Developers building a software business on our own terms.
John: Josh, do you ever not wear your RubyConf sweatshirt?
Josh: I was just telling Ben that, this is the first time I have worn it since arriving home, whatever, week or 2 ago from the plane. I put my hands in the front pocket, and I found, Brandon Weaver's 5 secret stickers that he had been handing out after his talk with the lemurs.
And, apparently, there's a code to decipher if you get all of the 5 stickers. And I don't know if I'm supposed to be saying that, but I think by now it probably needs a little help to decipher it because I can't figure it out. Maybe our listeners can mob on this or something and do some sleuthing.
Ben: I only got one of the 5 stickers, and it's the one with the Mad Hatter, and he's pouring from the teapot from A into B. And my wife looked at this—she’s like, what's with the lemur? And I'm like, you know, it was pretty involved, and I didn't understand half of it, so I can't even explain it to you.
Josh: You were like, let me explain Lambda calculus.
Ben: Yeah.
John: That's funny. My wife was like, what are those? And I was like, I'm really not sure, actually. And then eventually, I was like, oh, I remember lemurs. I think it's a lemur.
And my son was like, well, that one's a lemur, but that other one is not a lemur. And I was like, well, I think they're all lemurs, yes.
Josh: Take it up with Brandon. No. But his talk was really great. He does like his illustrated stories that are highly technical and involved and, like, Easter eggs all over the place if you pay close attention. So yeah. And he was what was he? The last keynote, of the conference?
John: Yeah. The morning. I left
Josh: right after that. The morning keynote or the morning keynote of the last day. Yeah.
Ben: Yeah. I love the I'm a teapot response code on the teapot.
Josh: So that was the one that I got. I think we both did. Like, I knew I saw that one coming because I saw the teapot and I connected the you know, it had the status, but he hadn't dropped the the punch line yet. But I was like, oh, I know where this is going. But, yeah, that was a good one.
John: You're right. It was the morning. I was thinking of the afternoon one. I did not leave right away. Yeah.
I love the topic, though, because, like, result objects and that kind of stuff, that's how I first did resiliency on notifications in GitHub was, like, some kind of a response object with a block that could run a thing, and if it failed, return a default so that when we moved notifications off the primary to a backup—another MySQL cluster—it wouldn’t, you know, all of GitHub wouldn't be down if notifications were down.
And I remember I just was like, how do I do this? And I came up with a thing because I'm not, like, you know, CA, CI or whatever. I'm not CS educated as much as the probably a lot of other people. And so I that's what I came up with as a block.
And then I was showing it to the team, and they were like, oh, yeah, that’s like a result object. And they showed me all the stuff, and I was like, oh, okay. Cool. Yeah. And then they made it much better.
Ben: See, you're so smart. You just invented some computer science right there on the fly. You're like, here's the thing.
John: That was my humble brag. I was hoping you wouldn't get it. Now I'm out, and yep. Yeah. You got it.
Josh: Nice. You just you just, like, naturally invented functional programming as you heard. Yep.
John: Yeah. Pretty much. You can thank me later.
Josh: That's awesome. Yeah. I did appreciate the—I hadn't heard a talk on functional programming in a little while, and I feel like there was a period where that was, like, a hot topic, I don't know, 5 or 8 years ago or something. And it's nice to see it coming back around. There's a lot of good things you can use from that in Ruby and—and JavaScript and whatever.
John: Yeah. The map and, in GitHub results, like map and then are really cool. Using those with rescue intermingled—like, I even have the honey badger rescue block that's, like, a constant that will I can call, like, you know, dot rescue and then do, like a ampersand, you know, pass a block and then a constant, and it will just pass that in. It'll notify Honey Badger, return a result error, and all that kind of stuff.
And it's it makes working with external services like APIs or if you're shelling out a lot, like, things like that in speaker deck or in other things. Like, it has made cleaned up code tremendously—using the the GitHub result pattern, which is I know it's similar to the dry RB and all these other things that do those, but their APIs haven't spoke to me as much as just that simple result object has. But, yeah, very cool stuff.
Josh: That's cool.
Ben: Yeah. I would say, like, before Brandon's talk, if you said the word Monad, I would just be, like, shutting down. Mentally. Like, okay. I'm out. You know? But I really liked how he started, like, in the low lands of here's some Ruby map stuff, and let's talk about what reduce does. And and like, okay, getting it, getting it. And then he's, like, adding on to that. I was like, oh, okay. This guy knows how to teach stuff.
Josh: Yeah. It was really, yeah, really great. And I was like, oh, you can make these other things that don't seem reducible. Like, they can be reducible in the same way that, you know, whatever.
John: And I remember when someone first showed me map. I was like, that doesn't make sense because I was thinking, like, map array or map, like, in a different context. And I was like, why would you call it map? Why would you call it zen? Or, like, any of these kind—it did not compute in my, like, non CS head.
But then, eventually, once I, like, really wrote some stuff in anger in it, I was like, yeah. Okay. It's fine. If it's called map or if it's called whatever, it doesn't really matter to me, but I get the paradigm or what's useful in it. And I can remember that it's called map because that's fine, so. But, yeah, it's really neat stuff.
Ben: So, did you learn anything else at RubyConf?
John: That's a good question.
Ben: I was like, because I know I was, like, just in the lounge the whole time, so I unfortunately did not make it to any sessions besides the keynotes, which is a bummer, but also fun in some way.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. Same here. I think I went to Carl Weber's talk, which was great. And then the keynotes, the first keynote, I took a picture of the room and it was like, I think Jim Remsik said, like, 650 people ended up registering and showing up. I mean, it was a packed—it was a packed room, and that was nice to see.
John: Yeah. It was really nice to see. I and I know I learned a lot. That's why I, like, paused when you asked that because I'm like, I feel like I learned a lot of things, and I left really excited. But I was like, yeah.
