Host Victoria Guido sits down with Steven Plappert, CEO of Forecastr, an online software designed to aid founders in financial modeling, which was born to help non-finance savvy founders understand and communicate their company's financial health. Despite the pandemic beginning right after Forecastr's launch in 2020, the company didn't pivot significantly thanks to extensive preparation and customer discovery before the launch. Steven delves into the operational and strategic aspects of Forecastr, highlighting the importance of balancing growth with financial sustainability, a consistent theme in their business strategy. Forecastr's significant development was integrating a strong human element into their software service, a move very well-received by their customers. Steven also outlines the company's key objectives, including cultivating a solid culture, achieving profitability, and exploring opportunities for exponential growth. Additionally, Steven discusses the importance of work-life balance, reflecting on his previous startup experience and emphasizing the necessity of balance for longevity and effectiveness in entrepreneurship. Victoria and Steven further explore how companies, including Forecastr and thoughtbot, incorporate these philosophies into their operations and culture. Forecastr (https://www.forecastr.co/) Follow Forecastr on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/forecastr/), X (https://twitter.com/forecastr), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/forecastrco/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ForecastrHQ), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/forecastr), or TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@forecastrco). Follow Steven Plappert on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-plappert-59477b3b/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant R¬obots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Steven Plappert, CEO of Forecastr, an online software that helps founders who hate building financial models in Excel actually understand their numbers, predict runway, and get funded. Steven, thank you for joining us. STEVEN: Hey, yeah, Victoria, thanks for having me. I'm stoked to be here. What's up, guys? VICTORIA: Just to get us warmed up here a little bit, can you tell me what's going on in your world? STEVEN: Well, you know, what is going on in my world? I had a great year last year, very healthy. I have a loving fiancé, and I'm getting married this year, which is going to be super fun. And, obviously, running a business, which takes up more than its fair share of my life. But yeah, it's early Jan, so I've been kind of reflecting on my life, and I got a lot to be grateful for, Victoria, I really do. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. You know, I used to work with a VP of strategic growth who likened forming partnerships with companies as getting into a marriage and building that relationship and that level of trust and communication that you have, which I think is really interesting. STEVEN: Oh, for sure. Emily always, Emily is my fiancé, she always says that, you know, Forecastr is essentially my mistress, if you will, you know what I mean? Because, like, that's [laughs] where the rest of my time goes, isn't it? Between hanging out with her and working on the company, you know, so... VICTORIA: So, how long have you been in a relationship with your business around Forecastr? [laughs] STEVEN: Yeah, right? Yeah [laughs]. Four years with this one. So, you know, we started it actually January 1st of 2020, going into the pandemic, although we didn't know it at the time. And so, we just celebrated our four-year anniversary a few weeks ago. VICTORIA: Well, that's really exciting. So, I'm curious about when you started Forecastr, what was the essential problem that you were trying to solve that you had identified in the market? STEVEN: I'd say the main problem we were trying to solve is that, like, specifically founders, you know, startup founders, really struggle to get, like, a clear picture of their financial health or, like, just the financial aspect of their business. And then they also struggle to communicate that to investors because most founders aren't finance people. You know, like, most people that start a company they don't do it because they're excellent in even, like, business or finance or anything like that. They usually do it because, like, they've identified some problem; they've lived it; they've breathed it, you know what I mean? They're some kind of subject matter expert. They may be good at sales, or marketing, or product. But a lot of times, finance is, like, a weak part for them, you know, it's not something that they're strong in. And so, they really have a hard time, like, understanding the viability of the business and communicating the financial outcome of the company to investors and stuff like that. And my co-founder Logan and I live that because all we did all day was built financial models in Excel for startup founders working for a CFO shop called Venture First. So, that's what we really saw. We really saw that just, you know, it's really hard for folks to get this clear picture. And we thought a big part of that, at least, was just the fact that, you know, there's no great software for it. It was just like, people are using Excel, which, you know, for people that are great in finance, you know, works but for most people, doesn't. And so, yeah, I think that that's what kind of inspired Logan and I to fly the coop there at Venture First and start a company. VICTORIA: No, that's really interesting. So, you found this problem. You knew that this was an issue for founders, and you built this hypothesis and started it. I think you said, like, right before 2020, right before the pandemic. So, were there any decisions you made that once you got more information or once you got started, you decided to pivot? And, like, what were those pivot points for you early on? STEVEN: There wasn't a lot of pivoting early on, I will say. And a part of that is because, like, this isn't my first company. I started a company right out of college back in 2013 called FantasyHub. In that company, we pivoted a lot and, largely because we didn't really put a lot of forethought into that company when we launched it, you know, we didn't do any customer discovery. We just launched the company. And then we skinned our knees a bunch of times [laughs] as we scaled that company up and had to change gears a lot of times. In Forecastr, you know, we had actually been kind of building towards starting the company for 18 months. So, Logan and I actually had the idea originally in middle of 2018. And we decided at that time, look, like, we're not going to go launch this company right away because we got full-time jobs, and we might as well de-risk it. So, we spent about 12 to 18 months just doing a lot of customer discovery, kind of in stealth mode while at Venture First. After about six months, we brought it up to Venture First and said, "Hey, here's this idea for a company we have. We want to go do it." You know, to Venture First's credit, you know, rather than viewing that territorially and saying, "Hey, you know, there's a great new product line for our company," they really inspired us to go forward with it. They said, "Hey, this is great. We want to support you guys." They put some money in. We did some more discovery. We built a prototype. So, long-winded way of saying that by the time we actually got to the starting line in 2020, you know, we had 18 months' worth of really clear thought put into this thing. And we had been building in this space for years, you know, building financial models and Excel for founders. So, I think we had a great understanding of the customer. We had a great understanding of the market and the needs. We'd done our diligence in terms of distribution and figuring out how we wanted to generate, you know, a good, healthy funnel for the business. And so, it was really just kind of a matter of execution at that point. And, you know, here we are four years in, and there really hasn't been anything that we've done that's really pivoted the business that much across those four years, except for one moment, which was actually six months ago. So, in July of 2023, we did finally have our first kind of pivot moment where one of the interesting things about Forecastr versus some other solutions in the market is that we're not just a product, just a SaaS platform. There's a real strong human layer to our solution. We've always felt like a SaaS plus human model was the right model for financial modeling for startups because a lot of these startup founders don't have finance expertise on staff or inherently. And about six months ago, it wasn't as much of a pivot as it was a double down. You know, we really doubled down on that human element, you know, and now that human element isn't just through, like, a white glove onboarding and some email support. But we actually do give our customers an analyst in addition to the software that's with them for the lifetime of their subscription and is with them every step of the way. And so, that's the only time that we really made, like, a significant change into what we were doing. And it was just, I think, off the back of three years of saying, "Hey, like [chuckles], people really love the human element, you know, let's lean into that." VICTORIA: I love that you saw that you couldn't solve this problem with just technology and that you planned for and grew the people element as well. And I'm curious: what other decisions did you have to make as you were growing the business, how to scale the tech side or the people side? STEVEN: So many decisions, right? And that's why I tell people all the time, I'm like, you know, I've been a founder for 11 years now. And, in my opinion, by far, the hardest part about being a founder is that all day, every day, you have to make a bunch of decisions. And you hardly ever have enough data to, like, know, you're making the right decision. So, you got to make a bunch of judgment calls, and ultimately, these are judgment calls that could make or break your company. And it's really taxing. It's taxing on the mind. It's stressful, you know. It is not easy. So, you know, I think it's one of the really hard things about being an entrepreneur. I would say one of the most consistent decisions that we've had to make at the highest level is decisions around kind of capital preservation, fiscal responsibility, and investing in the growth. So, categorically, it's like, on the one hand, you have a desire to build the company kind of sustainably, to get to profitability, to have a healthy working model, you know, where you have some real staying power, you know. And that line of thinking leads you to, you know, be conscientious about investments that you're making that, you know, increase the burn. On the other hand, you have a desire to grow the company very quickly. You know, you have certain benchmarks you need to meet, you know, in order to be attractive to venture capitalists. And so, you have decisions that you want to make, you know, to invest in that growth. And so, I think that's a very consistent theme that's played out across the four years is Logan and I trying to walk that tightrope between growing 2 to 3X year over year and being really mindful of the company's burn, you know, both for equity preservation and just to build the company in a more sustainable way. And I think as financial professionals and founders, the finance person in Logan and I a lot of times wants to be more conservative. The founder in Logan and I, a lot of times, wants to be more aggressive. And so, we kind of just, like, let those two forces kind of play themselves out. And I think it creates, like, a nice, healthy tension. VICTORIA: That is really interesting, yeah. And sometimes you have to make a guess [chuckles] and go with it and then see the results of what happens. So, you're a financial forecasting company. What kind of, like, key results or objectives are you working towards this year with Forecastr? STEVEN: Yeah, great question. So, we're really mindful of this kind of stuff. I'd say, you know, it's something that we really consider at a deep level is, like, you have to ultimately set objectives, which are very aligning and clarifying, you know, at an executive level, and then those should kind of filter all the way down through the organization. Because so much, I think, of building a company is you have to kind of punch above your weight. You have to grow faster than [chuckles] the resources that you're putting into it might expect or whatever. I mean, you have limited resources, limited time, but you got to go really quickly. I think alignment is a big part of that, and that starts with setting clear objectives. So, we actually have three very clear objectives, really four. The first one is living up to our cultural values. You know, we're a culture-first organization. We believe that, like, culture, you know, kind of eats strategy for breakfast, that age-old kind of cliché, but it's true. It's just like, I think, you know, if you build a really good culture, people are just...they're happier. They're more productive. You get more done. So, that is our number one strategic objective. Number two is to become profitable. Like I mentioned, we want to become profitable. We want to build a sustainable company. So, by setting that objective, it kind of forces us to be conscientious about spend and only invest in areas that we think is, like, a one plus one equals three. Our third strategic objective is reach 5 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of the year. We're at 2.4 right now. We want to at least double year over year. That's kind of, like, the minimum threshold to keep playing the venture game. And then number four is unlock exponential growth opportunities. So, we definitely adopt the philosophy of, like, hey, we've got a model. It's working. We've got 700 customers, you know, we've got two and a half million in annual recurring revenue. So, like, 80% of our focus should be on becoming profitable and hitting $5 million in annual recurring revenue. Like, that's, like, the bread and butter there, just keep doing what's working. But 20% of our attention should be paid to, well, what could we be doing to, like, triple down on that, you know, to really start to create an exponential growth curve? And, for us, that stuff and, like, kind of the data in investor space, like, there's a lot of interesting things that we could do, of course, as long as it's consensual, anonymized, et cetera, safe and secure, you know, with the kind of data that we have on private companies, you know, anonymously benchmarking companies against their peers, things like that. And I think there's a really big opportunity that we have to serve investors as well, you know, and to create a better investor experience when it comes to financial reporting, also something that we think can unlock exponential growth. So, those are the four objectives that we have going into this year. VICTORIA: Well, I really appreciate that you had culture at number one, and it reminds me, you know, you said it's old adage, but it's true, and you can verify that in reports like the State of DevOps Report. The number one indicator of a high-security environment is the level of trust and culture that you have within your company, not necessarily the technology or tools that you're using. So, being a financial company, I think you're in a good position [chuckles] to have, like, you know, protect all those assets and protect your data. And yeah, I'm curious to hear more about what you said about just unlocking, like, exponential growth. It's hard to keep both the let's keep the lights on and keep running with what we have, and make room for these bigger strategic initiatives that are really going to help us grow as a company and be more sustainable over time. So, how do you make room for both of those things in a limited team? STEVEN: Yeah, it's a great question. And it's not easy, I would say. I mean, I think the way we make room for it probably on the frontend is just, like, being intentional about creating that space. I mean, ultimately, putting unlocking exponential growth opportunities on the strategic company roadmap, which is the document that kind of memorializes the four objectives that I just went through, that creates space inherently. It's one of four objectives on the board. And that's not just, like, a resource that sits, you know, in a folder somewhere. We use the OKR system, you know, which is a system for setting quarterly objectives and things like that. And these strategic objectives they make it on our OKR board, which filters down into our work. So, I think a big piece of creating the space is just as an executive and as a leader, you know, being intentional about [chuckles] putting it on the board and creating that space. The thing that you have to do, though, to be mindful is you have to make sure that you don't get carried away with it. I mean, like you said, at the end of the day, succeeding in a business requires a proper balancing of short-term and long-term priorities. You know, if you're focused too much on the short term, you know, you can kind of hamstring yourself in the long run. Yeah, maybe you build, like, a decent business, but you don't quite, you know, reach your highest potential because you're not investing in some of those things that take a while to develop and come to play in the long run. But if you're too focused on the long run, which is what these exponential opportunities really are, you know, it's very easy to lose your way [laughs] in the short term, and it's very easy to die along the way. You know, I do think of startups as much of a game of survival as anything. I always say survive until you thrive. And so, that's where the 80/20 comes in, you know, where we just kind of say, "Hey, look, like, 80% of our time and energy needs to be devoted to kind of short-term and less risky priorities, such as doubling down on what's already working. 