Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 Man, you know, this is the, the nine women in one month. You cannot make a baby.
Speaker 1 00:04 <inaudible>
Speaker 2 00:14 welcome to another episode of the road startups podcast with Greg Hewitt and Dave Rodenbach. This is a podcast documenting the journey as self funded business founders and sharing lessons, tips and tricks for businesses following the same path as ours. The journey is long and winding, but we're glad you're joining us for it. And now it's time to go rogue with Dave and Craig.
Speaker 0 00:41 All right, welcome to episode 94 of rogue startups this week. Craig and I are struggling to find what to riff on. So we're going to talk about Craig's post release woes. Craig, how the heck are Ya?
Speaker 3 00:56 I'm good man. I'm good. I'm a, I guess not terribly excited to talk about, uh, you know, the ups and downs that we've had, but I think there's some, some lessons in there that, uh, that I've definitely learned and hopefully, you know, some people can relate to those and save themselves some headaches, uh, when they're getting ready to launch. So yeah, it's been overall a good experience, but definitely a learning lesson.
Speaker 0 01:19 You know, I have yet to hear somebody like real behind the scenes launch details that were like, oh, this was all smooth. We were cracking coronas and sitting on the beach and everything went perfectly. Like that never happens. Do you might see some stuff on social media where they're like, aw man, we were crushing it, but then you actually talk to them later and then you get sort of a real feed from them and, and you'll hear them say, well, you know, uh, posted that we were doing really great, but we had, you know, this problem and we ran into this issue and we kind of struggle with this customer service thing or whatever. In my personal experience sort of mirrors that, although I don't put a pretty face on it, certainly not here on the podcast, but uh, yeah. So why don't you lay out a kind of, what is going on here with your, uh, a seriously simple hosting release that just went out?
Speaker 3 02:14 Yeah. So, uh, I guess a little bit of a little bit of background I guess. So we, so we'd launched a three and a half weeks ago now. So by the time this episode goes live, it'll be just, uh, just at a month. Um, and I kinda touched on it a couple episodes ago. Uh, the initial release was just a disaster. I mean, we, we pushed a bad file, I think to the SVN repository in wordpress. So, uh, all of the people who kind of like auto update their plugins every day or whatever, um, auto updated a broken plugin that broke their site. It was, it was that broken. It didn't even have like a, a check that failed and deactivated the plug in or some, it was just the 500 error on their site. I'm white screen of Dad. Yeah. Yeah. So that was, that was just horrible.
Speaker 3 03:07 And you know, I mean, I, our developer, we're still working with the same developer. He's a great guy, and he really went out of his way to, to fix everything very, really, very quickly. Um, but I sort of got, just got us started on like on our heels, you know, so like we started just like, uh, in defensive mode I guess. Um, even then, you know, at this point we have 20 plus paying customers, which I think is pretty cool. Um, and I'm in a decent mix of, we have an annual plan and a monthly plan, um, and a decent mix of annual and monthly, uh, which is, you know, the annual thing is kinda good news, bad news, good news. Cause you get some cash in flux up front, bad news that um, you know, they pay a little less per month on like an MRR basis and they're not going to pay again for, for a year.
Speaker 3 03:59 But um, you know, it's nice that we have some money coming in the door. We have customers, a lot of customers are really happy about it, but I think it's just, uh, one of the things that, that we're running into after fixing kind of like the major release problem, uh, is just that and hate, I hate to to bad mouth wordpress cause this is like the, the place the business is, is based, but wordpress is just difficult to manage from a, from uh, an app perspective or a business perspective. Cause like we've tested maybe not tested as much as we should have, but um, we tested a bunch of stuff and then once we released and we get a bunch of things, people saying, oh we don't, I'm on this hosting provider and it's PHP 5.2 or something. And we're like, oh, how do you have a, you know, a server running PHP that's like nine years old. Um,
Speaker 0 04:56 oh. Oh it happens. Oh Man. It happens all too often. Yeah. Yeah. That, that, that is one of the sucky things about wordpress is the support burden and the Combinator boreal explosion of environments. So that's why you have to throw stuff out there that say we support PHP five dot three and higher. We've prefer five dot six and we'll support it all the way up to this. And you know, like we have a strict policy now just because of that crap that was going on where we basically said we're only supporting the four most recent versions of wordpress. So that's like four four dot. Seven dot. Whatever the latest is, four dot six dot. Whatever the latest is, four dot five and four dot. Four that's it. We don't go back any farther than that. So some, you know, I just had some guy that came the other day and was like, we're running wordpress three seven.