I thought back through it, and I'm like, I didn't go to anything but the keynotes. And I told myself this time I was going to go to talks, and I still I did not. I did the hallway track, but it was a very good hallway track. Lots of good conversations. So
Ben: Yeah. Totally.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. We had the Honeybadger lounge again this year, which we've talked about in past years that started out as the indie lounge concept and kind of that a little bit still. We invite our friends to come hang out and share their businesses and their stickers with us.
John: Yeah. It was very cool. I mean, I lounged in it. I was comfortable. It was nice. Good vibes.
Ben: So that was the first time that I've done actual, like, sales work at a conference. I had a table off to the side of our lounge, and I was doing some demos. And that was a lot of fun. Learned a few things. Like, I guess I relearned that you can never depend on the conference WiFi because it was just super slow trying to get anything to load.
So after the the first demo or two, I'm like, you know what? Let me just load up a bunch of tabs of things I want to show rather than because, like, at first, I tried just clicking through, like, okay, then you can do this, and now you can do that. And that—that didn't work out too well.
So eventually, I learned how to open some tabs ahead of time, and then I just flipped. Now if you clicked here, then you'd see this. You know? I started to understand why you have all these hand wavy demos because it's like, yeah, things break.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. I think it just occurred to me that we like to wing these podcasts. And so the topic is RubyConf. But I think this is what we can talk about is, like, what we do at conferences because I think that's been something Ben and I have been discussing in the background as well.
Like, how can we make these things more valuable as a use of our time? And if we're not going to the talks, we can be sitting on our butts, but we could also be, like, doing demos or have an actual, like, plan. And I know, John, you've done some conference stuff at Box Out and with your other companies. So I think that's kind of interesting.
We've always claimed to be, like, we're not the type of company that does demos, and that's always why we've done the kind of the lazy option of just bring people together, but don't you know—we—we don't like to have an agenda, and I think we're always gonna be like that. But I think you realize, Ben, that, like, the demos you actually like doing, and it was helpful for people. So maybe we'll do more of those in the future.
Ben: Yeah. It was fun that people who were actually interested in learning something about Honey Badger, I was able to share some stuff about Honey Badger. You know, I wasn't, like, in people's face, and I wasn't like, oh, you want a t shirt? Well, first, let me talk to you for half an hour, you know, kind of stuff.
But, you know, people who came by who obviously didn't know who we were, I'm like, hey.
Do you know about honey badger? Do you wanna know about honey badger? And they're like, sure. I'm like, oh, let me show you. And that's, I think, you know, pretty natural. It's like people weren't forced like they had to, you know, sit there and watch a a timeshare demo or anything.
Josh: Yeah. You're just kind of a guy with a laptop. And I'm happy to lure them in with the awesome radical t shirts too, which we had our the first batch of our new t shirts, I brought to RubyConf. And I didn't do many of them. I did a batch of 60. So I was like—they were sitting in my garage for, I don't know, a couple weeks.
And I was like, there's all these people I wanna give them to, but I'm like, I need to save them, save this one because I'm gonna do a new order. But I was like, I need something to bring to RubyConf. And so we brought them, and they were I'd say they were a pretty big hit. We had a special artist. I don't know. Did I talk about this on past episodes?
Ben: I can't remember.
Josh: I don't think so. I think I've talked about it on other podcasts. I randomly emailed the guy named Jimbo Phillips, who is the son of Jim Phillips, who's a famous they're both, like, famous legendary skate artists out of Santa Cruz, California. And Jim, his dad, did, like, all of the artwork for Santa Cruz Skateboard, the brand, like, from the seventies, eighties, I think, into the nineties. And then Jimbo, his son, took up the mantle.
So I had him do do, like, his take on a honey badger, basically. And then I put it on a very nice heavy made in California skate tee and had a screen printer in Portland print it, and it turned out really well. People liked it, it seems. So I will be printing more, and I think we might even have them available in our new Honeybadger shop, that we have—just because it makes it easy to collect addresses. And if people wanna pitch in a little bit, these are not cheap shirts to make, so
John: Yeah. They went fast and I've seen them, like, all over socials. So I mean, I feel like it's definitely a worthwhile thing. Like and what's cool too is you, instead of doing the art on the front, you did, like, very subtle on the front and art on the back and which I'm sure was intentional. But so everybody's pictures are, like, you know, from the back, like, pointing the thumb down or, like, things like that.
So it's like a different shot, which is kinda neat because you're like, oh, wait. What's that? Oh, it's just another Honeybadger thing, and then I scroll past again. But, yeah, it definitely you stopped me from scrolling a few times, so.
Josh: That’s a good point. I, yeah, I never thought about, like, how it changes—I did the back just because, like, that's a little bit more—I feel like it's a little more vintage. Like, a lot of the shirts, like, from the nineties, the graphic tees and things, like, they have, like, the kinda the big graphic design on the back and, like, maybe the company logo or something on the front. So I was going for that vibe. But it does make it it makes it stand out just a little bit more from the other T shirts that you get.
John: Also a big like, it took up a lot of surface area, and I found with T shirts like that, I have one T shirt that's similar, and everything catches on it in the front if it's on the front because Mhmm. Like, my seat belt will stick to it all the time. So, like, I don't drive with that shirt on because it just it drives me insane every time if I don't have a sweatshirt or something over it.
So putting it on the back, I think, negates that from ever happening as well, which is probably not at all considered, but I would just say that's definitely something that I've noticed on a couple of shirts that I have that have a big pattern on the front.
Josh: So, yeah, that's like our strategy, that’s been in mind. Our evil plan is I lure you in with a really cool swag, bespoke small batch swag, and then Ben slides up with his laptop, and he's like, hey. You wanna see what we're working on at Honeybadger?
John: Yeah. You're like, have you met Ben? Yeah. I we do the same thing at Box Out. Like, we take really nice Bella Canva, stuff like that, T shirts.
