Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Developers building a software business on our own terms.
Josh: So three years into the pandemic and I finally caught COVID.
Which I feel pretty good about actually.
Ben: yeah, you're overachiever there. You lasted pretty good long while there.
Josh: I gotta say, I would not recommend it. I don't, I might've been the last holdout, I think, but, , if you haven't caught it yet, I would recommend not, if you can at all help it.
Ben: Yeah, it's, I don't think that's one of those experiences that people just choose to have.
Josh: Yeah,
Ben: a glutton for punishment.
Josh: well, it's been, I think 10 days, tomorrow, so that's supposed to be like the full in the clear window, but, I have heard that you can catch it back to back. So I'm hoping that, this is the last time for the winter, but, yeah, me and my wife Kaylin both got it at the same time, which [00:01:00] is a whole extra level, juggling kids at home and trying to, Keep everyone separated and the kids had to stay home from school for a while.
And we finally were able to get them back in school, but we were still not feeling a hundred percent. So yeah, it's a, it's definitely a can of worms.
Ben: Do you feel like you're coming out of it now that you're on the, you're on the mend or is it anything lingering?
Josh: I think, I'm definitely feeling better, but just the, fatigue is definitely a thing. Like I'm definitely feeling tired. Just lately and the days are, feeling longer. yeah, if this is a short episode, or if I'm not particularly insightful, you'll know why,
Ben: well, we won't, we won't tap out all your remaining energy. I'm going to leave you, I'll leave you some fuel
Josh: but we can't, yeah, we can't, we got to keep the podcast going. Right.
Ben: Yeah. all of our adoring fans. We got to make sure that we are never taking another two year break. So
Josh: So what have we been up to besides being, uh, being sick? we have gotten some things. Done
Ben: yeah, yeah. So we're plugging away on insights [00:02:00] still. We got one, the current thing we're working on. we've got a few things we're working on there. I
Josh: real quick. remind me what insights is again. I'm my memory's fuzzy and know,
Ben: Well, I, yeah, thank you for asking. Uh, so insights is our new structured logging feature that we're adding to Honeybadger, or event capture in whichever way you want to think about it, allows you to capture the events that are happening that are important to you. So it might be structured logs that you're sending us a bunch of JSON for either Rails application or your.
Your node application or whatever. or it might be, some events that you're tracking inside your app, Maybe user activations, or building events, or, anything you want to be able to query on, or you can... The thing I really love about Insights is that not only can you get the raw data out, which, any logging app can do that for you, there's no, nothing new there.
But the, when you query the stuff, then you have a bunch of these, functions you can use, like you can aggregate, you can do counts, you can do averages, or whatever, and so... [00:03:00] You can take those logs or those events, which basically any kind of event stream, and then you can do some analysis based on that.
And, we're using Clickhouse behind the scenes, and there's a lot of analytic stuff that it provides. And so we're leveraging that. And, you get a log of all of your requests. Well now you can take the average of the response times and you can then sort that by the longest response time.
So, you've got a pretty basic little APM kind of thing telling you, you know, what are the, what are the longest
Josh: was going to say like that, what, that sounds like metrics.
Ben: Exactly. Yeah. we're bringing the metrics back after what was that, 2014 or whenever we tried the last time.
Josh: it's been a little while. this is a much different implementation though. Cause even if you're talking from like the developer perspective, in like terms of observability tools, you think that, Traditionally observability is like the three pillars, logs, metrics, and traces, and we're not really getting into metrics and traces, as like specific, like separate things.
We're kind of like stuffing everything into the logs pillar. A little bit right now. [00:04:00] but with the analytics engine that is Clickhouse, it sounds like we can actually bring some of the other pillars into Honeybadger just kind of for free. not to mention the ability to run all those same, functions over your, customer data or.
Whatever, like customer life cycle data, you could have like, you know, how, what's your signup rate, over the last two weeks or something like that. And that's easy to chart as well.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Being able to, to like, you can run that query, you can do this aggregates. And then once you got something you like, you can make that into a chart really easily. Click a button and you have a line chart or an error chart or whatever, and then click another button and it's on a dashboard. So now that's persisted forever.