20% of our time, thereabouts, can be devoted to some of these more long-term strategic objectives, like unlocking exponential growth. And I think it just takes a certain mindfulness and a certain intentionality to, like, every week when you're organizing your calendar, and you're, like, talking with your team and stuff like that, you're just always trying to make sure, hey, am I roughly fitting into that framework, you know? And it doesn't have to be exact. Some weeks, it may be more or less. But I think that's kind of how we approach it, you know, conceptually. VICTORIA: Oh, what a great perspective. I think that I really like hearing those words about, like, balance and, like, being intentional. MID-ROLL AD: Now that you have funding, it's time to design, build, and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Liftoff brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we'll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today's new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow today. Get in touch at thoughtbot.com/liftoff. VICTORIA: You mentioned earlier that you're getting married, so, like, maybe you can talk about how are you intentional with your own time and balancing your personal life and making room for these, you know, big life changes while dealing with also the stress of being in kind of a survivor mode with the company. STEVEN: Like I mentioned, this is my second company, and Emily, bless her heart, my fiancé, she's been with me my entire entrepreneurial career. We started dating the first month that I started my first company, FantasyHub. And in that company, I ran that company for three years. We took it through Techstars down in Austin. It was a consumer gaming company. Interesting company. It ended up being a failure but, like, super interesting and set me on my path. Yeah, I was a complete and total workaholic. I worked around the clock. It was a fantasy sports company, so weekends were our big time, and I worked seven days a week. I worked, like, a lot of 80-hour-plus weeks. And, you know, looking back on it, it was a lot of fun, but it was also miserable. And I also burned out, you know, about six months before the company failed. And had the company not failed when it did, you know, I don't know what the future would have held for us. I was really out of balance. You know, I had deprioritized physical health. I hadn't worked out in years. I wasn't healthy. I had deprioritized mental health. Emily almost left me as a part of that company because I wasn't giving her any attention. And so, you know, when that company failed, and I was left with nothing, you know, and I just was kind of, like, sitting there licking my wounds [laughs], you know, in my childhood bedroom at my parents' house, you know, I was like, you know what? Like, I don't know that that was really worth it, and I don't know that that was the right approach. And I kind of vowed...in that moment, I was like, you know, look, I'm a startup founder. I love building these companies, so I'm, like, definitely going to do it again, but I'm not going to give it my entire life. Like, regardless of your religious beliefs, like, we at least have one life to live. And in my opinion, there's a lot more to life than [chuckles] just cranking out work and building companies. Like, there's a whole world to explore, you know, and there's lots of things that I'm interested in. So, this time around, I'm very thoughtful about creating that balance in my life. I set hard guidelines. There's hard, like, guardrails, I guess I should say, when I start and end work, you know, and I really hold myself accountable to that. Emily holds me accountable to that. And I make sure that, like, I work really hard when I'm at work, but I take the mask off, you know, so to speak, when I'm at home. And I just kind of...I don't deprioritize the rest of my life like I did when I was running FantasyHub. So, I think it's super important. I think it's a marathon building companies. I think you got to do that. I think it's what's in the best interest of the company and you as an individual. So, I think it's something I do a lot better this time around. And I think we're all better off for it, not the least of which is, like, one of our six cultural values is live with balance, and that's why. You know, because, like, we adopt the philosophy that you don't have to work yourself to death to build a great company. You can build a great company working a pretty reasonable workload, you know what I mean? It's not easy. It is kind of a pressure cooker trying to get that much done in that little time, but I think we're living proof that it works. VICTORIA: And if you don't make time to rest, then your ability to make good decisions and build high-quality products really starts to suffer eventually, like, I think, is what you saw at the end there. So, I really appreciate you sharing that and that personal experience. And I'm glad to see the learning from that, and making sure that's a core part of your company values the next time you start a company makes a lot of sense to me. STEVEN: Yeah, totally, you know, yeah. And I've always remembered, although this might be an extreme and a privileged extreme, but, you know, J.P. Morgan, the person, was famous for saying, "I get more done in 9 months than I get in 12," in relationship to the fact that he would take his family over to Europe for, like, three months of the year and, like, summer in Europe and not work. And so, while that's probably an unrealistic, you know, ideal for a startup founder, there's some truth to it, you know what I mean? Like you said, like, you got to rest. And, in fact, if you rest more, you know, yeah, you might be working less hours. You'll actually get more done. You're a lot clearer while you're at work. It's a mindset game. It's a headspace game. And the better you can put yourself in that good mindset, that good headspace, the more effective you are. Yeah, there's just a lot of wisdom to that approach. VICTORIA: Right. And, you know, thoughtbot is a global company, so we have employees all over the world. And I think what's interesting about U.S-based companies, I'm interested in how Forecastr might even help you with this, is that when you start a company, you basically form, like, a mini-government for your employees. And you have input over to how much they paid, how much healthcare they get. You have input over their hours and how much leave and everything. And so, trying to balance all those costs and create a good environment for your employees and make sure they have enough time for rest and for personal care. How does Forecastr kind of help you also imagine all of those costs [laughs] and make sense of what you can offer as a company? STEVEN: I would say the main way that we help folks do that, and we really do play in that space, is just by giving you a clear picture of what the future holds for your company from a financial perspective. I mean, it's one of the things that I think is such a superpower when it comes to financial modeling, you know, it can really help you make better decisions along these lines because, like, what does a financial model do? A financial model just simulates your business into the future, specifically anything related to the cash flow of your business, you know, cash in, cash out, revenue expenses, and the like. And so, your people are in there, and what they're paid is in there and, you know, your revenue and your expenses, your cash flow, your runway, all that's in the model. One of the things I feel like we do really help people do is just get a clearer picture of like, hey, what do the next 3, 6, 12, you know, 24 months look like for my company? What is my runway? When am I going to run out of money? What do I need to do about that? Can I afford to give everybody a raise, or can I afford to max out my benefits plan or whatever that is? It's like, you can make those assessments more easily. You know, if you have a financial model that actually makes sense to you that you can look at and say, oh, okay, cool. Yeah, I can offer that, like, Rolls Royce benefits plan and still have 18 months' worth of runway, or maybe I can't [laughs]. And I have to say, "Sorry, guys, you know, like, we're cash-constrained, and this is all we can do for now. But maybe when we raise that next round and when we hit these growth milestones, you know, we can expand that." So yeah, I think it's all, for us, about just, like, helping founders make better decisions, whether they be your decisions around employees and benefits, et cetera, or growth, or fundraising, you know, through the power of, like, financial health and hygiene. VICTORIA: Great. Thank you. I appreciate you letting me bring it all the way back [laughs]. Yeah, let me see. Let me go through my list of questions and see what else we have here. Do you have any questions for me or thoughtbot? STEVEN: Yeah. I mean, so, like, how do you guys think about this kind of stuff? Like, you know, you said thoughtbot's a global company at this point, but the name would imply, you know, a very thoughtful one. So, I'd be curious in y'alls kind of approach to just, like, culture and balance and some of these things that we're talking about kind of, like, straddling that line, you know, between, like, working really hard, which you have to do to build a great company but, you know, being mindful of everything else that life has to offer. VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, I think thoughtbot, more than any other company I've ever worked for, really emphasizes the value of just, like, people really want you to have a work-life balance and to be able to take time off. And, you know, I think that for a company that does consulting and we're delivering at a certain quality, that means that we're delivering at the quality where if someone needs to take a week off for a vacation, there's enough documentation; there's enough backup support for that service to not be impacted. So, that gives us confidence to be able to take the time off [chuckles], and it also just ends up being a better product for our clients. Like, our team needs to be well-rested. They need to have time to invest in themselves and learning the latest technology, the latest upgrades, contributing to open source, and writing about the problems they're seeing, and contributing back to the community. So, we actually make time every Friday to spend on those types of projects. It's kind of like you were saying before, like, you get as much done in four days as many companies get in five because that time is very highly focused. And then you're getting the benefit of, you know, continually investing in new skills and making sure the people you're working with are at the level that you're paying for [laughs]. STEVEN: Yeah, right. No, that's super cool. That's super cool. VICTORIA: Yeah, and, actually, so we're all remote. We're a fully remote company, and we do offer some in-person events twice a year, so that's been a lot of fun for me. And also, getting to, like, go to conferences like RubyConf and RailsConf and meeting the community has been fantastic. Yeah, you have a lot of value of self-management. So, you have the ability to really adjust your schedule and communicate and work with what meets your needs. It's been really great. STEVEN: Yeah, I love that, too. And we're also a remote company, and I think getting together in person, like you just talked about it, is so important. We can only afford to do it once a year right now as an earlier-stage company. But as amazing as, you know, Zoom and things like this are, it's like, there's not really a perfect replacement for that in-person experience, you know. VICTORIA: I agree, and I also agree that, like, once a year is probably enough [laughter]. That's a great amount of time. Like, it really does help because there are so many ways to build relationships remotely, but sometimes, at least just meeting in person once is enough to be like, oh yeah, like, you build a stronger connection, and I think that's great. Okay. Let me see. What other questions do we have? Final question: is there anything else that you would like to promote? STEVEN: I guess it's my job to say we are a really awesome financial modeling platform and team in general. So, if you are a startup founder or you know a startup founder out there that just could use some help with their financial model, you know, it is definitely something that we'd love to do. And we do a ton of education and a ton of help. We've got a ton of resources that are even freely available as well. So, our role in the market is just to get out there and help folks build great financial models, whether that be on Forecastr or otherwise, and that's kind of the approach that we take to it. And our philosophy is like, if we can get out there and do that, you know, if we can be kind of the go-to resource for folks to build great models regardless, you know, of what that means for them, a rising tide will float all boats, and our boat the most of which, hopefully. So [laughs], if you need a model, I'm your guy. VICTORIA: Thank you so much for sharing that. And I have a fun question for you at the end. What is your favorite hike that you've been on in the last three years or ever, however long you want to go back? [laughs] STEVEN: Well, I would say, you know, I did have the great pleasure this year of returning to the Appalachian Trail to hike the Roan Highlands with a friend of mine who was doing a thru-hike. So, a friend of mine did a southbound thru-hike on the A.T. this year, went from Maine to Georgia. Good friend of mine. And I had not been on the Appalachian Trail since I did a thru-hike in 2017. So, I had not returned to the trail or to that whole community. It's just a very special community. It really is a group of, like, really awesome, eclectic people. And so, yeah, this last year, I got to go down to the Roan Highlands in Tennessee. It's a beautiful, beautiful area of Tennessee and in the Southeast, rolling hills and that kind of thing. And hike, for him, for, like, three or four days and just be a part of his journey. Had a ton of fun, met some awesome people, you know, great nature, and totally destroyed my body because I was not prepared to return to the grueling nature of the Appalachian Trail. So yeah, I'd have to say that one, Victoria. I'd have to say that was my favorite in the last couple of years for sure. VICTORIA: Yeah, it's beautiful there. I've hiked certain parts of it. So, I've heard that obviously the Appalachian Trail, which is the eastern side of the United States, was the earlier trail that was developed because of the dislocation of people over time and that they would create the trail by getting to a peak and then looking to another peak and being like, "Okay, that's where I'm going to go." So, when you say it's grueling, I was, like, a lot of up and down hills. And then what I've heard is that the Pacific Trail on the western part of the United States, they did more of figuring out how to get from place to place with minimizing the elevation change, and so it's a much more, like, sustainable hike. Have you ever heard that? STEVEN: Oh yeah, that is 100% true. In terms of, like, the absolute change in elevation, not, like, the highest elevation and the lowest, just, like, the change up and down, there's twice as much going up and down on the A.T. as there is on the Pacific Crest Trail. And the Pacific Crest Trail is graded for park animals, so it never gets steeper than, like, a 15% grade. So, it's real groovy, you know, on the PCT where you can just get into a groove, and you can just hike and hike and hike and hike for hours, you know, versus the A.T. where you're going straight up, straight down, straight up, straight down, a lot of big movements, very exhausting. I've hiked a good chunk of the PCT and then, obviously, the whole A.T., so I can attest, yes, that is absolutely true. VICTORIA: I feel like there's an analogy behind that and what Forecastr does for you. Like, you'll be able [laughs] to, like, smooth out your hills a little bit more [laughs] with your finances, yeah. STEVEN: [laughs] Oh, I love that. Absolutely. Well, and I've honestly, like, I've often likened, you know, building a company and hiking the Appalachian Trail because it is one of those things where one of the most clarifying things about hiking a long trail is you just have this one monster goal that's, you know, that's months and months ahead of you. But you just got to get up every day, and you just got to grind it out. And every day is grindy, and it's hard, you know, but every day you just get one step closer to this goal. And it's one of the cool things about a trail is that you kind of steep yourself in that one goal, you know, one-track mind. And, you know, like we were saying earlier, there's so much more to life. So, you can't and probably shouldn't do that with your startup. You should continue to invest in other aspects of your life. But maybe while you're within the four walls of your office or when you open up that laptop and get to work on your computer, you know, if you take that kind of similar approach where you got this big goal that's, you know, months or years away but every day you just got to grind it out; you just got to work hard; you got to do what you can to get 1 step closer. And, you know, one day you'll wake up and you'll be like, oh shit, like, I'm [laughs] pretty close, you know what I mean? Yeah, I think there's definitely some similarities to the two experiences. VICTORIA: I appreciate that, yeah. And my team is actually it's more like starting up a business within thoughtbot. So, I'm putting together, like, my three-year plan. It's very exciting. And I think, like, those are the types of things you want to have. It's the high-level goal. Where are we going? [chuckles] Are we on our track to get there? But then day to day, it's like, okay, like, let's get these little actions done that we need to do this week [laughs] to build towards that ultimate goal. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Steven. I really enjoyed our conversation. Is there anything final you want to say? STEVEN: I just want to thank you, Victoria. I think it's a wonderful podcast that you guys put on, and I really appreciate the opportunity to be here and to chat with you. You're lovely to talk to. I enjoyed the conversation as well, and I hope everyone out there did, also. So, let's make it a great 2024. VICTORIA: Thank you so much. Yeah, this is actually my second podcast recording of the year, so very exciting for me. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for joining again. So, you can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on X, formerly known as Twitter, @victori_ousg. And this podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.