We try and make them really comfortable. We make the logo relatively subtle. Like, we don't put, like, a bright you know, it's usually faded into it. And then when I went to the conferences, the ones that I went to, I mean, I pushed them hard. Like, everybody's walking by.
I'm just like, oooh. I was like, do you need a really comfortable shirt for the airplane ride home? But they're like Yeah. Who are you, and what are you even you know? And I'm like, look. I get it. Most people have terrible T shirts, but I was like, just feel this. Go ahead. Just touch it. It's fine.
Like, just give it a feel. And then they'll feel it, and they go, oh, that is pretty soft. And I'm like, you wanna wear it, right? You should take one. And they're like, okay. And they're like, what are you even selling? And then I'm like, oh, by the way, you know, and we talk about it and stuff.
Josh: T-shirts.
John: Yeah. Exactly. T shirts.
Josh: Right now.
John: We're not selling them anyway. We're just giving them away for free. We just bought a booth to give away for free. But, yeah, it definitely works. This year, we're actually taking a bunch of—a big pack of Yetis.
We have a high school conference next month. And so we custom engraved, like, the X logo on it and stuff like that. And I think there'll be a—again, this is the sports information director, athletic director. These people walk around with Yetis all day long. It's either water or coffee.
So I think it it'll be a good hit. We've also done koozies in the past because one of the conferences has, like, it's a free, like, open bar in the vendor hall. So the one night. So everybody's just walking around getting a beverage, talking, and having fun. The other one was like a a 2 ticket 1.
And so we literally just everyone's walking around with a wet napkin around there, like, Sierra Nevada or something. And so we just hand them “Oh my gosh. Your hand looks so cold. Is your hand cold?” Here.
Try this. Stupid stuff like that. And it totally went great, and I feel I swear we got some sales from it. It was totally worth the however many a hun—300 koozies that we whipped together. So Nice.
Josh: Yeah. Where you can match the item to a specific unique thing about the conference. That's a cool idea. I had an idea for swag at the conference because we were thinking, like, well, we have one thing that I'm not gonna talk about yet because it's pretty cool. It'll be a secret swag item.
But I had another idea at the conference because we have this lounge, and it's a little bit of a open space. And I've we I was thought, like, it would be cool to have some sort of, like, active act something fun that you know, like, a game or a ping pong or cornhole or yeah. And so the thing that, like, popped into my head was hacky sacks. And, like, I totally want a Honeybadger hacky sacks. So I was, like, super stoked about that idea when I thought about it.
And then I got home, and I had made a note after every conference. Like, I go through I keep notes throughout the event, and I like, I'll use to-dos or whatever if there's something to follow-up on or bookmark or whatever it is. So I go through and I process that note, basically. And I got to the hacky sack one, and I'm like, I'm gonna go see what the options are for this. So I went and looked at whatever commercial swag companies that that, like, offer branded hackysacks, and they're just total garbage.
I'm gonna have to search a little more. I'm thinking of, like, the nice woven ones from whatever from the nineties that we used to have. I feel like they were, like, fairly decent quality ones, but the ones that I was finding were, like, whatever, pleather stitched together with, like, bad logos on them. And it's just it's so hard to find the right thing once you think of what you wanna do. You can't just go to the whatever the—do a Google search and and find it. That's for sure.
Ben: Yeah. I think most people who are buying swag don't wanna spend that much money to get the quality stuff. Right? So most of the vendors are like, oh, I'll just give you the cheapest thing I can find.
Josh: That's, like, the dynamic between me and you, Ben, I think. It's like, I'm over here coming up with wildly expensive swag ideas, and you're just over there nodding along, like, okay, Josh.
Ben: I like the—I like the nineties thing you're going with, though. Like, these shirts, like I have a whole bunch of shirts look like our Honeybadger shirt because I'm a child of the nineties, you know, and the hacky sack things. And now I need to get, I don't know, some ultimate discs to hand out as well. And That'd be cool. I know you were joking about doing the hypercolor shirts, but we really, really ought to do the hypercolor shirts because those were the bomb.
Josh: You know, Gecko is still they're still around the brand, and they make shirts. And I even I bought one recently because that's the stage I'm in. And they're, like, really cool still, like, very yeah. It'll take you back. You go look at their website.
John: On topic, we just released the nineties Saved by the Bell graphic series. It's got, like, custom made shapes that look like it and everything, and all the marketing was, like, making jokes about the principal and everything. Yeah. It was funny. So we just—it was like—we just like to throw in random things like that.
Again, most of the SIDs and stuff like that, they were around in the nineties, so they totally appreciate it. But yeah. So we—you can now you can even use Box Out to make a Saved by the Bell graphic really easily to go with your T shirts and all that.
Ben: We totally have to put that in the show notes. You gotta drop us a link on that later, John.
John: I'll make a note.
Josh: I wanna see what it looks like.
Ben: Yeah. So, John, have you found the conferences to be useful in your sales efforts for Box Out?
John: For those, extremely. They're, like, literally mission critical because it’s—I don’t—I think it's a little different than a programming conference because for those, it's literally the 1,000 or 2,000 people that will buy your software all there in one room. And they do a fantastic job of encouraging the vendor halls, like, of getting people to go through them and stuff like that. So the 2 national conferences that we go to are big. So one's in the summer and one's, like, in December.
And so it's literally, like, 2,000 high schools and a 1000 colleges at the other one or something like that. And so everybody's there. So it's like fishing with dynamite. They're just all there. If you're, you know, friendly and helpful, we oftentimes, what we'll do is buy—we’ll go there, we’ll buy, like, a 60 inch TV, and then we just give it away at the end so we don't have to bring it back or don't have to, like, ship something there.
On one of them, we actually just threw it in Steve's camper and took it down because we were all camping on that trip anyways. So we had some extra storage in in his camper and did it. But then we end still ended up giving it away once we were down there. So anyone who, like, drove to the conference, we're just like, also, if you drove to the conference, just come back and you can get it.
