Giving Up On An Idea

When should you give up on an idea, and what does "giving up" mean? Michele and Colleen talk about Colleen's ideas that didn't pan out.

Show Notes

Michele Hansen  0:00 
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Colleen Schnettler  0:42 
So Michele, I saw a tweet you had the other day where you just casually dropped that you were quoted in Adam Grant's new book, what is that about?

Michele Hansen  0:54 
Yeah, it's kind of a funny story. So Adam Grant, who wrote Originals, has a new book out called Think Again. And a vignette from my application to my old job, actually is in the book. It's kind of crazy.

Colleen Schnettler  1:15 
So how did that happen?

Michele Hansen  1:17 
So he gave a talk at the place I used to work. And the talk was on sort of unexpected findings and learnings. And there was just one particular story he told that prompted me to go ask him a question and talk to him afterwards. And I love that story, if I can just tell it for a second. So he was saying how there was this startup that was pitching some venture capitalists for funding. And in addition to all of the slides, you would expect about, you know, the problem they're solving and how they're doing it, and why they are the team to do it, and how they're taking over the world and all those kinds of things. They also had a slide in there, that straight up said all of the reasons why their company may not work.

Colleen Schnettler  2:08 
Hmm. Okay.

Michele Hansen  2:10 
Yeah. And it's not something that people normally put in a slide deck. And what really stuck out to me was he said that instead of the VCs going, Yeah, you're right, like, this idea sucks, your company's never going anywhere, your team isn't qualified, like, all right. Instead, the VC started problem solving with them, and talking about how they could help the company overcome these problems and avoid these pitfalls. And it went from this kind of, I don't want to describe it, like pitching as an adversarial relationship, but it's definitely like a weird, icy dance. To one that was really collaborative, and they were diving in together and and those sort of veneers were dropped. And, and he was talking about how, you know, they they said that it wasn't going to work out. And then that made people more interested in and talking to them and helping them.

And so I went up to talk to him afterwards, because that that kind of reminded me of the application that I had written to the company. Because I had written in the application, basically, that I was probably not the candidate that they were envisioning, and that I didn't meet the qualifications they were asking for, but that I had other things that I was bringing to the table. And so he, you know, tells that story. In the book, I was also on his Work/Life podcast a couple of years ago telling that story.

Colleen Schnettler  3:50  
It's so cool. Yeah, it's,

Michele Hansen  3:51  
it's kind of

Colleen Schnettler  3:52  
weird. You're like secretly famous, and you never told us? Like you should have.

Michele Hansen  3:57  
I don't I don't know if I'm, I'm sorry, Colleen. Yeah, it's, it's it's pretty wild seeing my own name in print. But anyway, so since I'm in this book, and also I just enjoy his books in general. I figured he should read it. Yes, choice choice. He did send me a free copy of it. So and I absolutely loved it. 

Actually, there was some the part in it that kind of reminded me of something that you've been going through, and is something that's really common that I see in entrepreneurs, people who are starting out and also people who've been doing it for a long time.

Colleen Schnettler  4:39  
Which is...

Michele Hansen  4:40  
So I'm going to if you'll bear with me for a moment, I am just I'm going to read from the book. I have it in front of me here and it's a couple of paragraphs, so just bear with me here. 

So he's talking about if you can train people to think more like scientists and do they end up making smarter choices. And so, he says:
 

