I think we know at least a few of them are ready to pay. So I think we'll get that first dollar pretty quickly. I hope.
Ben: Yeah, and we're trying something new this [00:04:00] week. So we just started a part of our project management. We're trying to actually have some target dates for deliverables. That's not something that we've done much of in the past. We're not fans of arbitrary deadlines, but you know, it's good to have many milestones to get to your bigger goals.
so yeah, we're trying that. So we're shooting to have the insights pricing launched, by the end of this week. And,of course we might miss that. It's not going to kill anybody if we don't hit that date, but, that's our target date. That's our goal. our mini goal.
Josh: And if we don't hit it, we might like. Dedicate some more resources or put, kind of ship focus of the whole team. Right now, Roel is working on it and,pricing always is something you want to take your time with and make sure you get it right.
but yeah, I think that, we picked us a relatively simple implementation to start with to get, our current customers onto it. So I think we, we should have a good chance of getting there.
Ben: Yeah. I think, as per usual, when you're thinking about pricing, it's pretty easy to get stuck in analysis paralysis, what about this? And what about that? And is this the right
Josh: so many options.
Ben: yeah, and, I think it's been helpful. For [00:05:00] me to just frame it as, look, this is V1 pricing, right?
We're just going to go out the door with this and Hey, it might have bugs in it. And that's okay. if it has bugs, our customers will tell us and we'll figure it out. We can always change it.
Josh: It's MVP, minimal viable pricing.
Ben: There you go.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: You just got to have something for people to pay you.
Josh: Yep.
Ben: But before we get to our pricing stuff, before that's going to be out there in front of our customers, we're planning on having some UI updates out there in front of our customers. So that's one of our,
Josh: shiny new UI.
Ben: that's one of our many goals is to have some shiny new UI. And so today we're going to talk about how we're actually going to get that in front of our customers.
Josh: so this is, Something we've been working on and thinking about for a long time. And actually we, I think we spent more time thinking about it than working on it last year. we've, had this kind of simple user interface for Honeybadger for whatever, like 11 years.
I mean, it's changed over the years, but it hasn't changed drastically. and in the beginning, like it was a much simpler product. so the navigation and just the global elements that [00:06:00] were, the. information architecture and all that, that was set up in the beginning has evolved a little bit over time, but not too much.
And meanwhile, we've added like a ton of functionality and new features and new navigation links and, things. And, I think the, like just the general navigation slash shell of the application didn't really. keep up with that as well as it could. in addition, like we're trying to solve some of the just logical, or like accessibility things that,some links just don't belong where they currently are and we want to figure out how we can make everything intuitive and make it so that like when you click on something, you're not surprised by what's there.
So that was the goal, the way I put it, in the email that we sent to our customers today was like, we're trying to give Honeybadger, like a new coat of paint without changing the core workflows that everyone loves, and we'll get into why, we're a little sensitive to that.
but yeah, I think it was really great to finally like get into actually implementing What we learned from our research last year that we did with consultants and on our own of trying to figure [00:07:00] out how to like, make everything, be intuitive.
Ben: Yeah, and like you said, we've added a bunch of stuff over the years and we've fitted in where we can and in some ways it's made sense and other ways it didn't make the best sense. I know we were talking to someone recently and we're talking about the history of Honeybadger and he said, so you started with exception monitoring, right?
And I was taken aback by that because I had forgotten, we didn't always have uptime monitoring and cron monitoring.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: things that we've added on. And I was like, yeah, we did actually only have that one thing when we started. so I think, yeah, we've, we realized over the past year or so that, it was time for doing a bit of restructuring to be able to fit in some of these things in a way that made more sense.
So, you know, we're going to have things like being able to see the uptime at a glance over across the whole account, rather than, you know, just being so. Project base, which was the primary focus before. so there's a number of changes like that, that I think help get us, not only,adapted for the stuff that we've added so far, but also.
Positioning as well for adding the new stuff like insights, which are also going to have big impacts on the product.