So you can come back and you can see that how that changes over time. it's really a lot of fun to play with.
Josh: Yep. So maybe, next feature will have to be something to some sort of, abstraction on traces that we can, send some traces in. I mean, you can already kind of send them in cause they're just another event. Right.
Ben: Yeah, yeah. So one thing that we've been thinking about with traces is, another approach to that is just the correlated ID, right? So if you have some people call it a trace ID, some people call it a correlation ID. But basically, if you in Rails world, we have a request ID, every request that comes in creates a grid, right, you ID, and then you can use that to reference all the events that happened from that one request, right?
So if you wanted, you could instrument it. Your database queries, your queries out to Elasticsearch or whatever the activities the user does. Right. And if they all have that same request ID or the correlation ID, then you can query on that and in your insights data. Right. And then you could see all those events for that particular request right there, in a time series.
So yeah, so that's, you know, it's not like a nested span kind of view, but that is a trace of all the things that happened, for a particular request.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. And we do support, like we have visualizations on top of the data. So, um, maybe in the future we can have some sort of like even yeah, real APM function on top of that
Ben: Yep.
Josh: cool.
Ben: It is not beyond the realm of possibility.
Josh: I gotta say that sounds hella cool.
Ben: It is hella cool.
Josh: I gotta, I gotta work in my, California, betray my California roots there.
Ben: think for me like the most frustrating bit about it right now is that we are playing with it and loving it and we don't have it quite ready yet for everyone else to play with and love. And so it's like I've got all this excitement about it and can't share that excitement with people outside.
It's so sad. So sad.
Josh: I guess that means we need to ship it and take our own advice.
yeah. it's, we're struggling with that. the classic engineer case of like, how good is good enough. Right. Cause you know, every product has got warts. And this one is no different. There are things like, oh, I wish that was better and this isn't polished enough and all that UI could be a little better, but it's so when do you finally say, okay, fine, we just have to deal with it and ship it and just, yeah, Yeah. or wouldn't it be great if we could rework the entire application UI, around this feature and add like 10 new dashboards and do everything we've ever wanted. I think that's something we've been juggling, like. Um, do we just, you know, cause this is a major, it's, this definitely changes things for the UI, and in a perfect world would have like unlimited time to be able to like, rethink everything in light of this new feature.
but the reality is that, we need this to bring us some revenue at some point, as we continue to work on it. So, um, yeah, like how do you, how do you decide when it's ready?
Ben: Yeah. I think for us, it's like, when is it not breaking, right? when do we feel like we can put it in front of a customer, they can use it and have an experience that doesn't involve breakage or frustration, so we're not going to lose any of their data and, they're going to be able to do the basic stuff without, getting error messages.
yeah. And then at some point we totally revamped all the UI and everything is, Completely 100 percent different, but, that's not going to be, that's not gonna be this week.
Josh: Yeah, but we're getting close. We're getting close to actually having it in front of real customers. I mean, we have it in front of real customers. Now, we've had some alpha testers for a while that have been kicking the tires. And I think we've gotten some good feedback from them that we're now able to incorporate into the product.
So we're we've started that flywheel and, we're getting close to having it more generally available, so that will be, that would be good.
Ben: One thing that I did, this time that we haven't really done before is, we're using Ahoy, for tracking, our analytics for tracking what page views and clicks and things like that inside our app. So we'll put a link in the show notes, but Ahoy is a gem for Rails that basically logs your, user activity in your database or we can log it wherever actually.
and in fact, we're sending Ahoy data to our own internal. Insights instance. so we can do some analysis there, but anyway, that's kind of meta. So what I'm doing, you mentioned we have some customers using it, so what I did is I set up a, a dashboard based on that Ahoy data, which, does it.
