A fresh perspective on the stages of building a SaaS business

March 31, 2021

EP6: Two ideas to validate and building a mentality of progress [Nate search update]

We get an update from Nate on his search as Josh asks about recent ideas and projects. Nate wonders when it will “happen for him” and Josh talks about building skills and assets that one takes with you on your journey.
Searching For SaaS Podcast
Searching For SaaS Podcast
EP6: Two ideas to validate and building a mentality of progress [Nate search update]
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Transcription

Nate: [00:00:30] Cool. So Josh, how you doing?
Josh: [00:00:32] I’m all right.
Nate: [00:00:34] We missed our recording session last week.
Josh: [00:00:36] That’s true. Yeah, I had a, I had a bit of a rough week last week
and,
Nate: [00:00:41] Oh, shoot.
Josh: [00:00:42] yeah, it was kinda a couple, a couple of interesting things happened. One, I think when it all came to a culmination towards the end of the week, we did have a. One of our sales guys put in his two weeks. So that kind of just set off a cascade of emotions and feelings and things to do and stuff like
that.
Nate: [00:01:02] Oh, shoot. That sucks. Yeah.
Josh: [00:01:04] Yeah. I mean, he’s, he’s good. And we liked him and, you know, over the course of this week, essentially, we did exit interviews, other things like that, and we’re all in a good place. , I’m happy for him you know, he needs to do what’s best for him. And he’s been here about two years.
Nate: [00:01:21] yeah.
Josh: [00:01:22] So I think it was a good, yeah, I think it’s, it’s good for everyone.
You just always, you know, with, with people you’ve been in the trenches with, you kinda hope those consistent pieces stay around, but that’s not always the case.
Nate: [00:01:35] Yeah. It’s sad to see them go.
Josh: [00:01:39] Yeah. So that’s what that was the cherry on top of the cake of the week. The other things earlier was. A few weeks prior, we did a new website update to her for Referral Rock
trying to do a little bit of a SEO magic. Like we ranked well on the front page for our homepage, and I’m basically trying to get these other solution-based pages to rank for that instead.
Nate: [00:01:59] Okay. And it was just not working out or.
Josh: [00:02:02] well, you know, as with Google, you put those things and you just wait a little bit and you see. You know, if it tracks or picks up and see what happens. And it was about a weekend and I’m like, it’s not really picking us back up the way I wanted us to back into like a top three spot. So last week was kind of more on the, okay.
Now I’m actually seeing, you know, a little less leads, some other, other things running downstream.
Nate: [00:02:28] Okay. So your ranking, you actually end up ranking lower afterwards.
Josh: [00:02:32] yeah, we did. And I mean, it was moving certain things and we won’t get into the technical details, but speeding up the story that was most of my week. So it kind of lampooned last week. So I was just
like pulling out all the SEO tricks, moving things around, doing all kinds of stuff, but there’s a happy ending.
So we did get the ranking back overall this. Past Monday. So this week has been much better. Not on, not off track.
So
Nate: [00:02:55] crazy. So you’ve had like a sales and marketing craziness for the last little while.
Josh: [00:03:00] a little bit. Yeah. The biggest thing is just, you know, you can account for any given things. I’m sure you can too, in a, in a week blowing your wake up, but where it really just literally blows it up. And I got S pretty much zero down on anything I attended that week. So.
Nate: [00:03:16] Yeah, well, I’m sure you’re a farther down the SEO, a rabbit hole, and you were probably working on HR and stuff like that.
Josh: [00:03:23] Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things I had on today’s topic was to kind of talk about where you’re at a bit. I think in the past episodes, we’ve kind of gone through a little history why we started the podcast. We had an interesting ones with the m-MVP last, last one that just came out.
But you had an idea in our group about the shortest time to see an ER doctor.
Nate: [00:03:49] Yeah.
Josh: [00:03:50] a little bit about that?
