Communication, Empathy, and Flexibility
03/09/21 • 35 min
Get Michele's free newsletter on customer research: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/mjwhansen
Michele Hansen 0:00
The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners.
This episode is sponsored by Koody. Koody helps under 35 in the UK make the most of their money. Koody's website houses free money management tools, expert guidance and financial advisors. Koody's online community is the place to be if you need help with your finances, or are a finance expert, check out their website at www.Koody.co.
Thank you again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit balsamiq.com/go/software-social
So you remember a couple of weeks ago how I was reading the Jobs to Be Done Playbook?
Colleen Schnettler 0:59
Yes, I sure do.
Michele Hansen 1:01
I'mstill reading that book. But I'm also reading another book. And I want to talk about that other book.
Colleen Schnettler 1:07
Okay.
Psychology of Money
Michele Hansen 1:09
So I finally started reading the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.
Colleen Schnettler 1:15
Okay.
Michele Hansen 1:16
Which has been on my to-read pile for about, I don't know, about six months or so now, since it came out early last fall. And it's such a good book, like I mean, even if you're not a finance person are particularly interested in personal finance, like, it's a book about money that's not about money. And it's and it's so good. So but there's just one quote and that reminded me of stuff that we talk a lot about together. So I'm just gonna read it to you.
"In a world where intelligence is hyper competitive, and many previous technical skills have become automated, competitive advantages tilt toward nuanced and soft skills, like communication, empathy, and perhaps most of all, flexibility."
Colleen Schnettler 2:08
Hmm, interesting.
Michele Hansen 2:10
And this reminded me a lot of what we talk about, because it's kind of like we've been talking about as it relates to your business. The one of the like, the biggest challenges for you is not the engineering side, it's like, knowing when you should, you know, change directions, or be flexible with with like, what your image of what the business and what the product is. And also like communicating with people about what it does and what it is and pulling that information out of them. And then and then how do we use empathy to figure all of those things out, which is, which is a really big focus for me, and I read this and, like, grabbed the nearest writing utensil near me, which normally I only write in pencils in books, like I will underline things, but I only had a pen, and I was like, This is so amazing, I'm gonna underline it and pen because I'm not gonna regret that, like. That just really stuck with me.
Colleen Schnettler 3:09
Interesting. Why was that in your psychology of money book?
Michele Hansen 3:13
Oh, I mean, so I don't know if you've ever read Morgan's writing.
Colleen Schnettler 3:16
No.
Michele Hansen 3:16
He writes a lot about the sort of psychology of business. He's a very different business writer. And I used to work with him so I've sort of been been around a lot of his thinking for a while. And I'm really sort of grateful for that, because he has a very unique perspective on things. And you know, it's not very often that you read in a best selling business book that the key is empathy. Right?
Colleen Schnettler 3:42
Yeah.
Michele Hansen 3:42
Running a good business. Right.
And it reminds me a lot of something that I have been working on lately, too. So you know, we've talked about like getting people to reply, when you are trying to talk to them about the reasons why they use your product, which can be difficult.
Colleen Schnettler 4:02
Yeah.
Michele Hansen 4:03
And I think I mentioned a couple weeks ago, how we like so on our NPS survey like that, that pops up, I think, you know, relatively soon after someone uses the product, but not the first time and it's, you know, just rank us one to 10. And normally, we just look at this just to make sure we're getting mostly ...
Get Michele's free newsletter on customer research: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/mjwhansen
Michele Hansen 0:00
The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners.
This episode is sponsored by Koody. Koody helps under 35 in the UK make the most of their money. Koody's website houses free money management tools, expert guidance and financial advisors. Koody's online community is the place to be if you need help with your finances, or are a finance expert, check out their website at www.Koody.co.
Thank you again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit balsamiq.com/go/software-social
So you remember a couple of weeks ago how I was reading the Jobs to Be Done Playbook?
Colleen Schnettler 0:59
Yes, I sure do.
Michele Hansen 1:01
I'mstill reading that book. But I'm also reading another book. And I want to talk about that other book.
Colleen Schnettler 1:07
Okay.
Psychology of Money
Michele Hansen 1:09
So I finally started reading the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.
Colleen Schnettler 1:15
Okay.
Michele Hansen 1:16
Which has been on my to-read pile for about, I don't know, about six months or so now, since it came out early last fall. And it's such a good book, like I mean, even if you're not a finance person are particularly interested in personal finance, like, it's a book about money that's not about money. And it's and it's so good. So but there's just one quote and that reminded me of stuff that we talk a lot about together. So I'm just gonna read it to you.