A quartet of European researchers ran a bold experiment with more than 100 founders of Italian startups in technology, retail furniture, food, healthcare, leisure and machinery. Most of the founders businesses had yet to bring in any revenue, making it an ideal setting to investigate how teaching scientific thinking would influence the bottom line. The entrepreneurs arrived in Milan for a training program and entrepreneurship. Over the course of four months, they learned to create a business strategy interview customers build a minimum viable product and refine a prototype. 
What they didn't know was that they had been randomly assigned to either a scientific thinking group or a control group. The training for both groups was identical except for that one was encouraged to view startups through scientists goggles. From their perspective, their strategies a theory, customer interviews help develop hypotheses, and their minimum viable product and prototype are experiments to test these hypotheses. Their task is to rigorously measure the results and make decisions on whether their hypotheses are supported or refuted. 
Over the following year, the startups in the control group average under $300 in revenue, the startups in the scientific thinking group averaged over $12,000 in revenue. They brought in revenue more than twice as fast and attracted customers sooner too. Why? The entrepreneurs in the control group tended to stay wedded to their original strategies and products. It was too easy to preach the virtues of their past decisions, prosecute the vices of alternative options and politic by catering to advisors who favored the existing direction. The entrepreneurs who had been taught to think like scientists, in contrast, pivoted more than twice as often, when their hypotheses weren't supported. They knew it was time to rethink their business models. 
What's surprising about these results is we typically celebrate great entrepreneurs and leaders for being strong minded and clear sighted. They're supposed to be Paragons of conviction, decisive and certain. Yet, evidence reveals that when business executives compete in tournaments to price products, the best strategies actually slow...

Okay, I'm going to stop there. But what he's really talking about is the flexibility to change your mind and being open to new perspectives on things. 

And this reminded me of how when you were originally building your, your file upload tool, it was originally only for files, and then you keep talking about images and like, do people need images and you're talking to people, and but the really like, the core idea of this is, you know, we wrap up so much of our own feelings in the idea that we have, right? 

Colleen Schnettler
Yes. 

Michele Hansen
Like, we attach the validity of the idea to the validity of ourselves, right? 

Colleen Schnettler
Yep. Definitely.  

Michele Hansen
And the person who, if the idea is valid than the person who created the idea is valid, right? Like, there's this sort of unspoken connection between those things. But if we can detach our, you know, our feelings from it, and our sense of identity from that, and like our original idea, and we can say, okay, like, what does this actually, you know, how does it actually work in the real world, and how many other people think about it, and being open to how other people think about it, and pivot, then will be much more successful. 

And it just really reminded me a lot of the kind of different struggles you've had around, what should I build and your initial idea versus people are telling you what they're using for it? And? And then what do you do with that information?

Colleen Schnettler  8:39 
Yeah, and it's interesting, because the very first iteration of my product was completely different. It was actually designed to be like shared files in the cloud for teams for you to use on your website.

Michele Hansen
Oh yeah

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, that's how, cuz that's how I used it. So I like to have all of my files in the cloud. I don't like to package anything in on my servers. And so I was always dropping like, if you go to my website, simple file upload.com. I serve that video from my simplefileupload.com

Michele Hansen  9:11 
dogfooding. Nice.

Colleen Schnettler  9:13 
Yeah, I serve that video from my cloud storage, right. So I like to serve everything from Cloud Storage. So I had first set it up to be static files for websites, and no one cared. I mean, that was, so that first, that was hard. I know. And then just the other day, someone was like, wow, wouldn't it be great if we had a service? And I was like, they were like, if we had a service for static files, and I was like, Yeah, I built that. And no one wanted it. Change. I totally agree. But I do think it's important, something that I have really struggled with, is giving up too early.

Michele Hansen
Mhm.

Colleen Schnettler
So I feel like in my previous ideas, because I did a deep dive on several things. I think, you know, I did the babysitting thing I wanted to do. Then there was the content marketing stuff. That was gonna do like a deep dive on your content marketing, then there was, I don't know, there was something else. But each one of those looking back, I feel like I could have succeeded with any of those ideas. But I gave up a little too early. So I think the difference between like, this is a terrible idea. And pivoting is important to keep in mind too.

Michele Hansen  10:22 
I think there's also a lot more black and white there. And I think the ideas you had were good ideas. It just may be a question of, like, Are you the right person to do them? Is it the right time to do them? You know, I remember what you mentioned, as your babysitting idea was actually like a pretty good idea for, like military moms to watch other people's children as a way to make money because it's really hard for military moms to work. And like it was a regulatory problem in Virginia that you ran into.

