Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:08.5200000 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast, where two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 1 00:00:21.7100000 All right. Welcome to another episode of rogue startups. This one is two 20 Craig. Can you believe it? Yeah, man, it sounds like, it feels like
Speaker 2 00:00:30.0500000 We're like solidly into the two hundreds now and yeah, I guess 500 is right around the corner at this point. Just another five years or something. Right,
Speaker 1 00:00:38.3000000 Right, right. I think we might want to have a few milestones in between or something. If we have to wait to 500, that's going to be a rough celebration. I tell you. Yeah, that'll be a good drink when we get there. Yes, yes. And congratulations to the startups for the rest of us. I'm sure. By now everybody's long since seen their 500th episode, but that's a pretty impressive thing. And of course, Rob and Mike are huge inspirations to us, both. And uh, yeah, that was super cool.
Speaker 2 00:01:06.3300000 Absolutely. I mean, I think just doing anything for that long, much less like something that's actually pretty involved, like doing a podcast is really cool. I mean, like you said, I think a couple episodes ago, Dave, like this is the longest standing creative thing I've ever done by far. And so it's cool to see people that have done it for more than twice, as long as we've been doing this. It's pretty cool. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:01:28.3900000 Yeah. This definitely podcasting exceeds my blogging stint of a couple of years back in the day. And uh, uh, you know, aside from maybe photography, I think this is the second longest for me. So nice. Nice. Although, you know, since I've had kids, the, the whole photography thing has been put on the back shelf, so it's just different photography now, right? Yes. It's tapered. Yeah. My hands me, the camera is like take pictures of the birthday party. Dammit. Okay. Funny. That's funny. Yes. So it's been a while since we've talked, it has, yeah.
Speaker 2 00:02:07.3600000 There's been just a lot of stuff going on in the world. I mean, much less coronavirus kind of everything else going on. And yeah, I think we've kind of felt like talking business. Hasn't been the most important thing. Um, rightfully so I think,
Speaker 1 00:02:21.8300000 Yeah. You know, the black lives matter protests, I think really, you know, I know that you didn't have as much of that in your face in France, as we did here in the United States, uh, you know, it was all over the news. It was all over Twitter. It was, you know, when you were talking to other people in a social situation, it was all people were talking about and you know, it really, it made me put pause on just about everything. And so for the past, I don't know, month or so, you know, we've had some really hard, we sat our kids down and we've talked about, you know, two Americas and how the color of your skin gets you treated wildly different in this country. We've talked about white privileged. We talked about white fragility, you know, police brutality. You know, we had some hard conversations with my oldest daughter who was super excited about law enforcement and you know, one day on Twitter, there was 167 police brutality videos that people had crowdsourced.
Speaker 1 00:03:31.8400000 And I pulled that thread down and I sent it to her and I said, look, I understand that you are the one woman crusade. That's going to change law enforcement, but you should understand that you're up against a very difficult culture here. And this is what that culture generates. And I sent her the thread and she went through about 25 of those videos before she was like, uncle I've had enough. And you know, I mean, it's, it's been, it's been some emotionally draining stuff and I just didn't feel like I could podcast because of all that it didn't podcasting. Wasn't the priority. It was, you know, focused on where are we going to donate? How are we going to have these conversations with our kids? What are we going to do with our time? You know? I mean, if you're listening and you think, Oh, Dave's just one of those li li limo, social justice warriors, you know, we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one because this is a pivotal moment in our history. And if you're sitting on the sidelines, I think that's a, that's a problem.
Speaker 2 00:04:33.4500000 Yeah, man, absolutely agree. I mean, it's terrible to see on the TV, it's, it's complicated and difficult to talk to our kids about, um, other friends of theirs or asking them about it, you know, they're American and what is this really mean? And that that's complicated. It's hard enough to explain what's going on to our kids, but then you know how they should explain it to, to their friends. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's terrible to see from afar here. We haven't, uh, we haven't had protests really here in Annecy, man. We live in a really small village. Um, but yeah, it's, it's a pivotal time, I think, in the country's history. And I hope that the people in charge and the people that can make a difference will, and that there is true reform that comes out of this. I think that's just the hope for everybody is that out of this, something good will come.