Hosts Will Larry and Victoria Guido are joined by Wes Bos, a full-stack developer, course creator, and podcaster. Wes shares his web development journey, from blogging and creating a successful book on Sublime Text to developing his popular online courses and hosting the Syntax podcast. He talks about the spontaneous start of his teaching career, his approach to creating content that is both approachable and practical, and the importance of making web development accessible to all learners. Wes discusses the evolution of his career, detailing his experiences in teaching at Ladies Learning Code and HackerYou and how he transitioned into selling online courses. He emphasizes the significance of offering quality content in his free and paid courses, ensuring his teachings are relatable and helpful for real-world applications. Wes also delves into the technical aspects of managing his course platform, discussing the benefits of having complete control over his content and the challenges he faces, such as content theft and logistical issues in distributing his popular sticker packs. The conversation shifts to the role of AI in web development, where Wes highlights its impact on coding efficiency and the need for developers to adapt to AI integration in applications. He advises beginners in web development to be wary of over-relying on AI, emphasizing the importance of understanding the fundamentals of coding. The episode concludes with Wes offering advice for content creators in the tech space, stressing the importance of sharing knowledge and its positive impact on the community. He encourages listeners to stay passionate and continuously learn in the ever-evolving field of web development. Wes' Online Courses (https://wesbos.com/courses) Sublime Text Power User Book (https://wesbos.com/sublime-text-book) Syntax Podcast (https://syntax.fm/) Ladies Learning Code (https://www.canadalearningcode.ca/) HackerYou (Now Juno College) (https://junocollege.com/) Follow Wes Bos on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/wesbos/) or X (https://twitter.com/wesbos). Visit his website: wesbos.com (https://wesbos.com/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giants Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. VICTORIA: And I'm your other host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Wes Bos, a Full-Stack Developer, Coursemaker, and Podcaster. Wes, thank you for joining us. WES: Thanks for having me; stoked to be here. VICTORIA: Can you tell me, you know, on top of all of these skills that you have, podcasting, you're making courses; you're also doing development full-time; I heard that you've also picked up a new hobby in making stickers and, like, designing merch for aligning with some of your marketing goals. WES: Yeah. All right. So, my name is Wes Bos. I'm a full-stack developer from Canada, and I do primarily two things: I make web development training courses, and I have a podcast called Syntax in which we release three episodes a week and talk about everything related to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Node, just web development and things that surround it. WILL: I want to see how you started in those courses. I know a little bit about your story because I remember when I first started in development. I think it's gotten a little better, but I was the only junior at one of the first companies I started at. And I went through a bootcamp and then became a junior. And I was like, how do I develop? Like, how do I get better? And they were like, "Wes Bos, his course. WES: [laughs] WILL: Go to Wes Bos." [laughs] And so, I did that, and it helped me tremendously. But it's interesting. I just want to see how you started. I know some of your background with ladies who code, and I think HackerYou. So yeah, wherever you want to start, bring us into the beginning of Wes Bos. WES: So, I've been a web developer forever, a good chunk of my life. And back in, like, the blogging days, I was doing a lot of posting blog posts and whatnot. And I had a couple of the blog posts do super well. And back in the day, it was like, you get tons of traffic, and you try to, like, seize the moment. Like, oh, there's, like, 50, 000 people on my website right now. Like, how do I, like, take advantage of that? So, what I did was I threw up a quick, little...it was a blog post about Sublime Text, which was the hot, new editor at the time. And I threw up a little thing. I'm like, I'm writing a book about Sublime Text. And I threw up a little sign-up where people could pop their email in and hear a little bit more about it. And I got, like, 2,000 signups for that in a matter of a couple of days. And I thought like, oh, all right, well, now I got to make this thing, you know, like, I just [chuckles] I didn't have any plans to make it. I had kind of been going around in my head, but I decided to write the book. And then as part of the book, I gave a bunch of videos, and I realized I liked the video part a lot better. And it makes a lot of sense to show people what you are doing when you're talking about code and code-related things. So, I came out with a bunch of videos for that as well. People loved the videos, and I thought, oh, let's just keep doing this. So, I made a bunch of free courses, a bunch of paid courses. And kind of at the same time as well, I was teaching at this thing called Ladies Learning Code, which kind of transitioned into a bootcamp that I did the initial content for, which was called HackerYou. And, like, people kept giving me the same feedback into like, I'm not a traditional teacher. I'm just a web developer that has learned on his own and figured things out. And a lot of people said, like, " I really like the way that you explain things. Like, it makes so much sense the way that you explain it." And I figured out that, at least for some people, they really like the way that I explain something, and I will continue to do that. So, that's pretty much how I got into it. It's just explaining how it works in my head, putting it onto video, and putting it out there for web developers to learn from. WILL: Yeah. And that was one of the reasons why I think I was so successful in my career is because there's a...Just learning development is hard; let's be honest. It's just hard. And I would run into people that would honestly just talk over my head, and I was like, I have no idea what you're saying, but okay. But your courses, it was like, oh, okay, I understand that. That makes sense. Like, I can't remember the name of it, but the React beginner course I've been to that one probably three times just because I'm like, it's making sense. And every time, I get more and more and more out of it. So, I can definitely agree that the way you teach your courses it brings it down to earth. Like, I think maybe anybody could pick it up, I would say, because it's like you're talking to them, so yeah. WES: It's really important to me that everything is approachable. And I will often explain things, like, I'm the same as you. There's extremely smart people out there, and they'll just talk at you about all of these things. And it's just like, I have no idea what you're talking about. Those words don't make any sense to me. And it's not that I dumb it down. It's just like, the way that it makes sense in my brain is not the same way that they're talking. So, the way that I explain it is just how it makes sense to me, and people tend to really enjoy that type of thing. And I really hope that I can make a lot of this web development stuff approachable. And sometimes it's not the, like, exact perfect explanation of how something really works, the explanation you need to understand how these pieces fit together and when you would actually use something. That's the other part of a lot of the stuff that I teach as well is that I have this big thing on one of my course websites, which is like, no foo bar baz. Because when you're learning to code, you stumble across all these foo bar baz where people are making functions and passing the values in, and they're called meta-syntactic variables. The whole idea is that because foo bar baz mean nothing, you're able to take it out of context and focus on what is happening, and I'm quite the opposite. Show me a real example of a bunch of dogs, or a sandwich, or a button that you can click on that fetches data. And I always try to make my examples something that is real world enough that you could understand, okay, I see where this might be used rather than something in isolation because I find that myself very frustrating. VICTORIA: What's one of your favorite examples or, like, example scenarios that you use when you're designing a code problem to teach people? WES: It really comes down to, like, what you're teaching, but the ongoing joke on the podcast that we have is that I always use sandwiches because a sandwich is a great metaphor for a lot of things in life. So, for example, when we talk about streaming versus buffering, and we talk about, like, you're eating the sandwich as it's coming into your house versus you're cutting it into pieces and eating it. Or in my upcoming TypeScript course, I have a bunch of examples where there can be multiple types of food, and a sandwich can be one of them, and a pizza can be another one. And that kind of shows how to use generics, right? Like, you might have a database entry that is a food entry, but you want to further that to be a sandwich or a pizza, and not all of them are that simple, right? Like, a lot of them are also just related to web development, which is like, here's buttons that you need to click on, and here's data that you need to fetch, and here's a database schema that needs to happen. And if that's the case, I try to, like, make it real world enough where you can say, okay, I understand that this is how it works. Now, how can I apply that to my own idea? Because often, people learning to code have their own ideas. They just want to make something to solve their own problems. WILL: How did you learn to code? Because I don't think you did a traditional route. I remember on one of your podcasts, you said your dad was in IT, but I don't think you went to a traditional route. So, how did you learn to code? WES: It's a really long story. But the story is that I got into computers at an early age. I got into designing T-shirts and CD art for a lot of, like, hardcore bands in the music scene when I was in high school, and that parlayed into Myspace. Myspace taught me CSS. And then I've always been, like, fairly entrepreneurial, so that I parlayed into running my own business, making websites. And I've just been at it for so long that I've sort of taught myself all the pieces that I need over the years. I do have a degree in what's called business technology management, which is, it's a business degree but no coding or things involved. It was more, like, higher level. There was some, like, networking IP addresses, and then there was a lot more, like, business management teams, procurement, SAP, things like that, so none of the web development stuff I have learned comes from that degree. It's all self-taught. VICTORIA: So, you found that you had the skill around explaining web development concepts, and then that led to you creating your own business and having your own, like, coursework out there and everything through your podcast. So, maybe you could share a little bit what that journey has been like. WES: It's been a very long journey. I'm not sure which part you want to hear about, but I've been selling courses for probably about nine years. And I have sold quite a bit because I also offer about half of them for free. So, I have a bunch of free ones where people take it, and they're like, "Oh, this is amazing. I'm going to take the paid one that he has as well." And I spend a lot of time making sure that the free ones and the paid ones are the same quality. Like, it's not just some crappy 10-minute course that I'm using as a lead magnet to get you in the door. Like, they're actually pretty good. So, it's been really fun. Like, I've built a whole course platform that sells all of my courses, and you can view them and stream them, and there's invoicing and checkouts built into it. So, like now, if somebody wants to get into selling courses, there's lots of options out there where you can sign up for some SaaS and upload your course, and you're up and running. But at the time when I had done it, there was nothing like that out there, so I had to build my own whole course platform. And I've really enjoyed working on that over the years and upgrading it, and changing it, and rewriting, and adding features to it. VICTORIA: Yeah, that's really interesting. I like that you kept the quality the same on the free and the paid versions. That's a really interesting, I think, like, a reflection of your own values. And then, I'm curious: now that there are other hosting options out there, is there anything that would make you decide to switch to one of those platforms? Because it also sounds like you're getting a lot of enjoyment about managing the one you have yourself, and there might be some other benefits to that. WES: Yeah, probably not. First, because they take a cut, and a lot of these course platforms are not there to promote your business. They're there to promote their own business. And it's the same thing with YouTube. When your YouTube video ends, what does YouTube recommend? They usually recommend what you think you're going to watch, which is sometimes somebody else's video, right? And not having full control over how the courses are sold and consumed, to me, can be a little bit frustrating because you can't do different ideas that you have. So, like, one of the ideas I had early on is I was getting lots of email from people in different countries, you know, in Argentina, and in Brazil, and in India. And they say, "Hey, like, I would love to take your course, but the cost of the course is a day, a week's wages, and that's way too expensive for me." So, I implemented this thing called parity purchasing power. I didn't come up with the economic concept of it, but I was the first person to offer different prices based on the country that the user was coming from. And, A, that's a cool thing to do for people, and B, it helps sales tremendously. And if I was using some course platform, some of the course platforms now have that in place; it's table stakes, right? But at the time, I don't think I would have done as well if I hadn't coded that in myself. So, having full control over absolutely everything is really important to me. And also, like, nobody wants a teacher who doesn't actually build stuff, you know? No one wants to learn from the guy who just, like, skimmed the docs and came up with a crappy, little example. Like, you want to learn from people who are daily writing code and building real-world applications that, like, I have to support my family on this application, you know, it's pretty important, and it's pretty real world. WILL: Yeah, and just following you, I think...and I don't know if you would describe yourself like that, but I think you're, like, a tinkerer. Like, you just...some of the ideas you have is just like, let me just try it out and see if it works. And so, that's amazing that you're able to do that. Where does that side come from? Was it from your dad being in IT, or where did that come from? WES: Probably. Apart from growing up and seeing my dad just fix stuff and do stuff, but I'm just a constantly curious and hungry guy. And I absolutely love dipping into different tech and not even just tech but, like, I built this whole recording studio that's soundproofed. I built the whole thing myself just because I love to learn new things and to dive deep and learn how everything works. And I think a lot of developers very easily burn out. And I always like to say, like, my competitive advantage is not burning out. So, I'm very cognizant of that might happen at some point. And part of the cure for me is I need to be excited about this type of stuff, and I need to be using it. And being able to build new things, and dip into tech, and learn constantly is what keeps me excited and motivated about web development. WILL: Wow. So, you say you built your office. So, you built the entire, like, from concrete up? WES: Not concrete up. So, this was like a...I'm in a basement right now, and I put up some walls. And I talked to a bunch of sound engineers about soundproofing. So, the whole ceiling is not mechanically fastened to the actual ceiling. It's like kind of, like, a floating ceiling, which is pretty cool. And then there's soundproofing material in the walls and outside the walls, and special drywall, and all kinds of interesting stuff to make it sound as good as possible and be as quiet as possible in here because I have three kids. WILL: [laughs] I totally understand the three kids... WES: [laughs] WILL: And the noise that that brings. So, that's amazing. And I think you bring up something that we don't talk about enough in development is that mental health side. Like, just trying to figure out, what do you like to do outside of your computer, away from your computer? So, that's neat that you're working on that, and that that's probably why you haven't burnt out compared to other people. But yeah, kudos to you. That's yeah, that's pretty interesting that you have hobbies outside of that. WES: Yeah, I find that pretty important to sort of keep that balance. Otherwise, if you're doing it day in, day out, especially if you're working on the same thing...like, another benefit I have is I'm always dipping into new stuff, and that keeps it really interesting. But there's plenty of other creators out there that go too hard, and they go 24/7 on it, and then you don't hear from them for six months. And it's because they got burnt out on it, which is very scary to me that that might happen to me at some point. So, I try...I don't know if I've got it figured out, but I try to combat that as much as possible. VICTORIA: And I'm wondering how you balance just that need to create content because it seems to me that web development is constantly changing, right? And so, content that you created a year ago, maybe you got to go back and update everything. So, how do you manage that and keep your content fresh with all the ongoing changes in web development? WES: Yeah, unfortunately, sometimes it means you just have to deprecate content, or you say, "Hey, this is not the content you should be taking right now," because some of the courses take four or five months to record, and after a year or two, they can be out of date. So, I'll mark them as deprecated if they need to be. But I'm just kind of always working on something new, both with my courses as well as, like, the podcast. We always just have...that's the kind of the benefit of the job as well is that, like, yeah, it changes all the time, but there's always new stuff to talk about. As somebody who makes a living explaining how new things work, it's kind of nice. VICTORIA: That's great. You got a good pipeline of content to talk about [laughs] and to update for, so that's great. Mid-Roll Ad: As life moves online, bricks-and-mortar businesses are having to adapt to survive. With over 18 years of experience building reliable web products and services, thoughtbot is the technology partner you can trust. We provide the technical expertise to enable your business to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. We start by understanding what’s important to your customers to help you transition to intuitive digital services your customers will trust. We take the time to understand what makes your business great and work fast yet thoroughly to build, test, and validate ideas, helping you discover new customers. Take your business online with design‑driven digital acceleration. Find out more at tbot.io/acceleration or click the link in the show notes for this episode. VICTORIA: You know, you're creating this content for web developers, and you have this kind of global audience now. What's on the horizon for you? What are you planning for in the next couple of months or in the next five years? WES: Yeah, next couple of months, I have a TypeScript course I've been working on for over a year now. I've been sort of cranking on it, and that will be out. And then we have a podcast that we are going to be launching a video version of pretty soon, which I'm pretty excited about. We've been kind of going pretty hard. We just hired a producer. We've been going pretty hard on, like, the social clips type of thing. So, that's coming down the pipeline as well. And five years, I have no idea. I think I always say, like, a five-year plan is a five-year guess. You know, like, you can plan ahead for six months, a year, and have some good goals. But in web development, like, a year ago, AI, maybe a year, like, 13 months ago, the AI stuff was nothing but a murmur, right? And now, the AI stuff is a good chunk of what I talk about and what I teach. So, you just kind of got to react to it; otherwise, if you have a five-year plan, then you're not going to be able to catch these new things that pop up. WILL: How do you pick? Because I know you said you have a TypeScript course coming out. How do you pick new topics to talk about? Because there are so many. There's testing you can talk about. There's React Native. There are so many areas you can go to. How do you pick and choose that? WES: It's actually pretty easy because it's what I'm excited about and what I want to tell people and teach people, like, what they should be learning. So, like, every single one of my courses is tech that I myself am using and that I want to help teach other people, so it's pretty straightforward. It's not like I have some sort of, like, stats of, like, what is the most popular framework out there, and, like, obviously, that does play into it like a Next.js course. I've used Next.js in a couple of my courses. I'll probably do another Next.js course. But that's both because I enjoy it and