Colleen Schnettler  10:56 
Like, so someone did something like this, but no funding. Yeah, he got funding. But he so I internet stopped him, not in a creepy way just to find out more. And he got VC funded. Like he's deep in this. He did. Yeah. Because but but I see why for that.

Michele Hansen
But I think it needed it.

Colleen Schnettler
Like you needed funding, because it's a marketplace. And it's, it's just big, like you said there was regulatory hurdles with getting people like licensed and it's the whole thing. So I guess my point is, I don't think any of my ideas previously were bad. But like, the other one, that content marketing, there's someone doing that that's doing really well. But like, that just wasn't, it wasn't a great space for me.

Michele Hansen  11:37 
Yeah, because I think it wasn't your it wasn't your like niche, and you were building a lot of knowledge on that. And you were pounding the pavement, interviewing people for it.

Colleen Schnettler
Oh man, I was.

Michele Hansen
But everything requires background knowledge. And if you don't have the background knowledge of that field, it's just really hard to break into it. And so it doesn't mean they weren't good ideas. It just means it wasn't like the right fit. Like we've had stuff that didn't work out. And it it, I think that's like, the really important thing that I pull from that quote is that it doesn't mean anything about you as a person or your ability to generate ideas or your ability to execute on them, you just have to be willing to understand, okay, maybe I should work on something else. Or like, people, I initially needed this for sharing files, but then other people really want it just for this other purpose. And being willing to change to that is, is really, really valuable.

Colleen Schnettler  12:40 
I have to say, though, while you were reading that, and I know the purpose was to point out the pivot, the success of the pivot, but all I could think was if someone gave me four months and a team, I could like take over the world. Like right now I'm trying to raise kids, like, move, have a full time job and do this side project thing. Like, Oh, my gosh, how luxurious would it be? to just have all that time?

Michele Hansen  13:03 
Do you ever read the Myth of the Man Month, or whatever, I think I'm butchering the title of that book, but I mean, it's, among other things, it gets into this idea that it's like, it's not just a function of people in time about executing and succeeding on a problem. It's, you know, all of these other things we talked about, like building the right thing, and having the right skills. You know, of course, like, you know, it doesn't mean that you have to be an expert in what you're building for, right? Like, I am not a GIS person. And, you know, I say this now, and people are like, you have a geocoding service. You're a GIS person, I'm like, okay, yes, fine. But like, you know, I took one geography class, in college, like, I never took a GIS class, like, I don't have any, you know, advanced degrees in GIS, like, I don't come from that field. But I do come from it as a user of that information. And that's been really helpful because a lot of the GIS tools out there, geographic information systems, tools are built for GIS people. But there are a lot of people who are not GIS people who need geographic information, like marketers, and data analysts and developers, like all sorts of other people. And so building it from the perspective of a consumer of that information, like has been really helpful in that regard, even though I was not a subject matter expert when we set out on this.

Colleen Schnettler  14:30 
And maybe even better, right, because it you know, because you didn't have a deep knowledge of it, like you were able to design a product that appealed to someone like you who needs it, but doesn't have a deep knowledge of it.

Michele Hansen  14:44 
Yeah. And so I think that also counts as being a, you know, quote, unquote, expert in a field, you know, to your SEO idea. Were you doing much in SEO either as a developer or as a as a content- like you're not? How did that even come about?

Colleen Schnettler  15:06 
The content marketing, I think it was a great it came about because it felt like so it felt like a solution that could be solved with software. Because if you look at these midsize companies, they have content marketing managers. And to have a successful content marketing strategy, you should do like kind of a analysis of all your content. And there's so much you can do with your content. And I learned a ton about SEO while I was doing this. And people almost never do these, like annual reviews of their content. And so you have stale content that can hurt you, you have like, you have all kinds of stuff. And people were doing that manually, like they were building these content strategies manually. I mean, takes a ton of time. Like if you could extrapolate some of that manual content building into software, like I think you'd have a really great product. And I found some companies that were actually doing it. But it felt like it was good because people with small SAS is don't know a lot about content. Like I still think it's a good idea. Yeah. Right. Like you have a small SAS, you don't know a lot about content. So what if there was a software that could instead of you having to get a subscription to a h refs and spent hours every week analyzing it? What if something just spit out for you like what your keywords should be? And what you should write about? I mean, it would be so great. Yeah, it would

Michele Hansen  16:23 
be.

