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Developers building a software business on our own terms.
Intro: Prepare to dive headfirst into the world of business, wearing nothing but ambition and a keyboard. Oh, wait, that's us. Welcome to the Founder Quest.
Josh: Well, you're back, John.
John: Yes, I am.
Josh: Back from Rails World and back on request.
John: Much like Michael Jordan. I'm back. It was great for me. I want to hear from you guys as well, because I'm curious—I feel like this time, like RailsConf, I basically just attached myself to you two and just followed you around. We got to see each other a ton. And RailsWorld—it didn’t—it was not that way.
I feel like we got to see each other a little bit, but like, it wasn't near as much. So I was excited from the talking. Because I just—I went to one talk, the keynote, and then I didn't make it to another one. I had picked them all out ahead of time. I had no reason not to go. They looked awesome. They looked great.
I just kept having really nice, fun conversations with people who I hadn't seen in a while or had never met and it just didn't happen. So it was amazing, yeah.
Josh: Same—same here. Like I went to the keynote and there were at least a few talks I was really wanting to get to and just, didn't happen. For one, it's a two day conference, not a three day, like Rails Conf is, and also you have way more variety of people who are there.
Like, I thought that was another big difference for me. It felt like there were many more Europeans there, and it was cool because like, you see all these , different Ruby groups online that you don't always get to see in person. And put them all together with the U.S. people and it really was rails world, I think. You know, Ben and I are trying to do our—we’re trying to do our business stuff, do sales and networking and all that good stuff. We’re, like, walking around with our pagers.
John: Yeah. You're wearing your suits. I actually paged you a couple of times. I got no response.
Josh: Yeah. Sorry about that. No, I actually do have a pager. That's a different story, but it's not live right now—but it was—I wanted to, this thing we—this was from like an old FounderQuest episode, where we talked about this, but I learned you can still buy a pager and there are still pager networks that you can use. And I was like, I want to use a pager for PagerDuty, and so I did it. Yeah. And believe it or not, PagerDuty also supports actual pagers.
John: Oh, that's cool.
Josh: Yeah.
John: They have to.
Josh: So yeah, pro tip.
John: That's cool. I'm curious about the pager thing and PagerDuty and being woken up. Because, like, I've literally never been on call during the night for a thing in my life. I think technically maybe like once at GitHub. But generally, I have not been and like, I guess I've just been lucky.
Like I—I haven't really had any problems because of that, but yeah, like, I was here. I've heard you guys talk about that a few times of being on call and the rotation and all that kind of stuff. And I'm like, I can't imagine—I’m too old to be woken up during the night. I almost feel like that would be my first hire.
Yeah. It'd just be like, you look, you're going to be on call 24 seven. You don't have to do anything else. I would almost go for that, because I'm like, I just, the thought of being woken up, it's like, ugh.
Josh: Yeah. Or it is like you're working the night shift. Yeah. Ben's basically, like, always watching our slack alerts channel anyway. So like he—he usually knows if there's an incident before the, uh, pager duty alerts get triggered.
John: That's crazy.
Josh: Yeah. But yeah, it is nerve wracking. I will tell you, and especially since I'm paranoid about not being woken up. And so I put like, you know, the most blaring iPhone alarm ringtone, yeah, with the emergency critical—or override stuff. So it breaks through my do not disturb settings or focus settings. And yeah, like it doesn't happen too often, but when it does, it definitely gets your, uh, whatever, adrenaline pumping.
John: Yeah. It would take a while to fall back asleep and then you're looking at a screen, which makes it even worse. You've woken up startling and I’m—like, do you guys have docs internally or does PagerDuty have docs of, like, here's how to make sure things get through to you and?
Josh: Yeah, basically, yeah, yeah. And then PagerDuty, like, we have a rotation. So, you know, we were each on call for—because that's the other thing. Like, you don’t—you can only handle that so much. Like, it does make the week stress more stressful for me just knowing that I have that, that looming—even though we don't have very many incidents—it is a little extra pressure. So it's nice not to be on call, like, all the time, which was Ben's role at one point, and that's why we, yeah, created a rotation.
John: That's a lot.
Josh: Well see—yeah. I was like, I was waiting to tie it back to that because I was going to say, like, there's going to be a lot more rails developers on call for servers in the future. If NOPAAS is the way forward, which I don't think—I think that's one thing that, I don't know about you, John, but Ben and I aren't entirely convinced of that. I hope everyone likes PagerDuty.
John: I guess if that's a—if that's a question, not that we have to go into it, but I think I believe in it for certain things and not for other things, yeah. I mean, Heroku, we use that for Box Out and it's small fractional percent of all of our revenue , and, you know, probably maybe one of the bigger of the expenses, but it's not the biggest still.
And so I'm like, it's fine. I don't think about it ever. And if we have an outage, it's something that I can't do anything about. And I'm actually like, that's where I want to be in life. If it's an outage and it's something that I can do something about, I'm super stressed. So if it's like somebody else messed up and it's an outage, we're just like, “Hey, it's an outage. This is the provider. We'll let you know when it's back up.”
And , it's pretty rare for us. I feel like it's, you know, a few minutes here and there, and they usually are pretty quick and it's usually on the Postgres side. And there's other options there if we wanted to switch that, but, like, on the app server side. I mean, I feel like I have not had an app server down and that be a problem a customer has talked to me about or worker or things like in I don't even know how long.
Josh: Yeah. That's my take. Like, I think the app server, like, running apps are like, sure, run Docker on a VM or something and Hetzner and run your app servers. But the thing that no one wants to run is the database and you—like a database and services. You start getting into those and it's like, we'll use a PAAS, we’ll go use Crunchy Data or whatever. I am completely on board with that. I think that's totally the way to go. Because I don't want to run a Postgres.
John: Yes. He,—and he did tweet that the other day, he tweeted something about—I think I saw something about, like, Crunchy is great, but seriously, if we're running app servers with no state, let's just try something, do something different. I'm trying to be less afraid of that because I definitely turned into the pink elephant.
It's totally true and I'm okay with that right now. I really don't mind being the pink elephant, but I kind of miss hacking on servers too. Back in the day, I remember setting up like Mana and Munin and all these OG-like tools that were super ugly, but you got him working.
You're like, “I can see my CPU over time. This is amazing”. Now, of course, I use Honeybadger insights for that kind of thing. But, uh, no, yeah, I—I just get that. I was not afraid and now I am, but I don't think it's solely because I was brainwashed. I think it's also because I'm experienced and now there are problems I want to solve and problems I don't want to solve and I don't want to solve server problems. I don't want to solve code problems.
