Episode 13
· 40:30
Hey. Did you know that Kyle Fox, my cohost, has his own software as a service product? He does. It's called Photojournal, and this week we talk about how he built it and the lessons he learned along the way. But before we get started, I'd like to tell you about sprint.ly.
Speaker 1:At my day job, we've switched to sprint.ly, and I've gotta tell you, it has really simplified our development process. Now everyone on the team has a simple view of what's going on in development. On one screen, we can see what's in the backlog, what people are currently working on, and what's been completed and is ready for testing. I'd like you to go and try sprint.ly out for free. You can sign up for a thirty day trial at www.sprint.ly.
Speaker 1:Hey everybody. This is Product People, a podcast focused on great products and the people who make them. My name is Justin Jackson and my co host is Kyle Fox.
Speaker 2:Hello everybody.
Speaker 1:Hey Kyle. Kyle, this week we thought we would do something different. We've been interviewing other folks who have created their own products but the fact is you have your own product that you run on the side And in addition to being a podcast cohost and working as a product manager during the day, you have this SaaS business that you've built on the side. And I thought it would be interesting to interview you in a sense and kind of delve into what it is, how you built it, and maybe also talk about motivation. What should motivate us to build a product in the first place?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 1:So what what what is this what's your product called and what does it do?
Speaker 2:K. So the product is called Photojournal. It's photo with an f and the domain is myphotojournal.com. So I think lesson number one would be like, get some of that stuff right, right off the bat. Because like shortly after we launched, my wife, like she's obviously heard about Photojournal a lot while we were building it and everything.
Speaker 2:Then I was like, hey, we we actually launched it. She wanted to go check it out. She's like, she types it into the browser and she's like, it's not coming up. And I looked and she had gone to photo,ph,journal.ca. And I was like, k, first of all, it's actually my photojournal.
Speaker 2:It's photowithanf and it's .com. So you really want to nail that part down.
Speaker 1:Man, that's interesting. She to the Canadian domain. I know. And photojournal.ca is taken. Yeah, it's kind of bizarre.
Speaker 1:How bad is it when the domain trolls are taking photojournal.ca and hold
Speaker 2:it. Exactly.
Speaker 1:They got the Canadian one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So that's a quick tip for everyone out there. Oh, so Okay. Anyway,
Speaker 1:it's do myphotojournalcom.dotcom. Okay.
Speaker 2:And photoiswithanf. Mhmm. So and what it is is in a nutshell, it's a hosted blogging platform and community for professional photographers. So a professional photographer, when they want to start a blog, you've got these standard options where you can go to wordpress.com or blogger or tumblr or you can come to photojournal. So it's kind of like fits in fits in there.
Speaker 2:But it's it's focused yeah. It's focused primarily on professional photographers who, you know, are using blogging as a way to acquire clients and kind of get themselves known in the photography community versus like there's a lot of portfolio sites out there. Mhmm. Portfolios are they're fairly static and they're not super they're like they're not a great way. Some are, I guess.
Speaker 2:It depends on the portfolio. But they're not a great way to convey the photographer's personality. Mhmm. And a lot of the reason people hire a particular photographer over another photographer is because of the personality. Because a large part of what results in a quality photo shoot And quality photos is how comfortable the subject feels during the photo shoot and that's largely influenced by the photographer's personality.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So personality is a huge huge component when you're picking a wedding photographer or an engagement photographer, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, so you've gone into now that you've brought it up, you've gone into why someone would hire an individual photographer. Why would a photographer hire photojournal for their
Speaker 2:website? Well, mostly because I'm a really nice guy and, like, it's got pink on the website. I don't know. No. That's it.
Speaker 2:That's a good question. So well, there's lots of like there's lots of different options out there. WordPress is by and large the de facto blogging platform out there. But it's I mean, like guys like us who have we're we're fairly web savvy Mhmm. It's it's not that difficult to buy a shared host account, do one click install of WordPress and maybe find a theme, connect through FTP, upload the theme, tweak it a little bit through the WordPress interface, set up a domain.