Colleen Schnettler  16:25 
I just didn't know, it seems like it would be so great. But I interviewed content marketing managers at mid sized companies. And they didn't like it because their companies were big enough that they wanted, like tight control over what their content strategy looked like. And people at the smaller sizes were totally into it. But like, ultimately, it came down to it was a cool idea. But I couldn't build it without someone else. Because I just don't know enough about content. And then you start getting AI involved. And it was like it was cool. But that would definitely be something where I would need a lot more time. It wasn't something I could just build in a couple months. But think about it if you spent the same. What if you could spend the same amount that you spend on a href? And I know it's pretty expensive.

Michele Hansen  17:14 
And it would just like we barely, honestly, like I feel so guilty about it. Like I wish I used it more. I feel like it really makes sense for people who run ads, and we don't run ads. So we should use something else. Yes, thank you, I should say close my books for the year. And I'm reminded of all of our expenses, that one that one does come to mind as one that's like, I should do something about that.

Colleen Schnettler  17:39 
Yeah, so I think I still think the content thing was a good idea, I still think there's opportunity in that space. But ultimately, I didn't care enough because I didn't really understand the problem.

Michele Hansen  17:49 
Well, now you have the humility to admit that. It's such an underrated quality of entrepreneurs to like, you especially we have this, you know, there's this whole cultural image of, you know, the, the Steve Jobs like entrepreneur and how, you know, they, they stand on top of the mountain and these amazing business ideas are beamed to them from the heavens, like a lightning bolt like, and it's just like, come on, I think that holds people back because they're like, Well, I'm not a Steve Jobs person, you know, I don't have the personality for this or whatever. And it's like that. You just have to have the curiosity to go out and notice a problem. Talk to people about it. Admit that maybe you don't know everything about it, learn about it, right, like this, this kind of humility that you have exhibited. And then sometimes you say, Okay, I'm not the person to build this. And sometimes you are.

Colleen Schnettler  18:49 
Yeah.

Michele Hansen  18:51 
But being willing to listen to other people and listen to your own instincts on that is, is really key. And, you know, good businesses do not come down like a gift from the gods, you know, floating on a cloud, right? Like they are built by solving genuine problems that people have and how you find those problems is being curious about them, and listening to people about their problems.

Colleen Schnettler  19:20 
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the best thing, I probably spent six months on this content idea. And the best thing I did is I didn't write any code. I just talked to people, like I thought about it, like, how could I build this? I saw what else was out there. But I'm so glad I didn't spend two years writing something that would have been a bad fit. So that was that was useful.

Michele Hansen  19:43 
You just reminded me of a great tweet I saw the other day from Val Geisler. She said, "A lot of people will tell you to talk to your customers, but they don't tell you what they really mean is listen to your customers. The hardest and most important part of customer interviews is shutting up."

And you just reminded that when you were talking about, you know, you spent six months talking to people, you spent six months listening to people. And, you know, thinking about where you were from when you first had the idea about military moms making money through babysitting. And now something you have gotten really good at, in the last year and a half, or two and a half years, is listening to people.

Colleen Schnettler  20:30 
Yes, I definitely think I have gotten better. And the content marketing thing, I probably spoke to 10 people, at least, like I spoke to a lot of people, I was really emotionally tied to the idea because I thought it was so brilliant. But person after person was kind of like, I'm not interested. And then but you know what? I thought Michelle, I then thought about Steve Jobs. So it's funny, you just mentioned him, because I thought, you know what they always say about Steve Jobs. He doesn't listen to people. He just tells them what they want. Well, that's great for Steve Jobs, but like, Steve Jobs. So yeah, so I finally after talking to 10 people realize, literally not one of those people was excited to you know, seem to have this problem. It's kind of like, oh, okay, so this is not for me to build.