And they're like, okay. So but, yeah, they're great for that. I mean, you get all everybody in one place, and they're high intent. They're the literally the person who has the budget and has the need. It could not be a more perfect situation.
Whereas program conference, they might be the person who has the need, but it might not be the person who has the budget. It's not the CTOs at these conferences. And if you go to a CTO conference, it might not be the person who has the need. It might just be the person who has the budget. So it it's really nice for from the sports marketing side, so.
Josh: I think for us, it's like there's two possibilities. Like, either you're there to hire as a company or you're there because you do direct like, your strategy is, like, direct to developer. The developer brings you in and then, which we have done, which I think works a little bit. But, like, I think that is something, like, we are looking to get more in front of the the key decision makers as well.
John: But also, you guys should sell more. Like, I that's the thing that I think is hard for all of us. Like, as developers, we're, like, we don't wanna be pushy. We don't wanna be whatever. I think opening the laptop and showing people was awesome, but, like, you could definitely actually sell there and not aggressively, but, like, harder than you are, and no one would be bothered.
Especially because of your existing reputation, people would be like, oh, good for them. Yeah. Like, they oh, you're actually like, you told me something I didn't know and now you get excited. It's like, you could do that. It would not be a problem at all, I don't think.
I think it's just very natural for us to just be helpful and then walk away, and we could have got more revenue and help someone even more. And instead, we're just like, well, I don't wanna be a bother because I hate being bothered. You know?
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's easy to forget to make—to ask the question at the end because you're doing everything right up until that point. Good sales is just I mean, I think it's just helping people with their problems. But the key part for to make it sales is to make the sale at the end. And I often I'll forget that part because I'm just it's by default just to chat with people and, you know, whatever.
John: Well, I think if you end up in software like you guys are or like I am, like, you're a founder. You just have the leverage to make something to help people. It's not and you wanna make a living by it. We're genuinely, I think, helpful creatures. And because we're helpful, we wanna help people.
And once we've done that, we just forget to actually—to help ourselves, especially if, generally, things are taken care of and all all that kind of stuff. So I think it's really easy to forget that side of things, but.
Josh: On the topic of the TVs, that's a great idea, like, bringing your own stuff because the way sponsoring a conference works is usually—so you talk to the organizers because the conferences will have a sponsor package. They usually call it a prospectus. And so they'll send it to you if you're a known company or something. You might get them in the email. Or if you're looking for them, you can go to conferences and just look for them, they usually have them on the website or you can ask them.
But it doesn't end there. You have to actually design what you're doing. Like, they don't just do that for you. The event center or, like, wherever they're the venue usually has, like, maybe some things they provide as a default. Like, they might give you a table and a few chairs or something.
But beyond that, you're working usually with the venue. They might have a wholesale or warehouse company where you can rent furniture or design extra items, graphics, and signs, and all the things that you see that makes a company look really professional in a space. Like, all of that is designed and ordered by you. And usually those in my experience, those companies that provide those services to venues are just crazy expensive, for what they offer.
Like, the furniture, like, in most cases, I could go buy the furniture around here for cheaper than I'm renting it, basically. So I think, like, when you can, going out and buying the television instead of renting it, and then you get the giveaway on top of it. You're saving money, and you get to give away a free TV to someone. We saw when we did the lounge in Portland, we were the suckers that, like, rented all the official furniture. The one of the booths next to us, one of the guys had brought a couch from his house.
John: Nice.
Josh: Like, they actually just, like, literally brought it in. So you do have some flexibility if you can think outside the box a little bit at these places to, like, work around this and do it a little bit cheaper, I've learned. So I just think that that's a good information for people to know.
John: Yeah. Another good thing is ship it. Like, don't try and take it with yourself on your plane and stuff like that. We did that way too many times. And then finally, one of my friends was helping us, and he was like, he does a lot of this kind of stuff.
And he's like, yeah. You're literally going through the airport with tables and things and bags and stuff that he's like, what are you doing? Just ship it to the hotel ahead of time. Like, they—they’re accustomed to this. So, like, we literally, today, you know, Robbie, who I work with before the meeting, just dropped off everything to get it, you know, shipped to the for the conferences in a couple weeks.
Spend a couple $100, but, like, to not have to go through an airport with tables and all these extra bags, it's a huge saver to just ship stuff ahead of time. Even the t shirts, we—we’re bringing 300, 350 t shirts to the conference that we're going to, and we ship them all ahead of time as well. It's just—you don't wanna carry any of that stuff with you.
Josh: Yeah. I know this, and I still made that mistake this time. I mean, I only had 60 T shirts, but they were, like, a 120 T shirts at least in weight because I went and bought those heavyweight T shirts.
John: Yeah.
Josh: And so, like, I got this big suitcase because I was just lazy or not lazy, but I procrastinated and didn't ship them in time. And so I was like, a week before, I'm like, crap. What am I gonna do? Because I don't wanna take my old janky suitcase that can fit all of this stuff, because I'm usually, like, a carry on person now. So I just ordered a big orange suitcase off off of Amazon, and I did that.
But I got it to the it was, like, it was basically packed full. And I got to the airport, and I'd already paid for the checked bags and things. But, of course, then it was over the weight. So it was an overweight luggage item, and it ended up costing me, like, an extra $100, like, just to check it on top of what I'd already paid. And then I had to drag it around. So, yeah, definitely thinking ahead is worthwhile.
Ben: Yeah. And the conference centers will often have a FedEx location, like, right next to the venue space. It's so easy to get that stuff back.
John: I'll say one thing I did learn. You asked me. You're like, what did you learn? And here's the thing that that stuck with me the most. This brilliant guy, he's a salesperson at lounge area, but he was like, you should check out Ansible.