Nate: [00:03:52] Sure. Yeah. So that, that idea got shut down. So I’m not as excited about anymore, but I can tell you basically I’m at home and my daughter is freaking out because something bad just happened to her. And it’s actually happened to me. My daughter hit her head off her bed a while back And the problem is which I want to see the ER, doctor as fast as possible.
And the nearest at the hospital around the corner from me may not actually be the fastest route. It’s possible that if I go to a different hospital in a different region, that it’s actually faster for me to drive there, have the shorter wait time
get in to see someone.
Josh: [00:04:28] so total time to care versus just, you know, most things are optimized for like, Okay. You’re, you’re the, the least amount of driving time? Not necessarily like by the time you’re seeing a doctor.
Nate: [00:04:39] yeah, yeah. Total time to see an ER doctor from sitting in your driveway. And so the idea was, well, you could leverage some, you know, Google maps, API, and you could leverage the existing
Josh: [00:04:50] So you’re already building it in your
head.
Nate: [00:04:52] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Technically that’s how you could do it technically. In terms of benefit to someone it’s the, you see that that’s probably part of my problem is I’m thinking of the technical solution before thinking about why people care
Josh: [00:05:04] mean, well, no, I mean, not to take too much away from yourself, but you did start with the need. So you had the need, you had the pain first. So I can’t say it was just like I want to build this thing. So it didn’t come from, it came from pain, which is good, which is always a good
start.
Nate: [00:05:20] Yep. That’s true. Yeah. And so I figured, well, he could make some sort of app people could have it as a , standby thing if something were to happen, you could press the button and, you know, within a couple of seconds you’d know the
optimal route to go, to see an ER doctor as fast as possible.
Josh: [00:05:37] right. And I think with us kind of, when you, would you put that idea out there then. Few of us kind of threw some stones at it and we’re like, okay, so who’s going to actually pay for this, like follow the money. Let’s let’s see. Who’s you know, so where’d that go?
Nate: [00:05:53] Yeah. And so I like that. That right away. He got to that thing of like, who would pay for this. And I guess I kind of thought, well, someone really cares about this, they might pay a dollar or something like that for it to be pretty, pretty basic. Or maybe you sell it as an insurance plan, right.
Like, you know, pay a dollar a month and we’ll make sure that you can get to the ER, as fast as possible. I don’t
know how
Josh: [00:06:13] what’d, you what’d you pay for that yourself
Nate: [00:06:14] I don’t know about that. I probably wouldn’t.
Josh: [00:06:18] and in that moment of flux. So when you’re like looking at your phone, trying to find that clique, it’s like, you’re going to you going to go to the app store or you’re going to go to Google.
Nate: [00:06:27] Right. But I did think when I have a child who’s freaking out and I need to see an ER doctor as fast as possible, I would be willing to pay like $5 to know that information. If I knew that that meant I could save an hour of sitting in the ER, doing cause there’s nothing worse than sitting in an ER with.
Yeah, I’m just waiting.
Josh: [00:06:47] Right. So at that point of capture in your light, so you don’t have this ahead of time. Yeah, because these are problems you foresee happening. So it’s like, you’re not like, let me make sure I know where the closest ER is. So you’re, you’re hit Google or whatever, and you type in like, you know, shortest, fastest way to get care on, like, or, or, you know, however you’re going to query it.
And let’s say this app pops up and says, I will tell you if you give me $5,
how would you make it? How would that make you feel?
Nate: [00:07:17] that just doesn’t feel good. And, and like you said, we’re just kind of exploring the different ways that this could go. And that’s just, that doesn’t sound good.
Josh: [00:07:25] Right. That’s the, that’s the consumer side. So then did you venture and think about the hospital side?
Nate: [00:07:31] Yeah. And so I also thought about the hospital side. So maybe it’s like, well, we don’t charge the consumer. Instead we charge the hospital because the hospital, it gets a benefit too, because if you get enough people using this app, you can redirect to, to kind of smooth the load that the hospital has.
Right. So if one hospital is really backed up, you can kind of redirect people to a hospital that’s less backed up.
Josh: [00:07:53] Like a web app, like load balancing.