because it's stable enough and popular enough that people would want to buy it. I'm not going to be creating a Java course or a Rust course or something like that because I know that's popular right now, and it would probably sell well. It's just not something I know enough about, or I'm excited about. VICTORIA: Yeah, and I'm curious to go back to your comment about AI and just ask you, how are you talking about it in your courses? What are, like, the things you think it's really important for developers to know right now about AI and web development? WES: There's kind of, like, two parts to it. First, there's the part of, like, using AI to help you code. So, there's all these, like, coding assistants that get in your editor, and you can send them your code, and it can help you decipher it, and it can scaffold out code. Those things are really, really good. And I know a lot of developers are hesitant about it because, like, "Who knows what kind of code it's generating? And you still have to be able to understand it. And I prefer to write it by hand." And that's a valid opinion, but, like, I don't think that that's going forward. And I think that this AI stuff is making us so much more efficient in writing code that if you're not picking it up, I think that you might be at a little bit of a disadvantage there. So, there's that [SP] hunk. And then there's also the, like, we're going to have to start implementing this stuff into the apps that we build, and whether it's just pinging in an AI service and getting data back or creating a bunch of embeddings so you can have related, like, for a blog post or for a podcast, we want related podcasts. Or if you want to use AI to, like...group tagging on a blog is a really annoying thing. Nobody uses tags well enough. But, like, what if the tags could just be automatically generated based on the words in the post or the words that we speak on the podcast? So, there's just, like, so many, like, new features that will make it better. Your product is going to be better for your end user. And even starting now and, like, when those features are not enabled, like, it's not, like, necessarily an AI feature, but it's like, wow, I wish this had better grouping of podcasts, or I wish that you had better tagging, or that your search is not very good because it's just a text match whereas there's a lot more depth that could be added with AI. So, integrating AI into our websites and our applications that we're building is going to become just another skill that you, as a web developer, have. VICTORIA: No, I think that's a really interesting take on it. And I'm curious if you've also seen AI used to even, like, suggest better standards for code or certain design patterns and, like, tools that help you, like what you said, kind of get better at coding faster. WES: That's the thing people are talking about. Like, if you're learning to code, should you use these types of things? Because, like, you can just hit Tab a couple of times, and it might look good. And it certainly can bite you. Especially if you need to be able to go back and edit that code to fix it, you need to understand how it works, so there's that part of it. But, man, does it make you faster for doing a lot of common things that you will be doing over again. It just really helps you out, so I'm a big fan of it. I have lots of complaints about it as well, but I think it's here to stay. VICTORIA: [laughs] Yeah, it's here to stay. And I've talked to founders who are really excited about it, and maybe they weren't, you know, they don't have years and years of React development experience, but they know the functions that their app needs to do. And they're able to use coding prompts and tools to kind of create at least a minimal product of what they want to build, so it's really exciting. WILL: I totally agree with AI because I use some, especially with the coding, and it makes it so much faster, but I do think you still have to know what you're doing. Because I think you posted on it, like, in one of the coding helpers that I use in VS Code, it still doesn't know how to close out the end of the line. You have these extra backticks or whatever. And it is like, so, as a new developer, you still have to understand your code, or that's going to drive you crazy every time that you use it [chuckles]. WES: Yeah, that's extremely frustrating, the backticks. I've had an issue open on GitHub Copilot for about a year now. They've said they fixed it, and a couple of little situations, it's been fixed. But I would love to, like, talk to somebody about, like, the actual issue because if you give the broken code back to the AI and say, "Fix it," it fixes it. So [laughs], it knows what's wrong. I just, I don't know. Yeah, you still have to know these things. WILL: You taught at Ladies Learning Code and then HackerYou. Did that help you overcome the imposter syndrome of teaching? I don't know if you knew how big your courses were going to become. But what did the imposter syndrome look like for you during that time, or did you even have it? WES: To a certain point, yeah. I think everybody has imposter syndrome, and that's good. Because if you're so confident that you're so amazing and blessed at this specific thing, then your head is probably too big, and [chuckles] you probably don't know what you don't know. But with a lot of my stuff, I'll often just ask people who know better than me. Like, that's a big part of what it is, is you can just consult experts or like, "Hey, what do you think about this?" Or "Is this the best approach?" Or "Here's my code. Do you mind running through it really quickly and see if there's anything that sticks out?" People are often, like, you can pay them, or people are often willing to help, so there's that. And like, also, you have to just know that this is for the people who enjoy it. Like, I'm not making courses for people who are better developers than I am. I'm making courses for people who like the way that I explain specific things. And then, like, another thing that probably really helped me is that I have, like, a 100% money back, no time limit on it. And that just makes me feel good about like, hey, like, if this is not actually good, if you do not think that this is good, or if you just don't jive with the way that I explain things, no sweat, you know, here's your money back. You keep going. And that makes me feel a lot better because it's not like I'm trying to fleece somebody for money and trick them into buying the course. Like, I feel pretty good about it, and if you feel pretty good about it, then we're both happy. WILL: Yeah, that's amazing because I feel like there's certain things that I would love to get started, but that imposter syndrome and also, like, the opinionated developers out there, like, you know what we are talking about. But it just seems like it would be hard to start with that. So, that's why I asked that question. WES: Yeah, I've learned that, like, a lot of these people that have these extremely harsh opinions are, A, they lack all the social skills, so there's something with them that they just don't have it. And you have to understand that that's just something that they have, and they may not be trying to be a jerk. That's just kind of the way they are. And if people are overly opinionated, it's usually because they're, like, covering for their own insecurity of what they want, not always. But a lot of times, I feel pretty good about people telling me, "Oh, you could do it this way," or "No, why are you doing it this way?" Like, I feel pretty confident in my skillset, but I also am always willing to learn and always willing to be corrected and learn new tips and techniques because that's how you get better. So, the people that are constantly being angry online and throwing around opinions and saying things are garbage, that's very scary for beginners because they think, oh, like, am I learning the wrong thing? I don't want to waste my time here. Like, am I going to lose my job if I don't learn it? And the reality is it's not that cut and dry, you know, it's a lot more easygoing. So, I try to convey that as well. And I don't put too much into these silly people who get really angry at semicolons or something silly like that. WILL: That's good advice. That's good advice. Because I think there's been some stuff that I want to do, that's held me back. So, that's really good advice. I appreciate it. WES: Yeah, just do it, like, you never know. Like, if someone's calling you out for putting yourself out there, like, that's a really big jerk thing to do. And I've called people out as well. Like, I don't get it as much anymore, and that probably has to do something with the fact that I've sort of established myself. But several times in the early days, people would be, like, mean. And I would just be like, "Hey, like, just call people out, like, nicely, but, like, hey, you don't have to be mean about it. I'm just trying to share what I've learned here." And that usually gets them. VICTORIA: Yeah. It's like, what are your intentions with providing this feedback to me right now? Like, are you trying to help? [laughs] Because it doesn't really feel that way. No, I appreciate that. And, you know, I'm also...part of thoughbot we've traditionally put out a lot of trainings, a lot of, you know, Upcase things on Ruby on Rails. And with my team, I'm looking at putting together some workshops around site reliability engineering and things that would be helpful for developers to learn how to instrument their code. So, speaking of advice that you would give to maybe any engineer or any developer who's looking to share their expertise, or put together a course, or even a blog post about what they're learning, like, what would you advise someone who's trying to create content like that? WES: Put it out there. When I released my Sublime textbook, keep in mind, a book about Sublime Text that's a pretty niche thing, there was already two books out there on that exact topic. And a couple of times, I was like, is anyone going to want this? There's already one of them out there. Should I even write this blog post? There's 70 out there. And just keep in mind that, like, the way that you explain it or the specific issue that you hit or whatever, it might be the way that really clicks for somebody else. So, I always tell people just put it out there. You never know what is going to come of it. It's likely going to be a net positive for the web development world in general. So, don't ever feel that you shouldn't put yourself out there because you might not know absolutely everything about it. Just share what you know. That's how we get better. VICTORIA: Yeah, I had a friend many years ago who we used to organize Women Who Code, and she said, "Do you think anyone would really be interested in, like, a cloud series of these topics?" And we're like, "Oh, maybe not." In the first event we had around Cloud for Women Who Code, I think, like, 30 people showed up. So yeah, put it out there, see who's interested, and go from there. That's great advice. WES: Yeah. On the same topic, is like, 'Will somebody want this?' is a huge question. People always come to me and they say, "Hey, do you think if I make a course on X, Y, and Z, will people buy it?" Or they'll put out a tweet that says, "Hey, would you buy this, or would you attend this?" And everybody's always like, "Yes, yes, yes," just trying to be supportive. But at the end of the day, you have to test these things by actually putting things out there. So, for me, how did I know the first thing I wanted to do was Sublime Text? It's because I put out blog posts on probably 20 different topics, and those were the posts that just hit really well, and they really resonated with people. So, like, if you're trying to understand, like, will it work? You can test those things very easily by putting a YouTube video up, putting a couple of TikToks up, write a blog post, put a couple of tweets up. And, eventually, when you put out enough content, you're going to start to see a trend in a specific area, and that will give you a little bit of guidance as to what it is you should pursue. WILL: That's great advice. Have you had any hurdles through your journey of online courses and the podcast, releasing podcasts? WES: I feel like I'm always, like, course-correcting. I've never had, like, a flop. And, like, I've had courses I've shelved. Early on, after Sublime Text, I was like, I'm going to do a gulp course, which was, like, a build tool for JavaScript. And then webpack started to get a little bit more popular, and I was like, okay, well, maybe I'll just make a tooling course in general, but I was like, ah, that's kind of way too big. And after, like, working on it for a couple of weeks, I was like, you know what? Like, I'm going to scrap this because I don't think that this is it, you know? So, just kind of always listening, always feedback, and course correcting is probably my biggest advice there for the hurdles. There's stuff that comes up, like people stealing the courses. And, like, I had early access to one of my courses once, and somebody bought it with a stolen credit card and then put it up online. And, like, that's incredibly deflating because now there's your unfinished course out there before people could even buy it. And people will spam you and run DDoS attacks on you and lots of stuff like that, where people are just...they see that. And that's always really frustrating, but you kind of roll with the punches and kind of keep working on it. WILL: Wow. That's interesting. So, someone bought the course with a stolen credit card, and they released it early to the public? WES: Yeah. I don't know if I should say this or not, but there's a very large Russian website that is...literally, they have a paid membership, and the whole point is that you pay for the membership, and you get access to every course ever. Sometimes, they use paid cards, and sometimes it's stolen cards. WILL: Oh, wow. WES: They just buy every course by every creator, and they put it up on this thing. And you can get it for free for the first, like, three months, and then it goes under their paid thing. And that stuff was really frustrating to me at first, but I've learned just to...the web development community is incredibly supportive, and I have nothing to complain about, really. People who do want to support you will support you. WILL: That's neat. That's really neat. VICTORIA: Yeah. And speaking of the web development community, are there events or conferences you go to or different, like, places where you really connect to the web development community? WES: Yeah. Conferences are fantastic. I really enjoy that those are back. So, React Miami is coming up. It's going to be a really fun one. But I go to a couple of conferences a year, and I usually speak at them. We also do meetups every now and then with Syntax where we'll rent out a bar and get a bunch of merch and stickers and just kind of chit-chat with everybody. That's honestly, my favorite is just going to a meetup where there's no talks or anything. It's just a bunch of interesting people in a room, and you get to talk with all kinds of cool people. VICTORIA: That's fun, yeah. I've been organizing a monthly CTO lunch down here in San Diego, and it's like, we just get together and have lunch and, like, talk about different stuff [laughs]. WES: Love it. VICTORIA: And it's really great. I used to organize those meetups with, like, two speakers, and then there was pizza and drinks and all that stuff to coordinate. And it's a lot easier just to kind of get everyone together and talk, which is what most people want anyways [laughs]. WES: I'm always bummed when you go to a conference and the, like, after party has, like, a band or, like, music is bumping. It's like, I just want a quiet room with some drinks that I can talk to people and have a good conversation, you know. VICTORIA: Yeah, I go to a lot of events, a lot of conferences, a lot of events. I see a lot of different types of stickers and design and anything like that. So, I thought it might be fun to ask you about that. Like, you know, I don't know if you can share us a link of what your stickers look like. Or how do you make it fun and interesting for you to have that kind of thing to hand out? WES: Once a year, once a year and a half, I make these sticker packs, and they have, I don't know, 15 or so stickers in it, various web development things. And it's a pretty big production because I get a lot of them done. So, the last time I sold 11,000 packages of them, and I sell them for five bucks shipped anywhere in the world. And it's, like, a huge logistical hurdle to try to make that happen because there's so much to it. But it's really fun for me because I'm able to do something that is fun. A lot of people aren't able to go to conferences and get the stickers, and they want that. They want to feel part of a community, and everybody loves getting a pack of stickers. So, I've been doing that for probably seven years now. Just right now, I'm just doing a little bit of research into what the next pack is going to look like and some new materials that have hit the sticker world [laughs], so it's pretty fun. The website is bos.af with, like, bos.af. That might not work anymore. I got note that the people who I registered the dot AF domain name from have lost contact with the Afghanistan domain authorities. So, it's possible I might just lose that domain name, which is a bit of a bummer because that's a really cool domain name, but that's where I sell them once a year. And, usually, they're only for sale for about a week, and then they're done selling, and I do the whole shipping thing around the world. VICTORIA: Wow. I did not think you were going to say, "Sold 11,000" sticker packs. That's really impressive [laughs]. WES: Yeah, it's crazy. It's almost 200,000 stickers if you think about it. VICTORIA: That's, like, a major production. I bet when you got into web development, you didn't think you'd also have a side hustle making stickers off of it [laughs]. WES: Yeah, it's crazy. Like, I was, like, sending them out with stamps, and it's just like, I was holding in one single hand, like, $4,000 worth of stamps. It's crazy to think. VICTORIA: I can imagine going into the post office and being like, "I need $4,000 worth of stamps [laughs]," but that's great. WES: The first time I just started dumping them into mail, I would cross the border because I'm in Canada, and the USPS is much cheaper. So, we would just cross the border, and then we just dumped them into mailboxes. And it was okay. But they were like, "Hey, like, next time, just, like, bring it to the post office, and, like, we have processes for this much mail." I don't mail them out of the U.S. anymore because there's some weird stuff around crossing the border. You have to do all this crazy stuff. But it's pretty crazy buying that many stamps. They usually look at you funny when you go to the store and say, "Hey, I need this many stamps." [laughter] VICTORIA: They're like, "Well, what are you doing?" [laughs] Well, great. I think, let's see, we're coming up at the end of our time here. So, are there any final takeaways for our listeners today? WES: Check me out. I'm at wesbos.com; podcast is at syntax.fm if you want to give it a listen. We post three times a week. And I just encourage everyone keep learning, keep excited about web development because it's a pretty cool industry. VICTORIA: Awesome. Thank you so much for taking time to chat with us today. I really enjoyed our conversation. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on X, formerly known as Twitter, @victori_ousg. WILL: And you could find me on X @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.