Speaker 1 00:05:25.2300000 You know, it, it gives me hope to see what's going on right now, especially here in Colorado, where the protests have made a difference. I mean, you know, there's, there's been the violence and other things, but you know, Martin Luther King said that rioting is the language of the unheard. And let me tell you, they're all being heard right now. And the, the legislature here in Colorado has passed bills to remove some of the things that make police brutality a little too easy happen because there's no, there's no checks and balances here. There's no accountability. That's what I'm looking for. There's no accountability here. And you know, they, the Denver police department has had some terrible, terrible abuses in the past. And we've seen this before, you know, all of the recent protests and this has caused a lot of consternation, but the legislature basically just said, we've had enough. We're not going to do this anymore. You, you have to change. And you know, again, like you said, if this is lasting or not, that remains to be seen, but it definitely feels like we've, we've shifted society a few years into the future, whether it was ready to, or not, which I think is a good thing.
Speaker 2 00:06:45.1000000 Yeah. Yeah. And I think one of the interesting things about this time, that, that hopefully is, is on the side of like lasting changes is like the speed of information now versus, you know, any other time in our history when, when these pivotal moments were happening, where everyone is connected instantly and knows everything that's happening everywhere. Um, you know, through Twitter and signal and WhatsApp and whatever, um, to where everybody is, is in the know, and everybody sees what's happening and information is really democratized by, by social media and things like that, that I think empowers a lot of people to have that, that knowledge and that power. So I hope that this accelerates the change and makes it more lasting because before I think there was a lot of hiding behind the lack of information or misinformation, um,
Speaker 1 00:07:43.8100000 All right, that's enough politics for this episode. I'm sure everybody's ready for us to move on. So, uh, you know, the thing that kinda drove me back to podcasting here was of all things base camp and H H if you can believe that. So if you, unless you've been living under a rock in the last week or so base camp, Jason fried and DHH have launched a new email service called Hey, hey.com. And there's even, I mean, there's been enough energy around this, that there's already a parody out there by.fyi where it sends you insulting emails in return, and it blocks all the email that gets sent to your email address, which by the way is fucking hilarious. Um, but yeah, I mean this whole launch has been a travesty in outrage culture. Wouldn't you say?
Speaker 2 00:08:40.7400000 Mm. And, and what, what do you mean by that?
Speaker 1 00:08:43.3800000 Well, what I mean by that is there's been some pushback to the black lives matter protest where they're like, Oh, people are just outraged all the time. I'm like, well, you know, police brutality against people that feels like something that's worth being outraged against, but you know, then we have DHH going and submitting his app to the app store and then starting to use really inflammatory UN you know, exaggerated, hyperbolic language. Like we're going to burn this house down myself and pay this 30% tax to Apple. And, you know, Apple's outrageous and they're, you know, exploiting everybody. And, and I'm like, what are you fucking kidding me seriously? Like, this is a huge joke. And, you know, Hey is a fine email service. I'm sure it doesn't really fit my workflow. I've got so many different email accounts. I have to put under one umbrella and they all have to support I'm app and Hey is not there.
Speaker 1 00:09:48.7800000 And it is not worth it to me for, to pay that. So I'm just gonna throw that on the table right now, but I have absolutely zero against the email service that does the spy pixel blocking and the other stuff. But I mean, he's been really over the fucking top on this one. So, I mean, let's just start with the whole, the Apple platform thing is attacks. So first of all, 30% is not attacks. Attacks is something that governments leverage against the citizens that live in that country. And Apple is not a government. So, okay. By definition, it can't be attacks, but let's say it's something, you know, let's say it's extortionist well, it's not really extortionist because DHHS kind of conveniently forgotten that back in the day. If you had a mobile app that got included on a phone, and then there was some INAP purchases, this was before Apple's iOS ecosystem.