I want to solve problems for like, you know, businesses and stuff like that and customers. And so that's why I—like, I’m okay with PAAS on some of that stuff. But yeah, totally agree on Crunchy or whatever, something for Postgres, Heroku Postgres, something where your state is at least you don't have to worry about that.
Josh: Yeah. That seems like a pretty good deal to me, if you know what, like, SREs cost these days.
John: Yeah, yeah, there's definitely a lot of stuff like that that I completely agree. I'm just like, I don't want to think about that. I just, that's not what I want to solve. That's not the level of the layer now on like personal projects for fun or things like that. I'm like, okay, I, yeah, maybe I stood up a Hetzner server and I have, like, chat-dot-flipper cloud, like as a once-Campfire-thing-is-running there and I got to dip my toe in.
It's kind of like I grew up on the farm. And now I have a Kubota with a cab and air conditioning. And that's what I'm on my field with. Like, I get to feel like a farmer without any of the risks or like the long hours, that's what we're looking for here.
Josh: Yeah, that's a great analogy. I love it. Speaking of, like, things to keep online, you have a few new things or at least one new thing to keep online. You recently made a new acquisition of a business.
John: Yeah. We acquired a fireside.fm. It's a 2016—a kind of OG podcast host, it's a Rails stack. And actually, all the stuff you're saying right now, again, this was completely unplanned, but it's all the stuff I'm going through right now. It's like self managed Postgres on Linode. So I'm like, okay, Crunchy, stuff like that. I'm like, do I move app servers off? Like how complex is the stack, that whether that's worth it or safe or any of those kinds of things. I'm definitely not moving Cloudflare in front, it's crazy good for the terabytes, many, many terabytes of bandwidth that a podcast host that is this old has to deal with.
The stuff that we're talking about right now is exactly that. It's VPSs, and this whole time where like—I’ve always been on PAAS and Heroku, and now I bought an app and I have not PAAS, and in the meantime, I've been thinking like, “h, maybe I need to start going not PAAS, maybe I need to fire up some app servers”, and I've even went to the Linode website because, like, back in the day, I was like—I used Linode for a bunch of stuff and I was like, I'll just go to the website and just see what's happening here recently and—and then it's like, I buy the app and I have that and I'm like, “Oh, I kind of miss Heroku.”
Like, I wish I could just slide a thing and not, yeah. So it's definitely—it’s interesting to hear the shift in Rails and. me be in the past and now I have the opposite again, and it's going to be an AB test. It's Capistrano. I mean, it’s—it's definitely, you know, it's older stuff. So like, figuring out what to update, when to update it, how to keep things stable while we're doing those, yeah, there's a bunch of different stuff in that, so.
Josh: Nice. So it is a Rails app. That's nice, yeah. I've heard I’ve—we talked about this at Rails World, but I forgot to actually ask that. That makes things a little easier for you with your team?
John: That was a requirement, honestly, like I should be more nimble, but again, we've talked about earlier how important sleep is, we’re old men, and so I'm just like—I called a kid, a kid, today and he was 20 something and so then I quickly changed it to, like, young adult, but I still asked him to get off my lawn, but like, it's that kind of a thing.
And I was like I have to—I love Rails. I love Ruby. I've tried all the other stuff, not the JavaScript stuff, but I already know the answer to that. So it's fine, but I've tried Python, I've tried cold fusion, I've tried PHP, like there's a bunch of stuff out there and I'm just like, I don't want to, I want to stick with Rails.
And so that's the thesis, I guess, with this one. This is the first, and we'll let the dust settle just before there’s possibly any other ones, unless it's just some crazy scenario. But I've always had this, like, dream of maybe buying an app just because like you guys know how hard it is to grow something.
And so if you can just—if you can get that head start, that's really cool, to have the links, the people referring to it, the customers paying for it already, customers asking for things already, especially when you get in the product market fit range where it's making good money and the customers—you can just reach out to them and be like “What do you want? Like, what would be nice?”
We can survey—we know exactly who the customer is, because they're paying us already. We don't have to figure that out—should I talk to this customer or this customer and who's my ICP and—you don't have to figure that out. You already know. So I always wanted to do that. And it's just like—just dropped in in our lap basically, like, it was not a planned thing. I've spent many moments where I like looked like—I don't know if you ever have but like where you go to like, whatever acquire dot com, or like—Ben’s shaking his head again—everybody. Yeah, yeah.
Josh: Yeah.
John: Like there's so many of them. And I've been thinking for, like, a long time. I'm like—there’s probably all these, like, Rails apps where people have solo or a couple of founders—and again, I'm speaking to the choir, but you guys have been doing this for awhile and, like, you do it for a long time.
You got to find new ways to find energy and stuff. And if you don't, then you just lose the energy. And then they just sit there and they go down. And I think there's more people out there that have those. And so I'm curious about like—and I have more friends that I'd like to employ—so I'm like, that seems like an interesting way if you can make the financial side of things work.
And this one just, again, just dropped. I've spent time looking, this was literally just like a—like I wrote in the post, it’s, like, a text on a Saturday afternoon. “Hey, what about Fireside?” I was like, okay, you know?
Josh: Yeah. So, we’ll link your blog post in the show notes. But I am curious. So you get this text from Garrett and he's “Hey, like, do you want to acquire Fireside”—which is a podcast host? If you want to start a podcast that you can go here and it'll handle like the distribution and you, I assume —okay. Garrett. I think he had worked on this with Dan before, like, as a contractor or something. Is that how he…
John: Something like that. So that’s—and he—and also, uh, Dan was an advisor for him on Sifter, so they had a relationship already on Sifter and knew each other there. And then also—and like the guy who does the servers on the infrastructure and stuff like that on Fireside also did that for Garrett. And so there's a lot of commonalities between the two. So yeah, that’s where it came from.
Josh: That's cool. This is Dan, like, Dan Benjamin is a kind of a well known guy. I remember, like, reading,—I have logic, his blog, like his OG blog, back in the two thousands or something. That's one of the most, like that’s—I probably—it’s one of my most remember or like memorable websites that I used to visit.
John: How to install Ruby on Rails on Mac OS, whatever, like those were like—I mean, I don't even know what I would have done without those. Might've given up on Rails back in the day when it was actually hard. Like now, it’s so much easier, but yeah, he's definitely OG. I think he started the first Rails podcast and then eventually, like, it moved into five by five and then he handed it off to somebody else. And then they handed it. And again, now it’s changed hands several times, but definitely, you know, OG Rails and stuff like that, but also, you know, podcasting and other things, so.