Josh: [00:08:00] Right. I was going to say like, why are we drawing the line in the sand now? Versus we could have done this a while ago, but I think like it was the last straw, like we're adding this, the next big thing into the UI and we were just like, there isn't, we are not shipping this without solving this, like finally, like we need a better foundation to work with going forward, if we're going to keep building on the application.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. It's,the first little bit when we first tried squeezing it into the rest of your eyes, like this is just not working. And then as we talked to consultants and helping us, figure out the launch for this thing, we really realized how much this really changes the product, or at least has the potential to change the product.
And, we're not going to be there. I think on day zero, when we first launched insights, I think we'll see this evolve over time. But, I think, yeah, doing this work is, it was really timely to be able to be ready for the future.
yeah, this gives us a lot of room to build on. like the framework is much better that we have, like the UI framework. Yeah, and it's just nice to have a refresh every once in a while. [00:09:00] it's nice to put on new coat of paint, like you said, and, also one enabling thing was that we upgraded our bootstrap, a few months ago, we had a contractor help us with that. And so that got us into the place where we cleaned up a bunch of the, internal stuff, the structure and things.
it's been nice seeing the visual stuff now that's going along with the structural stuff that we did before that helped unlock this.
Josh: Yeah, this is tying into kind of our ongoing project, but I think really in 2024, aside from like launching insights, like one of our major goals for the year is just. Like polishing and just improving, what we already have and making it just better, updating and improving user experience and developer experience andpaying attention to the small details that we have probably missed in the past as we're trying to just ship things.
Ben: Yep. Yeah. And, to be honest, there have been times where we had thought, it'd be nice to do an update, but we got kind of gun shy with UI updates for a while there. we had a few times, oh, I guess it's been several years ago now [00:10:00] where, we would make a change and our customers be like, we don't really like that change so much.
And we felt sometimes the mob was come at the gates with the pitchforks like, undo that. Yeah.
Josh: yeah, we, I remember one time it was more than a few years ago, but, we had, we tried, I think we actually did make the changes and stuck with them, but the experience of rolling it out, I'll just say we, we learned a lot that we have, incorporated into, what we've done here that we're going to talk about.
And I, I think like it's gone really well. and I think we really did a good job of Building on the mistakes that we made in the past when rolling out big UI changes. I think like our application in particular is, it's,it's the type of application that is like. baked into people's workflows.
And if you change their workflows, then that's when the torches and pitchforks come out. And so we are not doing that this time. we're taking some baby steps. Yes. Like it's a big visual update, but it's not changing the core. Workflows that [00:11:00] people know and love. And, we've made that clear in our communication with everyone and we can step through some of these things, but I think so far it's been really positive, feedback and, I'm looking forward to getting this out to everyone.
Ben: Yeah. those are valuable, hard earned lessons from, just not inflicting changes on people that are big. Like you said,it's a part of their day. It's there's muscle memory involved. It's like, you know, if you move a control element, people are going to have problems.
Cause like I'm used to clicking in this particular spot. Right. And,we ourselves, as we've tested through this, it's like, Oh yeah, I can see where this muscle memory is going to want me to go over there instead of go over here. And, yeah, people naturally don't really want to have their work application change underneath them, right.
In the middle of the workday or whatever. yeah,
Josh: Now that said, sometimes it does need to change and it's going to be uncomfortable, like any change is going to be uncomfortable, no matter who you are. And,sometimes that discomfort is good and it's worth it. And, I think as the product team, we do need to [00:12:00] like, have a vision for where we're going and be bold about making those changes.
but I think what we've learned is that if it's going to be something that is disruptive to someone's, like muscle memory or, something that's baked into their process, like make those changes. Very slowly, like one at a time, if possible and,let them know what's coming if you can, maybe even multiple times, like, you know, basically like give people time to get used to it and to make the switch.
so,that's kind of, the goal here. Like, I think we will be. making like future changes that might be slightly more disruptive or change some parts of the app. but in this update, we're just making broad, high level things, that will then give us a better, foundation for making some of those over time,
Like we know it will be much better than what people have now, but we need to bring people with us on this journey and not just like do all this work and then drop it on them. and be like, here you go.
