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Mike chats with Co-Founder of Stack Aid, Dudley Carr, about the importance of funding Open Source projects, and Stack Aid's approach to helping Open Source organizations get paid.
Show Notes
Creators & Guests
What is APIs You Won't Hate?
A no-nonsense (well, some-nonsense) podcast about API design & development, new features in the world of HTTP, service-orientated architecture, microservices, and probably bikes.
Mike Bifulco: Hello, hello, and
welcome back to APIs you won't Hate.
My name is Mike Balco.
I am one of your api co-hosts and
guide through the world of designing
APIs and building APIs, and doing all
sorts of good stuff with API tech.
I am joined today for an interview with
a new friend of mine, someone who I met
at a conference here in North Carolina.
We're gonna be talking a little bit today
about his project and some of the sort
of mission of open source and supporting
open source and things like that.
So today I'm chatting with
Dudley Carr from Stack A Dudley.
How are you doing today?
Dudley Carr: I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me on.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, of course.
Super happy to have you here.
I have lots of questions for you and I'm,
I'm super glad you were able to make it
because from our initial conversations
when we sort of bumped into each other
all over the place at all Things Open
your work seemed very interesting to me.
And I think a lot of the squad
here that is part of the APIs you
won't hate community will really.
What you're doing.
So I wanna talk all about that.
I wanna talk about how you got to
where you are and what you're doing at
Stack and just kinda get some of the
history on, on the project in yourself.
So tell me a bit about yourself
and tell me about Stack.
Dudley Carr: Absolutely.
So I've been a, in the software
engineering space for the.
22 years.
I did my undergraduate in computer
science at Stanford and graduated at
the peak of the dot com bubble burst.
And briefly did a stint in finance,
actually worked at Lehman Brothers on
their exotic derivatives until I realized
that stuff is insane and I got out.
In the last 20 years, I've spent all
of it working with my brother, who
also did computer science, and so we've
gone from one venture to the next.
So he is not here, but is probably the.
More important of the duo.
And anyway, we did our first startup in
Rhode Island in my parents' basement.
I think there was radon in that
basement, but we we managed we
actually built in the, you know,
2002, 2003, we built a product that.
Became g talker.
It was flash-based, you know, pre action.
It was action script, but before it
was even before they released all of
their UI toolkits and stuff like that.
And back backend was Python.
It was initially a desktop
application, then became a.
Web-based product.
And we developed that out and ended
up selling that to Google and moving
to Seattle in 2006 to join the
Google Talk team and work on that.
And we spent about five years at Google
going from one project to the next.
First we were in apps and and
then eventually I worked on Google
Voice and then before leaving.
So that was super formative for us.
We learned a lot of things,
met a lot of great people.
I think that was kind
of the heyday for Google
And and then after that we, we did some
more startups food, food related things.
And then we joined a company called
Moz that does SEO here in Seattle.
And we spent another four or five
years there, I helped run a large
portion of their engineering team and
then grew some of their product areas.
That was also really formative for us
in terms of, you know, understanding
that space, growing teams and you know,
just going through various product
life cycles and things like that.
At the end of our MOS experience, we
actually did another startup with a friend
here in Seattle around crowdfunding.
And this was actually
crowdfunding for sports team.
So, There was another platform
that was really taking off.
We found out about Stripe
Connect and started using that.
And really the, the basis for
it was, you know, you have like
a high school football team.
They're selling candy
bars and things like that.
There's a lot of inefficiencies
there and there's a lot of price
gouging actually by merchants who
sell products to schools to do that.
And so there was.
You know, 2017, 2018, there
was a real impetus to you know,
move all of that stuff online.
And we have a lot of learnings that I
think happy to chat about, but that was
kind of formative for us in terms of
thinking about, you know, how you move
money from a set of people who wanna
support something to, to the recipients
and what all is involved in that.
That was also just kind of how we, we
transitioned from that into consulting.
So we've been doing consulting for.