Josh: Well, that's really, yeah, it's really awesome. I've always been a big fan. It's cool how that worked out. I'm curious about the process of actually acquiring the business, I think—because you kind of—you talked a little bit about—and we can get to the partnership, like how you chose your partners and your team and what the roles are.
And there’s, like, so much good stuff I think we can talk about. But I'm wondering, like, how do you acquire a business? Once Garrett texts you and “Hey, Dan wants to talk”. I assume you didn't know Dan, uh, too well at this point. What happened? Like, what was that two months? What's in the two month period where you know, you get the text , and then you're suddenly signing the deals and transferring money and all that stuff?
John: Yeah. I didn't think about that, that I literally skipped over all the work. that’s kind of funny.
Josh: It's fine because it gives us something exclusive for, uh, for this podcast.
John: Yeah.
Josh: I was like, I saw that. I'm like, okay, that's what I'm going to, I'm going to ask him about all that stuff.
John: and honestly, that's the stuff that's been the last two months. And that's the stuff that's the most interesting to me because it was—but I think a lot of people are just like, “Oh, business, whatever”, but I'm like, I—again, it's like, I'm seasoned in Rails, brand new to some of this stuff.
And so that, that was the stuff that was really fascinating. I guess how it went down. It was like, he sent that text. And I was like, “Yeah, sure”. And he, so he, then he texts Dan. “Would you want to talk?” And he's like, “Yeah, sure”. So he gave me Dan's number and I was like, “How about I call you in like an hour?”
He's like, “Cool”. So, I was finished up some stuff outside. So I just called him and, like, I literally just paced around on my deck as we're talking. And I was just like, tell me what your goals are. Like, what do you want? Because I was like, it doesn’t—none of it matters what I'm thinking, if I'm not going to meet his goals.
And so I was like, “Why do you want to sell? Why did you start it?” So he went back to the beginning. He's like, “This is why I started it. This is how I grew it. This is when it stopped growing and this is why, and these are”—he went through, like, these are the other offers I got and told me all exactly the, all the details about them, then he's like, “And I said no to them.”
And so then I'm like, “Oh, maybe I can’t—maybe I can't get this”, you know, because I'm looking at it from the standpoint of like, if you look at it from just money, you know, like, those are great offers. I'm not going to offer what other people have. And so we went through all that stuff. And then at the very end, I was like, “Okay, like this is cool.”
So like what I hear from you, I just repeated it back. I was like, I hear that you want to find a new home, so the customers are taken care of. They're not, like, harvested. Like you don't want this to just be like what Chartable that just got bought by Spotify. They shut it down, take the—
Josh: He doesn't want to like some private equity firm to come in and just chop it up. And yeah.
John: Exactly. And so, like, you want it to live on. You want to deal with, like, nice people and you don't want to be on the hook for a long period of time, because you're really busy. And that's why you're interested in selling is because you're really busy. You don't have time for it. So the thought of a long arduous due diligence process or a long arduous, like, handoff period or a six month retainer with, like, a kicker at the end or like any of these kinds of things, it's just, I don't want any of that, you know?
And so it's like, once you learn all those kinds of things, you can say, okay, well. Now we know all the levers that we can work with to come up with something that works for everybody—which is the goal. Like, you want everybody to be like, "Yeah, this is okay”. So I think that was probably like the first thing was just that, that first call.
And then at the very end, like, somehow watches came up, everything comes back to watches and so somehow watches came up. And he's a huge fan of mechanical watches. I am also. And I was like, “Oh yeah, I'm a huge fan”. And he was like, “No way”. And so then we start talking , and so then we've got a rapport. We've established friendship. We start immediately texting watch pictures, you know, back and forth, before we've talked to price and any of this kind of stuff, a watch was involved in the deal.
Josh: I was going to ask, you've got to have, like, there's got to be some kind of in kind trade, or—
John: Yeah, I shipped it, like, two weeks ago today. There's a part in my heart that still kind of misses that watch, but I know it's on a good—a nice, good, hairy wrist like mine. And so it's okay, you know? But yeah, that's how it started. And then it's just at some point, I was like, okay, now I know where he's at, but I don't know what offer he would say yes or no to how he's valuing it. So I was like, “Look, I'm probably going to finance this”. The only way that I'm interested is probably to do that. I've never done that before. I don't want to put all the risk up front.
I'd rather , finance it, spread it out over time, and I don't want to—I hear from you that you don't want to sell or finance it. You just want to be done. And so I was like, well, what—I need to, like, P and L’s, like taxes, things like that for, like, at least two or three years. I know a bank is going to ask for that first.
So we got those, and thankfully all that was like in really good working order, because Dan was like, maybe a couple of years ago, it was like, let's do this as a real LLC, get an accountant, do all those kinds of things that made it super streamlined. So I took those to the bank, they were like, “This sounds cool”, and, they gave me a couple of different options and stuff. I can talk about that if you want to—but basically that was like the start of it.
And then I was like, “Okay, I'm not doing this by myself”. So now I've got, to like, Avengers assemble. and so it was like, okay, who's going to be involved?
Well, Garrett was like, “Yeah, I definitely want to be involved”. And he’s like, dude, I've been thinking, what if there's like more out there like this, like—what if we do this, get it under our belt and just standardize the process of taking over a Rails app for people and continuing it on and hiring and have some shared services in a—like at the top of a holding company, because you don't need a full time marketer for quite a while.
You don't need a full time this and that—it’s like, what if you shared some resources across? And I was like, funny you say that, because like, that's literally been like everything I've been thinking about for like three or four years. And this just seemed like a good opportunity to do that. It had enough kind of cashflow and stuff.
It's like mid six figures kind of a thing where, like, I could immediately pay people to work on it. So it's not like, I'm not buying myself a job. Am I going to work on it? Yeah, I'm going to work on it. Like I'm excited to work on it, but I don't want to buy myself a job. I don't have free time to do that. So those are the stages. Go ahead. you look, you're gonna ask—
Josh: Oh, I was just gonna say like you, also wrote a recent blog post, “How to Find a Business Partner”, which I think—you talk a little bit about this, like, you just—you didn't want to do it yourself. I agree. Like, it’s much less scary. And it's nice to spread the responsibility of running and owning a business around if you have cofounders.
John: Yeah, we already covered “I don't want to wake up in the middle of the night”. So like, I'm like, that's, you know, that's like the worst case scenario—is that. So, I don't want to be solely responsible. I’ve, like, had those moments in my past where servers are down and I've got to figure it out.
And I might still be the most skilled on that, on in the group. That's fine. But at least there's somebody else over my shoulder who's like, it's okay, buddy. Like, it's fine. We're going to get through this together. I wanted that. And also I'm like, I really like in business, I like this idea of just, like, of bringing other people along. And the reason I like it is because I'm a scaredy cat. And because I'm a scaredy cat, would I have ever gone out on my own and started my own company?
