Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: I consider myself really lucky to be able to have such in depth, honest, and kind of forthright conversations with other founders like me. In this case, I chat with Colin Bartlett of Status Gator in a really open, vulnerable discussion about what it's like to run a SaaS business today. Kind of in the age of AI, how we think about team structure, productivity, and kind of culture. But also, Colin's been running status Gator for 11 years. One of the few founders I know personally who've been doing this longer than I have with Kastos. And we talk about what that means, how do we feel about ourselves as founders and the business that we're running, that it's been around for this long. He's really successful as a big team and is growing. Everything seems great. But I think that if you have been doing something for so long, your perspective and kind of mental framework around that thing kind of needs to change. We talk about this and a whole bunch more about just what being a founder means today and in this context, because there's never been more uncertainty, I think, in the world and in business. And so how we navigate that as founders is increasingly important.
And conversations just like this, to me, are the most important way that I know to help frame and what I'm thinking and maybe what we all should be thinking in the AI era, because shit is changing and shit is getting real and putting into context and perspective the things that we're feeling is more important than ever. And I think it's one of the most valuable things I do here in this show. And I hope it's helpful for you in this conversation with Colin Bartlett from Status Gator.
Well, I want to start with what happened last week, right? Like, the Internet broke last week, so I think what ended up happening is like Google, Google Cloud or whatever had a big outage which affected everything, including Cloudflare, which even more shit, including part big parts of Castos, runs on. Like, how is that for you guys as a day? Because I would imagine that's like the confluence of, like, what you do, but it may have been negative. I don't know. Like, how was it for you guys?
[00:02:18] Speaker A: That was a huge day for us, unfortunately. We were down briefly during that, only because we just got flooded with traffic, but we recovered pretty quickly.
Yeah, it was a massive day. It was a huge outage. It took down Google. And one of the things that Status Gator does now that it didn't do before, didn't do until recently, is alert people of outages before providers acknowledge them and so Google took almost an hour to acknowledge this outage. And people were wondering, what's going on? Is it just them, you know, who's down, what's down? And people were coming to Status Gator to find out if Google was down, and they were. Our customers who were already using Status Gator were alerted by, by us about this, which was huge, huge, huge for us. Like, to be able to prove the value of our product. And saying, like, we can show you when there are outages even before providers acknowledge them. That was a big showpiece for us. Even though, yeah, we had a little outage in there, but that's minor triviality.
Yeah, we recovered quickly. So, yeah, that was a big day for us. And fortunately or unfortunately, a lot of our, our growth comes from organic events like this, and we can't control those unless we hire someone to take down Google or something. But when there are big outages like this, we see a huge influx of discovery of our product and people, you know, realizing that they need a third party to notify them of these things. And yeah, it's a big growth driver for us, these major outages.
[00:03:48] Speaker B: How do you, how do you then like capitalize or take advantage of that because there's all this interest and then it kind of wanes away, I would guess.
How do you kind of like capture leads, keep people top of mind? Like, how do you guys think about that from like a procedural perspective?
[00:04:03] Speaker A: Well, we have like a really aggressive drip email campaign. You know, we userlist another tiny seed company for that. And we do continue to send people notifications, even if they don't. We have a free, a free trial, completely open free trial, so no credit card required. So we do get a lot of, a lot of signups, a lot of unqualified signups, frankly, as well as qualified signups during these events. But, you know, any random person wanting to know when Google's going to be back up will sign up for Status Gator and they're not really qualified for our paid product, but we do have a free plan and people can continue to receive alerts about up to three providers with Status Gator, and that is a driver of, of growth for us. Those do turn into paid customers eventually, even if they stick to the free plan for a year, two years sometimes, and then finally, you know, decide they want to commit.
But yeah, for the people that are qualified, for the users that look qualified, we do. In addition to like drip emails and automation, we do reach out quite manually to those people and we try to convert them into paying Customers and we give them, you know, little tips about their account and we record loom videos for it and we are, you know, rather aggressive about kind of following up with those people.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, cool.
We've played around with the idea of like a free plan for a while and largely the consensus is we should not do it. I think. Yeah, I think because it doesn't tick a couple of the boxes, which is like network effect. Like there, there's not a lot of network effect like Calendly or Sinewell, like a tiny seed company. Right. Reuben Gomez, if I'm seeing a document for you to sign, you might have documents to send to someone else to sign, which Calendly is the same thing can does the same way.
[00:05:52] Speaker A: It's huge. Yeah, yeah, right.
[00:05:54] Speaker B: But I'm a podcaster and you're a podcast listener. You're not going to start a podcast.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:00] Speaker B: Or you're not as likely, whatever. So I think that's one of the reasons we don't do it. The other is we have like, you know, pretty decent hard cost.
You know, our tool is not free.
We pay about 15% of our top line revenue in like cogs to Cloudflare Enable us.
[00:06:18] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like it's not cheap to run our application. I mean, I know like I have a buddy who runs a pretty basic SaaS. Like his entire infrastructure bill is about $60 a month.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: That, that's mind blowing to me. Ours is thousands, but yeah, yeah, I'm sure.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, you're an email, right? Like to send grid or whatever.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: Email, yeah. That's a big cost.