Four years you know, we're kind
of embedded engineers and product
specialists in inside of organizations
and to help them transfer in companies.
And that's gives us a ton of flexibility
and allows us to do cool things like what
we've done over the last couple of years.
At the beginning of the
pandemic by the way, we launched
something called Covid Trace.
So we had the hot idea
to do contact tracing.
We tried to launch an app immediately.
It was blocked by Google and Apple.
Mike Bifulco: Oh wow.
Dudley Carr: you're, you're not doing
anything location based and we're gonna
sort this out first, which is great.
I think it was totally the
right move on their part.
We ended up adopting their
the exposure notification.
APIs that they have, and we ended
up lo, I think we were the second
app to launch in the United States.
And so we launched with the state of
Nevada and worked with them over the
course of two years doing exposure
notifications, rolling that out for
iOS and Android, and then eventually
moving all of Nevada off of our
custom app onto IOS's, built-in
exposure notification function.
And at the same time building out
other things in terms of getting
results to people and things like that.
So really interesting problems
around health totally unanticipated.
So that, that was actually
that was all open source.
We released all of that infrastructure,
open source and the apps.
And then, yeah, about a year
ago we started on decade.
Mike Bifulco: Wow.
Yeah, that's some in
incredible back history there.
I, I.
Was not prepared for that, that much.
Incredible problem solving that you've
gotten into in your, your career.
For sure.
As someone who lived through an
entire pandemic of being, you know,
Locked in my home and not leaving
and being very concerned about
public health and those things.
Super, super cool to hear, hear
you worked on that and, and
obviously impacted so many people.
And also, you know, collaborated
with the, the big organizations
like Apple and Google.
That's massively cool to hear.
I also don't think I realized that
you and I had some sort of shared
overlap not overlap, but, but maybe
an odd Venn diagram of career stuff
before working at Stripe, I worked
at Google for a couple years.
Not quite on Google Voice,
on Google Assistant, so voice
related stuff at Google.
Although I'm no longer there and actually
probably worth mentioning for posterity
since you and I met at All Things Open.
I'm also no longer at Stripe.
So I'm, I've left Stripe in the past
couple weeks, but I'm very curious
to hear about your experiences with
Stripe Connect and, and all that.
And so.
All of this history of all the crazy
things you've done and, and like working
with complex teams and big problems
and across devices and problem spaces,
and I'm sure languages and all the
other things that have changed since
what, 2003 when you first got into the
the, the world of, of building things
has led you to where you're at now.
So tell me a little bit about
Stack Aid and what you're doing.
There.
Dudley Carr: Yeah, so Stack stack
is a service that allows you to fund
your second first order and second
order dependencies automatically.
It, the impetus for it came about
a year and a half ago when we.
You know, repeatedly saw articles about
people exasperated by their inability to
sustain their open source project because,
you know, the demands have increased on
what they have to deliver and the reach,
you the reach of their open sources
beyond their wildest dreams, but, you
know, they, they basically pay for it in
their spare time or it takes away from
other paying opportunities that they have.
And so you see a lot of people
kind of torn in those situations.
We, that really resonated with us.
As I mentioned, you know, we had
spent time in the fundraising
arena and we, you know, we saw.
Definitely momentum around Get Up sponsors
an open collective, but we, we thought
that there was an opportunity there.
You know, I think what's super interesting
about the software development space as
opposed to any other space where people
are trying to raise money is that we
know we know what, what you use, right?
There's sometimes it's imperative,
but increasingly it's a declarative.
Way of specifying all your dependencies.
And so we can, we can do so many
things automatically to determine
what you use and, and potentially
influence how we allocate money.
And so the, the, the seed of an idea
was there and we started exploring,
you know, the feasibility of it and
what that would look like, and is it
an effective model, things like that.
And so that's been like the
last year and it's, it's.
Super interesting.
Kind of flushing that out and we're,
we've been super happy with the
results and the initial reception when
we launched a couple of months ago.
Mike Bifulco: So.