I don't know if I would have, but, like, Steve went out on his own, he started a company, he started getting some consulting revenue. And he's the opposite where he's I don't know that I would ever start a product by myself. And I'm like, well, I don't know if I'd ever start consulting or like leave a job by myself.
I joined him and that reduced the risk for me. He's like, “Ah, I've got like X in the bank and I have some consulting clients”. We'll be fine, you know? And so I was able to, like, jump out and join that. And the rest is history and stuff. So I feel like because that was available to me, I mean, Stephen are the same age.
He's not like—it’s not like he's a mentor, but he like, you know, He took the risk first, and that made it easy for me. And so I try to, like, actively do that for other people. Like my goal is these are some people that are working with me that] might—that probably won't take this risk on their own, but they see me, like, have having taken the risk.
And they're like, I want to do that. But I'm a little bit nervous. And I'm like, “What if I just put a little bit of padding around it and then would you?” You know, I just think like, that's a really interesting concept for me of, like, how do you bring other people along who you think would be a good entrepreneur who you think would be good at doing this kind of stuff, but maybe aren't quite ready to take that risk.
And like, how do you get them in and help them take that risk? So that's the other reason that I wanted other people is not just to not do it alone, but also just because I like bringing other people along, if I can be helpful in that way, just like other people have helped me in the past.
Josh: That makes total sense. And actually, that resonates with me cause that's how I was—that’s how I got involved in Honeybadger originally. Because Ben and Starr were working on Honeybadger. and I was been working with them, but I wanted in basically. I don't think I was at the point where I was going to go start my own thing.
Like I had—I was, like, starting a consulting business. That was my dream at the time, until I realized, like, the hamster wheel of the consulting, and you know, yeah. So I think that's really cool. And then what you're talking about is like keeping the ladder down for the next person, who you could bring in, so yeah, that’s really cool.
John: Again, I'm just—I’m fortunate that I can be in that spot. I'm also fortunate that, like, I've taken the risks in the past, so it doesn't feel risky to me anymore. This stuff doesn't like, you know, everybody I talked to—like 40, probably 30, 40 people before I did this, all different skill sets, some in podcasting, some in other stuff.
I just—everybody that I knew that I thought might have some opinion or value on this. I just sprayed it out to everyone. It's just like, let, I want to talk, I want to learn. So I did that, and the number one question everyone always asks is, and the first thing I thought was, like, well, what if it goes to zero?
And I'm like, “Oh yeah, that'd be terrible". But they don't do that. Like realistically, this has kind of sat here and chugged along. You've got, like, the spectrum of apps and on one hand is an app that's like hard to get into, but once you're in, like, it's really sticky. And then on the other side—so that's like a content management system or something like that. To switch all your content out is a lot of work. So you're like, “I'll just leave it and just keep paying”. It's fine.
And then on the other side, it's like, an analytics system. And maybe we've even talked about that on here, but, like, analysts, you just drop a JavaScript in, you can have it in while you have other analytics to try it. And then you can be like, I don't like it and take it right back out. It's very not sticky. And so it's easy to get in easy to get out. And I was like, you know, what is this app? And I'm like, this app is hosting. This app is creative work that you want to stay up forever for people to consume.
Josh: Even if you stop podcasting, like you want—you don't want the podcast to disappear from Apple podcasts, wherever, and yeah, that’s—I imagine that's a huge pain to migrate.
John: Yeah. Exactly. So I'm like, to me, this is that kind of an app. It's not going to go to zero. It's not a real thing. Even SAS apps that are not as sticky don't just go straight to zero. And so I'm like, that's not going to happen. So I talked myself off that ledge. Then I'm like, okay, well, what would it look like to have debt service with this?
Because, like, putting that much cash up front into something is—that’s a big investment. Again, you guys know that as well. And so it's like, okay, what would that service look like? And I was able to do the math and I'm like, you know what, that's really not that scary.
Like, I'm already paying this out of pocket towards Garrett to work on Flipper and stuff. So the alternative way to look at it is I'm buying Fireside to fund Flipper. There's almost like that kind of a scenario going on where it's like nobody else may be like—so of the people that Dan talked to, like they're either too small, can't put a deal together.
It would be like seller finance—Dan’s taking on the risk that they're going to even run it well versus like just letting it sit until it goes to zero, you know, and like, that doesn’t—none of those options sound good. The alternative is somebody bigger comes in and buys it and they basically buy it for a smaller multiple, shut it down, harvest the customers.
That's not great for him either. And so it’s—maybe there's this in between, where we can make those things work, where we're like, okay, let's take on—let’s find a purchase price that kind of works. Everyone that I talked to said, if you can get a SAS app for two and a half times EBITDA profit, whatever you want to call it, that that's a no brainer.
Like you, you should definitely do that. That's a good price. Three, like, not a great price, but a good price and more than that, like five or seven, you got to have a plan and you probably got to be pretty funded and so I'm like—again, I got to—I joked in the post, a merry band of like, SAS people that I work with.
And so I'm like, you know, if Garrett can do some dev, Chris can do some marketing, like Steve can help with strategy, like that kind of stuff. And everybody puts in some capital and everybody puts in some—not everybody, but Garrett and Chris will put in some work sweat equity.
And then Steve is just, like, a passive investor, just for now—like he might work on it someday. That's fine. But there's no expectation of him to work on it. You figure that kind of all out and you're like, okay, well, that would reduce our debt by this much. And that means we have this much profit.
And if we take these amounts of salaries and because we're working on it kind of part time and maybe this person's working on it more, so they'll get more. Because we're going to value the effort—but like these two people are going to get the same equity because one's maybe going to work more, but once putting in a little more money, so that evens it out.
Like again, you just have talks and that was a lot of it, was probably 100 some hours over the course of six weeks or something—like that was just, like, a lot of phone calls with all the people. Organizing everything, the bank, all that stuff. And then it's like, okay, now it's just like, how do we finance it? What do we choose?
Do we do an SBA loan? Do we do other stuff? Which I’m happy to go into, like, those kinds of things as well, because I learned a lot. But I feel like the key thing was just like, nobody else was going to get the deal done. but me, like just the spot that I was in, I had the collateral to put up. I had the team that could help me with it right away. And because of that, I was the perfect buyer. Just lucky, just super, super lucky.
Josh: So figuring all this out—when did the letter of intent come? Have you already like given a letter of intent and then you, like, went and found the team and worked out everyone's equity? And I know you eventually started an LLC to be an umbrella over all of this, but what was like the deal process in terms of like, as you're figuring this stuff out, spending those 100 hours.