We do limit the number of emails you can get on the free plan and entice people to sign up because if a provider has a lot of outages, you'll get a message saying you're not going to get any more notices this month about this provider. And then people don't want to be blind so they'll, they'll upgrade. Yeah, we've, we have restricted the free plan over time significantly. But, but generally, yeah, we do have a little bit of the network effects. You know, we have a status page. You know, our, our customers can publish a status page and it includes our name on it. But that's not really, that wasn't really the main reason. I think that the number one reason we, we've kept the free plan is that it's very hard to give people that aha moment in the trial period. We had a 30 day trial for a while, then we restricted it to 14 day to kind of keep the conversation moving faster and we can't control what goes down in those 14 days. And so kind of the longer you use the product, the more likely you are to experience that Google outage and to get that aha moment like wow, shit is down and I don't know what to do. And Status Gator just told me about it like this is really beneficial to me. So we keep that free trial because sometimes people sign up and then it's two, three months into that trial before they get that major outage notice and then they're okay, now I, now I get it. Now I see that moment.
[00:07:54] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, makes sense.
I don't think we, I don't think we have the same dynamic. I guess the argument could be made that it takes some people a long time to start a podcast, but they'll just come back. It's kind of how we think about it. Like I, I don't know, like I don't see how us keeping their account active basically with nothing in it would be any better.
We also like, we require credit card up front so you're in like an opted in trial.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: We've toyed with that but we don't.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: Yeah, it's just different. We, we, we're a hosting company like you know, Digital Ocean or AWS or whatever. Like you, you got to pay upfront, like pay upfront in a lot of cases.
[00:08:33] Speaker A: The other thing that we're trying to cultivate more recently and I mentioned earlier that we didn't used to send notices about kind of unofficial outages. Like we really only aggregated or status aggregator Status Gator, that's where the name came from. And so it was just official outages that we send you. But now we have unfortunately kind of like a two sided marketplace to our product where we need people to tell us about outages so that we can tell other people about those outages. And so if someone's on a free plan, in theory they might report outages to us inside our products. And the more of those that we have, the better it is for our paying enterprise customers to know that more people are having the problem more than just you. Right. It's another advantage of the free plan.
[00:09:18] Speaker B: Where like where is the business today? Like you've been, I know you've been at this like a while and it's one of the reasons that we're chatting is like yeah, you've been 12, 12 years.
[00:09:29] Speaker A: Yeah, so we're over a million dollars in ARR and we are six full time people just to give some, you know, some semblance of where we're at.
Yep, we've been around 11 years, believe it or not, the product's been around. It kind of blows my mind honestly, that I've been every day, almost every single day in my life for the last 11 years getting up and working on this thing at nights and weekends and. But it was very, very slow in the beginning. It was a very slow kind of side project of mine just during having a full time job and just kind of working on nights and weekends occasionally. Sometimes I did nothing on it for weeks and months on end.
So I don't really count the first several years. But yeah, so we've been around a long time.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: So we've been around eight years to almost two years before that with our like productized service. So 10, 10 years kind of all in our team actually got me a plaque thing, a little trophy if you're watching on YouTube. That was amazing. So our 10 year anniversary I guess was, was a couple months ago.
You know, I think, I think a lot about this recently. I think with AI really has got me thinking about this a lot. Like in one respect, like, what the fuck am I doing? Like still, you know, sitting here doing, doing this when, you know, Sam Altman and those guys are out there changing the world on one hand. On the other hand I think amazing. Like it pays the mortgage and yeah, we have a similar number of, of team members.
It's a pretty stable business. Like, you know, I, I guess I'm at this point where like I'm past the seven year itch. Right. That's like a marriage is like seven years. You're like, oh, got past that. I really respect my business a lot these days.
[00:11:16] Speaker A: That's interesting.
[00:11:17] Speaker B: Which is a weird thing to say, but there are times when I didn't.
[00:11:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: And I look at, I look at the trajectory modestly, I would say like we're never going to be, we're probably never going to be a $10 million company.
We might be a $2 million company. We probably won't be a $5 million company.
And so it's a weird like thing to accept. Almost is like, okay, you're not going to do that. I'm not going to exit for $20 million, but I could run this for 15 years and it'd be a really good business. That's kind of like where I am today.
And then I think like, I just balance that with like, okay, what's the opportunity cost of that versus something else? And fucking especially right now with like the, the risk of something else and the uncertainty in the market and how fast AI is changing everything.
I guess my comments about, like, appreciating and respecting the business in some ways is higher because the risk of everything else is a lot higher too, I think.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: Yeah. Everything changing so fast right now. It's really hard to know. Yeah, yeah. It's really, just really hard to keep up with so much uncertainty. Yeah.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: Yeah. How do you look at it? Like, you've been doing this 11 years. Do you have times where you're like, I can't believe.
Am I going to do this another 11 years?
Like, well, we had Amar on, on the podcast recently and like, he said something that really hit me. He was like, one of my superpowers is being content.