"In a world where intelligence is hyper competitive, and many previous technical skills have become automated, competitive advantages tilt toward nuanced and soft skills, like communication, empathy, and perhaps most of all, flexibility."
Colleen Schnettler 2:08
Hmm, interesting.
Michele Hansen 2:10
And this reminded me a lot of what we talk about, because it's kind of like we've been talking about as it relates to your business. The one of the like, the biggest challenges for you is not the engineering side, it's like, knowing when you should, you know, change directions, or be flexible with with like, what your image of what the business and what the product is. And also like communicating with people about what it does and what it is and pulling that information out of them. And then and then how do we use empathy to figure all of those things out, which is, which is a really big focus for me, and I read this and, like, grabbed the nearest writing utensil near me, which normally I only write in pencils in books, like I will underline things, but I only had a pen, and I was like, This is so amazing, I'm gonna underline it and pen because I'm not gonna regret that, like. That just really stuck with me.
Colleen Schnettler 3:09
Interesting. Why was that in your psychology of money book?
Michele Hansen 3:13
Oh, I mean, so I don't know if you've ever read Morgan's writing.
Colleen Schnettler 3:16
No.
Michele Hansen 3:16
He writes a lot about the sort of psychology of business. He's a very different business writer. And I used to work with him so I've sort of been been around a lot of his thinking for a while. And I'm really sort of grateful for that, because he has a very unique perspective on things. And you know, it's not very often that you read in a best selling business book that the key is empathy. Right?
Colleen Schnettler 3:42
Yeah.
Michele Hansen 3:42
Running a good business. Right.
And it reminds me a lot of something that I have been working on lately, too. So you know, we've talked about like getting people to reply, when you are trying to talk to them about the reasons why they use your product, which can be difficult.
Colleen Schnettler 4:02
Yeah.
Michele Hansen 4:03
And I think I mentioned a couple weeks ago, how we like so on our NPS survey like that, that pops up, I think, you know, relatively soon after someone uses the product, but not the first time and it's, you know, just rank us one to 10. And normally, we just look at this just to make sure we're getting mostly ...
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TRANSCRIPT
Rob Walling 0:00
Welcome to this week's episode of MicroConf On Air. I'm your host, Rob Walling. And as always, every other Wednesday at 1pm Eastern 10am Pacific we live stream for about 30 minutes, we cover topics related to building and growing ambitious SaaS startups that bring us freedom, purpose, and allow us to maintain and value healthy relationships. We know that Silicon Valley way to raise buckets and buckets of money and go big or go home. But we believe in bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped founders who are making a change in their lives, maybe not changing the world, but at least changing their little corner of it. Thanks for joining me. Welcome back.
I am excited today to talk about the talk about Software Social, it's a podcast if you're not listening to it, you should be it got nominated for the Best podcast in the best podcast category in the MicroConf SaaS podcast awards. And I have the pleasure of having the co-hosts of that podcast on the show today. And we'll be talking about have some questions for them about getting started and the benefits they receive from podcasting and that kind of stuff. But if you are watching this, please chime in with your own questions. We'd love to have the listener engagement. And that's why level level and your engagement. And that's why we do live events like this, instead of just doing them asynchronously through a podcast feed. Before we dive in, I want to mention MicroConf remote, which happens at the end of the month, March 23rd 24th 25th. It's gonna be pretty amazing event producer Xander is really outdoing himself on this one, MicroConfremote.com if you want to get on the list for that, and we'll be putting tickets up for sale here in the next few days. It's an early stage event. And it's aimed at folks trying to get their really their first 100 customers and it's going to dive deep into four specific early stage marketing tactics. We're going to have folks on who have done a specific tactic to get early stage traction and example App Sumo or posting on Producthunt. And we're gonna have a founder or subject matter expert on who has done that very thing and we'll share as many numbers with us as they can. So it's going to be a real barnburner especially if you're early stage. I look forward to seeing you there here towards the end of the month.
With that, let's dive into Software Social. My two guests today are Michele Hansen. She's a co founder of Geocodio. And you might remember her from Startups for the Rest of Us Episode 524 called Bootstrapping a Commodity SaaS when she and her husband Mathias came on and spoke to me about their journey of growing Geocodio to a pretty amazing bootstrap business. They started that company in 2014 as a side project, she went full time in 2017. And as I've said, she's cohost of the software social podcast, which was nominated in several categories for 2020 SaaS podcast awards. She also recently launched a free newsletter about customer research for bootstrappers. So check her out at mjwhansen on Twitter, if you want to link to that.