Speaker 1 00:10:44.0400000 The take for the carrier was between 50 and 60%. And when they announced this at the I O S uh, iPhone worldwide developer's conference back in 2007, I guess it was 30% got standing ovations, and it was widely cheered. And, you know, third of all, this is Apple's fucking platform. They built this, yes, they're a billion dollar a year company, but they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on this platform, in the form of their developers, in the form of the infrastructure, the manufacturing, the devices, like they have a right to charge, whatever the hell they want for this thing. And by the way, 30% is not unprecedented for all of the stuff that they're giving you in the store, accessibility curation. Um, and it's not like, you know, the Google play store takes zero. It's not like Shopify take zero. It's not like Wu commerce takes zero. They're all in the same ballpark. So to hear DAA DHH say this and make it sound like, you know, Apple is a, you know, is agent Smith from the matrix coming to assimilate him and everybody else is just the biggest crock of bullshit I have ever heard. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 00:12:07.2800000 Yeah. I mean, I don't disagree that 30%, I mean, 30%, whatever 30% is a lot, right. To take 30% of your margin is a lot, but I don't think it's a lot for free distribution to billions of people. Um, I don't know all of the intricacies around, like when you can have like an app purchases and when you can drive people right. To your site and like the app has to work before, like right out of the box before people sign up to your service and all this. And I understand that's how they kind of got around this in the latest approval. The thing to me is not even really the, the story, you know, it's not like whatever the Hey is and that Apple denied them. And then, you know, they got approved again. It's I said this to somebody the other day that like, those guys don't live in the normal world, you know, like I have a ton of respect for what they've done with their business.
Speaker 2 00:13:06.4400000 But I think if you look at like anyone who's built and run a business for as long as they have is they are in alternate reality. That is not the same place that you and I live in where we're trying to, to build a business today. And so I think no fault of their own that they, they just think that there are different rules for them as for everybody else, because that's how running base camp is, is base camp is this huge business with a ton of momentum. And they basically get to do whatever the hell they want. And for them to think that the same rules that apply to everybody else apply or don't apply to them is, um, it is, to me, the funny thing here is that, like, they just think that, and maybe rightfully so, like in the rest of their life, that like, this is just bullshit and they're not gonna do it because they're the founders of base camp.
Speaker 2 00:14:02.5700000 And again, like, I, I, in a way say like, they've lost touch with reality. I don't know these guys at all. So it's tough for me to say this, but in a way I think that man, like if you've been killing it for 10 years and taking home millions of dollars in after tax profit, you might start to think that the rules don't apply to you. And that might actually be your reality. So this is like a, a stern awakening, um, that like they didn't expect. But, but to me, that's like the, the weird thing with this is the news is not like, Oh, there's this great new email client. The news is like, yeah, there's this, you know, cultural revolution, you know, base camp versus Apple. And that's just kind of silly to me cause that's not like that's not the most interesting thing in my life, I guess.
Speaker 1 00:14:50.2400000 Yes. Well mean, you know, a lot of people were saying, Oh, well, you know, DHH is using this outrage as a marketing stunt. And I was thinking to myself absolutely specific, well, I mean, I don't think he orchestrated this as a specific, like he wasn't trying to create conflict to set Apple up. I don't think it's totally manual. Like, don't let any crisis go away. Don't let a crisis go to waste. Yeah, no, I do think that he hasn't let this crisis go to waste, but he's putting it, you know, as David versus Goliath, you know, Apple's this huge mega multibillion dollar Corp against these poor little guys at base camp. And I'm like, you guys are millionaires in your own. Right. Give me a fucking break. I mean, this is not David versus Goliath. It's like big Goliath versus little Goliath, you know, compared to all other SAS apps that are out there base camp is a Goliath amongst us.
Speaker 1 00:15:46.1000000 So it's like, it's all relative Goliath ism, right? Yeah. But you know, I do want to say that I don't, you know, my comments here, it might sound like, Oh, Apple's completely blameless in this. No, no, no, no, no. And they had plenty of fuck-ups in this whole snafu as well. I mean the whole letter that they sent to the base camp guys and, you know, made it personal and directed at them, the fact that they've got all these arbitrary rules and that they're not enforcing them consistently. I mean, there is plenty of blame and accusation to level at Apple. And if this whole snafu actually makes Apple do some consistent shit around their developer iOS guidelines, which I know has been huge sticking point for independent developers for years, I've had conversations with lots of iOS developers like, uh, Charles Perry, um, and some other guys.