[00:12:48] Speaker A: That's interesting. Yeah, I'm not content for sure. I am, like, always, like trying to get bigger, bigger and better. And it's hard to imagine sort of being happy with what I've got kind of situation and that I don't appreciate what I have. But, like, I do want to be bigger, but we don't, you know, we have a business partner and neither of us aspire to be like the massive, like, startup. That's why we didn't raise traditional VC money. You know, we didn't even want to raise any money, but kind of happened into tiny seed and no regrets there for sure. It's the right model for us.
We would like to just keep growing this. Everyone says we'll never sell and you know, we don't have intending intention to sell right now, but maybe we would one day. It's more about just growing this into a lifestyle business. Sorry to be used the pejorative, but like being maybe working less than we do now and making more money, that's kind of the goal.
So we, you know, we just keep growing it.
Unfortunately, there's never. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, there's never really been major, like, hockey stick, like, growth trajectory with us. It's just been slow and steady growth for literally 10 years. Much, much stronger now than it was in the early years. You're adding $50 of MRR every month in the early years. Now we're adding thousands every month. So that's great. But it's not like we made some massive change and some huge trajectory, course change. We just keep making little tweaks, little experiments, little differences, pivoting slightly and just keep growing.
And I think we've fallen into some contentment with that arrangement. I think, like, I don't nearly need to have some massive growth changer. I don't need to raise another round in order to like try to up the ante. We'll just keep cranking at it and just keep growing and hopefully taking more money out of the business. Business as we grow.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. How do you guys think about profit? Because I think the conventional wisdom is like until you get to 2 million a year, a SaaS business shouldn't be profitable because you want to reinvest everything into growth.
To me, early 100% true. Longer. I kind of have this philosophy that the longer I'm in the business, the more I need to get paid because my kind of opportunity cost of staying is higher to where we have been transitioning the business from not profitable to break even to slightly profitable to more profitable, I guess. Do you look at it the same way? Are you still like, okay, yeah, we're.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: Trying to do the same thing basically for years we both had jobs and we both worked on it on the side basically. And then when we took tiny seed money, we went kind of all in, so to speak.
Right now we're paying ourselves enough to survive, but my partner and I both live in high cost of living areas. Both have families, both have spouses that are dependent on us. So we, we need to take more money out of the business and it's kind of time to do that. Right. We've invested a lot back in for a long time and we're kind of, we're kind of over that now. So, you know, we're definitely aiming to get more profitable. We're, we sort of operate on the edge of profitability. As it stands now, as you know this happens, you think you're going to have a big chunk and then you get some big expense or you get some churn and you know, just, we kind of operate on this edge right now.
We, we massively upped our infrastructure cost during that Google outage because we just got slammed with traffic and needed to increase our database side. So that was another setback recently.
But you know, the trajectory is we just keep grinding, just keep growing and we will have more Prof. To pull out over the next six months, a year. So I feel pretty confident that we're in that place and we don't want to hire more people. I think we've got a great team. I think we all, we could get a lot more out of what we have already.
So yeah, we're in a very similar position to you. It's time, basically.
[00:16:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it might be helpful for folk. Well, I think I want to underscore one thing and then I want to hear kind of what your team looks like. I'm going to say something negative, which is like, everyone thinks SaaS is such a great business model and maybe if you're a developer, it is. I have a friend who runs like a 30,000 MRR SaaS business. It's just him. I mean, that's a fucking great business. Right? Like, he has a really expensive job, but it's also an asset and he could go sell it for a million bucks. Right.
If you're not a developer or you have a team, you don't have a business until you get to a million bucks. Like, like you and I are.
And even then, let's just put some round numbers so it's you and a couple developers and a couple support people and maybe a marketing person. If you're doing 80 grand a month, that's it, you know, and you have a fucking $9,000 Cloudflare bill like I do. That's all of your money.
[00:17:47] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. It really. Once you start adding the people that are necessary to keep a business of any size running, then suddenly the baseline is not as slow as you think it is.
Totally. I mean, we are also trying not to build a business where we work people to death. Therefore we probably don't get as much out of ourselves and our team as we could, but we're okay with that. You know, we have some onshore and some offshore people, but we don't pay like the, the most massive salary. Certainly we're not paying Meta or Google salaries, but like, we pay enough that people can survive and we don't ask for a ton in return. And I think that's. We're kind of okay with that. Now it does mean that we, you know, don't have a massive profit to pull out. And I think we've come to terms with that. But I think I'd just rather build this kind of business than a business where everyone gets worked work to death and tries to grow a thing that goes to 10 million and sells it and then. And. Or not. And it just. That's not my style. I don't know.
[00:18:54] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, we're the same. We're the same. Like our slack is like a ghost town most days. And I'm like, that's cool. I assume you're doing your thing and that's cool. And as long as support tickets are answered and, you know, features are making progress. I'm working on marketing stuff. Like, I don't need a whole bunch of drama.