In this episode, host Victoria Guido talks with Jessica Wallace, the CEO of Flok22, an innovative app designed to enhance real-time social networking. Victoria delves into Jessica's unique journey from her roots as a hairdresser to becoming a tech entrepreneur. They explore how Jessica's personal experiences and challenges, including being a military wife and navigating life post-divorce with three children, fueled her drive to create Flok22. Jessica's desire to connect people in real-time, especially in the post-COVID era, led to the birth of this groundbreaking app. Victoria and Jessica discuss their mutual passion for music, revealing how their hobbies provide a creative outlet from the demanding world of startups. Jessica shares her aspirations to return to playing the drums, a skill inspired by her family's musical background, and her journey in learning the instrument during the pandemic. On technology and entrepreneurship, Jessica dives into the challenges and triumphs of developing and marketing Flok22. She reflects on the importance of networking, particularly in the startup community, and how her app addresses the inefficiencies and awkwardness often encountered at networking events. Victoria and Jessica discuss the evolution of Flok22, emphasizing its focus on enhancing in-person connections and its pivot towards a more event-centric approach, as well as the future of networking, the potential of Flok22, and their shared enthusiasm for making meaningful connections, both professionally and musically. Flok22 (https://flok22.com/) Follow Flok22 on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/flok22?mibextid=ZbWKwL), Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/company/flok22/), or Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/flok22app/). Follow Jessica Wallace on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-wallace-b9526361/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Jessica Wallace, CEO of Flok22, the app that helps you make friends and grow your network in real-time situations. Jessica, thank you for joining us. JESSICA: Thank you for having me. VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, just to get us started and warm up here, Jessica, is there any new skill or any skill you've come back to to practice more recently to kind of take your mind off of all the founder stuff that's happening? JESSICA: Yeah. It's been a busy past two months of events and things like that. So, I've kind of been taking a little bit of downtime. I am hoping to start practicing the drums. I play those, and I haven't been doing that in a while. They've been kind of staring me down, so... VICTORIA: So, were you a drummer before? Were you in a band, or? JESSICA: No, never was in a band. Actually, my dad and my uncle were drummers in a band. And as a kid, I would kind of pick up the drumsticks. And I remember my uncle kind of saying like, "Hey, is that Jessica down there?" Because I would sound like I was playing [laughs] something. Yeah, it took me a while to get into it. But during COVID, I picked it up and started practicing. VICTORIA: I love that. So, do you have a whole drum set at home, or do you have one of those, like, electric? JESSICA: I have both. I have the electric one, which I think I'm going to kind of get out and mess with. But I have an actual full drum set. It's like a TAMA light blue little set. VICTORIA: That's so fun. I like playing the drums, but I never made the leap to actually own my own drum set. So, whenever my friends have it, though, I can play, like, maybe one or two beats on [laughs] it. Nothing that impressive, but yeah, it's a lot of fun. JESSICA: Do you play any other instruments? VICTORIA: Yeah, I've always...I played piano when I was younger, and then clarinet and bass guitar through, like, middle school and high school. I did have a band in college. We played two shows, and they were both at my house, which was a lot of fun. JESSICA: [laughs] VICTORIA: I had kind of stopped playing music, and then when COVID happened, it was like, well [laughs], I guess I need to find another hobby again. So, I picked up piano again. And now I've been playing keyboard and trying to sing at the same time, which has been entertaining for everyone in my household, so...[laughs] JESSICA: Very cool. Too bad we didn't, like, catch up during COVID time. We could have started a band. VICTORIA: Yes. Yeah. I'm trying to think of a way to get more disciplined about practicing, actually, because that's...I know people who practice for, like, three hours a day every day. And I'm just like, how do you make yourself sit there for that long [laughs]? JESSICA: That's definitely been the challenge with me. And then, of course, being in a startup, and then, you know, that kind of got put on the backburner, but I hope to pick it up. VICTORIA: Yeah, right? So, we met at San Diego Startup Week, which was a fantastic event here in San Diego; a different location every night and, different speakers, and all of these really interesting people to meet. So, why don't you tell me a little bit about what brought you to San Diego Startup Week? JESSICA: Well, first things first is being a startup here in San Diego, so that made me go. And I knew it's very important, the more I'm realizing, to build your network and connect with people, and especially just within the community, getting yourself out there to be known, talking to other companies, even just showing your support to other startups. It's such an important thing to do. VICTORIA: And your app, Flok22, specifically, solves some problems people might have with going to an event like that and trying to make friends and network with people. So, can you tell me a little bit more about the initial problem you had when you just came up with the idea for the app? JESSICA: So, the initial problem was kind of around COVID time when everything opened back up. And there was this plethora of meetup apps that everybody was on trying to make these connections. And I would start to go out with friends, and as I'm looking around, it was that weird, awkward time where you couldn't talk to anybody you didn't come with. And I would literally see people, including my friends, swiping on matching apps while they were sitting at the table, but nobody was talking to one another. And that's when I realized we needed something that was more venue-based, where it was like, hey, I'm here. I'm out. Let me see who's available to connect. And that's where the concept came about. And then, during a lot of these networking events, I started to realize the same thing. It was people trying to network, and we're still doing the old-school name tags and signing our name on a paper. And it would just be so much more easier to have everybody on that one platform to connect with a little bit more effective and efficiently. VICTORIA: And so, how long has it been since you had this idea and you've been in this journey with Flok22? JESSICA: Well, it's been a little over two years. Right around COVID is when I got the idea. I was a hairdresser for, like, 20-plus years and wasn't working and at home with my three kids. And the idea just was kind of pricking at me. And it took me a while to try and figure out, you know, how can I do this? How can I, with no funds, you know, newly divorced, three kids, how am I going to start an app? And I just kept pushing on trying to connect with the right people and build a product. VICTORIA: I love that. What inspired you? Like, you had this idea for an app. And you're like, you know what? I'm going to make it work. Like, what kept you going? What made you think this is a thing I can put my time and energy into and be successful? JESSICA: You know, there's a lot of factors. I feel like it's just one of those things where you kind of just...you know how you just get that instinct and idea, and you're like, I just can't let it go? And I remember hitting a low point because I had tried to call different development teams. I had tried to do it on my own. And I felt like I wasn't getting anywhere. And I was literally walking on a treadmill, and a friend gave me this YouTube thing to listen to, and it was Les Brown. And he was talking about if you were on your deathbed, you know, these ideas and these dreams, they're just staring you with angry eyes because they came to you for life. And it, like, hit me, like, very intensely to where I was like, I have to do this. I can't just look back in my life and be like, I had this idea. I know somebody's going to do it because everybody would be like, "This is a great idea." So, it's just a matter of you just got to keep going. VICTORIA: Well, I'm glad that you're working on this because I can totally relate to that experience of, you know, for me, I came from Washington, D.C., and moved to San Diego. When I was in D.C., I had spent years in the meetup community and organizing meetups. And so, it got to the point where anytime I went to a meetup, I would know at least one person there. And now coming to San Diego, like, starting it all over again, was very daunting. And, like, walking into...what was it? San Diego tech event where there's, like, 100 people in this beautiful Balboa Park location and just being so nervous [laughs]. I'm like, who do I talk to? Like, how do I get started? And you immediately think I should just leave and go home [laughs]. But let me get a glass of Chardonnay and go over to the craft makers table and make some art and then I'll, like, feel a little bit better. So yeah, I'm curious, like, so you had this great idea. Like, you knew you wanted to put your effort into it. As you started going through the process of figuring out how to get started or how to find that market fit, was there anything that surprised you in your early stages that made you pivot into a new direction? JESSICA: Well, I would say just, like, hearing your story, so many of us have been in that boat. I used to be a military wife, so I was always picking up and moving. And the older we get, it's hard to build and start up your network again. And I see a lot of people posting on Facebook or, you know, Instagram, and they're, like, putting their profile out there trying to make friends. So, there's definitely a need for it. Originally, I wanted it more for the social aspect, which was coffee shops, bars, restaurants, being able to just check in and see who's there that is open to connect. One thing we did kind of start to realize is a lot of people, even though they want to make those connections, people are still nervous to claim that they're trying to, like, make a friend. So, the biggest thing that we learned in the product-market fit was people were more inclined to use it for networking. They felt a little bit more secure and safer that way. So, I would say that would be a thing that we kind of picked up on. VICTORIA: Yeah, that makes sense. Because when I'm going to networking, like, of course, I would love to find leads for people who need consulting work from thoughtbot or software development or platform engineering. But if you go in with that intention, it's disingenuous, and it's not very effective. Whereas if you go into a networking event with the intention to make friends and just to learn about people and to find common interest, it's, like, indirectly aiming at your target is the best way to actually get there [laughs]. So, it makes sense. And so, you pivoted into more events and networking. Has there been anything that you've found about that experience or that group of people that's surprised you, or? JESSICA: I do feel like the social side will pick up on it. I just think it's going to take a little bit more time. But with the networking, I wasn't really doing any of that until I got into this startup. So, I didn't even see the need for it until I got in there. And then here I am, you know, going to a table, trying to find my name tag, and everything's still very much old school when it comes to that. And so, that was what surprised me is just was, like, this would be perfect. Everybody's trying to exchange their LinkedIns. Everybody is trying to find the right person. And sometimes you get stuck in a conversation with somebody for 20 minutes, and it's some sales guy from who knows where, and you're just like, uh, I'm not really looking for that. You know what I mean? Great to connect, but got to go. So, it's so much better to just find the right people that you're looking for and network more efficiently. VICTORIA: Yeah, I don't know if this is that exact experience, but what I've kind of heard from other founders is sometimes you go to a networking event, and maybe you're looking for, like, mentors or people to help you or your own [inaudible 10:09]. And then there's more people trying to sell things to you [laughs] than there are, like, those actual people you're looking for who would help you. So, that's really interesting. So, now you've started to kind of really get involved in the networking. And I'm curious: how many events have you gone to so far this year? Do you have a rough estimate? JESSICA: I'm, like, trying to think. It's, like, such a blur because I really have been going to so many. And also, I've been a part of the SDAC E-track, which is the Angel Conference, San Diego Angel Conference that's coming up. So, we're hoping to get accepted in that. I'm going to say, at least this month, probably 12, I would suspect. VICTORIA: Wait, 12 this month? JESSICA: I think so, yeah. And some of them have been little ones. Like, I've done some happy hour events. There's these really cool, like, social happy hour events I've been trying to kind of partner up with. So, definitely some smaller ones, and then some bigger ones, and then including my E-track. So, that's kind of the calculation I have. VICTORIA: Wow, I mean, there's only been 15 days so far this month, so 13 events that's quite a lot [laughs]. I hope you do get some time to rest and play the drums later this month. But that's really exciting. So, I'm curious: as a founder, obviously, you have an event space networking app. But have you found other benefits from growing your network as an early-stage founder? JESSICA: Definitely. The biggest impact is connecting with these people. And whether you read that book, "Rich Dad, Poor Dad," they say, you know, "Poor people look for work, and rich people build networks." And it's true because I'm noticing that for myself. You get around these people, and most of the time, they really do want to help, or you just need to have the ask, you know, ask what you're looking for. And they're more than willing to set you up with other people to get partnerships. I ended up meeting somebody at the MIC Conference, which was in Vegas last month. And they connected me with somebody who now we are going to be partnering with them to have our app be used at their conference. So, it's as simple as that, just once you're in front of them and you get that more personal touch, and then they kind of refer you to other people. VICTORIA: Oh, that's great. And how does your app compare to the existing apps that are out there for networking at events or for managing attendees at events? JESSICA: Well, currently, there's not anything that's doing it in real-time. There is some conference events they have, like Cvent, Whova app. Personally, to me, it was just there's so much going on. You have the event, you know, vendors. You have the schedule. You have so much going on. And for us, our main thing is just connecting you to the right person. So, it's a more simplistic version of just being able to simply check in, see the profiles of the people that are there, see what it is that you're looking for, and know that you want to connect with them. Also, the other feature that we have is allowing you to see anybody that you may have missed when you leave. So, you can kind of easily filter through those profiles and decide who to reach out to. I mean, similar to maybe, like, a meetup, but it's more just on demand. There quite hasn't been anything that's doing it right instantaneously. VICTORIA: Yeah, and I can agree. I've used some of those apps before. And what I've noticed there's just not a ton of activity or user activity on the day of. And I'm curious to see...I really want to try out Flok, too. I know I'm like [laughs], I haven't had a chance to actually get in there yet, but it is on my to-do list. So, I'm curious, you know, as someone who didn't have a background in technology or building applications, like, how did you go about getting up to speed and finding the people you needed to help you actually build the app? JESSICA: Yeah, I mean, being a hairstylist, I was not tech at all. So, it's pretty interesting that here I am, you know, in this app development world. The main thing was just getting out there. I knew I had already been on so many apps just, whether it was some of the dating apps, meetup apps, so I knew how they operated and what I was looking for as a customer that I wanted to fix. Most of the time, it was heavily with all these pictures, and prompts, and things like that, and I would get bored of setting it up. It would take me, like, you know, 30-plus minutes. Not to mention, I call it, like, adding people to your cart. It's just very impersonal. You got so many people just piling people to their cart. You might talk to them for a little bit, then stop. And I think people are just kind of getting over it. It's time-consuming. It's a lot of time and planning, and sometimes you plan something and then...even with the girls meeting a friend, it's like they plan something for Thursday, and somebody cancels, and then you're SOL, you know? VICTORIA: Oh yeah. So, you had experience with using different apps for, like, networking or meeting people and making friends, and you saw that there was this gap. And then, how did you go to actually building the app? And were there any lessons that you learned in that process? JESSICA: That was my experience and why I was doing that. The main thing I did after that was I started hitting up events to find and recruit. That was how I started finding...I met my co-founder through a mutual friend. She's been wonderful. She's, like, complete opposite of me. She's, like, the business-organized one. Like, hey, we need an LLC. We need this. We need that. I'm more just the idea and brains and kind of behind the scenes. Then I started going to some tech events, met our UI UX designer, Laura, who's been fantastic. So, that would be my advice to people. If you're looking to build and you're trying to find the right people, of course, LinkedIn could be a good spot. Y Combinator could be a good spot. For me, I think going out there and actually making the personal connections and meeting the people and ask them and find what you're looking for. VICTORIA: And you could now even use Flok22 to find your early founder team [laughs]. JESSICA: Exactly. See? VICTORIA: That's awesome. MID-ROLL AD: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it’s easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn’t looking. By delegating server management, maintenance, and security to thoughtbot and our network of service partners, you can get 24x7 support from our team of experts, all for less than the cost of one in-house engineer. Save time and money with our DevOps and Maintenance service. Find out more at: tbot.io/devops. VICTORIA: So, you went out, and you just met people, and you had this compelling vision of what you wanted to build and were able to recruit them onto your team. Was there anything...you know, you've been at this for two years