Ben: Yep. Yeah. as we were talking [00:13:00] about the, these UI changes,we were, became convinced that it was going to be big enough that we couldn't just. deploy it one day and all of a sudden flip a switch that we had to give people a chance to see it first before they were, stuck with it basically.
And,when we've talked about this kind of thing in the past, we've hesitated because that's a big lift, to do a big change and to give a way to see it and go back if it's not quite ready and that sort of thing. and. In the intervening years, we've really become a fan of feature flags.
we use Flipper at Honeybadger and, that's been great for like managing. We have this new feature that we want to put out, but we want to test it, with a small group of people before everyone gets it. And that's been, really cool. We really enjoyed having, using that, but in this case, it was not that viable because we had a lot of structural changes, you know, just like, uh, templates move, the files moving in the.
And the app and we couldn't just have this one little toggle, cause it was a significant,redo of the structure. And so we're like,I guess we need to have like a preview environment or something. So we [00:14:00] had to stand up a completely separate thing.
Josh: yeah, I think that was the right call. we basically have a big running branch with these changes. it's basically a staging environment, with a few extra, things for like production use.
Ben: Yeah, one of the investments that we made in the past year that has paid off in this case is moving away from EC2 instances over to using ECS Fargate. So with AWS, that's where you can host your Docker container, you give them the container and they run it. Basically, and, that's allowed us to easily stand up new staging environments, new preview environments.
We use, Terraform heavily here at Honeybadger. And just having a new ECS service spun up that has our same container, based off this branch rather than off our master branch allows us to have a PV environment. One of the snags that we had though, as I was setting this up,we typically use subdomains for doing stuff and.
We had planned on having a preview. honeybadger. io, But then, as soon as I got that deployed, I was, I finished up, I closed the [00:15:00] laptop. I'm like, ah, I got that done today. I'm so excited. And then I don't know, 20 minutes later, I thought, wait a minute, that's going to be a problem. Because, when people sign in via GitHub, like they go to app.
honeybadger. io, they can't go to preview. because, GitHub restricts what, where you can redirect to. And then I was like, Oh, wait. And then we also have SAML logins where people, are going to our, that subdomain and, we can't just have all customers update their SAML configs just for a preview.
as I was looking at that, I was like,what can we do? And fortunately we have this really, convenient, AWS infrastructure where we have load balancers that have rules that can check, request headers. And I was like, Oh, what if we just had a cookie and, played with that a bit and turns out that
Josh: this is like a like aa huge lightbulb moment in my head as I'm imagining you in this story.
Ben: Oh, totally. Totally. Yeah. I was so excited. And, so turns out we can just check a cookie in our load balancer rules and send traffic over to this other ECS service. if it has a cookie and send it to our main ECS service if it doesn't have a cookie. So that would, that unlocked that and made it really [00:16:00] nice.
And I think made some, for some great UI that you built out.
Josh: Yeah. So, um, to kind of set the stage, like the initial plan, like you mentioned was to have this subdomain and we use user list, for, like customer communication and we use mostly email. So we were planning on, sending an email to our segment of users who,are like receptive to, product research which is, most of them.
fortunately, and, we were going to link up this sub domain and say, go log into the sub domain and click around and, whatever, like you can use that or switch back to the main app. Dot Honeybadger IO subdomain. and that's, that would have been, that would have been okay.
But like you said, there were some kind of edge cases around just it not being a complete, even though it's backed by our production database and all of our services and it's production. Otherwise, it's,the, login issues and there's other things that aren't, it's not
Quite a production. Um, so this allowed us to, not only, solve that problem, but it also allowed us to build in a nicer experience [00:17:00] to switch between these things because, really like you're just. Toggling a cookie. once we realized we could just toggle a cookie and have the UI change from the user standpoint, it's just the UI changes.
They don't know, at all how it's doing this, is it using a feature flag or is it redirecting to an entirely different environment? so it made a much nicer experience, for the user and it allowed us to build,a preview, landing page with a toggle button and add it to our navigation for the current app.
and then on the new UI, we added like the destination for them to land on when they. Um, basically we toggle the cookie for them and they see the new thing. it shows a new, landing page. It's welcome to the new Honeybadger. And you can click a button to go back or you can explore the new UI.