And so I checked out Ansible, and I started messing with it. And that was actually really cool. That's like my description would be, like, for Rubyists who have done Capistrano or, let's say, even, like, Kamal or whatever. It's like a push based—you can do pull with it as well—but you can just define your servers and throw in some, like, tasks, and you can just run those tasks on all the servers, which has been really awesome, now that I have an application that's not sitting on Heroku where all that stuff is automatic.
So I've been playing with that a lot recently, and that was something that talking to you, Ben, you were like, oh, yeah. Just check that out. And then I did, and I was like, this is awesome. So that was one of my favorite learning takeaway, not Ruby related, but it was helpful.
Ben: Oh, that's awesome. Give me the warm fuzzies over here. Love that. Yeah. Ansible is a great tool. Like, even if you only have one server, because cause it's really great for a farm of servers. But even if I have one, it's at least beneficial because it gives you a reproducible build.
Right? Because you have everything configured. It's all a whole bunch of YAML and just, hey, go do those things to that server and then you can repeat it. And if you run it again, it just does nothing. Right? And you can be assured that, okay, everything's in place.
Josh: You know, when I use Linux for my desktop, I used Ansible to configure my laptop, which was, next level. I had the dot files, and I was like, I'm gonna automate all of this. And it was useful. Of course, I was using some bespoke you know, I was using Arch Linux, like, hand configure every single thing in it. So you need something like that if you want any kind of reproducible system.
But you can use it for configuring any Linux system. An Ubuntu desktop would be a perfectly good use for it in my opinion. Ben got me into Ansible way back in the day too. Yeah. They owe you some money or something as a dev evangelist or, yeah.
John: The only thing that hit me is some of the servers are so old that there's, like, the wrong version of Python or some, like, bad version of the future PIP install thing. And so, like, I need to work through some of that. I have to make sure before I do anything that, like, that's not—that version is not actually used somewhere, and then I'm not gonna screw something up because I don't know all the history.
So some of that stuff takes a little bit of time then because I have to track down what's going on. But, like, just I mean, to just throw, like, 10 servers, URLs in it, and then be able to run simple things like crontab-L.
I'm like, where are the crons even set up? I don't even know where the machine actually runs crons, like, for these. And just to do stuff like that, it was really nice. I'm like, I'm not even keeping them around. I don't need to keep running these tasks.
I just throw them in there, and I'm sure I can do this same stuff with SSH and loops in a shell and whatever. But it's just nice to have a little bit of structure around it. It could not have done it without Copilot. It was so easy. I was like, this slick salesperson told me to use Ansible. Give me, like, a basic structure for, like, 10 servers. These are the roles, and this is the task I wanna run. And it was like, here you go. And I was like, copy paste, run Ansible.
It worked. And I was like, you've gotta be kidding me. And it was just back and forth from there. And I'm like, what am I even doing anymore? I'm not even working anymore. I'm just talking to the AI and tweaking stuff, so it was cool.
Josh: Man, Ben, you're supposed to be selling Honeybadger, not Ansible. I'm just—Ben, do we have an Ansible module for vector and the Honeybadger? Or do they call it a module? I can't remember now what they call their, like
John: Task book or something or—
Josh: It'd be cool if we had a you know, something you could just drop in in in your book and have it run.
Ben: That is a good idea. I can take a look at the document.
Josh: I think it's playbooks, isn't it?
John: Or Playbooks. That's what it is. Yeah. Yes. Playbook. I could I knew it's something book.
Josh: But yeah.
John: Yeah. I hate YAML, though. I don't well, I'm not even gonna we're not gonna go into that, but I just YAML drives me insane. I'm like, everything in infrastructure is YAML. I'm like, really?
Ben: Alright. So do you prefer TOML or JSON, or what's your preference?
John: Yeah. I see where you're going with this. What's another option? There's none. That doesn't mean I can't still hate the only one.
Ben: I hear you. Yeah. I'm not a big fan of YAML myself because it's the spec is like it's almost recursive. It's like, oh, and then you can do this and then you can do this. And it's like 5 layers deep, like, oh, wait.
Now I understand the entire universe in YAML. Right? But—
John: Right.
Ben: But there's not really a great alternative. Like, TOML is fine, but I don't really wanna go back to windows.ini, you know, and then there's JSON, it’s was like, yeah, if you miss a comma somewhere, then you're hosed. You know, it's like ughh—
John: That's true.
Ben: It's no great option. That's, I guess, a bit of a tangent though, but I'm glad that that Ansible stuff was useful to you. And I—I think, yeah, getting back to the point of, like, doing sales, the consultative sales thing is that's what it's all about. Right? You have a customer that has a pain, and it may not be that your product solves that pain.
But you can help solve that pain because with the experience that you have. And then, hey, that person has a good memory of, hey, that Honeybadger guy helped me out. And maybe you do use that knowledge to get that sale right away, or maybe it's 5 years down the road. They're like, hey. Those guys, they remember their they knew what they're talking about, and now I need that thing. And let me go talk to them again.
Josh: Yeah. They, like, they already solved one of my problems, so their product is would make sense that it would solve another one.
John: That happened to me last week even with Fireside. We—I had a sales call. I'm air quoting it. But, you know, where I talked with someone about what they needed, and they're like, do you do editing? And I was like, well, no.
We don't. And I was like, well, have you used Riverside? I realized this is confusing because there's 2 sides. But I was like, have you used Riverside? And they were like, I've never heard of that.
And I said, oh, yeah. I was like, you just hit record. And then at the end, you can, like you get a transcript. You get clips. You get auto leveling, you get all this stuff, cut out umms and ahs, etcetera, etcetera.
I was and I'm just, like, pitching this totally different product. But I think that's what you have to do. Again, like, the goal is to help the customer. And by the end of it, they were like, oh, yeah. So what then what part—you do the hosting? And I was like, yeah. And they're like, well, can I switch to you? And I was like, yeah. You can switch to me. Like, here's ways that you can import.