John: So I was probably 20, 10 or 20 hours in, when I—like, basically Dan and I did a handshake over the phone to say, like, does this price seem fair? I was like here on the left side, he's here on the right side and we met in the middle. It was literally that simple because I was like, you know what? I'm not going to go in and do crazy hard due diligence and waste all your time, which I think is, that's your valuable thing right now.
Because you're putting a bunch of time into other things. So I'm not going to go in and say, how many annual accounts do you have? And how do you prorate that based on when they paid and, like, how much is in the bank and we need to have working capital and I'm not going to go through all of that stuff. And then if you can just help me with the price to where I don't feel sweaty at night.
And so that was basically, I would say maybe, oh, two weeks in and probably 10, 20 hours of, like, probably five hours of conversations with Dan and probably 10 plus with various other people. Like I talked—I talked to it with Steve at that point. He was not going to be—he wasn’t—I hadn't asked him to be in. I was just like, “What do you think about this?” I talked with Garrett a whole bunch.
Because I knew Garrett was in, it was basically—originally at the beginning, it was just Garrett and I, and then I was like, “Hey, I want to bring in my friend Chris, because I think he could really help us with this”. Chris and Garrett have never met ever. And so I was the transitive property of trust between them, we did one Zoom where they got to meet each other and say, hi, I'm now going to be your business partner.
Josh: But then they met in person—have they met in person yet now? Okay. Yeah. I was going to say, because, like, we were the same, like I, well, I met Ben at one point, but I hadn't like [with] Starr and I haven't met it—hadn’t met in person, for, I forget, probably the next year after we started the company and it—
John: Yeah.
Josh: It was like, just like the internet is a wonderful place.
John: It is, it is a wonderful place. And like, with that, I was like, okay, so that got us to a price and I didn't ask anybody else—I didn't really say, “Do you think this is a fair price? Are you okay with this?” Or like, I mean, I talked about it, but for me, it was really like, look, if I'm going to put up the collateral and I'm going to do the work, I'm just going to come up with a price that makes sense.
And then I'm going to come up with something fair for other people to join. And then if it's not fair, tell me and we'll negotiate it. And we did. I bumped all of them up percentages wise from what they were at the start in my head, and what I told them. And then I bumped it up even higher at the end.
And then I had to bump it down 0.1 percent because of banks, and I, again, I can explain that as well, but that was probably the first couple of weeks was just, like, get to a price. No letter of intent, no signed anything. Dan was like, you're the person for this. I'm not going anywhere else.
I'm not talking to anybody else. I've said no to all the other, any other offers I have. We're going to figure this out together. So I—I didn't do a letter of intent. I didn't do any of that stuff. Because I was like, we're good at this point. I've operated on handshakes with Steve back in the day.
I've operated on handshakes with the GitHub guys when they bought us. Like we were—we were like, let’s—we can start now or in six months and they're like, let's do it now. And then the lawyers were like, no, no, no, no, you can't do this. And we're like, we just did it. Sorry. And then, three months later we signed the paperwork and I'm like, that's, I, it's okay.
In some instances you can get away with that. Papers are for when things go horribly wrong. Like, that's what papers are for. So I was like, there's nothing that can go horribly wrong in this other than he sells it to somebody else. And like that it was meant to be, then that's fine. So once I got a little farther with the bank, they're like, “We need something in writing, we're not going to send this to the board for approval if you don’t."
Josh: The bank won’t take a handshake deal.
John: They won't, they wouldn't do it. I said, I got my hand. Would you like a—it’s not sweaty—but they were like, no. I quickly just did a letter of intent. I have a friend who's a lawyer. He helps me with basically all this kind of stuff and he whipped something together. I sent it to Dan, Dan's like, good, signed it.
We gave it to the bank. Bank was good all the way until like. Basically two days before closing when they were like, we need a purchase agreement. This isn't enough. And we're like, okay. So we made a purchase agreement really quick. Same thing. And then we went back and forth a little bit about like stock sale versus asset sale and things like that.
And tax benefits for him and all that stuff. And, eventually worked it out. So I would say, like, going back to that original question, like the first week or two is like, let's be friends. And now it's cool. We're friends. Now let's figure all this crap out. And so mostly it was on my end.
So I’ve—it took me two to four weeks to talk to everybody, get concrete numbers. You know, it's never fun to talk about money. People don't like to talk about money. I'm getting more comfortable with it because I just have to, I’m—like, if you hire people, you know their salary. If you are going to hire people, you have to know what they need.
If you're doing equity deals with people, like you have to talk about—like Garrett and I are very frank about money and finances because I was like, look, I want you to work full time on Box Out and Flipper. Like, what do you need? How do we do this? Well, we can, I can give you more here, less here, but ownership, more here, but no ownership and all that.
So like, I, I've got some practice with it. So that, but that still took a while because not everybody. you know, it does that as much. so that's kind of like, I guess that's that portion. Does that answer that all kind of—okay.
Josh: I think so.
John: I was beginning to sense I was rambling.
Ben: Well, I do want to hear some more about the financing. So you decided that you didn't want to throw down the cash and Dan had already decided that he didn't want to front the cash. He didn't want to be the lender. So where'd you go from there and how'd you decide what to do?
John: Yeah. So thankfully I had just recently done two, small—smaller real estate things, smaller from my standpoint of investment. So one was a small one where I bought a building with Chris, who's on this as well, and then he has inside of it a print shop, like t shirts, swag, that kind of stuff, and he bought the business with his mom.
And so, because that, we had an existing relationship with a local credit union, and then we use the same credit union for a different real estate project, where there was more people involved. And so, I had enough of a relationship with that lender and that person who's running point on that, that I just kicked him an email.
I was just like, I'm interested in financing this. Can we just talk and just tell me if it's possible or not before I say yes or no to the other side. And they'd be like, “Yeah”. So we did a really quick talk. It was 15 minutes. And I was just like, okay, how does any of this work? And he's like we don't lend for software.
Because we don't know how to run software. So if you want to do software, the only way to basically do that is with personal guarantees or collateral. And so, you have two routes there. And so the personal guarantee route, you go at—like, an SBA loan. And the bank will do that because the government's backing it up to like 75%.
And so what they typically want you to do that route with the SBA loan is they want you to put down like 10%, they want 15 percent of like seller financing so that they know the seller is going to help you transition this. And then the 75 percent is what the bank does because they know that's covered by the government anyways.