Query that shows which users are hitting the insights paths in our app. The ones that we haven't exposed to people who don't have access to it yet. And I can, so I can see who's been using it, how often they've been using it. When was the last time they used it? So I can see, Oh, Bob checked it out five days [00:09:00] ago and clicked around three times and then went away.
All right. So that's,this is not like advanced kind of stuff, but it's not something that we've done a whole lot of in the past for our own product. And so it's kind of fun to, to see that. Yeah.
Josh: as a tool. it's not a tool really for marketers. because it's, you know, every time in my experience, every time I want something specific out of it, I have to go like, right, you know, some sort of active record query or something. but the ability to be able to do that is really flexible.
Like you can. You can basically like, once it's collecting the debt, the data, you can just pull anything you need out of it. yeah,
Ben: once, once we have this launched and our customers can use Ahoy and send the data to insights, then they can query it using some natural language, querying stuff and, not have to dive into SQL and be able to do those kinds of analysis.
Josh: And you don't have to use blazer. Right. Cause that's what insights can do on top of something like an engine analytics engine, like Ahoy or event source.
Ben: Well, talking about fun things we did this week, we actually, just earlier this [00:10:00] morning, we had a disaster recovery tabletop exercise. we have a monthly ops meeting, and, this ops meeting is dedicated to doing that exercise. So what we did is we said, hey, let's pretend that something really bad happened.
It's a Honeybadger. And, then how would we walk through the response to that really bad thing happening? And, this is something we do every year and, at least once a year. And it's a lot of fun. It's, fun to see what it would be like to go through an incident without actually having to go through an incident.
Josh: I gotta say that I'm not like a super, I'm not like super into like tabletop gaming, but I have done a little bit and I have friends who are like super, enthusiasts and, I gotta say like it is a fun, is like a fun exercise where, you don't have too much skin in the game luckily, but you can kind of like work out some of those scenarios.
There's a little bit of a, fantasy aspect, feeling to it. everyone, Once everyone starts to get into the scenario, you start having people like throwing out new ideas or, you know, like they're, you know, people were like trying to solve this imaginary [00:11:00] problem together basically.
And, uh, and it is it is game like and, I don't know. I like them. I know you, you put. The work into, you're like the dungeon master in this scenario. usually you have some sort of like scenario in your head and you set the scene. and then, then we go from there.
but yeah, it's, I enjoy them.
Ben: I never really thought about that as a dungeon master kind of thing, but I guess you're
Josh: That just struck me. And,as with our FounderQuest theme and every, we have a little bit of a, yeah. so a
I just got a new idea. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got a new idea, Josh. We can build a new startup just around doing tabletops for dev teams. I, that's a pretty great idea. I think that, yeah, especially with the audience, that would be a hugely popular,as a consulting gig. yeah, if we don't do it, someone should,
Ben: someone should, yeah. There's a free idea for you.
Josh: Maybe we'll hire you.
Ben: Or we'll at least test out your service for you. How about that?
Josh: Yeah. Yeah, but that was good. this, time, our database, went away, which is always a fun, thing to contemplate.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. And in previous years, we've done things like, all of US East one goes away or, something like that. So today we, a little smaller scope just if the database went away, which in itself would be a heart attack, but, I feel pretty good about how we, how he went through that scenario.
Josh: Yep. And the thing with like databases is that, especially or just generally single points of failure is that, when one fails, then everything else starts failing. you get to kind of brainstorm like all of the other points of failure that are dependent on that thing. And, and how do you respond to each of those individual things and juggle them simultaneously while you're trying to fix the underlying root cause?
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. It's very, and then I think the thing that's probably most helpful is once you get through all that and you realize, Oh wow, we could make this improvement here and that improvement there and we could increase our resiliency in this way. Then you have this, like this task list that comes out of it that, is really good for, Hey, I can sleep better at night now that we've got some of these issues tackled.
Josh: Yeah. We've got, always got a good to do [00:13:00] list comes out of these meetings.
Ben: And now we can check the box on our SOC audit for next year that yes, we did our test.