If you have problems, let me know. And so it's like I think that is an advantage of being a technical salesperson is that you can solve their technical problems even if they're not in something that you actually do. You can give them that solution, and then they think of you as a helpful person, and they will keep coming back to you in that regard.
You know, sometimes it's right away like on this one, and sometimes it's down the road like you're talking about. But if you're helpful, I just think it in the end, it comes back to you in in some way. So they'll remember it for sure.
Josh: Mhmm.
Ben: Yeah. And I think that's the message also that Amy and Alex, you know, from 30 by 500, that's what they're all about is like providing a bunch of value upfront before you get to the point where it's like, oh, they're actually gonna be a customer. Right? You don't go for the sale. You don't just talk about me, me, me, me.
It's like, well, how can I help you? How can I share with you something that would be helpful? And then that builds that relationship, that trust, and they then they think of you when they need that thing.
John: I was just listening to a podcast where a guy was talking about he took a negotiation class in school, and he was like, it was so awesome, but he's like, the people who did good, like, now it's 10 years later. And he's like, the people who were good in that negotiation class are not the people who were successful later in life. And his theory was basically that they were really good at, in a onetime scenario, maximizing the amount of extraction. But in the real world, that does not help you. You don't want to maximize extraction every single time you deal with someone because they will not want to be with you anymore.
Like, we've talked about pricing in the past. And I'm like, what your goal is to provide enough value for you and enough value for them that everybody sticks together for the long term. And then you get the compounding gains versus, like, every single time I interact with someone. And we all have those people we can just think of—salespeople, or not salespeople who are just extractors.
They try and get the most out of every situation, and you just don't even wanna talk to them or be around them. And, yeah, I just thought that along the same lines. It's an interesting thought of, like, you'd think if they're really good at negotiation, they'll be really good in life, but it's like, no. There there's negotiation over a long term and negotiation in a single instance, and they're different.
Josh: Negotiation is for lawyers or boardrooms at least. Maybe.
John: Yeah.
Ben: So, John, when you do these conferences and you're hanging out with the people and meeting a bunch of prospects, do you do some follow-up at the end, or do you just expect that they'll come back and find you again if they're interested?
John: Yeah. For this, for these, for the Box Out, for the high school stuff, we do follow ups. So what Robbie has started doing—so he's our head head of sales. So what Robbie does is he typically tries—initially, we weren't so great at that, I think, but now we've started to realize the power in that. And so it's less of, like, a a lot of the—at these high school and college conferences, a lot of them are just, like, get the whole email list and just blast them on repeat till they unsubscribe, basically.
So that's not what we do. We will sometimes send, like, a here's the booth we're at or here's the things we're giving away just as an incentive type thing. But what we try to do is right there, we try to get, like, an email address or get them to, like, sign up right there. Like, just sign up right here, and then we'll give you 2 a free 2 week trial, and then we'll, you know, catch up with you later. Or we can do a demo for your team and help everyone on your team learn how to use it in the correct way, all that kind of stuff.
So that's what we've kinda moved to is trying to get an email right away so that—not for sales, but just for, like, look. Here's what we can do, and here's how we can help you, and then we can follow-up afterwards as well. And, typically, it's with that. It's with merch. It's with free swag and then with extra trial time on the other end.
So it's not a zero value thing for people. They're actually getting something that's useful. I'd rather have, like, 10 to 30 personal ones than just, like, a Zoom blast to 2,000 people. So I think it's worked pretty well. And then we go to a lot of smaller state ones as well and do the same thing.
And those are even more personal, I think, because then you're talking about maybe a 100 people. So you can literally almost follow-up with every single person individually.
Ben: And do you track your conversion rate, or do you figure it just works?
John: We don't. We're not that like, I mean, this is how data driven. We have a budget talk today because we were like, oh, like, we make, you know, 70% of our money in 3 months. So we kinda need to think about how we spend it, you know, especially as we're growing and adding more people. And we're like, oh, yeah.
We should do that. And then so it's like, who wants to do it? Everybody's like, nah. Not not me. You know? So that's like, well, maybe our person who helps with our books can do it, and they can't. Okay. Cool. We're not data driven. We're, like, on a yearly basis, we're like, do we have more—did we make more than last year? Yeah. Cool. Alright. This is good. So we definitely don't do that.
We don't even have a CRM set up. Thankfully, right now, we only have 2 people who are technically in sales, and they talk to each other nonstop. So it's okay. If we started adding—even just if we added 1 more person in sales, I think we would have to have a CRM. And I have set up accounts multiple times and just never went all the way through with it so that we could keep track of that and put people in stages and all those kinds of things.
I think, you know, Robbie always has a gut sense in his head, but, yeah, we don't we should probably be better about it, but I think it's working the way it is too. And how much better would it be? It's probably like a micro optimization of, like, maybe 5% or something, which is a significant amount of money, but not enough that it's maybe worth the hassle is where we're at. I don't know what how do you guys look at it?
Ben: Yeah. We're definitely the same way. I mean, we're laid back and just about everything else we do in the business. So this is the same. I've had a follow-up call with a person or from the conference.
But, yeah, we don't necessarily like have a coupon code that we use to track everyone that came to the booth kind of thing. Yeah. You know? Yeah.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. for CRM, we just created a Notion page because they have like a CRM template and we use that, like, to keep track of some leads, but it's not always up to date. But it's nice to at least have, you know, remember who might be a good prospect that hasn't purchased yet.
John: I've tried HubSpot in the past, and I technically have that set up on Flipper, and we sync from our app to HubSpot. And we also sync from our the blog to HubSpot and from support to HubSpot. But then I've also recently tried 20.com, and it was really interesting. It seems like a new one. It's open source.