Speaker 0 05:47 I'm like, dude, your host. Yeah, you gotta upgrade. Like that just doesn't work. You can't do that anymore. And I just don't understand why people don't bring their stuff up to date unless it's like a technical, like they just don't understand what's going on technically or they don't have the chops to manage that technically or whatever that is. But that is a super frustrating thing to have somebody come contact you and they're on this ancient configuration that I think the Egyptians actually set up. Yeah. And I just don't know what to do with that is that you just have to draw a line in the sand and say, I'm sorry this, this doesn't work. You got to upgrade and, and try it again because you have to save your sanity somehow. But man, that, that stuff sucks. Just uh,
Speaker 3 06:30 yeah, and the big one was like, so like a PHP version that was required for the, the AWS library we're using. Um, it's like the most recent AWS library requires PHP 5.4, which I looked it up as like seven years old. And so I'm like, that's fine, let's just roll with that. I'm sure it's great. It turns out like 20% of WordPress's on an older PHP version than that. So then we have to literally took like most of my lead developers week to rip out that whole SDK and implement an older version of it. Right. For All these people on the older version. So, so anyway, I mean the specifics aren't important. I don't, I guess, but, but really, I mean the, the, the thing that I've learned and that we're struggling with and I'm still struggling with it, is like we have bugs at this point.
Speaker 3 07:23 They're, they're not causing our users to cancel. I'm like, absolutely, you know, um, they're, they're trial and we also have like feature enhancements that I know if we can make these feature enhancements in additions, it'll move the, the app and the business forward. And so like in my head I'm going to saying, okay, we have limited money and developer time cause we have two part time developers basically on it that are putting in at this point, you know, like 20 hours a week total maybe. Um, so, so kind of in my head I'm saying like, okay, we don't have like the burning problem that like people are canceling left and right because this is not working. Like occasionally someone's on, you know, whatever set up that it's just not working. And we're trying to figure out a better way to do that so that those people don't cancel.
Speaker 3 08:14 But, but generally we're getting a couple of signups a day. Most of them are sticking around at this point. You know, we're almost a month into it. I can say, you know, our conversion rate is, I don't know, shit 50% or more, which I think for the first month is pretty good. Um, but, but sort of like in my head I'm saying, okay, I want to fix everything. Um, and how do I say like, okay, this is not like houses on fire problem. Uh, but, and then over here this feature is like really would be nice. How do you sort of justify a those two? When I think from a business perspective I think they're equally important. So, um, yeah, I guess the long, the long version is we, we learned a lot about wordpress and compatibility and, and testing, um, that I wish I wish we would have known beforehand.
Speaker 3 09:09 Um, because we would have done a couple of things better. Um, just tested more variables and, and considered all these older versions of things, which is a very wordpress specific thing to consider. I think if you're building kind of like a standalone SAS, like, like re, well not even recapture cause then you have to worry about like your Magento integrations and stuff. But um, if you're depending on anything, I think you've got to really consider all the options there. Um, but, but if you're not, then, then like once you, once you launch and you start getting some feedback from customers, how do you distill down like the wants and needs, uh, that, that you start facing when you get like real feedback?
Speaker 0 09:53 Yeah, that is a, that is a persistent problem and I don't know, well I can only say how I've actually tackled that either in my freelancing career or in the wordpress plugin space so far. And it's tough. I mean there's, you can't, you know, man, you know, this is the, the nine women in one month, you cannot make a baby no matter if you know that, that still nine months in and one woman can do it. If one woman can do that, then nine must be better. And that's never true. Frederick Brooks taught us that with a mythical man month. But the thing that's the thing that's always toughest for me is when I hear that kind of stuff coming from customers. And then you have your own personal list of stuff is how can you sort of figure out what that balance looks like. And if I can tell you one strategy that I did with wordpress, which just didn't work, and that is as things come in, just fix them.