Speaker 1 00:16:46.6400000 And it's just a fucking joke. You, you literally have no clue whether you're going to run a foul of the rules, do sure. You know, and it's impossible to get through the app process cleanly smoothly and quickly because you just have no idea what you're going to run into. And if Apple was consistent and fair and you know, adhered to the guidelines, the way that they said they would, honestly, I don't think we would have seen any of this in the first place. I think there would have been like, look, here's the rules. You fucked up, nobody else in the store is fucking up. You're the one fucking up, please fix the fuck up. You know, but that's not how it went. Like they could go and point to say, Hey, look, there's Netflix over here. Hey, look, there's Dropbox over here. They're not doing this. And you're telling us we have to do that. Like, wait a minute. What's going on. Totally inconsistent. So, I mean, they had a point, but yeah, I think the way that they capitalized on it was kind of yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they drew plenty of attention to, and Hey, good on them for that, I guess. But I thought the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't think I'll be signing up for, Hey.
Speaker 2 00:17:56.5000000 Yeah. Yeah. It is kind of their shtick of like independent bootstrap antiestablishment. So boxing, right. I mean, that's, that's kind of a big part of their brand. Do it our way work, comm all this kind of stuff. And that's great. I mean, like I said, I think they've earned the right and being successful to be able to do all those things and espouse all those ideologies and that's, that's great. Good for them. I'm jealous. Uh, but, but I think that using that as your kind of marketing entire marketing strategy, or maybe a big part of your marketing strategy, I don't know that I agree with.
Speaker 1 00:18:30.6300000 Yeah. I mean, they definitely have a reality distortion field around them. Just like Apple has a reality store should field around them. I mean, all entrepreneurs surround themselves with the reality distortion field. Yep. It's simply a question of strength in size and you know, Apple's got a big power source behind theirs and Basecamp's got a decent sized power source behind there's me. I'm running on a nine volt battery over here. So, you know, there's only so far I can project that little sucker and it's easily popped, unfortunately. So what, uh, in other less outrageous news hour things with Casto S and uh, podcast, motor
Speaker 2 00:19:14.2400000 Things are good, man. Things are good. Um, yeah, I mean, on the podcast motor side, the number of leads has been picking up steadily for the last, you know, month or six weeks. You know, I think the initial shock of COVID in March and April as subsided, uh, and folks are realizing that, you know, they're, they're businesses still alive or it's coming back or whatever. So that's really nice to see, um, it was a pretty good dry spell for new leads there for awhile. So it was really happy to have recurring revenue. Um, yeah. And on the Castillo's side, things are good. We've been shipping a lot of good stuff and kind of looking at at what the next few big features we're going to be building right now are. So that's an interesting process to go through a fair amount of more strict validation around that.
Speaker 2 00:20:01.1600000 Other than me just saying, I think we're going to build this next, let's go build it. So that's been kind of a fun process. Um, I've been working with a designer recently on pretty much everything we do that has really been like game-changing. So like the whole like marketing site and the end of the app, like the whole process involves the designer from the really the beginning, like me saying, I want to build this thing and he mocks it up and then hands over in some cases like finished HTML, CSS and JavaScript to the developers to just implement. Um, and that's been really game changing. Like I am definitely not a designer, um, but kinda know how I want things to work. And so it's been nice to be able to just talk through that with somebody and then they go mock it up and then that's what it looks like. It's been, uh, a much better workflow for us. Um, so it's been cool to, to be able to settle in on that. Nice. Yeah. Do you work with any like design system or does your developer, is he kind of full stack enough to be able to just do that? Or how does that work for you guys?
Speaker 1 00:21:06.2300000 Well, I'd like to say that we have a design system. The truth is we don't. And, you know, since we, when I say we, I really mean me when I acquired recapture, it already had kind of a look and feel and a design aesthetic RD associated with it. And it was something that we could actually reference externally. It's pretty much Google's material design with a specific color palette and some other stuff. So for the most part, our UI and our UX gets very high praise from people. They really like the simplicity of it. They like how easy it is to use. And so based on that, I have kept a philosophy of make it consistent with the app, make it easy. Don't complicate things unnecessarily and make sure that we have, you know, reasonable defaults set up so that somebody doesn't have to come in and change shit to turn it to the setting that most people would use.