Speaker 2:All that kind of stuff is not insurmountable. Mhmm. But to a lot of like people who spend their time out and about on photo shoots and editing photos, like they're busy doing running their photography business. And I don't know about you but it in my experience, people who kind of jump on the WordPress train eventually end up becoming system administrators.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So they're worried about like how do I back up my database? What does that even mean? How do I hook up my domain? How Like my blog got hacked.
Speaker 2:What do I do? Mhmm. My blog is slow. It's not loading. There's like a ton of things that Actually Squarespace has a great thing on their pricing page where it says, I think the question is like why isn't Squarespace free?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And they kind of go into Obviously like, you know, you read between the lines it's the same question that I get I get asked a lot is, you know, WordPress is free. How can you compete with a free product? I'm sure Squarespace gets the same thing a lot. And Squarespace's response is like one of those things that I wish I had come up with because it's just so spot on.
Speaker 2:And they say, no solution is truly free because your time isn't free. And I think that pretty much hits the nail on the head of why somebody would use Photojournal. You can sign up and have a blog ready to go in thirty seconds. And it's smoking fast. You don't have to worry about getting hacked or backing up your database or buying hosting.
Speaker 2:And we're pretty helpful with setting up the custom domains and things like that. Like that can be a pretty That's probably the only, I guess, technical hurdle that most of our users have to overcome is setting up a domain because obviously they need to go register it and set up the records and things like that. But we're pretty Like I've I've logged into people's registrar accounts and set it up for them so that they don't have to do it. So it's It's a pretty low friction solution to get a professional looking website and blog set up with little effort. And then it takes zero Pretty much zero effort to to continue running.
Speaker 1:So it sounds like if I'm a photographer, I'm hiring you to save me time and to give me peace of mind.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good way to put it. It's kind of like your website and blog is one last thing that you need to worry about. Like you don't to the point where you pretty much don't even have to worry about it at all. Like even if you're on WordPress, you know, it's not like you're gonna spend all your time managing your WordPress blog. But it is still something that you've you know, in your to do list, every month you should be like backing it up or updating it, know, running WordPress up.
Speaker 2:Man. So I just actually, a few months ago, built a WordPress a custom WordPress site for some friends. And I've been kind of doing the maintenance. And man, it's a lot of work. Like making sure the backups are running, testing the backups, doing all the WordPress updates, making sure all the plugins are up to date, making sure there's no conflicts with the plugins.
Speaker 2:Like and I'm pretty web savvy. And for me, I'm like, I dread doing it because it's a lot of work to make sure everything is up to date and not breaking and that there's no plug in conflicts and things like that. So so even even if you are web web savvy. Mhmm. And on top of it, it's still a lot of work to maintain a WordPress site.
Speaker 2:And I don't mean to just pick on WordPress. Like even if you're using like another hosted, self hosted CMS, you'd you'd encounter the same sort of thing. So with Photojournal, it pretty much completely eliminates that from your cognitive load. Don't have to worry about that stuff at all. You can just kind of focus on the photography side of your business.
Speaker 1:That's right. This brings up two things in my head. The first is this idea that Jason Fried just brought out on the 37 Signals blog, which was we always talk about what people can do once they sign up for your product. But he was saying, What can people stop doing when they sign up for your product? So before they were spending time worried about upgrading plug ins and protecting themselves from being hacked and figuring out how to back up their WordPress site.