I've seen it and I'm sort of familiar
with the product, but I wanna make sure
that you know, it's abundantly clear what
you mean when you're talking about this.
So we're talking about funding open
source projects in a way that is sort of
sustainable and based on your dependency
graph for projects that you're using.
So when you say first and second
order dependencies, what do you mean?
Dudley Carr: Yeah.
So by first order, so let's take
a Packers saw JSON in the node E.
The first order of dependencies are the
the dependencies and dev dependencies
that you list directly in that za js o n.
Now, those first order dependencies
in turn have their own za js o,
where they list their dependencies.
That would be the second
order of dependencies.
Now you can walk that tree down
all the way down, and there are
gonna be lots and lots more.
not unusual for a project to
have literally thousands of.
Dependencies in their dependency tree.
But you know, from a funding perspective,
you have to draw the line somewhere.
Otherwise, you know, you take a
certain amount of money and divide
it into tiny little pieces and
it becomes somewhat meaningless.
So we wanted to, you know, the,
the easy thing was would be to
just fund first order dependencies.
But we, we realized, you know,
a lot of those open source
projects also want to give.
And if we, you know, defaults matter.
And we realize that if we came up with
a mechanism that, you know, when you
find a first order dependency, it passes
some of that onto its dependencies.
You know, you're doing that
automatically for the ecosystem.
You're bene, you don't have to have
everyone opt-in in order to have
further reach into the ecosystem.
And so yeah, that was the impetus to
fund first and second order depend.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
Got it.
So from the, I I, gosh, I don't even know
what, what you would consider to be the
end user, but from the perspective of
someone who is doing the funding, doing
the supporting what does that look like?
Like what is, what is the process for me?
Say for a project I'm running, let's
say APIs, you won't hate.com, right?
It's a, it's a no JS project.
We've got a whole heap of dependencies
that are sort of built into this thing.
What would I need to do to adopt.
Dudley Carr: a great question.
So, you know, when you go to Staca
us, there's the first step in the
onboarding process is oh, often thing
with GitHub and actually adding the
GitHub app to either your personal
organization or some other organization
where repositories are we then scanned
those repositories for you know, files
like Bax, J S O N, or you know, others
depending on whatever language you're.
And we use those declarative list
of dependencies, we ingest that and
start looking at that dependency tree.
Once we have that, we, you know,
we, we put you in the dashboard.
We show you what we had discovered,
like which files and which
repositories we're pulling from.
And we presume initially that you
ne you want to fund all of those.
You can, you can be selective, right?
So I wanna fund these repositories
and these package digest and things
like, Based on that, based on
the first order and second order
dependencies we've pulled from that.
And you can then indicate as
a level of support that you
wanna do on a monthly basis.
We then calculate how much would
go to each of those projects.
So it's hard to des describe, but
there's a tree that we have in the,
in the dashboard and it shows you,
okay, you've got React or low dash, for
example, as a first order dependency.
It has these second order
dependencies and it shows you
the amount of your subscription
that goes to each one of those.
And so that breaks down when you're,
the next step is to enter a credit card
and then, then you're off to the races.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
Okay.
So from, from my perspective,
it is, you know off with GitHub,
get this thing added to my stack
of or to my GitHub organization.
It'll go and, and I guess introspect
and look at, or I guess inspect is
probably even the right word there.
Go look at all the projects I have and
give me the the first and second order
dependencies for each is the target.
Then from there to say like,
just using easy numbers I want to
donate a hundred bucks a month.
To these various organizations.
I, I have one fixed cost and Stack
Aid kind of does the rest from there.
Dudley Carr: That's, that's exactly right.
Yes.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
Wow.
So how, well man, I, I feel
like I have so many questions.
How does the money get from A to B?
Like, how do you track down
the the various projects
that are then being funded?
Dudley Carr: Yeah, so that's the fun
part about building something like
this is because it's effectively
kind of like a marketplace, right?
I mean, we have, we're engaging with both.
Individual developers and companies
who are supporters and of course have a
relationship with open source, maintain.