Speaker 0 10:56 Doesn't matter what they are, just try to fix them. And that'll get you about 30% of the things that actually matter in my estimation. And then you're just wasting your time on 60 to 70% of shit that customers are asking for that nobody else wants or cares about except that one customer. So that's what I probably did for the first couple of years on the plugins. And then after that I'm like, okay, you're a software guy, Dave, you can do better than this. And so then I started tracking the issues and once I started tracking the issues, I saw some patterns emerge. But even then, the patterns themselves weren't enough. Like if you see people asking for a really goofy fucking thing, you still shouldn't necessarily add it to your software because maybe it's the wrong kind of feature to add in there. Like I still get people that are asking me to like build out what is essentially ebay inside of my classifieds plugin.
Speaker 0 11:53 Yeah, yeah. I'm like, okay, that's pretty cool. But here's the, the flip side of that. You guys are struggling to pay $40 for one of my modules and you complain about that. So if I'm going to dump in all this development effort to build what is a very complex piece of this thing and then turn around and charge you for it and you don't buy it, then I've wasted my time. Right? So you kind of have to say, all right, well what am I going to get bang for the buck? And also like what are the things that give me not necessarily bang for the buck but maybe massively reduced my support load. So when I was doing support for the plugins, and by the way, I love being able to say when I used to be doing support for the <inaudible>, when I was doing support for the plugins, I would notice patterns of things that would come in.
Speaker 0 12:42 So if I saw something come in like three times, sometimes maybe only twice, depending on what it was, if it was something like a fatal error or something like that, twice was all I needed to make me pay attention. But let's say it came in like three times was the same request, three different users, totally independent stuff coming in there. Maybe I'd see it on the forum and maybe I'd see an email and one is sometime on the repository form over there. Didn't really matter. But if I started to see that kind of frequency with it, that sort of made me go, Huh, maybe that's something that needs to be in the plugin at that point. So that sort of moves it up on the importance scale. But then there were other things that if I heard it three times, like if I heard the same support requests for something three times, that would make me go, all right, what can we do to make this stop happening?
Speaker 0 13:31 Because if I have to hear about this three more times, I'm probably going to get angry. And that doesn't help anybody. It doesn't help me. It doesn't help the customers. So what is it that needs to happen? Is it a documentation change? Is it a screencast? Is it we need to fix something in the plugin? Do we need to rearrange the user interface? Do we, you know, try to get to the root cause of this? My first couple of years it was like, I just pass it off to the developers and say, can you just fix this? And then they'd come back and say, oh, well this is, this is something we can't really fix. You know, this is the limitation and wordpress or whatever. And then I just, you know, respond with that back to the customer. But that wasn't good enough because I'd still keep hearing about it.
Speaker 0 14:10 So then we had to come up with, all right, is there an article? Then I can point them to to say, all right, if you get this, here's what you have to do. Um, so that's Kinda how I ended up handling a lot of feature requests for sort of the middle years. And now more recently where we've gotten better at tracking stuff. I haven't really been tracking the frequency. That's one thing that get hub issues. Doesn't really do like I can't have a vote button on there that says, you know, I've heard about the six times, but I kinda, I kinda make some mental notes on those things cause I've seen them enough that I'm like, okay, I know about that, I've heard about that, I've heard about that. And so we try to collect those all into something and then I hand that off to one of my developers and now he's solely responsible for adding in the new features that fix that. And then the other guy is about handling the day to day crap that comes in. You know, somebody's having a problem with their install license key won't activate a, they found a bug in the interface and it's something pretty nasty or something like that. So I kind of segregate their work so that I get movement on the features, but at the same time I still don't lose support either.
Speaker 3 15:21 Yeah. Yeah. So you're just tracking all this stuff manually. There's no integration with helpscout or get hub issues dumping into some sort of database or spreadsheet or anything like that? Huh?