Josh: yeah, I can take my, like put the pager back on the shelf and I don't know. I
feel like you're like, you're wearing, I can I can switch back to, from slacks back to jeans, for another year. Yeah. it's definitely like, yeah. Company like, yeah. Business things.
Ben: Yep. Business people doing business things. Do you remember those comics? Yeah, we should link to that in the show notes.
Josh: Good stuff.
Ben: let's see. The other thing I did this week that I haven't quite finished yet is working on our upcoming, team getaway. So we are planning a, an offsite. Well, I mean, we're always offsite because we're a hundred percent remote, but we're planning a team get together. Yes, an on site, which is weird for us.
we're gonna be going to Vegas. our thought was, hey, let's have some fun while we're doing this. So, we kind of miss going to Vegas every year for microconf, because microconf's not happening in Vegas every year now. And so we're like, hey, let's do that. so we're gonna plan a trip to Vegas, although we're [00:14:00] probably not gonna stay at the Tropicana.
Sadly, sad to say,
Josh: Oh, I'm like both, sad and relieved. I'm like, I don't, I was thinking about this and there's some serious nostalgia for the Tropicana. But when you think about the cheap rooms and the stale cigarette smoke, the nostalgia might be in the memory might be enough. but I am sad to hear that.
I hear it's being, is it being torn down or something? Yeah, it's going to be no more, which is, definitely end of an era.
Ben: Pour one out for the trout. Yeah, I actually, I went to their booking page. I'm like, Oh, let me just see what it, you know, what's the, what's the, and, if they're still around. Right. Um, and, uh, when you go to choose your room, you can still choose a smoking room. And I'm like, eh, not happening.
Josh: yeah, I remember some of those rooms, like definitely yeah, it's like time traveling back to the seventies or something.
Ben: For real. Yeah. good memories. But we will just leave those memories in the past.
Josh: be nice to be back in Vegas though.
Ben: yeah, like I [00:15:00] love Vegas, it's fun, like I'm not a gambler, but, I think there's like such a variety of things to do in Vegas. And, if you go in the winter, like we're planning on going sometime in January or February, then it's really nice weather.
you get a break from the rain here in Seattle and get some sunshine there in Vegas. And there's great food and, maybe even catch a show. The food is amazing. And, yeah, maybe we'll have to hit up, uh, Nacho Daddy, again. That one was a lot of fun.
Josh: Yeah. See a show or something. and of course it's a great central location for everyone to, To fly into, which is, I think why all the conventions are there
Ben: Exactly, yeah.
Ben: so cheap to fly there and so easy. So I think once, once we nail down the dates, we'll have to think about maybe putting out the word and maybe we can have a little customer get together for anybody that wants to show up in Vegas. That'd be fun.
Josh: that could be cool. Yeah. Yeah. We haven't done that in a while.
Ben: That made me think about, I was listening to the podcast with Adam Wathen, he was talking about how they recently had a Tailwind conference and it started out just as a team get together and then they like, it snowballed into a conference, their first one, so,
Josh: Well, like let's, let's just invite everyone
Ben: exactly. Yeah. So maybe we should do a Honeybadger conference.
I don't
Josh: would, that Would
Ben: Would anybody show up?
Josh: I don't know. Like we're not doing tailwind numbers in terms of audience. I got to say, um, But, uh, uh, not, not everyone can be, you know, Adam,
Ben: That's true.
Josh: but yeah,I bet we'd get, I bet, but we get a few people anyway.
Ben: Yeah, let's think about that. But the point is to get together to hang out just have some face time Thinking about you know doing an air B& B and just chillin Hitting the pool or playing some Xbox or whatever and have a planning meeting and just yeah
Josh: drive a tank through, through the desert.
Ben: yeah
Josh: a helicopter ride.
Ben: listeners, right maybe we'll Go shoot some guns, or, I don't know, go bowling, or... Oh, there was that, there was that pinball, museum thing. Did you go do
Josh: pinball hall of fame,
Ben: Yeah.