There's literally no risk. It's free money for them. And so if you go that route, your interest rate is basically like, I don't remember what he said, like prime plus two or something. And I was like, ChatGPT, what is prime plus two? ChatGPT, what is prime? Okay. And if I do, what's a BIP? What's a, you know, I'm just putting in all the number, the things, and I realize, okay, that's like basically like 11%.
And I'm like, that's quite an interest rate. And so that's, that was like the start. And he was like, we can definitely do this. I'll talk to my people and see if they're okay. I did these several of these at my previous job. I'm comfortable with them. I don't know if this place I work now is. So he went back, talked to him and he's like, I don't know how comfortable they are with that.
And I was like, well, I'll be honest. I don't know how comfortable I am with 11 percent interest rate. That feels like—you’re literally risking nothing and getting 11%. That's how do you get in that job? I would like to do that. Exactly. And so I'm like, well, what's another option, that I can do?
I was like, can I like take out a—like, a mortgage? I said, my house is paid off. Can I take out like a mortgage or can I like, I have some farmland with my—like, split joint tenants with my dad. I was like, can I, like, do something with that? That's paid for too. And I was like, I have collateral, but I don't know what to do with it, you know?
And they're like, Oh, you have collateral. Yeah. Oh, we can help you. Let me show you this shiny interest rate. That's much better. And like, it's really cool. And also, like, with an SBA loan, before I go to the other side, you have to pay it off in like five years, 10 years is like the max. And so you're talking to really jacked up rate.
And I was—when I was looking a— I was like on this deal, basically, at 11 percent interest rate on a five year payback, over half of the free cashflow was just going to go to that. And I'm like, I bought myself a job, if I do that. Because I can't really pay anyone to work on it, or at least not as many people as would be necessary.
And that just felt too risky. So I was like, okay, what's the next option? So then I went down the commercial loan path. And so they were basically like, look, the fastest and easiest way is you just do a commercial loan. You do house or land or something else as collateral. And then we’ll—what we do is as a bank, we give you like different percentage of appraisal value, is like click a button, receive funds.
So if you put your house up—they deal in houses all the time, super comfortable with houses. And they're like, you know what, houses don't just drop 20 percent overnight. So they're like, we'll give you 80 percent of your appraised [00:36:00] value. If you own your house, that means, and your house is worth a hundred thousand. They'll give you 80, 000, and done.
The interest rate—they don't lock the interest rate in when you start talking to them, which is really good, because we had a couple of drops in the two months. Thank you fed. And because of that, my, when I started, I think my interest rate was going to be seven and a quarter.
And when I actually signed the paperwork, it was under six and a half. So it dropped a significant—almost enough that you would refinance—like refinancing isn’t—I think, in the one to some percent range where it's worth refinancing and paying the fixed cost to lower everything. I thought, well, that's pretty cool too.
And so on a different thing that they're not as good with farmland. So like, farmland, it's like, well, what do I do with this, you know? And they're not as good with software at all. Like, they're just not going to do that period. But with farmland, they would do like 50 to 60%. Yeah. And so it was like, okay, well, farmland, it's going to be close the house.
It's not going to be—everything is fungible, like, worst case scenario, if it goes to zero and I have to like liquidate a bunch of whatever, investments, and then pay it off or, you know, if I don't want to do that, I have to sell the land and pay it off or—I’m not going to lose my house, basically like at this point, I was like, I have other things that I could figure this out if it went to zero.
And I still owed the money. And so that was the side, so, it's basically, like, you can either do a SBA loan or a commercial loan with collateral. I went commercial loan with collateral. I got six and a half—below six and a half, I think, interest rate, which I talked to several people who are really into ETA, which is entrepreneurship through acquisition, and including Jess from Indy rails, I'm going to throw him out, he's been an awesome resource and he—he like crosses T's dots, his eyes knows all this stuff inside now.
Because he's been listening to a lot of podcasts about it and doing a lot of research. And so, he told me like a whole bunch of stuff that was super helpful. But I got a very good interest rate. Everyone I talked to was like, how did you get that?
And I'm like, I just signed my name. I don't know. I got really lucky. And so, the way they work, I did a 15 year term. because I could do any term because they're like, well, we got your house, we don't care. And so I was like, let's do 15 year, that gets my payment similar akin to what I was paying Garrett before.
It's more, but it's similar. And then additionally, it—I can pay it off early with no—no prepayment penalty. And I was like, so you lower the risk cashflow wise, but you can pay it off early with the profit. So that's that—that was my approach, basically. So the goal is to pay it off. Initially it was like paid off as fast as I can, like three years.
Now I'm like, you know what? Some amount of leverage is actually like, it's okay. I don't have any really leverage anywhere. I'm like, I should just use some leverage. Someone is giving me money for free to make money with it. I should try this at least for a little while and just learn to stomach the fact that now I owe somebody, something. Lots of people say it's smart to do that and I should at least try it and see what happens. So that's the bank route.
Josh: Yeah. I like the long loan term with no prepayment penalty. Like I did the same thing with my house but I’m—I feel the same way now where I think there's a good argument still for paying off your house early. I know a lot of people say that's not, whatever, I know the math doesn't work out, versus the stock market, but there’s—I think there's all kinds of, like, psychological benefits of not having that hanging over your head, and one of those, I think, is—I think now I would be much more comfortable taking on some debt, because I'm just, I just feel more stable. That's a good point.
John: I think that's exactly it. If my house was mortgaged, the land was mortgaged, my cars were all mortgaged, like if all of that stuff was, and then additionally, I'm financing this software thing, I'm doing some real estate stuff, that would be—that’s a lot of risk.
That's how you end up in a bad spot and, like, how you don't is if you—again, you guys know this entrepreneurship is just risk reduction. It's like, how do you—I feel like it's less risky to have three things than to have one job. Like I realized that you might think you—not you guys, but you, someone else might think that's different, but I'm like, it's not, you get laid off, boom, you're done.
And I've seen that happen to friends over and over. And I'm like, it's way less risky for me to have—I joked the other day, I was talking to somebody and I—because you, I don't know. Do you remember trace commas from a Silicon Valley? Yeah. So like, I was like, I don't, I don't have trace commas. I'm not even close to trace commas.
Josh: Hanelman or—
John: Yes. Yeah. But I was like—but what I do have now is I have a business making five figures a year, six figures a year and seven figures a year, and they're in completely different industries. So I was like, I have a, uh, what was it? Five? I have a five, six, seven. I don't have a trace commas. I have a five, six, seven. And it's, I mean, it's a joke, but it's funny, but it's also like, that’s diversification to me, is spreading it out like that.