Speaker 1 00:22:07.0100000 So those have been kind of my three guiding principles on this and you know, my guys they're reasonable UX, UI guys. They know what a, to create stuff. Sometimes they, the naming of things or the text that gets used or whatever sounds a little developer, it's a little text heavy, or it's using jargon and things like that. So I simplify stuff like that. But aside from that, you know, that's, that's been enough to kind of guide us so far. And what's interesting is I'm still getting those comments today. Like I just had somebody yesterday saying, you know, this is like, you know, he's been in e-commerce for 13 years. And he said, I, you know, I think that apps and plugins and the ecosystem is generally a blight on e-commerce, but yours is the, like the rare, bright spot in the entire ecosystem. And I was like, wow, okay. I mean, that's a huge statement, but I'll take it. Yeah. That's great. I'm glad to hear that. It tells me that I'm on the right track and you know, that's the kind of feedback you want to hear. Yeah. Cause sometimes I just don't get anything. Um, and you know, ego aside, it tells me that those three guiding principles have been doing at least generally the right thing for most people. So I feel pretty good about that.
Speaker 2 00:23:24.8100000 Yeah. Nice. Uh, generally business been going okay for you.
Speaker 1 00:23:28.8000000 No business. The plugins are fine. There's really not much to report on that. They're just kind of humming along may was actually a pretty good month. I didn't really see a dip in COVID activity from them at all, which still to this day kind of makes me scratch my head. Like it wasn't up it down there. We'd just ride along the way. Yep. Um, recapture had amazing, you know, it had a, an okay, March, an amazing April and incredible may. And now it looks like June's going to be kind of a wash. There's been some heavy churn and some downgrades, but at the same time, we've also had new installs new upgrades. And the whole thing is kind of netted out and I've been looking at it like going, what the fuck is going on? Is there something wrong? Is there a problem with the service?
Speaker 1 00:24:16.7000000 I always assume it's me. And in digging into all of this, I'm finding that there's a lot of these businesses that are shutting down. They're consolidating. They there's a few that have moved on like their, they were top tier customers and they moved on to one of my competitors because we just didn't have enough features for it. But I've had people that do that. And then six months later turn around and come back because they don't like what my competitors are doing. It's too complicated. It's hard to use it. Doesn't have as good a delivery as recapture, et cetera, et cetera. Those are direct comments that people have told me. So I'm like, alright. It used to really stress me out that they would leave for the competitors. And then that'd be like, begging them. Please tell me what it is that we didn't have.
Speaker 1 00:25:00.1100000 And now, you know, I'm still, I'm asking those same questions. I'm just not on my hands and knees anymore. And I'm not getting any different answers than I was before. But when people are telling me what they liked the most about recapture is about simplicity. Ease of use the fact that it's so straight forward, they can do quick changes and it's easy to kind of monitor what's going on in the store. So I, you know, in all of this, I think I've kind of found where our niche is. You know, there are people that want a certain level of complexity and there are people that just want something to work that does a certain set of things. And we're kind of in that right now, now trying to market to that group is a bit challenging. Cause it's not like, it's not like there's a forum that says people who like apps that work well, but aren't complicated and are too expensive and not too expensive.
Speaker 1 00:25:52.2200000 Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, Hmm. Yeah. That's not a forum. That's out sadly. But, um, you know, I did double down on paid acquisition right now. Um, I expanded that. So it's, you know, I'm spending a shit ton of money on that right now, trying to bring people in while the getting is good. I was doing that during COVID, but then I just decided I'd try to open up the flood Gates because I kept getting limited. I'd run out of budget on any given day. So I was like, all right, let's just see what happens if I opened it up, I've got a little money to do that. Let's see if I can get more people in and see if it makes it worth it. And I just started that experiment at the beginning of the month. So I don't really have any hard data on that one yet.