Speaker 0 15:35 Not that sophisticated. No. So what we've got right now is we've got Zapier connected to Trello and helpscout connected to, um, my site. So that way I can talk to EDD and find out license key information and stuff like that. There's no help, there's no help scout get hub integration. That's actually useful for me. What I really want to be able to do is I want to be able to pull up issues that are related to this customer and nobody does that. The Zapier integration is actually kind of boneheaded. You can create new issues and get hub from helpscout, but that doesn't really help me. Um, I can't look up anything. I can't associate it to customers or use tags or none of that stuff. So it's not that clear. They were clearly not built to work together in that sense. So it's not quite what we need.
Speaker 0 16:25 But the Trello board gives me the prioritization aspect that I really do need. So I can sort of get visuals into what are my guys doing? Cause there's a support queue in there. There's an inbox, there's a support queue, there's a feature cue, there's a doing and a done and on hold. And then there's a, um, an archive section which comes with every Trello board, which is the same as done really for us. Sometimes it gets dumped in one or the other, but you know, things come into inbox from Zapier and then the guys move it over either to the support queue or into the feature queue. If it's something that isn't a support question. And that's all stuff that gets tagged in get hub. So it's a little annoying because github tags don't translate over into Trello. So we have to dual tag it.
Speaker 3 17:13 Yeah. So we started using code tree, uh, to sit on top of github issues just to give for me just like planning releases and prioritizing and like kind of assigning things between, uh, the, the two developers cause we have a private repo for, for the hosting. Um, and we have a fucking repo for the main plugin and each of the modules. So we have like five repos that we're uh, sorta like bouncing between cause we have of course updating the plugin and broke one of the modules and all this kind of stuff. So it's like, yeah. So code tree been really nice for me to get like a, and this is kind of where I am now I think is like we have a little bit of data. Like we were talking about like kind of tracking this stuff. But then like for me kind of like getting a bigger picture of like, okay we're working on these three things for the next week.
Speaker 3 18:05 You know, these kind of big things. We'll, and we'll launch a release and that's what this release kind of entails. And these are all the other kinds of bugs and feature requests and issues and all that kind of stuff. And how do we prioritize them? Code Tree's been nice to put everything in one place. Um, but yeah, I wish, and there's just, I mean, it's a limitation of wordpress. There's no way to get the data about, uh, you know, user interaction and stuff like that from, from wordpress admin. I'm looking at maybe some, some, uh, data on how much people are using the app. I mean, we have like the PHP my admin where I can look at how many episodes they've uploaded and things like that, but just some more usage stuff of how often they're publishing and, and things like that. Um, we're, we're looking into more of that kind of stuff. I think that's probably the right time to start looking at it now that we've launched and we have customers and trying to figure out how to prioritize some of this. Um, I feel like it's Kinda the right time now.
Speaker 0 19:08 Yeah. For something like that. You know, we built a plugin that um, allows the, it's basically it's a, it's a metal plugin, right? It's a plugin that's tracking the other plugin and within business directory there's a little thing that, you know, they have to opt in and say is it okay if we collect statistics about your usage? This is all anonymous data. We're not storing anything that's personally identifiable about your stuff. But it allows us to say things like, what wordpress version are you on? What version of business directory are you running? What language is your thing in? What PHP, my sequel o s web server, that kind of stuff. What plugins and themes are you running? So we know like what kind of stuff should we be testing against? What's major? What is a, you know, what is the majority of our install base have?
Speaker 0 19:53 And those sorts of things are super, super useful. But you know, the wordpress plugin rules, if you're going to be in the repository state, you have to ask them before you do that, you can't just auto track it cause they'll totally kick your ass out of the repository for that. So we, you know, we don't get, we don't get a hundred percent coverage on the plugins there, but a of the 20,000 installs, I've got 4,000 that have opted in roughly. So yeah. Well it's better than zero, that's for sure. Yeah. Um, so yeah, I mean that's, it's, it's helpful for me to know, like for example, when you were saying, oh, well, you know, we've got a, how many, what percent of people were on PHP five. Three you said? Oh I think it's like 20% or something. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. We have 12.6% still on PHB.