And, that, that was a really nice, like side benefit of this approach, which I actually like, I don't know, I'm sure this has been done before, but it seemed novel to me. and I really liked the approach.
Ben: Yeah, it's the first time for me trying something like this. And the thing I really liked about it, over the subdomain approach, which [00:18:00] We're thinking about before is that, with the subdomain thing, like you go to it, you try it out and you're like, Oh, okay, that's cool. You click around maybe three or four times and then you're done.
And you go back to your real work, right? You go back to the main site and do this stuff, but with this cookie thing, like someone can turn it on. They can click around. They're still using the main site. They're like, wait a minute. I can just stay in this preview mode and I can just use it. And so we were, I was doing that myself over the past week.
Like I had gone in and I had flipped the cookie for myself and I was, using the production app. But in preview mode, and, I think that's pretty awesome, to get, because I think we'll get more feedback from people who are like, oh, I can just stay here and just keep using it and it doesn't really interrupt my workflow.
Josh: yeah. so they still have the option to turn it off, but, hopefully it's good enough that, and I think it is that we'll have a number of people that, that stay until we get to the point of shipping it.
and this morning,this is a Tuesday. we. Sent the email, that,announced this and sent people to the new whatever app slash preview page, to enable the new design. And, we had some copy that asked them to, reply to our email[00:19:00] to give us some feedback on the design and,
it went out to our members of paying accounts. we decided to limit this, only to users who are actually paying us or people who are parts of accounts that are paying us. and we excluded the, like the free users, for now. and that was intentional because we really want to cater to people who are.
Giving us money and prioritize their feedback because, that's where we're going to actually like, meet this goal. so we sent it out to them. I was really surprised by the response, to be honest, because we've received very, Little outright negative feedback.
and the feedback that we have, we've had a lot of people just say I, this is a huge improvement. I love it. but the feedback that we have received, has been constructive overall, and I think we'll have a pretty good list of things to work on between now and when we flip the switch on this, or merge it.
but I think we'll get there next week. Like, I think We can make some improvements based on people's, suggestions and get this thing merged. So that's my hope [00:20:00] is that next episode, we will be talking about how this is live and everyone can go check it out for themselves.
Ben: Yeah, because one of those target dates that we put inside of our project management tool was a target date of shipping this, next Tuesday. So we'll see if we can hit that date.
Josh: Yeah. So one week
Ben: But I was pretty excited about the feedback and we got a good, we got a good bug report, which was great and dark mode and like dark mode is always the bugaboo because it's I don't use dark mode as my primary work, environment.
And We miss things there and, we, it often bites us. It's Oh,this little label and this page in dark mode is not great. Like, ah, all right, we'll go fix that. So that was cool. It's really nice to get people actually using it to the point where we can unearth some of those corner cases like that.
Josh: Yeah. And we also, got some good general feedback, from a few people. I found that anytime you give some people, anytime you give them like the opportunity to give you feedback, they're going to, even if it's not what you asked for, they'll do that. and that's great. Like I lo I love like any chance that [00:21:00] we can have to hear from our customers and,see what their use cases are and things like that's just great.
Ben: Yeah. That's gold.
Josh: just sending it to the. People on the paying accounts was brilliant because, one, one thing I noticed that we have, we do have a lot of people who are super helpful and like to communicate back to us when we email them, which is great. but sometimes it's just too much volume.
Ben: Like we get a lot of responses to these kinds of emails and even when they're all great, it's still a lot. And so I think limiting it to that audience was helpful in making it manageable today. Yeah.
Josh: users in the database. it would have been, I think it would have been more than double the people we sent it to, at least.
Ben: Mm hmm.
Josh: yeah, to be honest, I just didn't want to deal with, uh, not, not to mention, like not to rag on the free user, we have great free users, but just freemium in general tends to attract more, like the, the vocal, nitpicky, type of user.