Michele Hansen  21:19 
That takes humility to admit that.

Colleen Schnettler  21:21 
This is why I love the dogfooding build something for yourself idea. You'll see a lot of people say don't do that, because they're like, you don't really know what the market needs. But it's worked really well for me. And I never use your own product. Yeah, like, I'm using it, I have this product I'm using it across. And it's really nice. Because you know exactly how it works. I don't know, I think it's worked out really well for me, and you don't lose motivation when you're building it. Because you're so motivated when you're your ideal customer.

Michele Hansen  21:53 
Yeah, most of these days when I'm using our product, it's to, you know, like, validate an issue a customer saw, like, there have been some times for various volunteer efforts. I've been part of that I've actually used it. And those have been so exciting. And I end up being like, okay, one actually, we really have to fix this. This is super annoying. And this took way too long. This is awesome. But I what I need is be able to do this. And like, but like we have these really excited like jam sessions after that where we're rapidly improving the product, because you're seeing it firsthand. And yes, you are not the customer and you need more customers than yourself. That is no question but but sort of like we are reading an Adam grants book. Part of that is going out and talking to people and understanding what they need, and pivoting or just, you know, making slight changes and expanding your understanding of the problem based on what they need.

Colleen Schnettler  22:52 
Yeah, I do have to say, too, in the early days, when you're either idea generating or you have a nascent product like I do, it's hard to find people to talk to and I think that's, that can be hard when I got started, like all the advice was always to talk to people. But even that can be hard. You know, when you're when you're starting

Michele Hansen  23:12 
This this actually like on that topic. You know, I remember that you for the babysitting idea, you interviewed people that you found on military base Facebook groups, right?

Colleen Schnettler
That's right.

Michele Hansen
Like that's when you found that people and then you were talking to kind of like a community of people we know who are bootstrappers. And this makes me excited to read Arvid Kahl's upcoming book, which is apparently all about this kind of embedding yourself in communities and engaging with people and, and learning about problems that way.

Colleen Schnettler  23:50  
Yeah, yeah. So for the first thing, I found, like you said the babysitting thing, I found people on Facebook for the content marketing, I hit up SaaS owners, but I think I still think the content marketing thing is a good idea. But I hit up small SaaS owners like small one to two person companies. And I think you know, that was the wrong size company for a product like that. You'd need a midsize SaaS and I just don't have access to those people. And even now for my file uploader. I'm having a hard time talking to people, like I'm talking to anyone who will talk to me, but but I, if you ask me who my ideal customer is right now, I don't exactly know because it's

Michele Hansen  24:29  
okay not to know.

Colleen Schnettler  24:31  
Like, people are signing up, which is amazing, and people are using it. But very few people are talking to me and they're still people are still like kind of across the board in terms of how they're using it. So even now, I'm still kind of like, Huh, who is my ideal customer? I don't know. I find

Michele Hansen  24:49  
it you know, asking the right questions that get the information that's useful for you is a hard thing and it never stops being something you have to improve. And actually so this one We changed something. So we have a little like NPS survey that pops up for people. And so we'll see them come through. And I'll say, you know, someone gave us a 10. And then we have a little question that says, What can we do to improve. And sometimes, like people will put in something like that went wrong, or like they have a suggestion. But most of the time it comes, you know, it, it posts to slack. And then if they put comments, and it comes into intercom, and it'll say something to the effect of 10. And you know, what we can do to improve like, nothing like Keep up the great work, which like, is really nice and makes us feel good, but isn't necessarily giving us something that we can use to improve. And it is, you know, it's, it's not fair of us to ask our customers what we can do to improve like, that is our job. To know that right? Like, that's basically asking them to do our work for us. And so I changed that question this week to what did you use before you use geocode? Do not, and it has been so interesting. And I have gotten to jump straight into those conversations about people's processes and what their frustrations with the other tools are, and what they're trying to create overall, like, What does their end project or product look like? And and why weren't they happy with the other things? And what are they coming to us for? And, and I can get that out of a one, even if they give me a one word answer that says, you know, the Census geocoder, I can be like, you know, can you tell me more about that, like, why we're using that versus you're using us now. And it's a really good springboard into a conversation. But it's, it can be hard to ask the right questions to elicit the information that's both not too taxing on the person you're asking the question to, right. like asking them how we can improve is kind of a taxing question. Like you're asking them to sit down and think about it unless they had something like just right now annoyed them, that might be a difficult question to answer. So they just put nothing. And also gives us information that we can work with. And so I'm excited about this new question. I'm asking because it's giving us really good information that we can use as a springboard. But it's also a very easy question for them to ask.