Speaker 1 00:26:31.1600000 I haven't looked at the numbers. Um, yeah, but it's worked in the past for you. So that's encouraging that it's still an opportunity. Yeah. And of course, you know, you can look back and say, Oh man, I should have doubled down back during COVID. Well, I didn't have the money during COVID. So it didn't really matter. Like, it was nice to, to think that it's nice to say that, but the reality of your business is always a little different. So this should still be a pretty decent time. Like right now is the time that people are making big changes in their store. So that's why some of those bigger ticket customers of mine left, this is when they're going to make the changes before black Friday. And then they're going to get locked down by September. And then, you know, there's going to be a panic in September, October, November, as people try to install stuff right before the holidays.
Speaker 1 00:27:18.5100000 And then it's going to die down from December through, you know, mid February or something like that. It's definitely very cyclical having seen this enough times. I can finally get sort of the rhythm behind it, but yeah, I mean, we're doing OK. You know, um, aside from that heavy churn, which is always frustrating to watch, if you can at least understand the reasons behind it, you know, it's not delinquent churn. It's not because they hate me or they didn't like my customer service or I fucked up on, you know, the, on the delivery of our product or none of those things were the reasons. So that's good. Those were all things in my control. Yeah. And the things that are to my control, I'm like, okay, well, you know, treat him with respect and kindness as they walk out the door and I'm finding that they still come back later. So,
Speaker 2 00:28:04.1300000 Hmm. It's good. I mean, it's good to get a clearer sense of like who your ideal customer is. That's really nice that you're getting enough consistent feedback about what people like and what they are looking for and what they don't like to, to really narrow in on that. I mean think informs, you know, marketing copy and design and features and all that kind of stuff. So that's really cool that you're getting such a clear vision of that.
Speaker 1 00:28:27.6900000 Yeah. Yeah. And with that in place, that also means that, you know, it's easier to develop features at this point. So I have two, my two developers that are going full bore right now on, uh, a big thing for recapture, which all announced probably in August when it's all said and done. And yeah, we're excited to get that in place. I think that's going to be a new revenue generating opportunity as well.
Speaker 2 00:28:53.0800000 Awesome. That's cool. That's cool. I guess the only other update for me is we're hiring a new role at <inaudible>. Um, it's crazy. I haven't mentioned this on the podcast cause we hadn't, podcasted a regular episode in so long, but um, we've had the job open for almost a month now. Uh, we call it a director of podcast or success. So it's a customer success role. Uh, so a little bit of marketing, a little bit of customer success, a little bit of brand building and community. Yeah. I'm really excited about this, about this role. I think it, it ties in a lot of things that I do, a lot of things that I do poorly and, and hopefully can get somebody that is a lot better than me at a lot of these things. And I've gotten a bunch of really interesting applications from like community, um, both like the word press, the podcasting community.
Speaker 2 00:29:42.2799999 Um, so it's been cool. We're doing some interviews now. Um, if folks want to check it out, it's <inaudible> dot com slash jobs reopened for another week or so taking some more applications, but we've got a few folks in first and second round interviews. Um, so yeah, has been taking up a fair amount of time, kind of managing that process and talking to a bunch of folks. And it's super interesting. The backgrounds that people come from for this kind of role. Um, a lot of pleasant surprises there. It's been cool. Nice, nice. Yeah. How many candidates have you had apply thus far? Oh, a hundred. Oh God. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So you've been busy. Yeah. I mean, it's a really cool role, right? It's like, you're on a podcast, you're on a YouTube channel. You do some webinars, you get on the phone and every once in a while with a customer, maybe you do a little bit of like advanced customer support and just talk about podcasting all the time.
Speaker 2 00:30:36.9700000 It's like for the right person. It's really, really cool. Um, and we've gotten, we've gotten more than a handful of, of those right people. So it's, it's pretty cool to see. Yeah. Nice, nice. Well, I hope you end up with somebody pretty amazing in the role. Yeah. Yeah. So thanks for, uh, kind of bearing with Dave and I for our, our, uh, sort of rants in this episode, but David's good to get back on the mic and chat and catch up and kind of share what's going on in our minds and our lives with everybody. Uh, if folks have any questions for us, shoot us a message podcast@roguestartups.com and we'll be back soon.
Speaker 3 00:31:12.6100000 <inaudible>
Speaker 0 00:31:15.1500000 Thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey, that over to rogue startups.com to learn more <inaudible>.