I'll share what our team structure is like and I'd love to hear yours. So we are two full time full stack developers, one kind of part time person for our WordPress plugin we have head of product who's like design and then we have two full time customer support folks plus me.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: Nice. That's a good mix. Yeah, we have myself and my partner and we're both technical people. Andy is very, I would say more backend and I'm also back end but he's a sort of more infrastructure type stuff. So we both write code still all the time but we also do a lot of other stuff too, so it's hard to describe what we do.
Right now he's doing a lot of SOC2 stuff, bless him. And I'm doing a lot of marketing and sales crap.
And then we have two full time developers. One is very focused on backend and one's really focused on front end. So there's sort of four technical developer type people and then we have a full time kind of customer care, customer success support, whatever you want to call it.
Jack of all trades. He was our very first hire. And then we have a full time designer. We call her designer but she's way, way better than just a designer. Valeria. She does sort of all of our product development and UX and all of our marketing materials and just a way, a lot more than just design, so to speak. But she's kind of like my right hand on the, on the sort of customer facing UX stuff. Yeah, yeah. So that's six of us. And then we have a marketing guy we worked with for a long time who's not really an official member of our team but is a part time and we kind of consider him like a very close to our team and he does mostly SEO and content stuff for us, but all, all kinds of marketing in general.
[00:20:56] Speaker B: Well, you are.
This episode is the precursor to a miniseries about AI SEO. What, what's the term we're using for this?
[00:21:06] Speaker A: I've heard different.
[00:21:07] Speaker B: Aeo.
[00:21:08] Speaker A: I've heard that answer.
[00:21:10] Speaker B: Engine optimization.
[00:21:11] Speaker A: Yes, I've heard that one now recently I just call them the LLMs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: And amazingly all three of the recordings are today.
[00:21:22] Speaker A: Oh wow.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: I'm talking to you. I had one this morning and I have another one literally right after this which is just a freak of timing but I'm on vacation next week so.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: That'S just how it is. But big source of change.
[00:21:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So okay, I have a question. For you because this is so I, so I do. Advising for tiny seat. I was at the kickoff event in San Diego a month and a half ago and got to talking to one of the new batch founders is like a pretty seasoned guy. He's run two like venture backed companies and he and I were talking and he's like, the biggest problem I have going into this is I don't know how to hire a team in the AI era. And I was like, oh yeah, like I totally get it. Like, I think many of us with existing companies are kind of saying, my team listens to this and so I want to be sensitive but, but they know I'm, I'm very AI forward.
But I think the question for a lot of us is like, what do I do with my team?
[00:22:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:20] Speaker B: If you assume that they are 30 to 50% more productive.
[00:22:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:24] Speaker B: So if you're six people, do you go a week before or do you go, oh, you know, Jimmy, on our team, okay, you're responsible for this marketing thing because you like, we put a bot on our site, it handles more than 50% of the tickets that we would have gotten otherwise.
[00:22:41] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:22:41] Speaker B: So you're like, okay, Jimmy, like legit, like you're, your job just went down by half. And like he and I have had this conversation. This is not like news to him. Like you got to pick something up, you know, pick up something else.
[00:22:53] Speaker A: Does he? Why not? Just.
[00:22:54] Speaker B: Well, I, Yeah, I, like that's the question. Like, what do you think?
[00:22:58] Speaker A: I say let's just work less. I mean, that's my goal. I don't know if that's realistic.
[00:23:01] Speaker B: Are you going to pay them less?
[00:23:03] Speaker A: No. Why, why would I? If we can keep growing, if we can grow at the same pace and maybe even grow faster with help today, why wouldn't we just work less? That's the way I look at it. We just had this conversation on our team call the other day and you know, as I said to them, we're not firing anyone over AI Like I need. Everyone here has a unique skill that I need. I don't think I could do without it entirely.
But if we can have someone, a robot reply to support tickets, why not just do less tickets? I don't know. That's the way I look at it.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I guess I look at it slightly differently, which is like, and like we've had a lot of kind of philosophical discussions about this as a team and me one on one with folks and it's like, hey, this is going to replace the shitty, boring Work that we all do. And it's going to take us up to more critical thinking, creative levels. And it's been amazing to see the shit that some of the people have done, myself included. I've done some amazing shit.
We are doing some really cool things with Vibe coding up both internal and external tools. The bot, the way the development team obviously is working with all sorts of different tools.
But I don't just say, okay, do less work. I say, okay, that thing that was 20% of your workload is done basically that 20 of your time needs to be doing something else.
[00:24:27] Speaker A: That's like, I get that. And I'm, I'm certainly not saying everyone should do nothing. I, I certainly myself, I try to lead by example. And I want people to, you know, I want people to operate how I operate. And I'm not my kind of person to be like, oh, that task is now done, so I'm gonna go sit on the couch and watch Netflix. That's just not how I play golf. Yeah, no, but, yeah, but also, I'm not sure that I see the need to. Why, why, why should this technology not benefit us as humans? Like, I don't understand why, why, why should we not, like, just do less? I mean, I just don't see the need to fill everyone's time. I'll take just Even forgetting about AI for a second. Our, our first hire was in 2021, was a customer success person. And, you know, he. He's basically responding to tickets all day. And in the early days and even now there's lots of times when there's just no tickets to respond to. And I don't feel the need all day to time to make busy work. Like, his value is being responsive. His value is being there to reply to the ticket and fill in. And yeah, we have lots of tasks that he can do and things that he can fill in with, but I don't feel the need to fill his day up with busy work just because we're paying him. And I feel like the same. Hopefully this AI allows us to do less of this nonsense work and we don't have to fill it up with more nonsense work. I don't know.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: No, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fair. That's fair.