So we have slowly been reaching
out to open source maintainers
kind of as we drive awareness or if
they've receiving funding, we will
reach out to them individually.
, but we also have been realizing
that, you know, a lot of these
people don't know who we are.
There's a lot of things
grabbing at their attention.
So if they have an existing
relationship with GI UP sponsors or
Open Collective, we actually just
use our corporate credit card and
make the donation on those platforms.
So our, you know, our goal is
to get the money in their hands.
And if they have an existing
relationship, we, we lean on that.
So that, that's worked out well.
But but primarily over time, I think
for for the ease of developers and to
give them more control in terms of, you
know, how those funds are allocated.
Especially if there are multiple
people working on a project.
Things like.
You know, we we would like people to,
you know, claim their project on stack.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, sure.
What does that look like?
Dudley Carr: So we use Stripe
Connect under underneath.
So you know, when you log into the
dashboard and you owe off you also
have to oth with GI up at the moment.
We're working on other.
Hosting platforms, but you o often we
actually verify that you actually are
a maintainer on those repositories
that you're trying to claim.
We list out those
repositories you claim them.
And then as part of that
claiming process, we also need
to collect the a Stripe account.
So we send you over to Stripe.
They get all of the,
the details necessary.
To basically give us a, a stripe
account so that we can deposit
funds into at the end of the month.
And then that's it.
Then you're, then you're able
to collect money from stack.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
Wow, that's great.
So, so I'd imagine there's some population
of people who are very pleased to find
out they can come to Stack Aid, click a
couple of buttons and have money being
funneled into their project every month.
That, that's gotta feel pretty
cool to be able to, I don't know,
land that dream so seamlessly.
Dudley Carr: Yeah, I mean, I think
it speaks more distract than to us.
I mean, honestly, that flow is amazing
and there's so much complexity abstracted.
But I think from an end developer
perspective, it is surprisingly
easy to get up and running.
And yeah, and I think it's, it's
pretty great, you know, when you
show up that a lot of the times
there's, you know, a couple of bucks
at the very least waiting for you
there, and you immediately get that.
I think that has been an important
part of stack it, which is, you know,
you, you don't have to be a developer.
Like the developer doesn't have
to have an account in order
for money to accrue for them.
So you know, you have this kind of
problem I think on GitHub sponsors
an open collective initially where
people didn't have a relationship
with those platforms, so there
wasn't a way to get money to them.
A lot of people have set it
up, but there's also a large
portion of the ecosystem that
has no relationship with them.
And so it was important for us to be
able to accrue money and, you know,
show people that you can actually.
there's money in the open source
that they've contributed and have
that as a carrot for them to sign up.
Mike Bifulco: Sure.
Yeah, that's, that's a really interesting
model and having been exposed to GitHub
sponsors a little bit, I know that like
one of the nice things that comes along
with this actually may, might be a
Stripe Connect requirement, but to access
Stripe Connect, you have to essentially
have viable tax information, right?
Like the, the right information
to be able to be paid out.
So that you're not just, you
know, sending off money to some
anonymous bucket somewhere.
But instead, theoretically it's tied to
like an L L C or an individual proprietor
or, you know, a more complex corporation
in the case of vicar businesses.
But a lot of that is, I would
imagine abstracted away from you.
You just need them to, to, you
know, click the button and connect
to stack with Stripe Connect.
Dudley Carr: One of the biggest concerns
that we had out of the gate was you.
All open source doesn't
happen in the United States.
There are people across the world, and
the United States in particular has a
requirement called know your customer.
And so you need a lot of details in order
to verify their identity and make, you
know, make sure that this isn't for money
laundering or some other scheme like that.
And so that is actually
all abstracted away for us.
And that is pretty phenomenal if we.
A, a two person operation.
There's just no way you're gonna
Mike Bifulco: Yeah,
Dudley Carr: that.
Mike Bifulco: the, the scope and scale
of those money laundering operations
is far more complex and sophisticated
than, you know, I think we might realize
as, as sort of an average consumer.