Speaker 0 20:41 Five three uh, 24% on five for 13% on five, five and 40% on five six. What's interesting is that like seven o, which is the one that everybody's always like, Oh, do you support seven? Oh do you support seven? Now I've got 5% of people that are on this thing. I'm not, so it's like everybody's asking about it, but nobody's doing it. It's like, okay, we can get like get with the program here, hosting companies, like everybody is asking about it but you're not supporting it. So people are stuck in limbo and it's, you know, it's kind of frustrating cause we actually just did a release, had a bug where it was something that was in, um, PHP five, six but not in five, five. So it was a n or no, it was five, five and five, four, whatever it was. There was some call that, uh, they were using and it wasn't supported and you know, they had to basically back port, uh, an equivalent function for somebody who was on a down rev of PHB and that kind of stuff just drives you up a fucking wall. Yeah. Yeah. You're like, I can't make any assumptions about these environments here other than, you know, we kicked PHP five to, to the curb about a year ago. So I just said, nope, don't support it anymore. Sorry. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 21:56 Don a phd, five, three, five, three, three or something like that at this point. Um, but yeah, you know, it's, it's, I don't know, I think wordpress makes it a lot more difficult, um, in a way, in a way for marketing. It makes it a lot easier. I think we talked about that last time, but, um, I, you know, it's funny cause like, uh, a lot of you'll say, oh, start with like a wordpress plugin as your first business or something. I think that it's really difficult because the, the, the compatibility variables you have are so much higher than if you just build like a web app that does a thing and it's all self contained. Um, you have other sort of problems to consider and stuff. But I think the dynamics of wordpress from a development and testing standpoint make it really difficult and the support, like you're probably, if you have a a plugin in the repo, you're gonna support a ton of people that will never pay you money, which is okay because some of those people will, will turn into customers and you have to have good ratings and responsiveness in the forums and stuff like that.
Speaker 3 23:05 But two to bootstrap up a free plugin, uh, with a significant install base is a little challenging. I think right now I'd say half of my support volume is for paying customers.
Speaker 0 23:22 Yeah, that's rough. And you know, I got beat up to hell at big snow, tiny calm when I was talking about how much support I was given to free customers and how many features I was putting into a core plugin. And they're like, they're not paying for that, are you high? And I was like, that's wordpress. Like it's just, it's not something that, unless you're in the wordpress space that people understand that it's kind of a cultural thing, I guess. And if you want to participate in that space and be part of that community, you kind of, the expectation is that other people have done this, therefore you should do it as well. And some people have just said, I'm not going to do that. Fuck that. Um, and they just do a premium only thing, but then they might have another channel that they can promote it.
Speaker 0 24:08 Maybe they've got their own podcast, maybe they're a wordpress agency or whatever, and they've got some other way to do it. But if you want the repo traffic, you know, you kind of end up playing by their rules and you do stuff like you put significant functionality into a free plugin and you generate your own support. Hell yeah. That's kind of rough. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I know Pippin Pippin Williamson has been on the show before his talked about, uh, how EDD for him is in for their businesses so difficult, um, because it's in the repo and because they support so much free, uh, so many free customers that it's not profitable. Um, right. And they've changed their support model, uh, multiple times to try to align themselves with that because they realize that they're getting this huge load of support and it's just not cost effective for them to do it for free.
Speaker 0 25:08 They just, it's impossible for them to offer free support for something that complex. And I totally get it. Like they got to hire people to do it. They got to get smart people that are willing to do that. They don't come for free. If you want good support out of this, that's what hat, that's who has to be on the other side of this keyboard to provide it. And you know, that's what you're paying $250 a year for the air quote premium support package. I paid for it. I, I'm, I got it at a grandfathered rate of 129 bucks and when it went up I was like, Woo, I'm glad I have that. I'm keeping that for indefinitely. I don't use it that often, but when I do need it, it's like you got to have it. And that's not the only plugin that I've used that ever.