How, how do you see AI?
I don't want to say shaking out, because that's not specific enough. How do you see AI affecting the business in the next two years?
[00:25:56] Speaker A: Good question. Two years is a long horizon. Well, we can look at how it's affected us already, which is okay.
[00:26:02] Speaker B: Yeah, Someone maybe in the next year, if that's easier.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: I would say the number one positive development we've seen is that unfortunately we kind of invented a product category, which is the worst thing you can do. Status aggregator, Status Gator, we invented this didn't exist before.
No one even wanted this in the beginning, which is why no one was searching for it.
But it's a problem that is doesn't have a name in a lot of people's minds. This idea of seeing the status of all of the things that you use in a single pane of glass, basically.
And the LLMs are a lot better at teasing out good responses to these types of queries. So we see a lot of inbound interest now of people saying, I heard about you because I was having a conversation with ChatGPT about this problem I was having or Copilot or meta what all the different AIs.
And it eventually got me to Status Gator and that what I need is a page for my team to see the status of all of their services. And that just isn't possible. With the way search used to work, we were struggling to find things that people would search for or even just to find our ICP and then put our ads in front of them with retargeting. And so this has really changed the way people discover us for the better.
I would say. The downside is that other people are now spinning up clones of Status Gator overnight. I mean, I literally see new ones pop up every day. And it is very frustrating for me, for someone who's worked on this product every day for 11 years, to have someone spin up something overnight that like tries to replicate what you do.
I think we have a big advantage there in that we have sort of pivoted to this crowdsourced incident notification and not just aggregating status pages because you could spin up a clone any day with vibe coding, but it's not going to have the volume of people submitting issues to you.
[00:27:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:27:57] Speaker A: About outages, like, it's just there's no community aspect to those at all.
So we're really leaning heavily into that now as our sort of advantage because none of these sort of clones that that are spinning up can do that and none of the ones that have even been around a while do it as well as well as us.
Where it's changing from here, I don't know. It's a good question.
I see more people talking about building less SaaS and sort of building it themselves, but I just don't believe that's going to be a viable solution long term. I just.
The maintenance aspect of sort of building and running your own SaaS.
We've had this conversation for years now about sort of on premise versus using a SaaS. Like it really sucks to maintain your own stuff on premise. It's way easier just to pay someone $30 a month for it. So I don't see, I just don't see this stuff lasting.
When I hear people saying that they're going to like replace SaaS or I don't know, beyond, beyond the shorter horizon, the two year horizon. I don't know. I see people like you prognosticating, did you post something like 30% chance that there's gonna be 20% unemployment in the next like year or two? And I don't. Maybe I'm willfully ignorant, but I really have a hard time believing. I feel like there's too much vested interest in like the economic engine that that won't, that that won't happen. But I don't know that.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I mean, alarmist to me. I guess we're like the. My thinking there is and I. Fuck, I don't know. Right? Like, I'm definitely not an economist.
I just see like, well, exactly this, this conversation, right? Like, hey, we're 25% more effective as humans and employees.
Some companies are going to say, hey, cool, we'll have 25% less people, right? Some, some won't, right? But, but then I think to me, the knockoff effect of that is then you have a bunch of people who are unemployed who can't pay for shit like podcast hosting anymore. And so our revenue goes down and then we do things to, you know, whatever, compensate for that, right? And so like that's. My logic is like, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a compounding kind of trickle thing.
It is like there will be less people working just because people can. The companies need less people working now. There's like a declining population and aging and all this like people leaving the workforce. So maybe, like, maybe that's not going to happen. People are just going to work in different jobs. I, I don't know. To me, like, I, I am at the same time like an AI maximalist, right? Like, AI is everything I'm so excited about. I use the shit out of it all the time, mostly for like marketing stuff. I'm also like, I have to be paranoid to say, like, hey, there's not a lot of huge existential risks to my business and the thing that pays my Mortgage. That's about the only one that I can see.
[00:30:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:55] Speaker B: So aside from, like, me dying, which, like, I don't have much to worry about then, but, like, you know, my business is not going to just go away, and your business is not going to just go away.
Like, it's not. It doesn't have massive platform risk. There's not channel risk. Like, the market itself is not going to just die.
About the only thing that would totally kill us, aside from me doing something super dumb, is, like, the economy just getting really horrendously bad.
[00:31:20] Speaker A: Have you been through, like, other economic downturns in the past? Because I also. I mean, I have this. This makes me nervous for sure. But when I always think back to it, every business that I've ever had has grown in every economic downturn. And I don't know why it could. Interesting happen stance. But, like, 2008, you know, I was in another business before that. In 2001, I had another business and all. I've never suffered from a business perspective during these downturns. There's. There's winners and there's losers for sure, but I've always been on the kind of growing side of those.