And I would love to spread it out more and then I can maybe hire more friends and stuff like that. But I don't, my wife was like, I joked about something just a little bit ago and she was like, you're not going to buy another one. Like all right. I was like, well, I'm talking to a lot of podcasts. Maybe I'm gonna get some good deals. Yeah. I was like, I don't know. And Garrett's like, no, let the dust settle, bro. Let the dust settle. But—
Ben: I don't know, John. We got this other—we got this other business in the corner we can sell to you. Let's talk after.
John: Uh, yeah, no, yes. I, I mean, I'm, it is like, I think it's really fascinating to me because, it's just some skills that I have actively tried to learn over the last two or three years, never got to apply them really, a little bit of Box Out, but not much talked with a ton of PE people through that.
Because they just start sniffing around at a certain size. Learned how they talk, learned how they think, learned about multiple arbitrage of buying for like two to four X selling for four to six X after you grow it I'm not looking to sell Fireside at all ever, like I want to try holding for like a long time.
Now I've done my selling in the past. Like, I'm curious what would happen if I didn’t—but it's really interesting to finally be able to apply some of those things and be like, all right, again, avengers assemble. Who's in, who's out, how much, let's figure this out. Who's going to do what, how, if we're going to start a company from scratch, what are our values, stuff that like, I joined Box Out—
So it kind of maybe counts as like my first investment or something I bought in. But like, I didn’t—it's not like I'm creating the culture there or there was already culture. I'm just joining another culture—but it's like, we're starting this from scratch. What do we want to do? We want to be calm.
You know, we want to like cashflow. We want value, like, the value that's coming out of the company goes to those who contribute, whether it's capital or just even writing some of those things down was really neat. So sorry, I’m, I—that was a lot of talk.
Josh: This is—this is pretty good software, um, is the name of your new company?
John: Yeah, very good. Yep. Yep. Very good software. And that's Very good—pretty good? Very good.
Josh: I'm sorry, John.
John: It's from Parks and Rec. If no one's seen it, you can view the source on very good software dot company and the YouTube URL is linked in there, to Ron Swanson's very good building and development company. And he does a commercial and he's like, buy our very good buildings, or do not, we are not beggars.
Josh: I got to watch that show again. It's so good. Like ,I love that show. Yeah.
John: And he's like commercial done. And I'm like that. I love that, so.
Josh: You got to put Ron Swanson and, like, the humans text , on your domain, you know, like, yeah. Yeah.
John: That’s a really good call.
Ben: Well, and, and your—
John: I didn’t even think about that.
Ben: Your benefits package must have a treat yourself line item, right?
John: Oh yeah
Ben: You got, you got—you got your 401k, you got your health benefits, and then there's the treat yourself.
John: That's one, one time a year. The company will help you treat yourself.
Josh: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah.
John: That’s a great idea.
Josh: Let’s—got your Avengers, what’s next for you all? Like what's next for, very good.
John: We’ve got to deploy the app once. So that's the next goal. And I'm not even joking, like again, it was like, it was last, uh, so yeah, recording on Thursday, Monday was a week of the signing of the papers, Tuesday, we kind of started transferring stuff, again, a week ago.
So we're on day, like, 10, we've got most of the stuff, transfer the stripe, you know, change the bank, update the—I had to get a credit card. I was like, “Oh, I don't even have a credit card to pay for anything”. So I had to put in my personal one. And then it got, uh, the CloudFlare bill dinged on it. And that's like the—literally the biggest expense. So now I got to reimburse that.
And again, it's all the stuff that next time I'll be much better at someday, but this time I wasn't. So the first goal, the goal for this week is to deploy, get our SSH keys on all the servers. We got that now. And now it’s—we got to do a cap production deployed. There's currently a branch deployed.
So I need to merge that branch and then get that kicked out, just so I've done it once and I'm like, okay, cool. Now I can change it from made in Austin with a heart y'all to whatever made. In Colorado and Indiana or whatever we change it to, or tips from Dan becomes tips from us kind of a thing.
So we can start doing those things. That's really the next step. And then we've taken a very conservative approach to this again, because like, debt ratio to profit, that’s coming in as maybe like 25 percent or 20 percent or lower. I'd have to do the math to know exactly, but it's pretty low, especially once we get—like, the plan is, all the other guys who are contributing, when their money comes in, we're just putting it right on the debt.
So we're going to lower the debt so that—because as soon as that debt gets paid off, there's a lot more—the profit gets used for that instead of for paying off the debt. So that's good. And then additionally, we don't have the debt service, which is X amount of the cashflow. The plan is basically a conservative—
It’s—look, the first month or two we're on Ruby two, seven, we're on Rails, like six or something. So it's let's get to like, six, one, seven, seven, one. Let's get to like—not, not like—we don't have to be perfect. We're not gonna be, like, Rails eight beta, or like stuff like that, we're not switching to Kamal overnight.
Like, but I'm like, get some stuff updated so that we can iterate. So that’s, like, the first—really, like, month or two is just—the goal is like, don't mess anything up and get some stuff upgraded, which we have a lot of experience with. I think we're bootstrap three. So maybe we try to get to bootstrap four or, you know, stuff like that. Then, the goal is—that’s the rest of the year, because we're October. So we have a two, three months left, who works in December. Am I right?
Ben: Right.
Josh: We don’t.
John: Yeah, exactly. And so, that’s the plan for the rest of the year. And then next year it's like, okay, what are some things that we can start hitting feature wise? So, Garrett, when he worked on it back in the day, it was working on dynamic ad insertion, and it was basically, like, all written and it was just sitting, waiting to decide on the pricing and ship it and stuff. So we're definitely going to look at that cause the functionality is all there.
So it's like, okay, how would customers want to be charged for that, some amount for free, some amount paid, you know, like we—you guys went through with Insights and adding like a second bit to it. That's on our radar for sure. Got some good suggestions from people for features. Because I've reached out to like, uh, Adam at The Changelog and locally, there's a guy that I’m acquaintance-friends with who does podcast editing. Another guy who is podcast producer has 20 or 30 podcasts that he manages and stuff.
So like those people I'm like, I’ve—it's meetings. It's talk to them, figure out like, what do they need? Do we want to service what they need or not, kind of stuff. What are they like? What are they not like? Just learn about podcasting, talk to a bunch of podcasts. We've talked about basically starting a podcast about, like, where we talk to podcasters so that, and some of our customers, so we know what they want, what they need, how they do things.
It helps people learn how to start themselves, that kind of stuff. Yeah. And then just talk to everybody about it. So that's, I've literally—I think this—I think—hate to say this, you guys are not the only people that I'm talking to. I, before it was like, it was exclusive, you know, I talked to maybe three or four podcasts this week and all, like, counting you guys.