You know, again, I'm, I'm not at Stripe
any longer, but during my tenure there,
like you, you do Financial crimes
training and it's pretty astonishing
in the creative ways people, you
know, will, will go to lengths to
make money disappear or just harder
to trace whatever the case may be.
And nice that you don't
have to worry about that.
There's a lot of mechanisms in place to
detect and prevent that fraud as well.
. Okay.
So I, I want to know a little
bit about when did you what, what
signals were you given that this was
something that was going to work?
In other words that when you're starting
to build stack, because it's only a year
and change old at this point was there a
moment or a series of events that sort of
made you feel like, oh, this is something
that actually has some momentum behind it?
Dudley Carr: Yeah, I think well, I
think we had to prove to ourselves that
it's viable and, you know, we, we have,
there's some nuance to the model in
terms of how we distribute that money.
And, and more importantly, what's
interesting about this problem is
that it's not a one-time thing.
So if no one shows up to collect the
money, what do you do with that money?
So there's a time component to it as well.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
Dudley Carr: we wanted, so we.
There's complexity around the model to
some degree in terms of implementing
and doing it right, and we, we knew that
the model itself needed to be validated
and be comparable to things like get
up sponsors and, and Open Collective.
So we actually spent a large
portion of the development.
Building out a simulation.
And so there's a, like
simulation Dots US has.
It's, it's effectively like the, it's
our entire site, but it has 5,000
made up subscribers at various price
points using Pax JSONs that we had
discovered on GitHub using source graph.
Source graph was pretty instrumental
in terms of d doing that.
And we, we needed package js
os that weren't on n p, right?
We didn't want to grab load
Dash's, patch json accidentally.
And because that, that's not
representative of potential end users.
So we took those 5,000 subscribers,
plugged them in, you know, gave them
some subscription amount between $25 per
month to a hundred dollars per month.
And we.
Look to see what happens.
Right?
What's the outcome of, of this?
Like, is it just a couple of projects
that get all the money or, you know,
what does that distribution look like
and the, the, the end result is that,
yeah, you, you still have a power
power law curve just like you do on
Get up sponsors in Open Collective,
but it was it was more stretched.
So we ended up, we ended up funding
a larger percentage of the, let's
say the top 25% of funds included a
significantly larger set of projects.
So even though they're at the tip
of this parallel curve, they, you
know, there's more of them included.
That's great.
But the middle, the
middle was much broader.
Right.
A lot more of the money was going into
that, and so that, that was the validation
that we needed, right, internally to know
that, yeah, we can reach more of this.
I think in terms of the broader like
readiness for this type of product,
I, I think, you know, there's
just a drumbeat of vulnerabilities
and also just individuals.
Really talking about the lack of
funding, the lack of maintenance
around this, around this.
And so that is the validation that
we continue to look for you know,
as an opportunity to do something
about, I think we're, we're very
nascent in terms of evangelizing
this and, and driving awareness.
But I think, you know, those two things
kind of has given us the confidence that
you know, the timing is hopefully right
and it's the right product for the time.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
Yeah.
I, it's an interesting, almost, it's not
that you have a chicken and an egg problem
to, to work with, but I feel like the
whole funding nut to crack is that like
we, we all on some level, developers,
engineering teams or organizations
understand that it's important to Keep
these projects funded so that they stay up
to date so that vulnerabilities get shut
down, bugs get addressed, functionality
gets added, whatever the case may be.
it seems like a lot of the social
pressure lands on individuals to do the
funding in a lot of ways, and I think
that maybe is a law of numbers thing.
Like people you know, you get
a lot more call to action as an
individual to go fund things.
But my guess is that the bulk
of the volume of money is coming
from organizations who are willing
to fund open source things.
Is that roughly.
Dudley Carr: Yeah, so we actually
were able to analyze all of the
Open Collective transactions.
They do this amazing job of every
transaction on Open, the Open Source
collective, on Open Collective.