Sorry, when people migrate from, like, a more expensive podcast platform to yours during an economic downturn, is that. Could that be an advantage for you?
[00:31:59] Speaker B: Maybe, yeah. And we're already kind of towards the higher end of the market. Um, but, you know, but yeah, we would pivot if. If, like, that became a real thing. Like, maybe we try free. Maybe we try a really cheap plan.
Like, yeah. Where I think we're aware enough as, like, getting back to the conversation of, like, you've been doing it 11 years. How do you guys think about, like, staying, like, fresh, like, in the. In the business, in the market? Like, it's easy. I'll say this for myself. Like, it's easy to be like, I've been fucking doing this for 10 years. Like, I. I know my customer, I know this. I know the market. Market. And sure enough, like, I don't anymore. Like, I'm not. I'm not our ICP anymore. I'm not as hip with all the new stuff and podcasting as maybe I used to be, because I more enjoy running a business than being a podcaster.
Like, I don't know. How do. How do you stay fresh after being in the business for a while?
[00:32:50] Speaker A: I think we've been around a while, but we've. We've reinvented or evolved quite a lot over those years. And I think getting back to the. We mentioned inventing your own market, and I think very early on we realized that was a mistake and that we needed to kind of position ourselves as something people understood.
And so we did at one point try to pivot ourselves more towards a being a status page provider. There are status page companies. The status Atlassian status page is the big one. They sort of invented it and there are many other, Many, many others now. And we tried to position ourselves as one of those.
And I think that took two or three years basically to do that kind of reposition that. And then I think by the time we did that, the market kind of caught up with us and people were sort of asking for the thing that we actually were, which is a status page aggregator and more of an alerting system, or like a down detector for teams kind of people sometimes call it.
So then we've had to kind of pivot again or migrate again or evolve again into that. And every single time, you know this, these evolutions aren't quick because we're small team and we just kind of keep evolving with the market. We've evolved our, our marketing materials and our sort of acquisition channels each time, and we're still sort of evolving now. Now we're evolving again based on this kind of early warning signal, these sort of unofficial outages. And that has positioned us more against things like down detector. And yeah, we stay fresh just by. We still are kind of finding our way. To be honest, after 11 years, like, we're still sort of evolving. The downside there is that every time that we've evolved, you know, you pick up what you think is kind of a new ideal customer profile, and then you have all of these other customers that are not really ideal anymore and that are still sort of hanging on. Right. So we still have people that came to us because they thought we were like a status page, or they came to us because they. We were doing website monitoring, like a pingdom kind of. And the product isn't really great for either of those things. Right. Anymore.
[00:34:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I think, like, at our core, we have always done the same thing, and it's probably just like that's the kind of product we are.
Like, we're a podcast host. We've added a lot around, like monetization, but. But to me, that's like an aspect of being a good hosting provider.
[00:35:19] Speaker A: Sorry, we've been the same thing at our core. It's just we just call ourselves something different in order to, like, sell it. That's, I think, the hard part. At the core, we've always been. And I think the one thing we've always done and no one else really did for a long time is this aggregator, this concept of, like, pulling on all these statuses together. Yeah.
[00:35:38] Speaker B: What's the hardest part of running the business?
[00:35:41] Speaker A: Not being a bottleneck, I think I try so hard to get out of the way of people, but it just always comes back to me being a bot bottleneck of stuff. I do try really hard to not be somebody that has to, like, see or approve everything that goes through, but somehow it's really hard to let go of that kind of stuff. It's really hard.
[00:36:03] Speaker B: I. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm going on vacation next week and told the team, like. Like, literally, unless the whole thing is gonna burn down, don't.
Don't message me.
[00:36:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:15] Speaker B: I'm not checking email.
Like, unless there's a massive outage, you can text me. But even then, like, what the would I do? Like, if there's a big outage, like, the team has access to all this stuff. I don't. Like, I have no idea how to. Like, I could barely log into aws.
[00:36:29] Speaker A: That's why I'm so glad I have a partner. Like, having actual business partner. You know, Andy And I are 50. 50. Well, what's 50? 50 before tiny seed. And, you know, maybe we have different skill sets, of course, but from kind of keeping the lights on, we both can do it. And so either he's on vacation now, and if anything goes wrong, I'm 99% sure that I can get in there and figure it out. And if I go away, the same thing, which is just a huge, huge, huge stress relief compared to other businesses I've had in the past where there hasn't been that.
[00:37:02] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I said this before. I definitely wouldn't do this again by myself.
I would do it with two other people because I think having one co founder would be challenging, like, from a, you know, 50. Everyone says, like, the 50, 50 equity splits, not how you should do it, but whatever.
[00:37:17] Speaker A: Whether that's right or wrong, it worked fine for us. I don't have any. Any qualms there.
[00:37:21] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. That's great. I mean, to me, I would want a. A really good technical person. That's really important.
[00:37:31] Speaker A: I can see that. Yeah.