Speaker 1:And some of those things are just things that they actually aren't doing. They're just worrying about them. Just sitting up late at night going, Oh man, I always think about how do I back up my WordPress blog but I don't know how to do that.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And like there's even a hurdle before you get to that point where, like again, I'm pretty web savvy and every time I need to set up like a small little website for somebody or or whatever, and I need to kinda look at all the different shared hosting options. Like that's overwhelming. Like if you wanna try a shared, finding a shared host, it's like well I could use DreamHost but they've had a lot of downtime and there's these problems and this other one is kind of expensive and this one looks good but it's a really I mean, not to paint everyone with the same brush, but it's a I feel like it's an industry where confusion creating confusion in consumers is almost like the way that they do their business. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and so like, you know, you can imagine somebody who doesn't know the first step about like how do I how do I get a domain? How do I get my.com name? Like they don't even really know, first of all, what hosting is, let alone which of the thousands of web hosts to choose from.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Even like that, that first hurdle is kind of eliminated by, you know, like presenting, hey, this is it's built for you. Like you just have to click a few buttons and like you don't even have to think about hosting.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Now here's another question. How many of your customers do you think are hiring you just for support?
Speaker 2:I don't know. That's an interesting question.
Speaker 1:This comes from this comes from something that Adi is it Adi at Wu Theme said? And he said that the thing that a lot of people who are starting SaaS businesses don't realize is that a lot of your customers are actually sure, they're paying you for the software. But what they're really paying you for is they want support. They want to be able to email someone and get an answer, or they want to be able to call someone and get an answer. And you had just mentioned, you've even gone in and set up people's custom domain names.
Speaker 1:So maybe just talk a little bit about support. How important do you think that is or has it been for you anyway in building Photojournal?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a good question actually. Of all, support is critical. We've had a lot of positive responses just from like how like kind of proactively and overly helpful and quick we are to respond. And so like people have I mean, our customer base is fairly small and like relatively small, should say.
Speaker 2:But we've got kind of a reputation for being like really good and really quick with our support. So and there's been like a lot of cases where you can take maybe a customer who's dissatisfied for whatever reason and turn that around into a really positive experience for them. Mhmm. So so I'm pretty like personally committed to customer support. Like I think it's a pretty important component of any any like especially SaaS businesses.
Speaker 2:But I think it plays a huge part because our like our audience, like I sort of just described, is primarily the people who don't really know what they need to do. Mhmm. And so they'll sign up for photojournal and like our support volume isn't super high. Like it's not like we get crushed with people asking us a lot of basic questions. But
Speaker 1:How many support emails do you get in a day or a week?
Speaker 2:In a week, I'd say maybe, I don't know, four or five. And usually most of them are you know, they're 90% the same things, which we've created articles for on our knowledge base. So I'll I'll kind of respond and usually include the link to whatever article is relevant. And if there's something else that I can tell from their question the article doesn't cover, I'll include that And I'll ask if they have any other questions and things like that. Overall, it's pretty I like the product itself is pretty stable.
Speaker 2:There's not a lot of bug reports or problems like that. It's mostly just people, you know. Honestly, over half of the support requests are I help setting up my custom domain. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which exactly like you said, they're kind of hiring you for support. And it's actually a good thing because someone will sign up, they don't really know. They're kind of like, okay, I've got this thing now, what do I do with it sort of? Yeah, yeah. Because the barrier to entry is so low.
Speaker 2:And then it's actually really really awesome because we have an opportunity to educate them. Mhmm. And say like, well here's how you should use your blog. Like you should use it to post this kind of stuff. And here's how you should promote yourself.
Speaker 2:And here's how you set up a domain. And here's how you do all these things. And suddenly like, we're kind of like seen as the experts. That's right. There's this like, there's this really trusting relationship where, you know, like, oh these photo journal guys, they totally helped me set up my whole website and they told me how I can promote my blog on Twitter and helped me figure out all these different things.
Speaker 2:So it's a pretty low touch consultancy almost that keeps them using Photojournal and keeps them happy with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But that's fairly high touch in in some ways in terms of think what some people feel is that they're going to flip the switch on this app and that money just comes in and all they do is work on the code and the design. And a lot of people miss that. Actually, a big part of what people are paying you for is support. Like, they wanna be able to ask you a question and and get an answer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And like that's why it's important to streamline your support system. So like we use an app called Tender and it's it's okay. I don't love it but it does the job. It's basically like a private forum.