Josh: like that. I went to that and it was amazing. Yeah, we should definitely, definitely hit that up. it's still, I forget like their collection. I mean, like it's supposedly like the, one of the bigger collections, I, or the biggest, I'm not sure how they pitch it, but, It's Vegas, so it's the biggest collection in the world, I'm sure. but it's all like, you know, um, like, uh, coin operated, and some of the machines going back to the, like 40, like, you know, some of the early mechanical games, um, really cool to, to see, and the guy who like runs the place is just like a crusty old, like game mechanic, you know, like mechanic type.
And, like he was like working in the back on some of the machines. yeah, pretty funny.
Ben: he's a, he's what you might call an enthusiast, I guess.
Josh: Yeah. I, yeah, I think he's more than an enthusiast. I'm not sure.
Ben: Yeah, I didn't, I didn't make it to that, but the sounds, sounds like a lot of fun. Now, can you play any of the games? Do they have them set up for
Josh: you can, yeah, you can play most of them. Yeah. you gotta bring, or you gotta get like coins out of the, whatever the machine, but yeah.
Ben: Can bring your quarters.
Josh: bring some, yeah, quarters or dollar bills or whatever,
Ben: [00:18:00] but yeah, it's good.
Oh, that'll be fun. So we just gotta nail down some dates and, it'll be fun to
Josh: Nailing down the dates is the hard part. It's especially like, we were trying to, we were trying to figure out like, if we could make this happen in January and everyone's already got a bunch of things that are overlapping. I think we're shooting for early February now, but that's, seems like that'll come together.
Ben: Yeah, it's, uh, surprising just how, how hard it can be to get five people's schedules lined up. and spouses and families, too, because, there's vacations and so on. I was thinking about the, uh, base camp. they made that video a while back, a year or so ago, about they had to get together in New Orleans and, They talked about how they use Basecamp to manage the process of their, you know, arranging that.
And I guess they had, I don't know how many people, but it's gotta be, you know, 50, 60, 70 people. They're trying to get all in the same place at the same time. And that's just, I can't even imagine. That's gotta be a nightmare.
Josh: Yep.
Except we don't use Basecamp.
Ben: That's true. This podcast is not endorsed
Josh: works. Okay. Slack and Notion.
Ben: So, um, one, one of the things that we're struggling with or they haven't, not necessarily struggling with, but haven't finished yet for insights. One of the things that's kept us from, launching yet is that we don't yet have the onboarding quite nailed down. Like we've been so busy on getting the, doing the product ready.
now we're trying to hustle to get all the stuff that goes around it, like the emails out to people to announce it. what are you thinking on there on the onboarding side? Like, how are we going to get people to use it more?
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: Or use it at all.
Josh: well you, you need to like be able to at least introduce it to people when they see this new thing in the UI. that's probably the first thing that's on my mind. and, luckily. One of the pieces of feedback we received from some of the people that were using it, recently was that, when you have like some data to play with, um, because you, it's like basically like a query engine.
So you see, like, you see a list of, events basically. with fields and you have a query box [00:20:00] and it has a query language, badger QL, which will be unfamiliar to anyone new who's coming in the door. so there's a learning curve that we have that we're going to have to get people over.
And,but the thing is that Being able to, just like dive in and tinker is a great way. especially for developers, like we hear this a lot that, if you can like actually have some data to play with and just start like breaking things, basically, that's a great way to start to learn like how the query language works.
so what we're planning on doing, At least for our current customers, like that already have been using the other parts of Honeybadger. They will have some data in the system already because we're going to, make all of your internal Honeybadger data available just out of the gate.
in the insights page. So you will have something initially just to dive into and start like playing with. so that's what we're thinking right now is having like a light touch, like introduction onboarding, no, Big like walk through wizards or anything.[00:21:00]
just like nudging people to just get into the basically like dive into the query language.
Ben: Yeah, I'm not a fan of those like nine step tours that you have to go through and you can't cancel. And yeah,
Yeah. Just like push me into the deep end basically. yeah.