Colleen Schnettler  27:14  
Yes. So I thought about that. So as I said, it's hard. I mean, I'm hand emailing everyone, right? Literally every person who signs up, and the response rate is really low. And then one guy emailed me back, and he's like, Sure, I can answer your questions. And I emailed him, like, for detailed questions, and he never responded. And I'm looking back at that email. And it was like, way too much of a cognitive load for this poor guy to answer. I mean, I should have emailed him one question, like, I feel like, because the questions we've talked about, like, what are you using it for? And like, what did you use before this? Have you paid for Cloud Storage before? And like the guy just bounced, which I get, because it was probably way too overwhelming, it would have taken 30 minutes to respond to all my questions.

Michele Hansen  27:58  
Yeah. So I feel like a call would be better for that. When you have

Colleen Schnettler  28:02  
one on one I always, yeah, I always go call first. I always asked for call first. But a lot of I don't want to say a lot. Very few people have taken me up on the call maybe four, which is still better than zero. People are so scared by sales calls, like especially I feel like technical people like worse.

Michele Hansen  28:22  
We're so you know, sort of shell shocked by it. Like we're so used to sign up a service and you get the call from the sales guy.

Colleen Schnettler  28:29  
And you're like, you hate it. And no, I hate that. 

Michele Hansen  28:32  
No, I don't want to have to give you my phone number to sign up for your service. Like, I just want to use your $10 a month plan, please leave me alone. Like, and I think people are just are so has been so burned out by companies with, you know, bigger sales departments than product departments that that somebody asked me to have a phone call right after you sign up for something? Is it like red flags go up? Like I used to say explicitly in the feedback email, like no, this is not a sales call. And then I realized that my response rates were going down further because I think because I use the word sales for sale, like had that like anxiety feeling. And they're like, and like ran away. actually putting in like, I put in mind, yes, this is an automated email, but I will respond to you personally. Like and basically just like, try it out. Come on, like test me. And people seem to like that. I've gotten some good comments on that.

Colleen Schnettler  29:32  
So I have set up, I have like five templates that I'm just randomly assigning to different people to see if I can get a better response rate on like one template versus the other. But I think as we've talked about, it's just kind of a playing around with different language and you know, figuring out what people will respond to

Michele Hansen  29:51  
and I have 5% back that's really really good, by the way, like the most I have ever gotten is 8%. So You know, keep keep that in mind. Like if you get one person out of 20 people, you're you're doing pretty good.

Colleen Schnettler  30:05  
Yeah, I think too. I hate email. So I get that, like, I totally get it. I am email overload, like, I will not respond. If I got that email, and I wasn't having any problems, I would not respond to it. So I mean, I totally get it, although maybe I have more empathy now that I'm actually trying to build my own business. Maybe next time I get that email. I will, I will respond. But yeah, I feel

Michele Hansen  30:31  
like we could talk about customer interviews and strategies to get people to talk to us forever. But I am curious. So how is the business side of everything going this week?

Colleen Schnettler  30:43  
It's so good. Michelle. 

Michele Hansen  30:46  
Okay, what are we like burying this lead, like 30 minutes in here?

Colleen Schnettler  30:50  
they are not still here. You don't get to hear.

Michele Hansen  30:54  
Congratulations on making it this far.