Speaker 0 25:51 It has that like a, the shitty forum or plugin that I use called simple press, which not thrilled about its look and feel, but there aren't a lot of choices in wordpress. So a to the bat or BB press, uh, or discourse, which is sort of a weird wordpress hybrid in there. And um, yeah, I mean, I've been on simple press for so long, I can't really migrate off of it. So every year I have to pay 99 bucks to get support so I can go in and ask questions. When there's an upgrade and something breaks, you know, it, it's enough of a money maker for me. I gotta do it. Um, it's a little bit annoying, but you know, I know that if I were to add exclusive paid support for the plugins, I'm probably going to hear about it and I plan to do that and I'm ready for the, the on slot because I need to pay for Bobby. So, you know, it's not a right, this
Speaker 3 26:43 isn't a nice to have for me. This is a must have now. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. You know, something that's come up a few times is a, is you know, the, the idea of like paid support. We don't have a premium version of the plugin, but for people who aren't seriously simple hosting customers but need kind of advanced support for the free plugin, I've just thrown up, uh, you know, say, Hey, yeah, we can, you know, our engineers can go in there and developers can go in there and fix your problem, whatever it is. Um, you know, it's $40 an hour and we'll work for three hours and then we'll check back in with you if it's not resolved. And people have not balked at it at all. Um, so we don't sort of advertise it, but if it really gets into it after a couple of back and forths on email, um, may just say, hey, look, it's going to take a developer to go in here and figure out what's going on.
Speaker 3 27:33 This is what the deal is. And some people say, I'll figure it out or I'll get WP, WP, fix it. Or one of those kind of deals or you know, they've taken us up on it. So I think, I dunno if you're, I think if you're clear and fair with people as you go that then support is not terrible. Especially in email. We, we have, we had in our email address to the website right after we launched. Um, just cause for me, email is easier than the, the wordpress forums. But, um, I think if you're able to have that conversation with people, they're, they're typically sort of reasonable and we've had some people who who huffing and puffing, then you get, you're getting kind of real with them, be like, fine, just go do something else. I don't, you know, I don't care. Go, go pick a different solution.
Speaker 3 28:19 And their tune typically changes. Uh, when you say that, they're like, oh, all of my stuff is here, I'd like to stay. Can you help me figure it out? Um, yeah, I get that too. Yeah. People huff and puff a lot and then you threatened to, cause, I mean, you can't, you can't bend over backwards all the time. And to the extreme for customers especially that aren't paying, you know, if they leave a one star review in wordpress, then that's fine. It's better than, you know, me spending thousands of dollars and tens of hours or whatever on, on a customer that's not paying. So the one star review. Yeah. Yeah. Which happens too, which happens too. So, but, uh, yeah, so it's, it's, um, yeah, it's been a learning experience for sure. I, I, I, uh, I, I guess honestly, I don't know that we would've done it a ton different now kind of in retrospect, I've learned some things that, uh, that we would have done different, but generally I think we've, we've kind of done it about right. But, but honestly, at this point, I kind of, I'm, uh, am as uncertain as, as kind of I was before about like how to, how to prioritize and kind of move things forward from here. Like we're getting new customers in and that's cool. But then like how do I push the pedal down on marketing, um, and grow the app, uh, and where to, where to put time and money and financial resources into, to development to, to continue and help supporting that. Um, yeah, I definitely don't know. But um,
Speaker 0 29:56 well here would be my parting thoughts on that. I would say that if it's something that you can charge for or something that is a feature that will differentiate a pricing tier, that should bubble towards the top of your list four features. And if it's something that's causing you a shit ton of support headaches that should bubble to the top of your list as well. And that should, you know, bifurcate your list pretty nicely so that you should get the really important stuff kind of at the top. And then just focus on getting that stuff out. And then when you're left with a bunch of blog features, you know, if people aren't asking for those blog features, maybe it's something that's not worth adding and you want to put in something that you know, would really move the platform forward. You know, you, you still have to kind of look at it from a frequency standpoint.
Speaker 0 30:47 Like did one person, like here's a great example. So I have this one guy that's asking for this one feature on one module. He's the only guy who's ever asked for it, but he like checks in about every three months. So have you done this yet? So have you done this yet? And he's been doing this, like I've kept telling him, I said, you know, if this, if we get enough demand for this, we would be happy to do this. But you know, we're a small team and we have limited resources and we have to prioritize on what's going to be the biggest bang for the buck on the user base. And if it makes it up there, great. If it doesn't then a, you know, we'll have to pass and move on to other stuff. But he keeps like, he's been bugging me for like two years, like seriously two years.