And, I think not only is that like, you [00:22:00] know, I didn't want to deal with it, I'll be honest, but also like, I think that could potentially,drown out some of the more like actionable feedback, or valuable feedback. So yeah, I was glad with that decision.
Ben: Yeah, it was fun, seeing the email. I love the emails that you write there. I appreciate the writing process that you go through, you know, you do edits and we review them and stuff. You do a much better job than I would, but,I like getting those emails because I'm one of the customers that's on the list.
And so I get that and it's Oh, there's this nice little personal note from Josh, you know? And I know it's a bulky email, and, you know, Presumably 90 percent of the people who are receiving it know it's a bulk email. But still, like, I, I really appreciate your, tone of voice and the approach that you take.
It does feel like a personal note from Josh and please, let me know what you think, you know?
Josh: Well, thanks. I actually, I got that approach, or I've, I was, I've been inspired in my email writing, by Derek Sivers, who, I don't know if you're on his, email list,
Ben:
Josh: If you're not, you should join,just to see how he does email. But, it's very like people know that it's [00:23:00] like an email, a CRM system that he's using because he.
Um, so many people that he emails with and he replies to everyone. Like I've emailed with him a few times. if you email Derek Sivers, like he will reply to you and it will be personal and a nice chat, but so he, first of all, he doesn't send a lot of email. Like he doesn't bug people unless he has a really good reason to.
It's like, if he's released something or if there's, something very actionable or interesting that he wants to share and when he does email. It just comes from his account, and it looks just like he, dashed off an email to you. it doesn't have any of the trappings of like marketing like a MailChimp email or something.
And so, and it's also like just straight and to the point, basically like giving you the information that is like valuable to you and personal, but not too markety. and so that's how I've gravitated towards that approach a little bit more in my marketing copy, especially for emails like this, our product update emails and some other like more [00:24:00] marketing style emails, I'll take a little bit more of a, I don't know, like a bubbly or marketing.
but when I'm like, Trying to get some, something specific from someone I've found that it really helps if it seems like it's a personal, just intentional email to someone. And it is, it's just to a lot of people at the same time.
I mean, it, it really is the same email that you would have written to someone if you were emailing them individually. hey, Bob, would you do this for me? Like, yeah. yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's just, instead of setting, sending it to one friend, I'm saying it to like 15, 000 friends. I appreciate those types of emails, becauseI'm busy and, if I even open the email, that's good news for you.
and then if the email can actually help me like figure out like, okay, what do I need to do here? Cause if I'm opening the email, I probably like you. and I want to help, but I don't want to read through like. You know, three, four paragraphs to figure out like what you want from me.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah, that's one thing that,that you and Star both, helped me a lot on is, when I send an email that I want to [00:25:00] explain something or have someone do something, I spend, you know, a book. Explaining the thing, here's the backstory, like at the beginning of time, when the cave men first came out of their caves and, and eventually I get to the point, but you and star like, uh, you really need a TLDR here.
I'm like, can you pull up this for me?
Josh: TLDRs are great. I love bullets. I think I will say. There are many cases where you want the backstory,and if there's like important information that requires explanation, like you don't want to leave that out, but yeah, in that case, like a TLDR is great, I really like summarizing things, like everything you need to know.
I like to summarize at the top of the email, if you have a longer explanation. but also in this case, I kind of did that. and I, a lot of times I'll start by writing that email just for what it's worth. Like I do a lot of editing. So a lot of times, like I'll have that email and then I'll be like, okay, this is not, you know, it's not very actionable or it's going to be, it's gotten too long.
and so then I'll figure out how to like, make it. so people can grok it easily. and in this case, I wanted to tell people what we [00:26:00] did. like I wanted to explain the actual changes we've made. but I didn't want to start with that because like for the people that are just like quick, like I'm using this all the time, all I really need to know is that something has changed, I can toggle it on and go check it out.
I wanted them to be able to just. Understand that and do it, right away. So like the email has like a, just, it's a very short intro, and that explains that and then just has a big orange button that's like test drive, the Honeybadger UI. but then to give them some of the extra context, I actually did like a postscript.