Nate: [00:07:55] It but that, that idea, right. And so you could get the hospital to pay some sort of subscription fee to be part of it and make your money there and offer it for free to consumers.
Josh: [00:08:07] Do you want to try to, you want to try to sell the hospitals or the health care system?
Nate: [00:08:12] And so that’s kind of what we ran across too, is like, well, you know what, selling to a hospital that sounds like a, that sounds like a lot work that I’m not too particularly keen on getting myself into
Josh: [00:08:24] I think I distinctly remember you asking and saying, well, how hard could that be? And I think then you’ve got an additional round of shooting, shooting that down.
Nate: [00:08:32] Well, I like to do that though with these ideas, right? like even if you were to say, how much should we try if we charged the people like the consumers, you know, at the time of pain, you know, how would that go? And I think it’s good to ask the question of like, Like challenge your initial assumption, right?
Like how hard, how bad would that actually be? Would it be like an annoyance or like, you know, I think you’re a crazy person and I’m not going to go anywhere near you, you know? That’s, it’s good to explore that.
Josh: [00:08:57] Yeah. no, I agree. It’s a good exercise. But this was one of those ones where, Hey, you didn’t write a line of code. You didn’t buy a domain, did you?
Nate: [00:09:06] didn’t. Yeah. It turns out that like, just talking to friends. First is a good way to check on the things that you didn’t Even,
Josh: [00:09:15] biases. So you might’ve just been like, ah, you guys don’t know what you’re talking about and yeah let me go ask Twitter.
Nate: [00:09:22] Yeah. There you go. Well, some listening out there wants to give it a shot. You’re more than welcome
Josh: [00:09:26] free idea.
Nate: [00:09:27] free idea on the house.
Josh: [00:09:28] Okay, cool. But you don’t know if you’d paid for it, so.
Nate: [00:09:33] I bet you, the hospital could pay for it somehow, but it sounds like a lot of work.
Josh: [00:09:36] All right. So So, what I want to also ask you about a bit today is, you know, for some of our listeners is like, you’re working, you’re doing consulting and you’re trying to do these side projects. So what is, what is your day look like? How much time do you allocate towards these types of things?
Like, what does, what does that look like for you?
Nate: [00:09:56] I do software consulting as my main source of income. And so I spend most of my day doing that. I spend probably probably around 10 to 15 minutes every morning, kind of. Perusing the internet to kind of see what’s going on in the world of tech and to see what other people are doing. just to kind of see, keep on top of trends and like where, what other companies are doing. That might be interesting to me that I might be able to leverage in some other way.
Josh: [00:10:20] So you dedicate that much time. Like you dedicate like 15 minutes a day specifically towards like ideation and an exploration of
Nate: [00:10:29] Yeah, I’m not sure if it’s like exactly ideation. I think it’s more just like information. Like I know, that information will come to me every once in a while through different newsletters that I look at or through different people that I follow on Twitter, like good information will come through that I can sometimes get an idea out of.
And so I just try to stay on top of those information sources, in the hopes that something there will trigger me.
Josh: [00:10:55] okay. And you have kids as well, right? You have
Nate: [00:10:57] Yeah, I have two, two kids, a son and a daughter. They’re quite young. So my evenings are mostly filled
up with that.
Josh: [00:11:04] Bat time, book, time,
Nate: [00:11:06] yes, books, lots of books, a little bit electronics too. It’s kind of fun. And same with my weekends, spending time with the family and that. So I don’t have a ton of time, like after they go to bed and whatnot, I can fool around. On different things, but, not a ton of time in the evenings for that sort of stuff.
Josh: [00:11:24] Okay. And then I know before we even started this podcast, you had another idea and I don’t think we’ve talked much about that. And I wanted to kind of check in on that one. So it was the, the PDF types of stuff, right? What’s that idea. And what’s the status of that one.