now. Through the development process, was there anything you learned about what to do or what not to do in how you engage with your designers and developers? JESSICA: You know, it's like, we dove out there, like, headfirst. And then there was a period of time where we needed to pause and re-calibrate, and that was due to the fact that you have to be very diligent in looking for development if you're outsourcing. If you know a CTO or you have somebody in-house that, you know, you're working with, you may not have the problems that we ran into. But with outsourcing, there's still very much a gray area. And we ended up getting a product that was not really functional and had a lot of issues, which caused a huge setback for us. It was a great, you know, lesson learned if that. But you have to be really particular on who you're finding. I would suggest heavily on finding somebody that is a referral from somebody that you know, as a matter of fact, that they use. Because nowadays, there's times that they can almost, like, fake what they have. I mean, they might have references. They'll put stuff up on their website showcasing products that they did, and those aren't even products that they did. So, we ran into a huge deal with that. But it made us take a step back. We re-honed in on our user persona, had our UI UX designer redesign everything, and came back out here again. VICTORIA: Yes, because people will let you pay them to build anything [laughs]. JESSICA: Oh yeah. VICTORIA: But it may not be exactly what you wanted. And what you said, going with someone who is a referral, going with someone who, I think, clearly demonstrates that they need to understand the underlying issue, as opposed to just being willing to take whatever requirements you have and build it. That's a big differentiator for companies. And it can be frustrating because I think, you know, for thoughtbot, sometimes people come to us, and they're like, "We already have the designs. We already know what we want. You just build it for us." And we [inaudible 19:21], like, coach them around that. Like, are you sure? Like, let's look at your market validation, and let's look at your product fit. And, you know, let's go back and make sure that we're all aligned and that you're actually getting value out of something, and showing you the results on a regular basis, as opposed to it'll be done in three months, and you just wait until then. Sometimes, that can be $150,000 later, and, at the end, you're not actually getting a product that you really wanted. JESSICA: Exactly. And like I said, there's still a big, gray area in that where, you know, you can be given a product, and it's not even barely working, or it looks like garbage. And you're kind of stuck because trying to go after these people to get your money back it's most likely not going to happen. And then you just lost out on all that money you put into that product. So, it can be very frustrating for people. I hope to eventually kind of shed light on that and maybe help people along the way, so they don't fall trap to those type of kind of scammers that are out there for development. And I'm sure you, being CTO, you've seen a lot of that [chuckles]. VICTORIA: Yeah, that's something we work really hard to kind of coach clients around and figure out to make sure because we don't want to end in that situation where our founder feels like we built something for them that doesn't work or doesn't look great, or what they're happy with [chuckles]. So yeah, I think it's very common. It happens to a lot of people. But I'm happy that you didn't get discouraged and you said, you know what? We can go for round two. Let's take what we learned and put it into the next version of the app. And one of my favorite phrases from doing this podcast that I've heard is, "If the first product you build if you're proud of it, you didn't do it fast enough" [laughs]. So, like, usually, the first thing you build is not pretty, but you had to push through and build something. And that's the first application you've ever built. So, how did you feel about the second time going around? What did you do differently to be happier with and prouder of the product version that you put out there? JESSICA: Yeah, I like that phrase, too, and sometimes I'm the same. It's kind of like, you know, fail fast and get out there. But the second build was definitely so much more smoother and better. But, actually, we are in transition to a newer, bigger development team because there's still some things that we're just not completely set on. And I do think that moving along to this next development team, there's a more better fit. And then, we also received a grant from AWS to build a better back-end infrastructure, so when we do scale up, and there is more people on there, that it can withhold that capacity. So, I'm definitely happy with it right now. And I know that getting it out there—and you know this, too—is just getting it out there with all the users, you know, there may be some different feedback coming in and out. We plan on, you know, making any changes necessary if need be, and just kind of always making it a little better each time. VICTORIA: Is that the AWS Activate program? JESSICA: It's not the Activate, but it's just we're actually working with a company, and it was AWS. They had filled everything out for us, you know, they want to help startups getting out into the app world because, again, if we're making money, they're making money, too, with it being on their servers. So, it's kind of a win-win. And we can store all of that data and be able to scale up properly. VICTORIA: Absolutely, yeah. And so, for those who don't know, the AWS Activate program, you can apply for up to $100,000 in free credits, and other cloud providers have similar programs where you can get free money [chuckles]. But, no, that's really cool that you're a part of that. So, what challenges do you see on the horizon for Flok22? JESSICA: Of course, I hope there's going to be none, but we know in this entrepreneurial world, it's always there. I think, you know, the hard part are always going to be kind of those situations where maybe people aren't using the app properly or things of that sort happening. Other app companies have dealt with that. It's like, you could be out somewhere, and a situation happens. So, that's kind of the only thing that I would be worried about is just ensuring the safety of all of our users, making sure that everybody is understanding. And I guess when that time comes and if there are things that, you know, come at you, it's just a matter of handling it. So, I hope it's not anything too heavy, but I guess we'll see. VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, I appreciate you having that concern early on. Because I do feel like sometimes people create apps for networking and collaboration without thinking about the safety of their users. And it's more common from founders who have never been in a situation where they're unsafe [laughs]. So, like, maybe from your unique perspective, you, like, know that that is an issue that you might need to solve or that will come up, and having a plan for it makes sense. JESSICA: We definitely have a plan for it. I mean, a lot of people don't realize with these apps that are out there, there's actually been a pretty high increase in, like, sex trafficking and different things. And most people don't know that because they're not the ones going in there and doing the market research. So, our main thing is getting people out there to meet in public places, which is much safer. You're not, you know, getting lured and unsure if that's even the person who that they say they are, or you're going to someone's house or on a hike. It just makes it for a much safer environment. And then we're working on some other added features where, you know, you can kind of validate the people just to ensure that. VICTORIA: Yeah, that makes sense. And what is the wind in your sails? What keeps you going and keeps you excited about working on this? JESSICA: It's my passion. It's kind of like now; this has been my baby for a couple of years. So, of course, my family is always number one. I have three kids, a rat, two dogs, and a lizard. I adore my family, but I just have a passion for this. And I know that it's just a matter of time before this becomes a thing. And so, I just push myself on the daily trying to figure out the solutions and just keep moving forward with it. VICTORIA: And what does success look like in six months, or even beyond that, in five years? JESSICA: I think, for us, it will just be getting that heavy adoption of users, getting known out here in San Diego or in other parts. We plan on trying to hit more of the major cities where you got a lot of newcomers coming in and traveling, whether that's Chicago, New York, Miami, Vegas. As we get that adoption, just growing as a company and see where it goes from there. VICTORIA: That's great. Yeah, I look forward to when I can go to a conference and just identify who are all the rock climbers in the room, and I can go bug and talk about [laughs], like, climbing with. I love that. JESSICA: And, two, going to these conferences, also, not only your...you get to connect with the people that are there, but it's the people in the surrounding city, too. It's like a lot of people leave the conference, and they want to go to a bar or a coffee shop. And the fact that you have the option or opportunity to connect with the people who are there as well is a win-win. VICTORIA: I love that, yeah. And do you have any questions for me about thoughtbot, or the podcast, or anything like that? JESSICA: For me, you being, like, a CTO, I know you've maybe...have you seen apps like this become successful? I would love your take on kind of getting out there in the market for something like this because we are at that stage where we're trying to hit the market pretty heavily. We're hitting college campuses, you know, bigger conferences, trying to get that adoption in small clusters for it to be, you know, fun and usable for users. But I would love your take on that. VICTORIA: Yeah, and, actually, I'm a managing director. Our CTO is Joe Ferris, who's currently my acting dev director for my team. But from my experience, you know, there might be a lot of competing apps who try to aim for similar things. But if you're very closely understanding your users and their needs and focusing on solving their problems, then you will find your niche, and you'll be able to be successful and grow that from there. So, if you have a strong vision for what the problem is and you're willing to actually listen to your users and pivot based off of that, that will set you up to be successful. Yeah, and I've talked about this with other friends who are really into networking and meeting up with people. And there continues to be this gap of, like, how people communicate and how we actually connect. So, I think you're on the right track [chuckles], and you're doing a lot of great things. And I think the only other advice I would say is what you've already kind of pointed out is to make sure you're not burning out early on and that you're taking that time and space to be with your family and to do your hobbies, and having a strong rest ethic as you do a work ethic and making sure you're still a whole person. And you'll make better decisions if you're giving your brain a little bit of downtime. JESSICA: Definitely. I so agree with you. That's very important to have that balance. And we just hope that we can fill that gap when it comes to the networking. So, I hope that everyone can give it a try and see what they think. VICTORIA: I love that, yeah. Is there anything else that you would like to promote? JESSICA: I mean, honestly, this is not so much about me. I'm really passionate about this app and networking and connecting people together and getting it, so it's just more easy for everybody to connect out in person without wasting that time and energy. Just be out doing you and meet the right people. That's what Flok22 is all about. VICTORIA: I love that. And we'll have to get together and play some music. I'll tell you the two songs I have memorized on piano right now are Kiss from a Rose by Seal and Someone Like You by Adele, so...[laughs] JESSICA: Oooh. VICTORIA: But we do have a bit of a girls' band going in San Diego, so we'll connect on that, too [laughs]. JESSICA: Yeah, we'll have to link up. Add some drums to your... VICTORIA: We don't have a drummer, so that's perfect, yeah [laughs]. JESSICA: See? It's networking at its best [laughs]. VICTORIA: Yes, yeah. I love it. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate hearing your story. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.

In this episode of the "Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots" podcast, host Victoria Guido delves into the intersection of technology, product development, and personal passions with her guests Henry Yin, Co-Founder and CTO of Merico, and Maxim Wheatley, the company's first employee and Community Leader. They are joined by Joe Ferris, CTO of thoughtbot, as a special guest co-host. The conversation begins with a casual exchange about rock climbing, revealing that both Henry and Victoria share this hobby, which provides a unique perspective on their professional roles in software development. Throughout the podcast, Henry and Maxim discuss the journey and evolution of Merico, a company specializing in data-driven tools for developers. They explore the early stages of Merico, highlighting the challenges and surprises encountered while seeking product-market fit and the strategic pivot from focusing on open-source funding allocation to developing a comprehensive engineering metric platform. This shift in focus led to the creation of Apache DevLake, an open-source project contributed to by Merico and later donated to the Apache Software Foundation, reflecting the company's commitment to transparency and community-driven development. The episode also touches on future challenges and opportunities in the field of software engineering, particularly the integration of AI and machine learning tools in the development process. Henry and Maxim emphasize the potential of AI to enhance developer productivity and the importance of data-driven insights in improving team collaboration and software delivery performance. Joe contributes to the discussion with his own experiences and perspectives, particularly on the importance of process over individual metrics in team management. Merico (https://www.merico.dev/) Follow Merico on GitHub (https://github.com/merico-dev), Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/company/merico-dev/), or X (https://twitter.com/MericoDev). Apache DevLake (https://devlake.apache.org/) Follow Henry Yin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/henry-hezheng-yin-88116a52/). Follow Maxim Wheatley on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/maximwheatley/) or X (https://twitter.com/MaximWheatley). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Henry Yin, Co-Founder and CTO of Merico, and Maxim Wheatley, the first employee and Community Leader of Merico, creating data-driven developer tools for forward-thinking devs. Thank you for joining us. HENRY: Thanks for having us. MAXIM: Glad to be here, Victoria. Thank you. VICTORIA: And we also have a special guest co-host today, the CTO of thoughtbot, Joe Ferris. JOE: Hello. VICTORIA: Okay. All right. So, I met Henry and Maxim at the 7CTOs Conference in San Diego back in November. And I understand that Henry, you are also an avid rock climber. HENRY: Yes. I know you were also in Vegas during Thanksgiving. And I sort of have [inaudible 00:49] of a tradition to go to Vegas every Thanksgiving to Red Rock National Park. Yeah, I'd love to know more about how was your trip to Vegas this Thanksgiving. VICTORIA: Yes. I got to go to Vegas as well. We had a bit of rain, actually. So, we try not to climb on sandstone after the rain and ended up doing some sport climbing on limestone around the Blue Diamond Valley area; a little bit light on climbing for me, actually, but still beautiful out there. I loved being in Red Rock Canyon outside of Las Vegas. And I do find that there's just a lot of developers and engineers who have an affinity for climbing. I'm not sure what exactly that connection is. But I know, Joe, you also have a little bit of climbing and mountaineering experience, right? JOE: Yeah. I used to climb a good deal. I actually went climbing for the first time in, like, three years this past weekend, and it was truly pathetic. But you have to [laughs] start somewhere. VICTORIA: That's right. And, Henry, how long have you been climbing for? HENRY: For about five years. I like to spend my time in nature when I'm not working: hiking, climbing, skiing, scuba diving, all of the good outdoor activities. VICTORIA: That's great. And I understand you were bouldering in Vegas, right? Did you go to Kraft Boulders? HENRY: Yeah, we went to Kraft also Red Spring. It was a surprise for me. I was able to upgrade my outdoor bouldering grade to B7 this year at Red Spring and Monkey Wrench. There was always some surprises for me. When I went to Red Rock National Park last year, I met Alex Honnold there who was shooting a documentary, and he was really, really friendly. So, really enjoying every Thanksgiving trip to Vegas. VICTORIA: That's awesome. Yeah, well, congratulations on B7. That's great. It's always good to get a new grade. And I'm kind of in the same boat with Joe, where I'm just constantly restarting my climbing career. So [laughs], I haven't had a chance to push a grade like that in a little while. But that sounds like a lot of fun. HENRY: Yeah, it's really hard to be consistent on climbing when you have, like, a full-time job, and then there's so much going on in life. It's always a challenge. VICTORIA: Yeah. But a great way to like, connect with other people, and make friends, and spend time outdoors. So, I still really appreciate it, even if I'm not maybe progressing as much as I could be. That's wonderful. So, tell me, how did you and Maxim actually meet? Did you meet through climbing or the outdoors? MAXIM: We actually met through AngelList, which I really recommend to anyone who's really looking to get into startups. When Henry and I met, Merico was essentially just starting. I had this eagerness to explore something really early stage where I'd get to do all of the interesting kind of cross-functional things that come with that territory, touching on product and marketing, on fundraising, kind of being a bit of everything. And I was eager to look into something that was applying, you know, machine learning, data analytics in some really practical way. And I came across what Hezheng Henry and the team were doing in terms of just extracting useful insights from codebases. And we ended up connecting really well. And I think the previous experience I had was a good fit for the team, and the rest was history. And we've had a great time building together for the last five years. VICTORIA: Yeah. And tell me a little bit more about your background and what you've been bringing to the Merico team. MAXIM: I think, like a lot of people in startups, consider myself a member of the Island of Misfit Toys in the sense that no kind of clear-cut linear pathway through my journey but a really exciting and productive one nonetheless. So, I began studying neuroscience at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. I was about to go to medical school and, in my high school years had explored entrepreneurship in a really basic way. I think, like many people