And I've got a couple next week. There's a couple of people I ran into at Rails World who were like, Oh, like you should talk to my friend who's in marketing and like they want to buy apps, you guys should just know each other. It’s, like, some of that stuff got scheduled for next week and stuff. So it's a lot of, of talking.
Josh: Yeah.
John: Which I’m terrible at. You guys can tell I’m—just a struggle. Yeah.
Josh: It's hard, hard to get you to say anything.
John: Yeah, I know that. So that's pulling teeth. That's a short term. The short term is stabilized. Don't mess anything up three months. Maybe there's some new stuff, little new things, and then long term, okay, let's start looking at what's our thing that we want to do that's different than everybody else.
Is there anything—and we don't know the answer to that yet. I honestly, like I said before, I did not do—I didn't look at the code before. I looked at the financials because that's really all I was worried about. Because I'm like, how different can a Rails app be, you know? So I was like—and it's a Rails app that basically had two people work on it.
Josh: Mm hmm.
John: You’re—and one of them I've already worked with. I'm like, we're going to be fine. We'll figure it out.
Josh: Pretty good fit. Yeah. It's pretty nice.
John: So yeah. So that's kind of the plan.
Josh: That's cool. And I think you're eventually you'll be moving Flipper into—you want to hold all your company or all your—your SAS—and you're starting, like, a SAS holding company acquisitions. I see more acquisitions in your future. Sorry to your wife, but I, I think this is your job now.
John: I mean, I think it'd be cool. I still want to hack on them and stuff. I made room in my schedule to like, start hacking on Flipper regularly. And then Fireside dropped in literally the next week. And I was like, why do I do this to myself? Every time I get room—
Josh: Yeah,
John: —to do the thing I want to do, I fill it with something else. Yeah. It's just.
Josh: Yeah. But the stuff, the stuff we're interested in, like the valuable things and it's the business product thinking side—it makes total sense to bring more company, put more apps in the company because you can take advantage of the people you hire to use their time efficiently. I think that's really—it would be really fun to try, so I’m—I'm excited. I'm living vicariously.
John: If you’re wanting to try if you're want—maybe there’s, you know—
Josh: We'll see.
John: To, yeah.
Josh: Some Honeybadger, a very good collaboration in the future. Yeah.
John: I don't know something. I will come up with something like Bennifer make it happen. I was going to say on that front too, like, honestly, the reason I want to merge Flipper in is a hundred percent to align incentives, because I feel like, again, , reading too much Buffett, but I'm like, the number one thing in a company is what are people's expectations?
And then what are people's incentives you know? If people have different expectations, that causes conflict. And if people have different incentives that causes conflict. I'm really fascinated from Box Out and other stuff about those two things. And I'm like, if Garrett's like, X percent owner over here and bigger percent over here, and I'm bigger over here.
And Chris is more over there. Nobody's aligned. We all have our own things that are different than that. And so I'm like, that's why I was like, I just want to figure out a way to merge them all together. So that every—and Garrett pushed for this very hard as well. He's like, let's just make them all aligned. Let's get them all together. Now, Chris still has speaker deck. It is separate, and I'm giving him a whole lot of crap about that. Someday he'll listen to this.
Josh: Maybe speaker deck will be coming in too.
John: Yeah, exactly. , I don't know how we're going to tax wise merge Flipper in. There’s weird things with what I would like to do is merge Flipper in and like nobody's percentage changes but mine. Like, mine just goes down or something, like, if—because Brandon—there’s two of us in Flipper, Brandon and myself at this point.
And because of that, we can merge it in and then he'll just dilute, but then it would also dilute the other people. And I don't want to dilute them. I—what I want to do is just give him some of my percentage to move my percentage and his percentage in, or maybe it's better if we just give him cash and buy him out.
Or buy us out, or—so I don't know. So some of that stuff, well, I'll have to spend some time with the accountants and just be like, look, this is the end goal. What's the most tax efficient way to do this so that, because this is what we're trying to do and we're really not trying to, nobody's trying to cheat anything.
We're just literally—we just want to merge these in and make it legit. And like, I want these people to owe more, but I don't want it to look like I sold a chunk of mine and now I need to pay taxes on that when I didn't realize the gain. Technically I'm losing out of this. So I'm losing equity and also this other thing, but that's, I'm okay with that, but I want the government to be okay with that, , like, so that—that kind of stuff got to figure out.
But then everyone's incentives are aligned. And I think that's the best thing. And that's what I—that’s why I wanted to merge everything into one is because I think that long term then it's every new deal that comes in, however, we do it like very good. It's going to be the owner. So like we might do it where, if there's outside investors for some reason, or like somebody else helps with it. Okay. Then very good is like 50 percent and they're 50 percent or 60, 40 or whatever. We'll figure that out. But like the incentives for everyone inside of very good are aligned. That's the goal.
Josh: Yeah.
John: We'll see.
Ben: Makes sense.
Josh: Well, I'm excited. I'm excited for you.
Ben: Yeah.
John: Thank you.
Josh: Cool.
John: Appreciate it. I'm excited too.
Josh: Nice.
Ben: And I'm glad I caught you before you were completely tired of talking about it.
John: You know what?
Josh: We got to get Addison on the editing for this episode. So we don't get scooped.
Ben: Exactly.
John: Well, you guys will definitely, yeah, it'll get out. It'll get out fast. Probably everybody else is slower. So I don't know their schedules, but,
Josh: We'll see. I told him he could, it's the—we normally record earlier in the week. So I told him it doesn't have to be out this Friday. Because that's a little bit of a, that's a bit of a time crunch.
Ben: But you know, he's young, he can do an all nighter. It's all good.
John: Yeah.
Josh: Get him some, uh, get him some red—red bulls.
John: Get him a beeper. Just send a message every—
Ben: Every hour, yeah.
Josh: I know. He's just shaking his head, listening to this right now in the future.
John: In—that’s funny.
Josh: Well, this has been great. I think we learned a lot and the listeners will learn a lot. So appreciate you sharing.
John: I hope so. Again, if I can save somebody else time, that's my goal. Because I learned a lot of this stuff the hard way. And there was a lot of back and forth at the end. And it was very painful. Hopefully, most of that is shared and some of it's not, but I'll put it up somewhere. So, yeah.
Josh: Cool.
Ben: Well, thanks John.
Josh: Yeah. Well, this has been founder quest founder quest podcast. com. Go give us ratings and love on the whatever podcast platforms. If you need to start a podcast, maybe, yeah, check out Fireside and we'll catch you next week or whenever.
Ben: See ya.