Josh: and then throw me a
lifeline.
Ben: Right. Right. Tell me the thing. Let me go play with it. and then give me an escape hatch when I get, when I start to struggle. Right.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. But that said, like right now we have none of this. we just have a, basically like an event list and a query box. we have, we do have some pretty good inline documentation that I think people will really like. which is cool. We, in addition to our, our separate docs site, which will have additional documentation.
Um, so The docs are right there. but we just need to basically like do a light introduction for people. And, and then of course, like we're, people come like new customers coming in the door, the, it's a slightly different experience for them. because they might not have any Honeybadger data yet.
So, you know, we have all our existing onboarding [00:22:00] problem of let's get you set up, let's get some data into the system and then you can start to explore. So there's like a leveling up process, where hopefully we're able to teach people, to become like gradually teach them to become expert users of our product.
and if we're, Good at what we do. We might even, teach them to just be better expert users in general. that's always like something we like to try to focus on is like, how can we actually like educate developers, and just help them be better developers. even if it's not specifically about our product, usually there's a tie in, how can you do, how can you get better at monitoring, for example.
Um,
Ben: kind of things should you be paying attention to and how can you use this data to, to help your development? Yeah. Yeah.
Josh: always do better at that. And so that's part of what we're thinking about right now. we already do a lot of that in our content marketing as well. it all ties together. but yeah. And then of course the, we'll have to send some emails at some point, I imagine.
Ben: So we'll have to [00:23:00] do some marketing emails, but also we have a drip email sequence inside of our app. Like when you start to onboard where we introduce you to the product over time, I don't know how many emails is that six or seven or so we'll have to,
Josh: seven to 10 based on there's like a few conditionals. So not everyone gets every email, but yeah, it's like a sequence.
Ben: So we'll have to figure out, like, how can we slot in insights into that email sequence? And where does it make sense to introduce that?
Josh: yeah, I haven't started thinking about that too much, I'm debating on whether I just want to like draw, add a few emails to the sequence or rewrite the sequence, in a more holistic way, which takes a little longer, but it might be better.
but then again, we also try to, we try not to send too many emails, especially like. For,like for marketing a SaaS product to developers, because developers, don't always love emails, to begin with. but especially like they didn't really, they're not necessarily signing up for, an email sequence.
like you might be, if you're signing up for like, if you're dropping your email. we're trying to like, [00:24:00] yeah, there's kind of a, a line to walk there.
Ben: Yeah, I, I really appreciate how we've separated out our marketing email campaigns from our in app, drip that we send people, not only because our provider requires us to only send transactional emails using their service, but it also helps, keep that, those two domains, I guess, separate, we don't have to worry about cross pollution or sending somebody the marketing emails that we shouldn't be sending them.
Yeah. But also since we use Heya, which we'll link to in the show notes in our app, as opposed to having it like at a, let's say at ConvertKit, which we use for our marketing emails, then we can say in our app, okay, if they've used Insights already in this way, then we don't have to, we can skip that email entirely, right?
We can use that Ahoy data that we have. we can use other data inside of our app to decide, oh, okay, they're already into that. We don't need to send them a message about that. So I love how we have that set up in our app.
Josh: Yeah, I built, Heya, uh, uh, so that we could do that inside the application, like our rails [00:25:00] application, as opposed to, using, like third party external marketing tools, which, , if you're using an external tool, you basically have to send events to be able to do the conditional, email workflows, basically.
which is fine, but, it's nice to be able to like, just have everything run on top of your, our database. and, yeah.
Ben: Yeah. And then also, I think it's really easy to be able to say, Oh, we're pushing out this feature. And here is the, you know, and you can see in this pull request where we're changing our email sequence, because those conditionals are defined in the code along with everything else, right? It's not in some separate thing where you got to, Oh, let's go, remember to do that over there.
And when do we change it over there to match up when we're deploying and stuff like that?