Nate: [00:11:40] yeah. So the PDF thing, I have a service that does WK, HTML to PDF as a service. And so if you’re not familiar with that, that’s, as basically a tool that will convert HTML and CSS and all that into a
Josh: [00:11:53] Okay. So something that would be able to show up on any webpage, then you can make a PDF report out of.
Nate: [00:11:58] Yeah. Yeah. You can take any web page and make a PDF. And that that’s beneficial because it’s hard to make PDFs and it’s easier to make webpages. And so if you format it just right, then you can run it through something like this, and it’ll give you a nice PDF when you’re all done.
Josh: [00:12:12] So you’re a little further down that one, you bought a domain in terms of like where, where you are on Ida. You’ve had the idea you bought a domain. You’re is there any, any code around this
yet?
Nate: [00:12:24] Yep. So the there’s a proof of concept. There is, , some hand polling to get the billing to work and, I’ve done some SEO work on it even. I’ve done a bit of like awareness, around it, not a ton, but just a little bit. So it’s been out there for probably a month or two now. so I did do a bunch of code for it, probably about three or four days worth of coding. so nothing too crazy. At this point I’m just kind of waiting to see what happens with it.
Josh: [00:12:50] you did a little bit of a product hunt launch as well. Was that a couple of months ago?
Nate: [00:12:55] Yeah, so our launch on product hunt, and that was actually really cool because I actually got a decent amount of uptick on that. I’ve launched on product hunt before and kind of got a mixed
response,
Josh: [00:13:06] With, with status list
or with
Nate: [00:13:08] with status last year. with this one, it seemed to have a bit more juice. I think I got, a couple thousand views that day.
And that got me really excited because I was like, all right, this is going to work. and then of course it just dropped right off and there’s not much activity coming in right now. but that was kind of neat just to kind of see how that all worked with with product hunt and how to kind of manage that.
And I think, I think I learned a few things of like what I could do differently for next time, but, yeah, it was a cool experience.
Josh: [00:13:36] Okay. So did you get anyone to sign up through that or, or what do you have there is there, it’s just like a landing page for interest or what, what, what are you doing to kind of capture some of the demand.
Nate: [00:13:47] The lowest tier is a, you could generate an API key for free. no questions asked no name or email or anything. Just generate an API key. If that’s my base metric on like interaction. And I had done fairly well on getting that one to work. And then I’ve got a newsletter or a more information kind of spot as well to put your name and email it, and then I’ll follow up with you.
And that has got some, some input, but very little, and a lot of that has been pretty spammy.
Josh: [00:14:18] so you’ve been actively reaching out to any of these people or you did initially, and now you’re really not getting any more. Emails since the product hunt has died down, is that.
Nate: [00:14:29] Yeah. I have been keeping an eye on the stuff that comes in through the email capture and, anything that comes to the email capture. I right away reply to, like I, I manually do that and that hasn’t really like, people haven’t even really interacted with that. And so I haven’t like pushed too hard in that direction. and then in terms of product hunt too, I’ve just kind of kept an eye on it. And if there’s like any interesting comments, then I might respond to them on prototype, but nothing, not a whole lot going on there.
Josh: [00:14:58] So what’s next is this just like a net that is out there and you’re see if you’ll catch any fish.
Nate: [00:15:03] Yeah. Yeah. That’s kind of where that one’s at. I didn’t want to invest too much time into it. after doing status list, I just wanted to kind of put a net out there, see if anything would surface from that. And at the moment I’m kind of looking for, I’m looking for something new to, to work on.
Josh: [00:15:21] Maybe you’ll catch something or you’ll reply to these and see what happens, but generally not, not really further investing anymore into it at this point.
Nate: [00:15:30] That’s exactly right.
Josh: [00:15:31] So obviously this is probably not the outcome you wanted out of
this PDF. What, what do you, what is the name of it? So we can
Nate: [00:15:39] Oh, it’s a WK HTML to PDF service.com.
Josh: [00:15:45] All right. That’s a bit of a mouthful.
The great, great branding opportunity there.