You can literally download
all of the transactions and
so, I did that and I went
Mike Bifulco: Oh wow.
Dudley Carr: And yes, you know,
organizations like Google and, and
others, they do put in a ton of money.
But if I remember correctly, I would
say, Over 60% of it are from individuals
donating at at much smaller amounts.
So they're, they have a long
tail and it is a significant
portion of the contributions.
And so it, it's, it wasn't
as skewed as you would think
towards large organizations.
Mike Bifulco: That that is a, a bigger
percentage than I would've guess.
That's really interesting.
So what, what is your call to action
or maybe your pitch for those who
might have the capacity to donate?
Like how, how is the I guess the,
is there a sales process for this?
Is it something that you're going to
organizations and people and trying to get
them to discover and use Stack as donors?
Dudley Carr: You know, I think, I
think there are certain organizations
that are very attuned to open source
and, you know, they have open source
program offices and they are actively
engaging those communities and they are.
they're looking, you know, they're
either doing this themselves.
So century is a customer of Stack and
they did a ton of this by themselves.
They, they wrote custom things to analyze
their dependencies, and they had a big
spreadsheet and it's super impressive,
but it's incredibly time consuming.
And I think Indeed and others are also
analyzing their dependencies and trying
to figure out where to allocate money.
So this is something
that is happening today.
So we're looking to engage with
those types of organizations and
understand, you know, how STACK
can potentially be a part of that.
So I think step one is to
really engage with organizations
that are receptive to it.
I think that's the kind
of low hanging fruit.
And I think beyond that, you know,
there's, there's or organizations
that are certainly consuming large.
Portion of open source and you know,
there's kind of a, a sales, different
sales process around, you know, here
are the ways that you engage with
open source at those organizations.
Funding is one aspect of that.
And so I think over time that's
where that conversation's going.
But I think the organizations that are
currently funding open source to some
degree, You know, they're kind of making
the case for that and, and we, you know,
we're trying to expand that conversation
and, and as well as piggyback off of that,
Mike Bifulco: right?
Yeah.
It's nice that it's kind of the zeitgeist
is that it seems that support has really
changed in the past, I don't know,
maybe 10 years to, like open source is
something we can try or should try to,
open source is something that, you know,
I is the infrastructure of the internet
in a lot of ways and something that you
know, almost the, the ethical impetus is
to support open source projects and to
also be a part of that if you're able.
So, okay.
I, I guess one more important question
then, if I'm an open source developer
what, what are actions I can take to
be proactive about I, I guess making
sure that I'm, I'm covered by stack
or that you know, that I'm doing
the right things to seek funding.
Dudley Carr: Yeah, I think you know, one.
One theory that we have is that, you
know, the, there are organizations
like we were just talking about that
are attuned and are willing to donate,
but I, I actually think a fundamental
shift will is dependent on individual
developers donating and independent of
the platform, but actively participating
in that way of funding open source be it
GI UP sponsors, open Collective Stack.
Thanks, DD Dev, any of those
platforms is a good way to start.
But there, there has, you know, we have
to have that expectation that developers
are doing this just like they do other
types of open source contributions.
And I think that.
That groundswell of developers
participating and educating and kind of
demanding this in their organizations
is what actually turns the tide.
And so our focus initially is actually
to get individual developers to come
on board and we're, we hope that we're.
You know, one of those solutions
that makes it a lot simpler.
But if GitHub sponsors is the
way that you do it, great.
Right?
Go, go on there.
Fund, fund the people or the
projects that you really care about.
But I think that speaks volumes, right?
And that I, I think is the thing
that actually moves the needle.
And those platforms have made it simpler.
We hopefully have made it
simpler based on, you know, what
some set of people care about.
But, you know, our, our goal is to
evangelize individual developers.
Contributing more.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, that's a noble
conceit and definitely one of those things
that I think all of the people listening
to the show can probably relate to.
I certainly identify with it.
I, one of the things I've been mulling
over a lot lately especially, especially
in the past few weeks that I've been like
reconsidering my personal budget and the
way I allocate money for things is that
I, I think I would like to be a little
more public in sharing and explaining.