And her co host is calling Colleen Schnettler who is @Leenyburger on Twitter. She's a Ruby on Rails consultant. She's spoken at both Rails Comp and RubyConf and loves being part of the dev community. She recently launched her first product, Simple File Upload, excuse me, which is in the Heroku app marketplace. If you haven't been following their story, it's super cool to hear this going from zero to $360 MRR in the span of about a month with this file uploader app. So again, software social podcast if you want to check that out. Colleen is a mother and a military spouse and loves chatting about all things software and business. Ladies, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me today.
Colleen Schnettler 3:45
Hi, thank you for having us. Yeah, it's great to have --
Rob Walling 3:49
issues are great had issues. Anders, it's great to have you here, as I read the outline where Xander says the int...
Next Episode
Customer Interview Part 1: The Interview
Michele Hansen 0:00
The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners.
This episode is sponsored by RosieLand. RosieLand is going meta and building a community for community builders through a newsletter community of course and soon to launch podcast. RosieLand brings together community builders for conversations wherever we can have them. And Rosie Sherry would love to chat with anyone who is building a community. Check it out at Rosie.Land.
Thank you again to Balsamiq for generously supporting our listeners this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, visit balsamiq.com/go/software-social
Michele Hansen
Hey, everyone. So we're doing something a little bit different this week. We've had a lot of conversations lately about doing customer interviews. And so we thought that it might be helpful to do a demo of one so that you can all understand what goes into one. So we have someone who has agreed to be interviewed. Who is using Colleen's product, Simple File Upload. And so I'm going to interview them today.
Alright, so here we go. We're gonna get started.
Michele Hansen
Hi, Is this Drew?
Drew 1:24
Yep, this is Drew.
Michele Hansen 1:26
Hi, Drew, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I really appreciate it.
Drew 1:30
No problem. Thanks for having me.
Michele Hansen 1:33
So before we get started, I just want to ask if you had any questions for me?
Drew 1:38
I'm not off the top of my head. I'm sure I'll find some along the way.
Michele Hansen 1:42
Okay, feel free to ask any questions that might come up.
Drew 1:45
Okay.
Michele Hansen 1:47
And just before we get started, I just want to make sure that it's okay, we record this interview.
Drew 1:51
Yeah, absolutely.
Michele Hansen 1:53
Okay, so um, so just to get started, Could you just tell me a little bit about like, how you came to even needing something like Simple File Upload in the first place?
Drew 2:05
Well, I'm, I'm building a product that is going to play currently has a, it's a job listing platform. So we wanted companies to be able to upload their logo, you know, to sit next to their listing. But our stage two of that we're actually adding in some more verbose user accounts, where users will have avatars, they'll be able to upload resumes and stuff like that. So we just really, we really saw that we were gonna need something that would allow us to upload all the files and handle them easily.
Michele Hansen 2:42
Yeah, that makes sense. Um, I'm curious, have you tried anything else to do this?
Drew 2:51
Yeah, we were using Firebase Storage, because we were using firestore as our database. So we started using Firebase Storage. Just because, you know, they, they were right next to each other seemed like an easy enough fit. And it was working at first. But we recently started going through a big migration to next js, which has, which is you know, some things are just handled a little differently from a code perspective. And Firebase Storage just did not work as easily. As it was, we found ourself running into a lot of walls, jumping through a lot of hoops just to make the simplest things work.
Michele Hansen 3:36
Can you tell me a little bit more about those hoops and, and walls that you ran into?
Drew 3:44
I'm trying to think a specific case. So we were we're really just trying to load the image before the component was loaded. You know, so it would be there when, when the page did load. But because of because of how they give you access to it with promises, and you know, all that fun stuff. I don't know if it's because we were implementing it wrong. Or maybe they just weren't ever really meant to work hand in hand, but we would get we were getting errors that, you know, it couldn't it couldn't do what we were asking because the data it needed, wasn't there yet when it was asking for it. And we really started to feel like we were just putting band aids on things to make something work. And this was really kind of our big push to make the platform more stable, not less. That was probably the biggest one.
Michele Hansen 4:45
Sounds like that was like frustrating. A lot of like, fits and starts for you guys.
Drew 4:51
Yeah, it really was because there we had it working. And it you know, it ...
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