do, finding ways to monetize my hobbies and really kind of getting infected with that bug that I could create something, make money from it, and kind of be the master of my own destiny, for lack of less cliché terms. So, not long after graduating, I started my first job that recruited me into a seed-stage venture capital, and from there, I had the opportunity to help early-stage startups, invest in them. I was managing a startup accelerator out there. From there, produced a documentary that followed those startups. Not long after all of that, I ended up co-founding a consumer electronics company where I was leading product, so doing lots of mechanical, electrical, and a bit of software engineering. And without taking too long, those were certainly kind of two of the more formative things. But one way or another, I've spent my whole career now in startups and, especially early-stage ones. It was something I was eager to do was kind of take some of the high-level abstract science that I had learned in my undergraduate and kind of apply some of those frameworks to some of the things that I do today. VICTORIA: That's super interesting. And now I'm curious about you, Henry, and your background. And what led you to get the idea for Merico? HENRY: Yeah. My professional career is actually much simpler because Merico was my first company and my first job. Before Merico, I was a PhD student at UC Berkeley studying computer science. My research was an intersection of software engineering and machine learning. And back then, we were tackling this research problem of how do we fairly measure the developer contributions in a software project? And the reason we are interested in this project has to do with the open-source funding problem. So, let's say an open-source project gets 100k donations from Google. How does the maintainers can automatically distribute all of the donations to sometimes hundreds or thousands of contributors according to their varying level of contributions? So, that was the problem we were interested in. We did research on this for about a year. We published a paper. And later on, you know, we started the company with my, you know, co-authors. And that's how the story began for Merico. VICTORIA: I really love that. And maybe you could tell me just a little bit more about what Merico is and why a company may be interested in trying out your services. HENRY: The product we're currently offering actually is a little bit different from what we set out to build. At the very beginning, we were building this platform for open-source funding problem that we can give an open-source project. We can automatically, using algorithm, measure developer contributions and automatically distribute donations to all developers. But then we encountered some technical and business challenges. So, we took out the metrics component from the previous idea and launched this new product in the engineering metric space. And this time, we focus on helping engineering leaders better understand the health of their engineering work. So, this is the Merico analytics platform that we're currently offering to software engineering teams. JOE: It's interesting. I've seen some products that try to judge the health of a codebase, but it sounds like this is more trying to judge the health of the team. MAXIM: Yeah, I think that's generally fair to say. As we've evolved, we've certainly liked to describe ourselves as, you know, I think a lot of people are familiar with observability tools, which help ultimately ascertain, like, the performance of the technology, right? Like, it's assessing, visualizing, chopping up the machine-generated data. And we thought there would be a tremendous amount of value in being, essentially, observability for the human-generated data. And I think, ultimately, what we found on our journey is that there's a tremendous amount of frustration, especially in larger teams, not in looking to use a tool like that for any kind of, like, policing type thing, right? Like, no one's looking if they're doing it right, at least looking to figure out, like, oh, who's underperforming, or who do we need to yell at? But really trying to figure out, like, where are the strengths? Like, how can we improve our processes? How can we make sure we're delivering better software more reliably, more sustainably? Like how are we balancing that trade-off between new features, upgrades and managing tech debt and bugs? We've ultimately just worked tirelessly to, hopefully, fill in those blind spots for people. And so far, I'm pleased to say that the reception has been really positive. We've, I think, tapped into a somewhat subtle but nonetheless really important pain point for a lot of teams around the world. VICTORIA: Yeah. And, Henry, you said that you started it based on some of the research that you did at UC Berkeley. I also understand you leaned on the research from the DevOps research from DORA. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and what you found insightful from the research that was out there and already existed? MAXIM: So, I think what's really funny, and it really speaks to, I think, the importance in product development of just getting out there and speaking with your potential users or actual users, and despite all of the deep, deep research we had done on the topic of understanding engineering, we really hadn't touched on DORA too much. And this is probably going back about five years now. Henry and I were taking a customer meeting with an engineering leader at Yahoo out in the Bay Area. He kind of revealed this to us basically where he's like, "Oh, you guys should really look at incorporating DORA into this thing. Like, all of the metrics, all of the analytics you're building super cool, super interesting, but DORA really has this great framework, and you guys should look into it." And in hindsight, I think we can now [chuckles], honestly, admit to ourselves, even if it maybe was a bit embarrassing at the time where both Henry and I were like, "What? What is that? Like, what's Dora?" And we ended up looking into it and since then, have really become evangelists for the framework. And I'll pass it to Henry to talk about, like, what that journey has looked like. HENRY: Thanks, Maxim. I think what's cool about DORA is in terms of using metrics, there's always this challenge called Goodhart's Law, right? So, whenever a metric becomes a target, the metric cease to be a good metric because people are going to find ways to game the metric. So, I think what's cool about DORA is that it actually offers not just one metric but four key metrics that bring balance to covering both the stability and velocity. So, when you look at DORA metrics, you can't just optimize for velocity and sacrificing your stability. But you have to look at all four metrics at the same time, and that's harder to game. So, I think that's why it's become more and more popular in the industry as the starting point for using metrics for data-driven engineering. VICTORIA: Yeah. And I like how DORA also represents it as the metrics and how they apply to where you are in the lifecycle of your product. So, I'm curious: with Merico, what kind of insights do you think engineering leaders can gain from having this data that will unlock some of their team's potential? MAXIM: So, I think one of the most foundational things before we get into any detailed metrics is I think it's more important than ever, especially given that so many of us are remote, right? Where the general processes of software engineering are generally difficult to understand, right? They're nuanced. They tend to kind of happen in relative isolation until a PR is reviewed and merged. And it can be challenging, of course, to understand what's being done, how consistently, how well, like, where are the good parts, where are the bad parts. And I think that problem gets really exasperated, especially in a remote setting where no one is necessarily in the same place. So, on a foundational level, I think we've really worked hard to solve that challenge, where just being able to see, like, how are we doing? And to that point, I think what we've found before anyone even dives too deep into all of the insights that we can deliver, I think there's a tremendous amount of appetite for anyone who's looking to get into that practice of constant improvement and figuring out how to level up the work they're doing, just setting close benchmarks, figuring out, like, okay, when we talk about more nebulous or maybe subjective terms like speed, or quality, what does good look like? What does consistent look like? Being able to just tie those things to something that really kind of unifies the vocabulary is something I always like to say, where, okay, now, even if we're not focused on a specific metric, or we don't have a really particular goal in mind that we want to assess, now we're at least starting the conversation as a team from a place where when we talk about quality, we have something that's shared between us. We understand what we're referring to. And when we're talking about speed, we can also have something consistent to talk about there. And within all of that, I think one of the most powerful things is it helps to really kind of ground the conversations around the trade-offs, right? There's always that common saying: the triangle of trade-offs is where it's, like, you can have it cheap; you can have it fast, and you can have it good, but you can only have two. And I think with DORA, with all of these different frameworks with many metrics, it helps to really solidify what those trade-offs look like. And that's, for me at least, been one of the most impactful things to watch: is our global users have really started evolving their practices with it. HENRY: Yeah. And I want to add to Maxim's answer. But before that, I just want to quickly mention how our products are structured. So, Merico actually has an open-source component and a proprietary component. So, the open-source component is called Apache DevLake. It's an open-source project we created first within Merico and later on donated to Apache Software Foundation. And now, it's one of the most popular engineering metrics tool out there. And then, on top of that, we built a SaaS offering called DevInsight Cloud, which is powered by Apache DevLake. So, with DevLake, the open-source project, you can set up your data connections, connect DevLake to all of the dev tools you're using, and then we collect data. And then we provide many different flavors of dashboards for our users. And many of those dashboards are structured, and there are different questions engineering teams might want to ask. For example, like, how fast are we responding to our customer requirement? For that question, we will look at like, metrics like change lead time, or, like, for a question, how accurate is our planning for the sprint? In that case, the dashboard will show metrics relating to the percentage of issues we can deliver for every sprint for our plan. So, that's sort of, you know, based on the questions that the team wants to answer, we provide different dashboards that help them extract insights using the data from their DevOps tools. JOE: It's really interesting you donated it to Apache. And I feel like the hybrid SaaS open-source model is really common. And I've become more and more skeptical of it over the years as companies start out open source, and then once they start getting competitors, they change the license. But by donating it to Apache, you sort of sidestep that potential trust issue. MAXIM: Yeah, you've hit the nail on the head with that one because, in many ways, for us, engaging with Apache in the way that we have was, I think, ultimately born out of the observations we had about the shortcomings of other products in the space where, for one, very practical. We realized quickly that if we wanted to offer the most complete visibility possible, it would require connections to so many different products, right? I think anyone can look at their engineering toolchain and identify perhaps 7, 9, 10 different things they're using on a day-to-day basis. Oftentimes, those aren't shared between companies, too. So, I think part one was just figuring out like, okay, how do we build a framework that makes it easy for developers to build a plugin and contribute to the project if there's something they want to incorporate that isn't already supported? And I think that was kind of part one. Part two is, I think, much more important and far more profound, which is developer trust, right? Where we saw so many different products out there that claimed to deliver these insights but really had this kind of black-box approach, right? Where data goes in, something happens, insights come out. How's it doing that? How's it weighting things? What's it calculating? What variables are incorporated? All of that is a mystery. And that really leads to developers, rightfully, not having a basis to trust what's actually being shown to them. So, for us, it was this perspective of what's the maximum amount of transparency that we could possibly offer? Well, open source is probably the best answer to that question. We made sure the entirety of the codebase is something they can take a look at, they can modify. They can dive into the underlying queries and algorithms and how everything is working to gain a total sense of trust in how is this thing working? And if I need to modify something to account for some nuanced details of how our team works, we can also do that. And to your point, you know, I think it's definitely something I would agree with that one of the worst things we see in the open-source community is that companies will be kind of open source in name only, right? Where it's really more of marketing or kind of sales thing than anything, where it's like, oh, let's tap into the good faith of open source. But really, somehow or another, through bait and switch, through partial open source, through license changes, whatever it is, we're open source in name only but really, a proprietary, closed-source product. So, for us, donating the core of DevLake to the Apache Foundation was essentially our way of really, like, putting, you know, walking the talk, right? Where no one can doubt at this point, like, oh, is this thing suddenly going to have the license changed? Is this suddenly going to go closed-source? Like, the answer to that now is a definitive no because it is now part of that ecosystem. And I think with the aspirations we've had to build something that is not just a tool but, hopefully, long-term becomes, like, foundational technology, I think that gives people confidence and faith that this is something they can really invest in. They can really plumb into their processes in a deep and meaningful way with no concerns whatsoever that something is suddenly going to change that makes all of that work, you know, something that they didn't expect. JOE: I think a lot of companies guard their source code like it's their secret sauce, but my experience has been more that it's the secret shame [laughs]. HENRY: [laughs] MAXIM: There's no doubt in my role with, especially our open-source product driving our community we've really seen the magic of what a community-driven product can be. And open source, I think, is the most kind of a true expression of a community-driven product, where we have a Slack community with nearly 1,000 developers in it now. Naturally, right? Some of those developers are in there just to ask questions and answer questions. Some are intensely involved, right? They're suggesting improvements. They're suggesting new features. They're finding ways to refine things. And it really is that, like, fantastic culture that I'm really proud that we've cultivated where best idea ships, right? If you've got a good idea, throw it into a GitHub issue or a comment. Let's see how the community responds to it. Let's see if someone wants to pick it up. Let's see if someone wants to submit a PR. If it's good, it goes into production, and then the entire community benefits. And, for me, that's something I've found endlessly exciting. HENRY: Yeah. I think Joe made a really good point on the secret sauce part because I don't think the source code is our secret sauce. There's no rocket science in DevLake. If we break it down, it's really just some UI UX plus data pipelines. I think what's making DevLake successful is really the trust and collaboration that we're building with the open-source community. When it comes to trust, I think there are two aspects. First of all, trust on the metric accuracy, right? Because with a lot of proprietary software, you don't know how they are calculating the metrics. If people don't know how the metrics are calculated, they can't really trust it and use it. And secondly, is the trust that they can always use this software, and there's no vendor lock-in. And when it comes to collaboration, we were seeing many of our data sources and dashboards they were contributed not by our core developers but by the community. And the communities really, you know, bring in their insights and their use cases into DevLake and make DevLake, you know, more successful and more applicable to more teams in different areas of soft engineering. MID-ROLL AD: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you’re tight on time and investment, which is why we’ve created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product’s next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at tbot.io/entrepreneurs. VICTORIA: I understand you've taken some innovative approaches on using AI in your open-source repositories to respond to issues and questions from your developers. So, can you tell me a little bit more about that? HENRY: Absolutely. I self-identify as a builder. And one characteristic of builder is to always chase after the dream of building infinite things within the finite lifespan. So, I was always thinking about how we can be more productive, how we can, you know, get better at getting better. And so, this year, you know, AI is huge, and there are so many AI-powered tools that can help us achieve more in terms of delivering software. And then, internally, we had a hackathon, and there's one project, which is an AI-powered coding assistant coming out of it called DevChat. And we have made it public at devchat.ai. But we've been closely following, you know, what are the other AI-powered tools that can make, you know, software developers' or open-source maintainers' lives easier? And we've been observing that there are more and more open-source projects adopting AI chatbots to help them handle, you know, respond to GitHub issues. So, I recently did a case study on a pretty popular open-source project called LangChain. So, it's the hot kid right now in the AI space right now. And it's using a chatbot called Dosu to help respond to issues. I had some interesting findings from the case study. VICTORIA: In what ways was that chatbot really helpful, and in what ways did it not really work that well? HENRY: Yeah, I was thinking of how to measure the effectiveness of that chatbot. And I realized that there is a feature that's built in GitHub, which is the reaction to comment. So, how the chatbot works is whenever there is a new issue, the chatbot would basically retrieval-augmented generation pipeline and then using ORM to generate a response to the issue. And then there's people leave reactions to that comment by the chatbot, but mostly, it's thumbs up and thumbs down. So, what I did is I collect all of the issues from the LangChain repository and look at how many thumbs up and thumbs down Dosu chatbot got, you know, from