The ways that I spend money
in four good ways, right?
Like charities that I donate to on
one side, but open source things that
I donate to projects that I support.
And also, this is more on the creator
economy side, but like Patreon and
things like that, where there's like,
you know, I love this podcast, so
I give them a dollar a month, which
is, you know, more than they would
ever get from me clicking on ads.
I could click ads every day for a week.
And wouldn't give them a book.
And it goes a lot further
than you would think.
And it, it's funny, I've been
kind of thinking that that's
something that belongs in.
Almost public profile, like I
should be sharing this somewhere
and making that a part of the my, my
persona, my support for the world.
And I think that that's something
that we have a, great opportunity
to do with projects like Stack A
and with other things that we all
participate in because it also
creates that social pressure and that.
Impression that expectation that part of
being a, a good citizen as a developer
when you can and if you can, and if
you have, you know, the, honestly the
mountains of privilege that I'm sitting on
top of, like, you should be giving back.
I really like that.
And I, one of the things that I like about
STACK is honestly the, the tree view of
the dependencies and seeing the amount
of impact that, you know, even a few
bucks a month can have is like visceral.
You really feel like you, you see that
not only are you using this cascade
of things to power whatever project
you're working on, but you can also
give back to them fairly directly.
And, there's infrastructure
in place to do that for you.
I think that's really exciting and I
think it's a noble cause and I'm hoping
it's something that a lot of the folks
who are listening to the podcast will be
able to jump into and go ahead long into
supporting, but also benefiting from.
Dudley Carr: Yeah.
No, I appreciate that.
I, I think what you're saying
really resonates with us in that
how you spend your money matters.
You know, we are in a position
of privilege where, you know, we
we have discretionary money that
we can funnel towards things.
And I think, I think you nailed it.
You know, a lot of these developers
are, you know, at the moment
maybe a couple of bucks per month.
You know, we're still small, but I
think it, it really matters to those
developers partly because it is a real
recognition of what they're doing and
they know that someone took the time
and their money, you know, to do that.
And I think that's super powerful.
I think it's easy to dismiss it as,
oh, it's, you know, it's a trivial
sum of money or something of the.
But you know, when you are working on
something, and a lot of times, you know,
you can look at your MPM install numbers,
like, oh yeah, that's through the roof.
But this is, you know, getting
an email from someone saying
like, I like your project.
That's really visceral as well.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
Dudley Carr: like people
actually just paying.
I think that's an incredible way.
And so hopefully people are not put off
by, you know, initially like, oh, the,
the dollar amounts are not significant.
It, it, it supports that individual
at so many different levels.
And so yeah, how you spend your money
matters and and it has a really great
upside on the other other side of it.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
, it's pretty profound and an
energizing thing for me.
Well, Dudley, thanks so much for
coming and hanging out today.
I have two important questions
for you before I let you go.
One is I wanna know how APIs you
won't hate listeners can find you and
talk to you if they're interested.
And where can they go
to get started with?
Dudley Carr: Absolutely.
Yeah.
So you can email me at dudley dod e y
stack.us and our website is stack a.us.
I think if you search for
Stack Google, we're number one.
And you know, as we were chatting earlier,
it's, it's super simple to get started.
If you run into any issues
please reach out and we're,
we're happy to answer questions.
But yeah, it's pretty
self-service at the moment.
Just click on the button o off
and then hopefully you're off to
the races and, you know, always
looking for more feedback and, Yeah.
No, we, we appreciate every,
every person who signs up and
happy to answer questions.
Mike Bifulco: Great.
Wonderful.
Dudley, thanks so much
for hanging out today.
It's been a pleasure having you.
And I'd love to catch up again you
know, maybe in a few months or ear down
the line to see how things are going.
Dudley Carr: Absolutely.
Thanks so much for having me.
Really appreciate it.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, of course.
Take care.
Dudley Carr: Bye-bye.