Nate: [00:15:49] Yeah, rebranding opportunity. There you
Josh: [00:15:52] Right. So,
um,
Nate: [00:15:54] but yeah, it’s like a, it’s kind of frustrating, right? Like he try all these different things and some works and some doesn’t
Josh: [00:16:00] and so where do you think that, like, you put a lot of time and energy into status list. This one you’ve kind of, I feel like you’re making faster iterations, you know? So you’re putting, putting things out there. Getting less, less invested, maybe emotionally that’s probably didn’t hurt nearly as much necessarily,
Nate: [00:16:19] Yeah, Yeah, exactly. I went into it with the, the intention of an experiment, as opposed to this is the idea that I’m going to, you know, go to the moon with,
Josh: [00:16:30] yeah, what’s interesting to me is like, I wonder where the line is not investing enough. Because what’s funny with that is, is if even tracking back with referral rock a little bit, there were plenty of services that were doing similar things to us. And a lot of them are no longer around and, you know, there’s, there was definitely a certain element of, of charging through and kind of continuing with it.
But I honestly, I don’t know where that line is. It’s, it’s, it’s very gray. There’s like definitely over investing and there’s definitely under investing and then there’s not quite sure.
Nate: [00:17:06] Yeah. I wonder if there’s something along the lines of like how excited you can get like one or two people about your product. Like, if there’s something like that, where. You provide the basic value that you set out to provide. And then if one or two people that get really excited about that, then you’re like, okay, I’ll put a little more in.
And then if you get like five or six people excited, then you’re like, okay, I’ll put a little more. Yeah.
Josh: [00:17:29] It actually reminds me of the, one of our conversations, I think. And I think it might’ve been an episode. One about. The 10 unaffiliated customers who was like that, that Jason Lemkin articles. So when you mentioned that it reminded me of it when you said, you know, people getting excited about it, but then I would add the filter of people that you don’t know.
So it’s not, it’s not people in your friends and family and a Slack group and the whole mom test stuff, all those, the people that are supposed to be cheerleaders for you. And they’re excited about it. Yeah. But they’re never going to actually pay you or if they are it’s, it’s kind of like, Hey, I’m actually just doing this to support you and encourage you.
And not because I actually think this is worth
something.
Nate: [00:18:11] Yeah. Yeah.
Josh: [00:18:14] So I think, I remember you asking at some point is just like, when does this going to happen for me? You know? And is that, is that something that you, is it something that bothers you like on a daily basis or is it just kind of a. Every once in a while, you kind of take a step back and you go like, do I want to keep taking at-bats and keep swinging?
Or, you know, do I go, you know, continue on this consulting. Do I start maybe building out more than just you as a consulting company?
Nate: [00:18:42] Yeah, I do think about that probably probably every week Just, yeah, you keep throwing things at the wall and I, and I just. I keep trying to think of like, what’s the process. Like if I do the process, then you know, I can know that it’s gonna work out I’ve realized that that’s not like, that’s not the case.
That’s not how it works. But, like there’s a lot, there is a process, but not, you know, strictly speaking and yeah, I, I think about that quite often and it, sometimes it makes me sad cause you’re like, no, I’m good. Keep trying, but what’s, what’s, what’s going on.
Josh: [00:19:19] so I think, I think one thing I think about with that is, you know, you’re trying to find value for a customer. And they’re willing to pay for it. So those are some of the criteria we’ve, we’ve walked back to. I think this other piece is value to you, like in terms of your own personal fulfillment. And I think it’s, it’s interesting that those seem very tied together.
I mean, I think it’s natural. Most people do tie a lot of those things together. But how would you feel if I said that? Like, what if you decouple those two things? I dunno if that’s just a mindset, mind shift, change. But decoupling, like, okay. So we walked back status list is like, what did you learn?
Right. So obviously like personal learnings, what new skill sets did you learn? Did you build, you know, you’ve talked about a lot of lessons in a lot of things. And if, if that’s the goal, right. And almost assuming this other piece of it. Is a little bit more variable like there, you know, you’ve talked about there being a process and that, I don’t know, there’s, there’s timing involved.