[00:37:33] Speaker B: And. And then, like, interestingly, I would want a really good marketing person because that's not what I want to do. I just.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: What do you want?
[00:37:40] Speaker B: I just don't.
[00:37:40] Speaker A: What do you want to do? What's the part that interests you.
[00:37:43] Speaker B: So, so I would want to like own like product direction and sales and that's, that's kind of the shit of like our model is like, we don't do much sales.
Do you do. You know we do, we do on like our custom production side. But like the majority of our revenue and like our customer acquisition is entirely self serve.
So it's interesting, it's interesting to not be able to like exercise that muscle.
[00:38:11] Speaker A: This is a muscle I've had to develop and I hate it. So you can come do it for us.
[00:38:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's good. Like you, you've grown, right? Like we all, we all kind of grow. Like I've grown into like, I didn't, I never did marketing before and like I've gotten decent at it but, but I don't love it. Like it's not my inherent thing.
[00:38:28] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm on calls all day long now and I hate it. And Andy right now is doing all admin SOC2 stuff and he hates it, but yeah, doing it to get it done, you know.
[00:38:39] Speaker B: So we're, so we just got asked by like an enterprise lead about SOC2 compliance and we're not SOC2 compliant. Like, what does that look like for you guys? So you're going through the process like, how, like, how long is it taking? What do you think it's going to cost you?
[00:38:53] Speaker A: I think it's taking a lot longer than it should, but I think that's only because we're not putting as much time into it as we probably should or sort of trying to stay sane and doing other stuff at the same time. But I think, you know, we kind of started this in November. It's now almost July, but in the, probably for the first three or four months we did very, very little on it. Now we do have like a fractional CISO has been very helpful to kind of keep things moving along.
The less infrastructure that you have yourself, I think the easier it is we have over the years, at times as we've evolved, added bits and pieces of technical infrastructure that are not just like a SaaS service that's hosted, but that we have a little bit more control over. And the more of that stuff that you have, the more actual work to implement SoC2 there is. If you don't have any of that, and if you're just hosted on a SaaS or pass a platform, it's a lot more of just like hand them the document, the SoC2 document from them.
[00:39:57] Speaker B: If you're on Heroku or something like that.
[00:39:58] Speaker A: And we are on Heroku, but we have a lot of stuff that's not on Heroku too. You know, as we've evolved and, and that's where there's actual, actual work to implement things.
Beyond that, it's a lot of like box checking and policy generation and like, you know, making sure everyone signed all these stupid documents and quite honestly, a lot of nonsense, but nonsense that has.
[00:40:20] Speaker B: What do you get? Like, what would you say it costs to do this?
[00:40:26] Speaker A: It will probably end up costing us.
Forgetting about time, actual hard costs, probably about 20,000.
We've got SOC2 audit, we've got things like pen testing, we've got our CISO that we need just advisory help on or paying 1000 or 2amonth to her right now.
We've been able to get away without having this for a long time. And we have some very large enterprise customers names that you've heard of. They are mostly able to get around it with a lot of extra paperwork because we just don't have that much information or data from them. When it comes down to it, somebody, a human being actually analyzing this contract would look at it and say, like, they don't have anything that's secret from us, just go ahead and do it. And that's what it usually comes down to. But that takes three months and a lot of back and forth and a lot of process, which is why we want have the SOC too. Just to be able to hand it to them and say, look, we've got it, don't worry about it.
I think it will move our deals along a lot faster.
They feel like you could be in a similar position.
[00:41:29] Speaker B: Yeah, we don't have like, for our enterprise deals, we get like company like employee email address and name. So like that, that's like the most sensitive thing that we have. And like their content from their podcast for like internal podcasts.
But we have big old, huge. I mean, Fidelity is a customer. London Stock Exchange is a customer. Like, we have very big customers and they've never said anything and that.
[00:41:57] Speaker A: Right.
[00:41:57] Speaker B: You know, and then you have some that are like, hey, what about this? And you're like, come on. Like, you guys are like, you know, over your skis. So I don't know, we'll see. Yeah, I've heard, I've heard 20,000 and about six months from a few folks. So that seems, I think that's something like Fanta.
[00:42:14] Speaker A: We're using Trust Cloud, which is free, and you get what you pay for. I Think I probably would, in retrospect, if we weren't so far along, probably would have just paid for another service.
There are some limitations to their free plan that are frustrating. So.
[00:42:28] Speaker B: Yeah, cool, man.
Yeah. Anything else you want to chat through as we wrap up?
[00:42:33] Speaker A: What about the. I don't think so. I mean, I really like that pot. The last episode that I listened to, at least not the one that you recorded, where they really got into like the longevity aspect and yeah, I think it was just.
[00:42:44] Speaker B: Oh, did your. Your team works like 5 days a week, 40 hours a week?
[00:42:49] Speaker A: That's an interesting question.
Yeah, well, we kind of officially said 30 hours. We said aim for 30 hours. That was what we said.