Speaker 0 31:32 I'm like, Okay Dude, you seriously want it. So I finally caved and I said, look, we'll do it as custom work. And you know, you've got to pay me for it because nobody else is asking for it. And you know, he's like, oh, right, right. So I basically came to him and I said, well, all right, is this something you're interested in? He's like, oh, well I need an estimate first. Of course. And I'm like, as soon as it becomes their money, then it becomes real as to how important this is in their mind so that, you know, you could push back on somebody and say, do you want to do sponsor development on x? If they think it's really like, got to have it gotta have it. Because most of the Times that I've pushed back on people, they're like, oh well we'll find something else or, and I'm not that rarely interested in about it. So sometimes they're just fishing for features to see if you'll do it, but saying no sometimes make them understand what was important to them as well. So maybe you can use that as a tool to try to figure out whether some of these features are really what the customers want or they just think they want it. You know? Hmm
Speaker 3 32:36 hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do that. What, what
Speaker 0 32:40 you're saying of of what, what will give us an opportunity to charge or charge more, uh, should, should probably come first and then what is causing customers to not convert or to we haven't had churn yet but to to cancel. Um, yeah, which, which one of those wins but those definitely those two definitely have to put stuff at the top of the list. Actually. White screens of death always win anytime I got shake, right? Yes. We just drop everything. We're like, just give me credentials, we'll go in and we'll fix it right now I see one of those I panic and nine times out of 10 that panic is often not under, you know, it's not an overreaction cause we did screw up something and we need to fix it. Like a couple of releases ago. I had one where I pushed out some files and I screwed it up.
Speaker 0 33:32 And sure enough, within an hour I got my first fatal error, widescreen and jumped on it, fixed it within the following hour, pushed out the update, probably saved ourselves 20 support tickets the next day by doing that. So those always go to the top. Yeah. Somebody says my site is broken because of this. You've got my attention. What do you want to know? Yeah. So there you have it. That's, that's your priority right there. So how, how have you approached this with recapture? So I know you have obviously paying customers and um, hey, do you have someone to do development work or bug fixes or anything right now? You don't right now. So I'm still the guy doing the development. I hired one of the previous founders to do some minor bug fixes on a, um, Magento two extension for the marketplace in there. But that was really it. And so far, you know, it's a different frequency problem with recapture.
Speaker 0 34:35 So there's just not as much support. So I'm not hearing as much from customers. So when they do contact me, like probably the biggest thing that I've heard of so far is just people that are having installed problems. And of those people that are having installed problems, I'd say like 60% just didn't read things carefully enough. The other 40% there's like maybe half of those are weird configuration problems on their server. Like they missed a dependency during their package installs or whatever, uh, using composer or they just needed to like uninstalling re-install the extension and everything started working. Uh, I had like one time I went in to try to debug their server and I just couldn't figure out what the hell was going on. So I was like, yeah, sorry. It's not working for you man. Yeah, yeah. I don't know why. And you know, you're your server.
Speaker 0 35:24 I, you know, you've got a running store on there. I can't tell you to tear the whole thing down and rebuild it. That just doesn't make any sense. So yeah. So, but the things that I have been hearing about for enhancements and stuff like that, I've been capturing them in Trello cause that's a real sort of low friction way to do that. And then I've just kinda been monitoring and see how often that stuff comes up. Um, I have a couple of them that I've heard of more than once, like maybe two or three times tops. So I kind of have an idea of where to head next. But then there's also the stuff that I'm looking at that is probably going to drive customers. So things like integrations with other solutions and you know, you have to decide, well which of these am I going to get more bang for the buck out of?
Speaker 0 36:09 And you know, for the ones with my existing customer base, if I finished something and I changed the pricing plans and say, Hey, you're only getting this on the new pricing plan. And by the way you have to upgrade to get there. You know, is that more valuable than me going and integrating this over here, which might be three times the work. But then all of a sudden I see 30 new customers come out of it, whereas I'm only fixing it for five customers in my base or something like, so yeah, there's some calculus that goes on in there and uh, you know, in all honesty with the time I've spent on cold email and trying to dig up a new channel and, um, talk to other vendors to try to find integrations, it hasn't been a real priority to do a lot of development at this point. I have started looking around for a developer though, cause I've got a little bit of a budget to work with at this point, but that's not easy either. Ugh, man. <inaudible> yeah, hiring sucks. Yeah.