There’s markets involved. There’s so many variables that you can’t control. You can control one, you can control your skills, you can control building in your mindset and, and learning.
Nate: [00:20:33] Yeah. I think, I think that’s a really good way to think about it. Just, just because like a self-reflecting I think that, I feel sometimes that my time is wasted when the idea doesn’t turn out. And I don’t think that that, like, that’s not always a good way to think about it because in reality, I’ve I learned quite a bit through the mistakes that I’ve made
Josh: [00:20:57] So what, what do you think the root of the disappointment is? Is it more that you wasted your time and like, Hey, that was time I could have been spent doing something else or is it that you put some weight into this? And then it’s also more of like a, you know, you question yourself when it doesn’t work.
Because it’s like a reflection on you. So you told all these friends and family, Hey, I’m launching this thing. And then, you know, six months later they ask you about it and you’re kind of like, you know, you’re kind of crouched down your local, it feel a little sheepish. Does, do you think it, it routes on more in one versus the other.
Nate: [00:21:30] I think it’s probably a bit of both. and I think probably more on the, the time wasted, like, yeah, there’s a bit of a letdown. If you tell someone about your idea and then six months later, they ask about it and you say, well, no, it’s, it’s no longer existed. But I think probably more for me is the, the time spent because especially with the family and stuff I look at the opportunities I’ve got I want to be, I want to be very efficient in the work that I do
Josh: [00:21:57] true engineer.
Nate: [00:22:00] well, and I think that.
The lack of efficiency or the perceived lack of efficiency sometimes, you know, where you spend a month working on status list, right? Like, and then that doesn’t seem to work out so great. So then you feel like you, you wasted that month, then you kind of just bend to doing other things.
Josh: [00:22:20] well, yeah, I mean, you have technically like, you know, I don’t know what your customer and client. Consulting situation is, but you know, you could definitely look at that from an opportunity cost lost scenario. Like, Hey, these are, that was a month of billable hours that I didn’t do. Even from a financial standpoint, you could put a value
metric on that.
Nate: [00:22:40] right. And I think then like, and then when you kind of take a step back, it’s kind of like, well, On some level, this is just a personal decision to do something that I like to do as opposed to a business decision, because if it was a pure business decision and I look at my past track record, then I would say, I should just keep consulting for forever and just never try anything different because that has proven to be an income source for me.
And the, the cost of, lost opportunity by spending time on startups is, you know, I should not do a technically
Josh: [00:23:15] I’m glad, I’m glad you went that direction. After, after I said those words, I had a. 10 seconds of regret being like, I hope I didn’t add a worst bug in your ear or a worst, like mental shift that now I think about every hour I’m doing these things, like what I’m missing out on, and that could also be detrimental to your entrepreneurial dreams.
Nate: [00:23:36] I think like any consultant would be able to relate to that too, is that you feel like you’re always on the clock or that you could be on the clock, making the dollars that you could be making. And I think, probably just part of work life balance too, is just, you have to accept sometimes that you’re not going to be the biggest money maker there is.
And that’s not always the goal either. You know, it’s there there’s life to just live your life too.
Josh: [00:24:00] No, that’s, that’s definitely a good mindset. So, so back on the other ones of like, what is value to you? I mean, I would say like this building those skills you know, going through the status list experience, and hopefully, you know, being able to iterate and get in on things faster. I mean, this PDF thing you went through faster, we don’t know if it’s too little at this point, but at the same time, you know, there’s less regret.
I think you have less. Feeling of, of loss and remorse of, of this not going somewhere. And these are all like nets out there. Like we said, like these are out there, these aren’t dead. Like there, I think as you mentioned, status list does still make some money, is that
correct?
Nate: [00:24:40] Yup. Yup. Yup. Satisfies still exists. Installs making money.
Josh: [00:24:43] And. So I think so you’re building these assets, but you know, I’m always thinking about assets in terms of the value to you. So like taking away these other ones is, you know, even this PDF thing from a tracking back to at the beginning of our conversation, talking a little bit about SEO, like you’ve built out a couple properties that have some backlinks and some, some other things like that.