After my, like I signed up, signed the email, Josh, and then did a postscript that said, by the way, here's a, like a punch list of the things we changed. And then I had five bullet items that kind of explained, like walk through that. So they still have the extra context, but they could ignore it if they want to
Ben: Yeah, that's awesome. As I was looking at the email and, I did a proofread, you asked me to check it out and I did that. And, And, but then as I was, after I did that, then I was sitting back and just like looking at it and looking at the balance of the email, just like [00:27:00] visually and like, I mean, picture me like scooting back, you know, from the desk, like a few feet.
Right. And, and so I'm, yeah, exactly. make a little fuzzy. And I was just like, okay, there's this big orange button. And then a lot of the meat though, is in the PS. Like here are the details of the stuff, but if you don't care about that stuff, you're never going to see it. You're just gonna click on the button and go check out the thing.
Right. Cause it's like, here's two sentences. It tells you what it is. Click here. But if you keep going, then you get the details that I would have put at the beginning, because that's the kind of way I write stuff. Right. So I was looking at that. I'm like,that's pretty cool. I liked it.
It's in a PS. And so this is always the extra stuff, but this is actually the meat of the emails. It's like, it's kind of cool.
Josh: Yeah, that, that was like a little bit different for me. Like, that was kind of an experiment. and I think, yeah, I think I think it worked well. but yeah, normally like a PS is a little shorter. and this was like a list of things. so yeah, a little different,
Ben: Oh, yeah. I loved it. And the proof is in the pudding. We've had a bunch of responses and only one that was like neutral or negative. the rest have been just like very nice. [00:28:00] So props to you.
Josh: the negative one was also just someone who was saying, I hate this thing in the app that's been there since the beginning. So I'm like, maybe you should like, what, like, do you want to keep using Honeybadger?
Ben: it's like we didn't actually change that thing you're complaining about.
Josh: yeah. like I have a pretty thick skin for those.
Types for email responses in general now, because just, you know, you're going to get someone who is just in a mood to rant, and is going to take it out on you. and in those cases, like, you know, I, I replied to that person. I was like, okay. is there something specific you would, could you explain like what you.
Dislike about this core thing in the app, that has been the same since, for the last 10 years. maybe we'll get some feedback, or at least it hopefully disarms them a little bit, If they're really hostile, I'll just, unsubscribe them for them. I'll, click the button, and,
Ben: No need to antagonize people. But yeah. maybe he's been sitting there for eight years. Like, you know what? I just, this thing bugs me. and this was the thing that prompted him to be like, I've got to speak up now. [00:29:00] Like here's my chance, you know? So
Josh: while you're changing things,
Ben: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Josh: good could come out of that or something actionable. but also there's just people that, have preferences and you can't please everyone. we could easily change this and then, upset a hundred people that just were happy with it.
Ben: if you're listening to this and you're a Honeybadger customer and you haven't checked out the preview yet, you should definitely check it out. assuming that you get to hear this before we actually launch the preview
if you
Josh: but
Ben: if you're listening to this after we launch the preview, then send us an email and let us know how you like it or what you think could be better.
We'd be happy to continue to make tweaks on that for you.
Josh: yeah. if it is not launched by then, for some reason, you can go to a forward slash preview, just app. honeybadger. io slash preview, and it will let you toggle it or go to the user menu and it's got a UI feature preview link, so
Ben: Yeah. And more exciting things to come.
Josh: Yeah, I'm really excited to get this shipped and then get insights, into it.
I think that's the [00:30:00] goal. Cool. we're wrapping up. this has been founder quest. you should, uh, do all the things we normally say, but, visit founderquestpodcast. com. you can follow Ben and I on Twitter. I think all of our social links are there. or ideally Mastodon. I think we're a little more active on Mastodon these days.
Um, go give us some reviews and all the podcast apps and, uh, we'll catch you next week.
Outro_1: Founder Quest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger Zero Instrumentation, 360 degree coverage of errors, outages, and service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it available@honeybadger.io. One more from the founders. Go to founder quest podcast.com. That's one word where you can access our huge back catalog of episodes.
Founder Quest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week![00:31:00]