You can just install it and run it on your own, or you can use their hosted version. But it's, like, $9 a month instead of, you know, however much all the other—the problem with a lot of those all the CRMs is, like, they you go in for free, and all of a sudden, you're paying them 1,000 of dollars a month, and you're like, what happened?
Josh: Like, I invited 2 people.
John: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Exactly. So I'm curious about 20. I'm gonna follow it a little bit. I did a trial, and the UI felt really nice. I liked some of their UI choices that they made and stuff. But, obviously, the problems with CRMs is that the their mode is integration.
So that when you integrate with just, like, everything that people use, it's really hard to switch to anything else because you're gonna involve custom code, and nobody wants to write custom code for CRM stuff. So yeah, it’s—
Josh: Yeah.
John: I don't know. It's a tricky situation, but it's worked okay. I mean, HubSpot free has worked okay for Flipper just to keep track of people and some of that kind of stuff. I don't think it's increased sales or anything to date, but probably that's my fault, not theirs, so.
Josh: Yeah. I'm a fan of the snooze function in most email tools for follow-up emails. A lot of times that's enough if you're doing manual emails, because I just straight to spam or block the person that is, like, sending me a series of obviously, like, template or generated emails anyways. I think, like, for us, that works. I don't know what you use, Ben.
Ben: Yeah. I think well, we use Front to manage our help desk. So we have that for our support, and it also has a shared we use it for 5 or 6 different shared inboxes basically, and it has that snooze feature, and so I use that. The thing that's really beneficial to me for that and the thing that I find most beneficial from a CRM since we don't have, like, the scheduled outreach kind of thing is the history of interactions with somebody.
John: Yeah.
Ben: So I want to know, like, what when have they reached out and what were they reaching out about? Like what problems have they had in the past? And so having that in Front is really helpful because all their support requests are in there. Right?
And so if I'm reaching out with something well, for example, we have alarms coming up pretty soon. We haven't released it yet. It's currently in a private test, but we have had people express an interest in it. And so what I'll do is I'll flag them in Front as someone who they've emailed in. It's like, hey, I wanna get a part of this.
And so I add them as a tag, whatever. In this case, it's alarms, I guess. And then I can go back later and I can say, okay, I can email them. I can snooze it to see when I should reach out to them again, you know, that sort of stuff. So I I guess I'm just not very sophisticated when it comes to that sort of process.
So that simple tool does it for me.
John: That's cool. That makes sense. I like that approach. I think for you know, again, if you're doing it full time and that's all you were doing and there's, like, 3 people doing it full time, keeping track of that is insane. You definitely need something.
But if you're, like, fewer than 10 person company, 1 or 2 people doing sales, air quotes, I feel like that's a really good approach. Like, it to me, it makes sense to me. But what do I guess, I don't have a proven track record of, you know, selling and closing. So maybe that's why.
Josh: Don’t listen to us. We're not sales guys.
John: Yeah. Exactly.
Ben: We're we're just couple of dogs to the keyboard trying to figure out what we're doing. Yep. Yeah.
Josh: So back to RubyConf. John, I'm curious. You were at Drew Bragg's keynote for who wants to be a Ruby engineer. What did you think of the commercials?
John: The commercials were awesome. And fun fact, he, like, reached out to me, like, 10 days, 7 days before and was like, I'm watching these commercials. Here they are. Like so I saw them ahead of time. And he's like, they're hilarious.
And he's like, I just realized I want a Flipper one. He's like, is there any way you can do one? And I was like, bro, these are so good. I can’t—I don't even know where to start in 10 days with all the other stuff that's going on. I was like, I love this, but I was like, I cannot I just can't say yes.
So I was super jealous. You guys not both knocked it out of the park. They were hilarious. The Judoscale and Honeybadger commercials, they were great.
Josh: I gotta just hand it to Adam with Judoscale because I think Drew came to us first. I, like, basically tracked him down and made him accept us as podcast sponsors. So we were, like, the first podcast sponsor. But I had this we had this, like, commercial that we had Less Films, which is Alan Branch's company make for us, and—but it was a little outdated. So I sent it to Drew when he I was like, you know, would this work?
And he's like, yeah. That's perfect. So we had them just do a quick light update of it, and it was pretty much ready to go, which was nice. And then we had them tack on that, like, thing at the end where it was with Ben and I, like, our South Park talking heads on cartoon bodies.
If you see the founders of Honey Badger wandering the halls, go say hi to them. So we did that, but then he sent me Adam's. And I was like, oh, man. Because Adam did this, like, infomercial for Judoscale, and I won't describe it. Like, he has an actual scale, and it's in his kitchen.
And, like, he's been posting it on his, like, socials since RubyConf. So if you haven't seen it, we'll put it in the show notes. It’s—it's excellent. We'll put both of them in the show notes. They're both awesome, but Adam's is just—I was a little jealous even that I didn't think of an infomercial.
But I would love to see John become the dolphin, though. I mean, I think that would be a natural like, some sort of, like, hacker dolphin like, you know, Flipper guy that's, like, shipping on Fridays.
John: Most people when they watch me swim say that I look like a dolphin. So yeah. Not doing.
Josh: Is that where the dolphin came from?
John: Yeah. No. Definitely not. No. The it's solely just because it's, like, flipping things, and that made me think of Flipper, the old TV show, and then it became adult.
And I—literally, the first one was a ASCII dolphin. Like, I just searched, like, ASCII text dolphin because I wanted to look good in the Read Me. And so because it couldn't embed images at that point. I'm dating myself. And yeah.
So that that's where it all started originally was from that. And then, eventually, it was like, yeah. We need a better one with, like, a mood. Actually, Andrew Mason's kind of the inspiration for the current one. Right.
He posted something, yeah, about Friday or whatever. I'm leaving for 2 weeks, and I just turned the feature on. And he had, like, sunglasses and a hoodie, and I was like, that. That's what I want right there. And so I literally like, when I sent it to the designer, I was like it was like a picture of Andrew, like a AI generated one I had made, and I was like, work with this.