I don't know. Honestly, I don't ask anyone how much time they put in. I know, again, leading by example, I do put in more than 40 hours for sure. But also, you know, I take my kid to school and then I go do the dishes and you know, it's hard to know. I don't track my own time either. But I also work on weekends and nights and all. Just. I'm always thinking about work.
But for the rest of the team, we officially kind of said it would be a 30 hour.
We say aim for 30 hours again. Like our customer success guy, he probably is at the computer 20 hours a day. He's always responding to tickets. Yet how many, how many hours is he actually responding? Tickets? I don't know.
We would really like to not be a 40 hour a week company. That's what we aspire to. Whether that's actually happening, I don't know, to be honest.
[00:43:44] Speaker B: So, yeah, we don't have an official policy around this, but I would suspect it's something similar.
I think that the team probably, hopefully feels empowered to not have to monitor their time. That's really important. I don't say be there at 8 and leave at 4.
I don't see messages from many of them, like most days, you know, which, like, I'm totally fine with, like being on slack does not mean working.
Yeah, we have one person who works four days a week by, by design.
But I still think they mostly get almost 40 hours because they work like, like a madman.
The four days a week they work. I just think it's interesting because like, this concept of like, I don't really care how much much time you work as long as you're doing good work is kind of counter to what a lot of business leaders, especially with in person teams would say.
[00:44:36] Speaker A: Oh, sure.
[00:44:37] Speaker B: And I don't, honestly, I don't know if that's good or bad.
[00:44:39] Speaker A: I don't know either. I think there is a tendency to say people aren't valuable unless they're clocking in and clocking out. And I completely think that's wrong. I think that the perfect.
The perfect example is the customer success person. Their value is being responding fast, and they do not have to be doing that responding fast all day long. They could be available to respond fast, and that's their value. Right, right. But the same thing comes for pretty much anyone on our team.
Even when it comes down to engineering, we do a lot of, unfortunately, interruptive engineering work because we're integrating with 6,000 different services, and that is a lot of work. This is the work we hope AI replaces.
But that is a lot of work that has to be done pretty quick. Something that I don't think our competitors do. And so the value for that engineer is being responsive to that. Not necessarily day or night, but. But. But reacting to that. And they don't have to be punching the clock and filling up their 40 hours a week all the rest of the time in order to be of value to us.
[00:45:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, totally get it. Totally get it.
[00:45:46] Speaker A: We're very asynchronous, and we don't. We have very few meetings. We try to be very asynchronous. We're distributed. Some of us are here on the east coast, some of us are on the west coast, some. We have one in South America, we have one in two in Europe.
We're really all over, which makes it challenging to be a kind of, you know, synchronous team. Of course.
[00:46:07] Speaker B: Cohesive.
[00:46:08] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, cohesive.
But we like it that way. Means people can work when they want to, and we sort of design it that way.
[00:46:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I guess the key is, like, people should be able to work when and how they want to, so they're most productive because then they don't need to work 40 hours to get the thing like the unit of work out. That's how you look at it.
[00:46:28] Speaker A: Exactly. And we have a company holidays, you know, we have standard official American holidays. And because also we're not all in America, I say take whatever you want. If you don't want. If you want to work on July 4, because that's on a holiday in Spain, go ahead and then take a different day off. And that works for great. For us, honestly, everyone sort of works when they. When they want to.
Obviously, there's challenges there. We do have to have synchronous meetings occasionally. We have one Per week, basically one team meeting per week with everyone. And then we try to have one meeting per week, like kind of one on one with myself and my partner and each individual person, but that's it. And yeah, there are challenges to that for sure. We have an issue now of sort of how long things take to get go through review cycles between different members of our team because it's 24 hours sometimes so someone can, can respond to that. But we're working through that and improving that. Yeah, but to me it's, it's less about punching the clock and more about are you getting things done. So we, we try to say aim for 30 hours.
[00:47:26] Speaker B: Yeah, we have almost the exact same team structure or meeting setup. So we have all hands Monday at 10 o' clock. I have one on ones with everyone every other week that probably is moving to monthly.
And then we do this thing called co working on Thursdays where it's just like get on and just, just hang out. Like, oh, no agenda. You can talk about work, you talk about travel, you can talk about whatever. It's just like it's a coffee, coffee time and it's optional like you can come or you cannot.
[00:47:55] Speaker A: I would like to do more occasional in person events, like a once a year thing, but that's very difficult with our team. Specifically. We have people who, who can't leave the country they're in. We have people who can't come to the country that other of us are in.
[00:48:08] Speaker B: It was very difficult logistically and it's expensive. Our last one we did two years ago is about 25 grand.
It's like, it's tough.
[00:48:16] Speaker A: Talk about staying profitable. A lot of those events anymore.
[00:48:21] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. All right buddy, well it's good to chat. Thank you for coming on folks. Want to check out statusgator.com. where's the best place to connect with you?
[00:48:30] Speaker A: Statusgator.com or LinkedIn? It's the only social media I have. LinkedIn. Find me Colin Bartlett.
[00:48:36] Speaker B: Cool. Awesome buddy, I appreciate it. Thank you.
[00:48:38] Speaker A: Yep, take care. Peace, man.