Speaker 3 37:03 Hiring sucks. Yeah, I know. I feel fortunate that, uh, you know, our, our development workload at this point is not like super, super high or urgent. Um, yeah. And so like that the team we have is good. Uh, if I had to hire somebody new at this point, I would, I would shoot myself because the whole thing is just so new, you know? Um, yeah. So that's an interesting thing to talk about is like kind of deciding the, the next step. Um, you know, for us, we're gonna obviously the hosting platform is like a monthly recurring deal. Um, and right now we're charging $15 a month kind of unlimited and we'll start metering that at some point and having different,
Speaker 0 37:46 yeah,
Speaker 3 37:48 I mean that's, um, it's very much in line with our competition, which is fair, you know, as a sort of new provider. I think that's a fair thing. We will start charging by, uh, storage at some point, which, um, I know in our first month our AWS bill was $11 this month. So, um, it's not, uh, you know, storage is not costing us a ton of money, but, um, but, but everybody else basically, no, not everybody about, about a third of the providers are sort of like us, like, just upload as much as you want. Um, the rest of them do it by storage. So, uh, you know, like Libsyn, which is what our show used for a long time, um, was like, you know, 250 megabytes a month is this much, and then 500 megabytes a month is this much in seven 50 is much.
Speaker 3 38:35 And we'll probably roll out something like that. But the only thing we're going to look at is like a premium version of the plugin. So like I'm just a wordpress based kind of deal. So like advanced stats and re redesigned styling and things like that. Um, so it'd be interesting, it's kind of a wordpress specific thing, but it, it addresses like two very different types of people almost from our customer base. Like they already, these people would already have hosting figured out and they're happy with it. But if we could kind of like jazz up their site and their player and give them a little bit more interesting, interesting stats, um, you know, what would that sort of look like in terms of value to customers? So I'm gonna just sort of like mental gymnastics at this point I guess. But probably some of the questions you're dealing with too.
Speaker 0 39:25 Yeah. Yeah. Um, metered usage is tough. Uh, you know, recapture charges on a per email basis. And I think as a general earmark email marketing tool, that might make some sense. I've looked at what some of the competitors are charging and, uh, some of them are doing it by like rev share. So they'll say, you know, we get this many orders back from you, we'll charge you this much, we'll charge you a percentage of that. Or if you make this many orders in a month, we'll charge you a percentage of that. Or based on the number of orders that go through, we'll charge you based on buckets for that. So yeah, I don't think anybody's got the metered problem figured out. You know, having a flat fee does seem to be somewhat attractive to at least a handful of customers that I've had conversations with. So yeah, metered usage is tough. I think if you get the right value metric and the customers are getting a lot out of it, then they don't really have a huge problem paying for it. Um, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3 40:25 yeah. No, generally I think the more you use something, the more you should pay. Um, but we almost did it just from a development standpoint that adding in the, the, the metering and the monitoring of it would have added, you know, a fair bit of complexity and to, to sell up a more simple solution in pricing structure at the beginning was a little appealing. But yeah. But at this point I think we're going to look at doing something a little more complicated. So a good chance to sell a bunch of people on the cheaper option too. Maybe.
Speaker 0 40:56 There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'd like to open it up to the audience and ask you, do you have any thoughts about how Craig should be prioritizing his, uh, development here or how he should be ordering his new features and support in a way that makes more sense or even, uh, value metering that, uh, either of us could take advantage of for seriously simple hosting or recapture. Why don't you send us an email podcast@roguestartups.com and give us your thoughts on that. We'd love to hear from you and, uh, tell us what you thought about the episode in iTunes. Leave us a review
Speaker 2 41:34 using the link below in the show notes. Have a great week. We'll catch you next time.
Speaker 1 41:38 <inaudible>
Speaker 2 41:45 and that's our episode for this week. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know in podcast@roguestartupsdotcomsubscribetousonitunesbysearchingforroguestartupsandbesuretovisitroguestartups.com for full show notes on each episode. If you're enjoying the show, we'd sure appreciate a review in iTunes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. <inaudible>.