Josh: Nice.
Ben: So this is why we we love John. Right? Because he named his after a TV show. We named ours after a YouTube video. It's all good.
John: Yeah. That's, I mean, that's important
Josh: What was the nineties movie or—or 90 or 2000, like, movie with the dolphins? It there was a dolphin movie that was kinda, like, free willy type from that era.
John: Yes. I'm blanking, but I know what you're talking about.
Josh: That would be fun. Like, nineties throwback with Flipper.
John: Yeah. That's a really good idea. Yeah. And I'm just like, oh, it's okay, little guy. Petting the injured dolphin because it got deployed without feature flags.
Ben: That'd be cool. Yeah. Lots of possibilities. Well, RubyConf was fun. Glad we went. It was a good experience. I got to practice my sales skills a little bit, level up there a bit. And, of course, it's always cool to hang out with cool people like the ones that show up at RubyConf.
John: Yeah. It was fun. And I'll just say that steak dinner was real good. You missed it, Ben, but, oh, man, that was some of the best steak I've had in my mouth.
Josh: That was a good steak dinner, with oysters even. Yeah. We had, like, all the appetizers.
Ben: Well, speaking of dinners, okay, gotta slip this here in right at the end. So Josh and I, we were looking for dinner on the the last night, Thursday night. And so I found this this place that had seafood. I grew up in Alabama. I was born in Louisiana, so I am a big fan of seafood.
So found this place and had jambalaya on the menu. I'm like, let's go there. So we went over there, and it turns out it's like a—it’s like a blues club. And I was like, cool. That's fine. I wasn't really aiming for that. I just wanted some jambalaya, but nice. So we sat down, started eating, and—
Josh: Well, first when we got there, they patted us us down for like, to see if we were packing, which we thought was a little strange.
Ben: Yeah. That was a little odd. He's like, uhhh, you know, and I'm like, what kind of place did I bring us to exactly?
Josh: Like Yeah. Like, they have, like, club security.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, sort of like, okay. So we I've started eating and somebody started doing a set and that was fun. And then we left. Didn't really think much about it. And then we're looking at the guitars on the wall, and there's one that says Tom Petty. And Josh is like, hey. You think it's really Tom Petty's guitar? And I'm like, sure. Why not? And there's another one there from Keith Richards.
Josh: There were, like, probably 20 guitars.
Ben: The name of the place is Buddy Guy's Legends. Alright? So I'm like, okay. I don't know what this is about.
Josh: We're not, like, Blues fans, obviously.
Ben: Yeah. Obviously. Right? So we had our dinner. It was good. It was really good. Recommend it in Chicago. Go to Buddy Guys. It was really good. And we left.
And then later, someone else, posted to Slack, the RubyConf Slack. They went to Buddy Guy’s Legends, and Buddy Guy himself showed up and was hanging out with the crowd and doing a thing. And I was like, what? We like, oh, and then then I looked him up on Wikipedia and, like, he's a thing. Like, he's just known in the community.
Like, he's a super legendary blues dude. And part of his career, he worked as a janitor at LSU. And I'm like, oh, so I totally had this connection to this legend. And I went to his place and I missed him by, like, I don't know, half an hour, an hour, whatever.
John: Oh, wow.
Ben: Yeah. Such a bummer. And I was like, I guess that's what I guess that's why they're doing pat downs.
Josh: They I guess they're It was great, though. I love that place, and the music was really good. The I can't remember his name now, the performer that was there, but he was great. And the food was good. Fun vibe. So blue: clubs recommend.
John: Nice. Yeah. That sounds awesome. I literally only left for Remington's that one night to the steak house. The rest of time, we were, like, inside the hotel the whole time. It's just a massive hotel, had everything. And the food was, like, it was good enough. Like, it wasn't amazing, but it was good enough that you're, like, there's some people there. I'll just go. And there's always Rubyists in the bar there. So it was really easy to just hang out with people.
Josh: Yeah. Big sprawling hotel. But, yeah, I wanted to mention RailsConf next year. It is the last RailsConf that ruby central is putting on and it is going to happen in Philadelphia if enough companies sponsor it. So I want to throw that out there.
They are still looking for sponsors I believe and we'll put a link in the show notes that you can go and look at that if you're interested. I think they're also collecting email addresses for people who are interested. So if you are—if you wanna go to RailsConf or you plan to, go drop your email in there because I think they're gauging interest still. So I'm really hoping that it that they could pull it off and, trying to help as much as we can. And then, of course, RubyConf 2025 is gonna be great and really looking forward to that, so.
John: Did they announce where or not?
Josh: Did they? I don't I might have missed it if they did. I don't recall. Do they announce them? Do they do that for RubyConf?
John: I actually don't know if they do. I just we had to cut out really fast afterwards. So I it was, like, keynote, and we left before they even summarized anything. Yeah. Because I was like, look. If we get out now, we can grab our stuff and be out of the hotel before everybody else. So, yeah, we cut out quick, so I missed it, so.
Josh: Well, we'll figure it out. And then, of course, there's all the new and old coming back at regional Ruby Conferences that I've already seen several new ones announced for next year, and we might even be hosting our own here in the Pacific Northwest if we can make that happen. Shout out to Nate Vic, our wonderful organizer. But, yeah, we'll hopefully have more to share about that at some point.
John: Cool.
Josh: It's been good.
Ben: Oh, thanks for joining us, John. It's fun as always.
John: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Josh: So this has been FounderQuest. Find us at founderquestpodcast.com, and I don't know. Are we doing another podcast this year? This might be our last of the year. So.
Ben: Yeah. We’re recording right before Thanksgiving. December's kind of a slow time for us, so there might be one more, but there might not.
Josh: And if we surprise you, then it'll be your Christmas bonus.
Ben: We're out.
Josh: Cool.