So, you know, those are another, another piece of an asset. That maybe there’s something to do with it, with
those.
Nate: [00:25:15] And you’re talking about assets in terms of like skills acquired. I think one of the skills acquired by doing more of these is the, that I’m less, I’m less emotionally involved in the idea in the sense that if I see that it’s failing. I don’t feel like I have to hold on for forever because that’s the only idea I’ve ever had. I feel like I’m becoming more better able to make those judgment calls on what to do and where to go with it and stuff like that.
Josh: [00:25:44] Right. Cause I mean, you look at your timeline for the most part it’s I think you’re, you’re getting faster at this. Like the, was it mortar Q you spent a lot more time on and went, like, if you look at like lines of code and time invested in all of these things, you have shortened that substantially.
Nate: [00:26:00] Oh, yeah. Incredibly. Yeah.
Josh: [00:26:02] so assets we’ve talked skills we’ve talked about, you know, potentially SEO assets.
I think, you know, another one that I’m not sure if you’ve gotten this one, but I wrote down as an idea for assets is like, Network and people, you meet potential customers, other things like that. And I think those are things that could, you could take with you if, if status list pivoted into something else that was related to some other monitoring, you know, you have a list like you have a list of potential customers or people that at least trusted you enough to give you their email address.
And you can take that with you as well on to other projects.
Nate: [00:26:39] Yeah, Yeah, totally. And just people that you meet kind of over the course of doing it too, right? Like people like partners or, people that are in similar and niches to yourself that you you’ve built up relationships with.
Josh: [00:26:53] Yeah. Did you find any best friends out of a customer interviews with status list?
Nate: [00:26:59] No, I didn’t find any best friends, but I did find some interesting personas out of the customer interviews I did there. And that really helped to shape some of my thoughts around, other dev ops personas. And yeah, it helps, helps me to think about the problem better because I often think about the need in terms of how I would feel about it.
But of course there’s a lot of other people who think differently than me and to, to know how those people think is really helpful.
Josh: [00:27:26] Yeah, I think there’s how they think. And yeah, it just, I think you’ve, you’ve, you’ve touched on a part. It’s like it probably just talking to a lot more people. And I think that also speeds up this process and you’re doing more validation with talking to potential customers versus versus just throwing this stuff out there or spending, you know, 80% of the time coding before ever talking to a customer
about it.
Nate: [00:27:53] Yeah. And that’s that kind of interesting if you loop that back to our discussion around wasted time and how much opportunity cost there is, if you had to spend a couple of hundred dollars doing customer interviews versus potentially spending a couple hundred dollars coding like that, you could have been paid for coding something else.
You’re probably cheaper off talking to people than just writing the code. That is probably, you know, not, not lined up in the right way.
Josh: [00:28:19] That’s true. That’s interesting. I didn’t think about it that way. But yeah, cause I would bet you, if you spent a hundred hours talking to people and a hundred hours coding something, when it didn’t work out, the hundred hours, coding would hurt a lot more. Then talking to a hundred
people.
Nate: [00:28:36] Yeah, you would have a lot more benefit from talking to those people because you’d probably have other ideas, you’d have relationships. And if he did get the right idea, those people would really hone in it. Whereas the coaches, the coding, it wouldn’t have,
Josh: [00:28:51] Right? Right. The coding still sits down at a server. And if you never got someone to look at it, it’s kind of still just sitting there.
Nate: [00:28:57] yeah. If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears a fault.
Josh: [00:29:01] Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s probably a good a good place to wrap this episode. Last quick, the little Quip on network and people, now that I think about it, if you never did status list, I’m not sure we would be on this podcast right now. Like that was probably the impetus of us first having. Early conversations was, I was wondering, I actually, I was one of your interview, ease of status list in its first phase.
So
that’s
two on that for a minute.
Nate: [00:29:28] Crazy.