Colleen Schnettler  30:56  
Only the committed listeners. Things are going really well. People are signing up. Okay. So it's funny because I think I put something on Twitter the other day saying I was going to shorten my free trial. Yeah. 30 days to seven. And the way it's set up with stripe right now, as we've talked about, I don't have any time to do any dev work. So I had two people that were either gonna convert or churn, they both converted, by the way, nice. Oh, no. And then I was gonna change it to seven days, but four people signed up. Right before you changed it right before so I can't change it till those people convert or churn or I have the time to figure out how to do it properly. So that was really funny. Like, I don't know if that was just a total random fluke, coincidence. Or if someone like saw my tweet was like, I should sign up now. So I get 30 days. But

Michele Hansen  31:48  
yeah, I think I retweeted it from the podcast count, maybe I shouldn't have. So time was like, You were like, $120 a month in MRR? Can I ask you where we're at now? Or you're at what is that a week? This is a you?

Colleen Schnettler  32:04  
Yes, you can. $325 Heck, yeah. Right. What is happening? That's amazing. It's amazing. Now, as we have discussed, this is all fake money until the end of the month, because I don't get paid till the end of the month. So I have only seen 10 of these dollars. Okay, so you

Michele Hansen  32:24  
have, like, $10,

Colleen Schnettler  32:27  
I have received this $9.50 whatever to Stripe. So I have received real money from a real person that is not me. That amazing. That is amazing. But based on the signup rate, like things are going really well. But again, like I don't really count that because I think the Heroku people are gonna have a high propensity to churn. Because if they don't use it, they're gonna see it on their bill at the end of the month. And you know, the culture, you get

Michele Hansen  32:55  
paid, even if they don't use it, right, like you get paid once they start, like once they enable it, then that starts the charge, even though that's rolled up at the end of the month, like like if someone signs up right now, and then decides they're going to cancel on March 1, you would still get paid for that period of time.

Colleen Schnettler  33:16  
That's right, prorated amount, so I don't get paid for the whole month. 

Michele Hansen  33:20  
But yes, every minute, I want to keep an eye on that. But that's like, yeah, you get that money.

Colleen Schnettler  33:25  
Every minute, they have the thing provisioned, like I get paid. So I'm gonna get paid something. So it's very exciting.

Michele Hansen  33:31  
dolla dolla bills, y'all,

Colleen Schnettler  33:32  
right. So I think my goal, so my goal before had been to get one new signup a week, like that is a growth rate that I think would be really great. And I'm far exceeding that. So I think my kind of modified goal is to get one signup plus actually uploading files a week, because once they upload files, they're much more likely to stick around.

Michele Hansen  33:55  
So, you mentioned you have all these emails going out to people? Do you have an email that's like, Hey, I noticed you signed up, but you haven't uploaded any files. Let me know if I can help you.

Colleen Schnettler  34:05  
Yeah, I do. That's one of my so every couple days, like I don't do it right away, because I'm still doing that manually. But every like two or three days, I check it and I send out all those emails to people who have not uploaded files, that sort of thing to do. It's actually good. I'm so busy with work because I'm not obsessing over it like and so I'm spending the time on it that I can, which is not a lot right now. But it's really giving it some space to breathe, I think. And I think with that space, I'm going to learn I've gotten some really good feedback. Like one piece of feedback that didn't even occur to me is someone mentioned that he really liked how you can see all your files and your admin dashboard. And one of the really frustrating things about s3 is you can't see your me you log into your AWS account, you can see your bucket and then you can see like your folders. So you have to go in every folder and then you don't even know what image it is unless you click on it and it's a whole thing. So he I never even he was like Oh, I didn't know I was gonna have this feature. This is super cool because I don't talk about it. Yeah, reading of delights. So yeah, so things are things are going really well and just gonna keep on keep on.

Michele Hansen  35:08  
All right. I think that's gonna wrap us up for this week. Thank you so much everyone, for listening and we'll talk to you next week.

Creators & Guests

Host

Colleen Schnettler

Co-Founder of Refine, Founder of Simple File Upload

Host

Michele Hansen

Co-Founder of Geocodio & Author of Deploy Empathy

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