all of the comments they left with the issues. So, what I found is that over across 2,600 issues that Dosu chatbot helped with, it got around 900 thumbs ups and 1,300 thumbs down. So, then it comes to how do we interpret this data, right? Because it got more thumbs down than thumbs up doesn't mean that it's actually not useful or harmful to the developers. So, to answer that question, I actually looked at some examples of thumbs-up and thumb-down comments. And what I found is the thumb down doesn't mean that the chatbot is harmful. It's mostly the developers are signaling to the open-source maintainers that your chatbot is not helping in this case, and we need human intervention. But with the thumbs up, the chatbot is actually helping a lot. There's one issue where people post a question, and the chatbot just wrote the code and then basically made a suggestion on how to resolve the issue. And the human response is, "Damn, it worked." And that was very surprising to me, and it made me consider, you know, adopting similar technology and AI-powered tools for our own open-source project. VICTORIA: That's very cool. Well, I want to go back to the beginning of Merico. And when you first got started, and you were trying to understand your customers and what they need, was there anything surprising in that early discovery process that made you change your strategy? HENRY: So, one challenge we faced when we first explored open-source funding allocation problem space is that our algorithm looks at the Git repository. But with software engineering, especially with open-source collaboration, there are so many activities that are happening outside of open-source repos on GitHub. For example, I might be an evangelist, and my day-to-day work might be, you know, engaging in community work, talking about the open-source project conference. And all of those things were not captured by our algorithm, which was only looking at the GitHub repository at the time. So, that was one of the technical challenge that we faced and led us to switch over to more of the system-driven metrics side. VICTORIA: Gotcha. Over the years, how has Merico grown? What has changed between when you first started and today? HENRY: So, one thing is the team size. When we just got started, we only have, you know, the three co-founders and Maxim. And now we have grown to a team of 70 team members, and we have a fully distributed team across multiple continents. So, that's pretty interesting dynamics to handle. And we learned a lot of how to build effective team and a cohesive team along the way. And in terms of product, DevLake now, you know, has more than 900 developers in our Slack community, and we track over 360 companies using DevLake. So, definitely, went a long way since we started the journey. And yeah, tomorrow we...actually, Maxim and I are going to host our end-of-year Apache DevLake Community Meetup and featuring Nathen Harvey, the Google's DORA team lead. Yeah, definitely made some progress since we've been working on Merico for four years. VICTORIA: Well, that's exciting. Well, say hi to Nathen for me. I helped takeover DevOps DC with some of the other organizers that he was running way back in the day, so [laughs] that's great. What challenges do you see on the horizon for Merico and DevLake? MAXIM: One of the challenges I think about a lot, and I think it's front of mind for many people, especially with software engineering, but at this point, nearly every profession, is what does AI mean for everything we're doing? What does the future look like where developers are maybe producing the majority of their code through prompt-based approaches versus code-based approaches, right? How do we start thinking about how we coherently assess that? Like, how do you maybe redefine what the value is when there's a scenario where perhaps all coders, you know, if we maybe fast forward a few years, like, what if the AI is so good that the code is essentially perfect? What does success look like then? How do you start thinking about what is a good team if everyone is shooting out 9 out of 10 PRs nearly every time because they're all using a unified framework supported by AI? So, I think that's certainly kind of one of the challenges I envision in the future. I think, really, practically, too, many startups have been contending with the macroclimate within the fundraising climates. You know, I think many of the companies out there, us included, had better conditions in 2019, 2020 to raise funds at more favorable valuations, perhaps more relaxed terms, given the climate of the public markets and, you know, monetary policy. I think that's, obviously, we're all experiencing and has tightened things up like revenue expectations or now higher kind of expectations on getting into a highly profitable place or, you know, the benchmark is set a lot higher there. So, I think it's not a challenge that's unique to us in any way at all. I think it's true for almost every company that's out there. It's now kind of thinking in a more disciplined way about how do you kind of meet the market demands without compromising on the product vision and without compromising on the roadmap and the strategies that you've put in place that are working but are maybe coming under a little bit more pressure, given kind of the new set of rules that have been laid out for all of us? VICTORIA: Yeah, that is going to be a challenge. And do you see the company and the product solving some of those challenges in a unique way? HENRY: I've been thinking about how AI can fulfill the promise of making developers 10x developer. I'm an early adopter and big fan of GitHub Copilot. I think it really helps with writing, like, the boilerplate code. But I think it's improving maybe my productivity by 20% to 30%. It's still pretty far away from 10x. So, I'm thinking how Merico's solutions can help fill the gap a little bit. In terms of Apache DevLake and its SaaS offering, I think we are helping with, like, the team collaboration and measuring, like, software delivery performance, how can the team improve as a whole. And then, recently, we had a spin-off, which is the AI-powered coding assistant DevChat. And that's sort of more on the empowering individual developers with, like, testing, refactoring these common workflows. And one big thing for us in the future is how we can combine these two components, you know, team collaboration and improvement tool, DevLake, with the individual coding assistant, DevChat, how they can be integrated together to empower developers. I think that's the big question for Merico ahead. JOE: Have you used Merico to judge the contributions of AI to a project? HENRY: [laughs] So, actually, after we pivot to engineering metrics, we focus now less on individual contribution because that sometimes can be counterproductive. Because whenever you visualize that, then people will sometimes become defensive and try to optimize for the metrics that measure individual contributions. So, we sort of...nowadays, we no longer offer that kind of metrics within DevLake, if that makes sense. MAXIM: And that kind of goes back to one of Victoria's earlier questions about, like, what surprised us in the journey. Early on, we had this very benevolent perspective, you know, I would want to kind of underline that, that we never sought to be judging individuals in a negative way. We were looking to find ways to make it useful, even to a point of finding ways...like, we explored different ways to give developers badges and different kind of accomplishment milestones, like, things to kind of signal their strengths and accomplishments. But I think what we've found in that journey is that...and I would really kind of say this strongly. I think the only way that metrics of any kind serve an organization is when they support a healthy culture. And to that end, what we found is that we always like to preach, like, it's processes, not people. It's figuring out if you're hiring correctly, if you're making smart decisions about who's on the team. I think you have to operate with a default assumption within reason that those people are doing their best work. They're trying to move the company forward. They're trying to make good decisions to better serve the customers, better serve the company and the product. With that in mind, what you're really looking to do is figure out what is happening within the underlying processes that get something from thought to production. And how do you clear the way for people? And I think that's really been a big kind of, you know, almost like a tectonic shift for our company over the years is really kind of fully transitioning to that. And I think, in some ways, DORA has represented kind of almost, like, a best practice for, like, processes over people, right? It's figuring out between quality and speed; how are you doing? Where are those trade-offs? And then, within the processes that account for those outcomes, how can you really be improving things? So, I would say, for us, that's, like, been kind of the number one thing there is figuring out, like, how do we keep doubling down on processes, not people? And how do we really make sure that we're not just telling people that we're on their side and we're taking a, you know, a very humanistic perspective on wanting to improve the lives of people but actually doing it with the product? HENRY: But putting the challenge on measuring individual contributions aside, I'm as curious as Joe about AI's role in software engineering. I expect to see more and more involvement of AI and gradually, you know, replacing low-level and medium-level and, in the future, even high-level tasks for humans so we can just focus on, like, the objective instead of the implementation. VICTORIA: I can imagine, especially if you're starting to integrate AI tools into your systems and if you're growing your company at scale, some of the ability to have a natural intuition about what's going on it really becomes a challenge, and the data that you can derive from some of these products could help you make better decisions and all different types of things. So, I'm kind of curious to hear from Joe; with your history of open-source contribution and being a part of many different development teams, what kind of information do you wish that you had to help you make decisions in your role? JOE: Yeah, that's an interesting question. I've used some tools that try to identify problem spots in the code. But it'd be interesting to see the results of tools that analyze problem spots in the process. Like, I'd like to learn more about how that works. HENRY: I'm curious; one question for Joe. What is your favorite non-AI-powered code scanning tool that you find useful for yourself or for your team? JOE: I think the most common static analysis tool I use is something to find the Git churn in a repository. Some of this probably is because I've worked mostly on projects these days with dynamic languages. So, there's kind of a limit to how much static analysis you can do of, you know, a Ruby or a Python codebase. But just by analyzing which parts of the application changed the most, help you find which parts are likely to be the buggiest and the most complex. I think every application tends to involve some central model. Like, if you're making an e-commerce site, then probably products are going to have a lot of the core logic, purchases will have a lot of the core logic. And identifying those centers of gravity just through the Git statistics has helped me find places that need to be reworked. HENRY: That's really interesting. Is it something like a hotspot analysis? And when you find a hotspot, then would you invest more resources in, like, refactoring the hotspot to make it more maintainable? JOE: Right, exactly. Like, you can use the statistics to see which files you should look at. And then, usually, when you actually go into the files, especially if you look at some of the changes to the files, it's pretty clear that it's become, you know, for example, a class has become too large, something has become too tightly coupled. HENRY: Gotcha. VICTORIA: Yeah. And so, if you could go back in time, five years ago and give yourself some advice when you first started along this journey, what advice would you give yourself? MAXIM: I'll answer the question in two ways: first for the company and then for myself personally. I think for the company, what I would say is, especially when you're in that kind of pre-product market fit space, and you're maybe struggling to figure out how to solve a challenge that really matters, I think you need to really think carefully about, like, how would you yourself be using your product? And if you're finding reasons, you wouldn't, like, really, really pay careful attention to those. And I think, for us, like, early on in our journey, we ultimately kind of found ourselves asking, we're like, okay, we're a smaller earlier stage team. Perhaps, like, small improvements in productivity or quality aren't going to necessarily move the needle. That's one of the reasons maybe we're not using this. Maybe our developers are already at bandwidth. So, it's not a question of unlocking more bandwidth or figuring out where there's kind of weak points or bottlenecks at that level, but maybe how can we dial in our own processes to let the whole team function more effectively. And I think, for us, like, the more we started thinking through that lens of, like, what's useful to us, like, what's solving a pain point for us, I think, in many ways, DevLake was born out of that exact thinking. And now DevLake is used by hundreds of companies around the world and has, you know, this near thousand developer community that supports it. And I think that's testament to the power of that. For me, personally, if I were to kind of go back five years, you know, I'm grateful to say there isn't a whole lot I would necessarily change. But I think if there's anything that I would, it would just to be consistently more brave in sharing ideas, right? I think Merico has done a great job, and it's something I'm so proud of for us as a team of really embracing new ideas and really kind of making sure, like, best idea ships, right? There isn't a title. There isn't a level of seniority that determines whether or not someone has a right to suggest something or improve something. And I think with that in mind, for me as a technical person but not a member of technical staff, so to speak, I think there was many occasions, for me personally, where I felt like, okay, maybe because of that, I shouldn't necessarily weigh in on certain things. And I think what I've found, and it's a trust-building thing as well, is, like, even if you're wrong, even if your suggestion may be misunderstands something or isn't quite on target, there's still a tremendous amount of value in just being able to share a perspective and share a recommendation and push it out there. And I think with that in mind, like, it's something I would encourage myself and encourage everybody else in a healthy company to feel comfortable to just keep sharing because, ultimately, it's an accuracy-by-volume game to a certain degree, right? Where if I come up with one idea, then I've got one swing at the bat. But if us as a collective come up with 100 ideas that we consider intelligently, we've got a much higher chance of maybe a handful of those really pushing us forward. So, for me, that would be advice I would give myself and to anybody else. HENRY: I'll follow the same structure, so I'll start by the advice in terms of company and advice to myself as an individual. So, for a company level, I think my advice would be fail fast because every company needs to go through this exploration phase trying to find their product-market fit, and then they will have to test, you know, a couple of ideas before they find the right fit for themselves, the same for us. And I wish that we actually had more in terms of structure in exploring these ideas and set deadlines, you know, set milestones for us to quickly test and filter out bad ideas and then accelerate the exploration process. So, fail fast would be my suggestion at the company level. From an individual level, I would say it's more adapting to my CTO role because when I started the company, I still had that, you know, graduate student hustle mindset. I love writing code myself. And it's okay if I spent 100% of my time writing code when the company was, you know, at five people, right? But it's not okay [chuckles] when we have, you know, a team of 40 engineers. So, I wish I had that realization earlier, and I transitioned to a real CTO role earlier, focusing more, like, on technical evangelism or building out the technical and non-technical infrastructure to help my engineering teams be successful. VICTORIA: Well, I really appreciate that. And is there anything else that you all would like to promote today? HENRY: So if you're, you know, engineering leaders who are looking to measure, you know, some metrics and adopt a more data-driven approach to improving your software delivery performance, check out Apache DevLake. It's open-source project, free to use, and it has some great dashboards, support, various data resources. And join our community. We have a pretty vibrant community on Slack. And there are a lot of developers and engineering leaders discussing how they can get more value out of data and metrics and improve software delivery performance. MAXIM: Yeah. And I think to add to that, something I think we've found consistently is there's plenty of data skeptics out there, rightfully so. I think a lot of analytics of every kind are really not very good, right? And so, I think people are rightfully frustrated or even traumatized by them. And for the data skeptics out there, I would invite them to dive into the DevLake community and pose your challenges, right? If you think this stuff doesn't make sense or you have concerns about it, come join the conversation because I think that's really where the most productive discussions end up coming from is not from people mutually high-fiving each other for a successful implementation of DORA. But the really exciting moments come from the people in the community who are challenging it and saying like, "You know what? Like, here's where I don't necessarily think something is useful or I think could be improved." And it's something that's not up to us as individuals to either bless or to deny. That's where the community gets really exciting is those discussions. So, I would say, if you're a data skeptic, come and dive in, and so long as you're respectful, challenge it. And by doing so, you'll hopefully not only help yourself but really help everybody, which is what I love about this stuff so much. JOE: I'm curious, does Merico use Merico? HENRY: Yes. We've been dogfooding ourself a lot. And a lot of the product improvement ideas actually come from our own dogfooding process. For example, there was one time that we look at a dashboard that has this issue change lead time. And then we found our issue, change lead time, you know, went up in the past few month. And then, we were trying to interpret whether that's a good thing or a bad thing because just looking at a single metric doesn't tell us the story behind the change in the metrics. So, we actually improved the dashboard to include some, you know, covariates of the metrics, some other related metrics to help explain the trend of the metric. So yeah, dogfooding is always useful in improving product. VICTORIA: That's great. Well, thank you all so much for joining. I really enjoyed our conversation. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time.