Josh: yeah, no, that said, we do, we send broadcast email, through a user list still, which is also, I think is receiving some of our customer data events. So we could duplicate or, we have options now. and I, at least until I build the broadcasts into hey, yeah, but I'm not, I'm not like holding out for that at this point, cause I've been talking about that for too long. We won't [00:26:00] get into that.
Ben: so we've got, so we have three sets of emails, then we deliver, right? So we got marketing emails to someone that might come to the blog and like they drop their email on the box, the blocks, and we have a drip sequence specifically for them. And then, we have the in app onboarding emails and then we've got the in app, mass emails, broadcast emails.
Josh: Yep. Yeah. And that's the classic problem there is, like when we want to send an email, it's like, where do we send it? Do we send it to, do we send a marketing email? And say we like, announce a new feature, for example, like insights when it comes time, do we send like an email to the marketing list?
obviously we want to send an email to all of our customers who might not be on the marketing list, but there's also some overlap in there. And we like to be respectful of not like sending people multiple emails. so that's usually, I don't know. That's just marketing. That's a marketing headache that I think everyone has to deal with.
but I do I think lately we've, we have been like sending more emails through, [00:27:00] ConvertKit, like for marketing stuff. but most of them have been like related to our blog. Like we have it. We have a pretty good, like settings page where you can select like the types of content that you want.
and then when we publish a new blog posts, it's about Ruby or about PHP. Like if the people that are interested in that, we'll get that email. But, I think we could always do a better job of actually like, um, creating additional marketing content for people who are specifically interested in hearing from us, in that respect and.
Those emails are different from just like general customer update, or like new feature emails. so there's always more email to send.
Ben: Yeah, we could definitely do more there. I like, what is it, Seth Godin, I like his philosophy, like if you have something that's really useful to the world, then you should be sharing that with the world, right? don't cover up the stuff that, you think actually brings value, but you know, don't impose upon people stuff that's just, like garbage, but, when you have something that you think is useful to say it, get it out there.
Josh: yeah. I like Seth's approach. just cause like marketing in general, like I have mixed feelings about it. at its worst it's manipulative and, like not always honest. but I think there's a better way to do it. And Seth's always been, delivering real value.
Like you, you're actually like educating people and, I think also, you had this, this tweet, from Michelle Hanson, who was, quoting, Alex Hillman in, his book, the tiny MBA, which is a great book, that's on my shelf back here actually. but I, he said when, when done well, marketing and teaching are nearly indistinguishable from one another.
And, that reminded me of the Seth Godin, marketing approach as well. it should be like both parties should be benefiting equally, basically, to earn the permission. It's like permission marketing,was Seth's thing. that's what we always shoot for.
Yeah, that's good stuff. I always appreciate when someone is giving me something that's useful,there's a newsletter I get, just the name, it just left my head right now, but it's about, it's about pricing. It's about, talking to customers. It's about marketing. but it always has something useful in it.[00:29:00]
Ben: And so while it's this newsletter that, shows up once a week and could get annoying, but it's got this useful info. And so I actually do want to read it. So
Josh: Yeah. And then hopefully you might want to give them money at some point when you are, when you happen to need the service they provide, which I think is the, is the trait. Yeah.
Ben: That's what we're all hoping for, right?
Josh: it's a good way to do it. Cool. Well, I've got some noise starting outside my window here, I think maybe that's a cue to wrap it.
Ben: I guess so. Yeah. Well, always a pleasure. Hope you get, uh, kick that COVID to the curb pretty quickly.
Josh: I hope so. And I hope I don't have a, have any recurrence. Um, but I hope everyone, stays safe out there and, yeah, whatever mask up and be cautious because it's still out there.
Ben: Yeah. And if you don't have COVID or if you do, you can give us five stars on any of your favorite podcasts, listening areas, assuming that you think we're worth five stars, we'd be happy to have your glowing review anytime you can leave it.
Josh: Cool. until next time.
Ben: Until next time.
[00:30:00]