Speaker 2:People can submit tickets and we can link it to their photo journal account and stuff like that. But, you know, if something comes up more than a couple times, we'll put it in the knowledge base. And that way, at the very least then we can link to it. We can link to it within the app and kind of preempt. You can preempt a lot of the common questions.
Speaker 2:But it's definitely not just, know, a SaaS business is not a set it and forget it type model. But I think that's a good thing because we learn a lot by talking with our customers and seeing the problems that keep coming up. Or not even problems, but questions. And there's a huge opportunity to educate. I don't know why this is, but kind of the photographer photography industry as a whole is a little bit behind on a lot of web stuff.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And so there's like a huge opportunity to educate customers on how to effectively use your blog. Like stuffing keywords into the tag field isn't helping anything.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But because of all this background with like the way that they've approached the web all these years, that's kind of ingrained as like, there's a tag field. I should put every possible keyword combination in there. And so Yeah. When they reach out to you, you can say like, Well, no. Actually a better strategy is to like Like the tags are there to help your visitors navigate your blog and And dive deeper into the parts of your blog that they like.
Speaker 2:And what you should focus your effort on is writing content that they'll want to read and share with other people. So when they kind of reach out to you, it's a good opportunity to yeah, educate them. And because of like photojournalists sort of built to be kind of, I mean, a little bit sensationalist to say this, trying to be the perfect tool for photography blogs. Yeah. As as we educate users on the proper ways to blog and use it to for their photography business, photojournal suddenly it becomes more and more looking like the perfect tool to do all these things.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So even though it's I guess it's high touch in the sense that you do have to occasionally talk to customers and help them out. I think it's overall a good thing to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's let's kind of circle back here and start from the beginning. What what's the story behind Photojournal? Why did you decide to build it in the first place?
Speaker 2:Well, what originally So I've kind of always wanted to I guess, like let's go back to where I was. I was at the time, I think I was still in college. So this would have been or shortly out of college. So this would have been about 2007 or 02/2008. And I was like I've always kind of wanted to to run my own business.
Speaker 2:And that was shortly around the time that Rails had started coming out. And you know, this new shiny new thing Basecamp was sort of starting to gain attention because it was just built by some guys who, you know, they built it themselves and put it out there and started charging money. Like my my love has always been like building things. Mhmm. And so I was like, Oh, this is awesome.
Speaker 2:I can just like, I can build something and put it out there and charge money for it and become wildly rich and wealthy. And that's how it's turned out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So anyway Story.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. That's that's it in a nutshell, basically. But no, I so I I was kinda like, okay. This is an interesting way to create a business where I'm not doing like service consulting work, but I can still get to do the things that I like to do.
Speaker 2:And so I was kind of like, I was looking for something to do that fit that model. And I kind of kind of toyed around with a few different things. So like most of the most of these never really got past the idea stage.
Speaker 1:Oh tell me, what what did you toy toy around with?
Speaker 2:So one of the first things I wanted to do was an online invoicing tool. Yeah. Which it was actually kind of funny because there is some I'm trying to remember what the name of the program was. There's some pro like kind of mentorship program here in Edmonton that there's like one night a week for for a month that you'd go and you'd you'd basically like, people would show you how to make business plans and and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. So I went to
Speaker 2:that and like the whole idea was to build this invoicing tool and it and I was like, I I don't I wasn't a 100% sure if people would use online invoicing. And like, at the time, there there really wasn't a lot of options Yeah. Out there. And I don't know if it was I don't know how long FreshBooks has been around but it was around that time that I saw FreshBooks and it was pretty new. And I think there's another one too.
Speaker 2:Can't remember the name of it. I wanna say Blink Sale maybe?
Speaker 1:Okay. Me
Speaker 2:Google that quickly actually. Yeah. Blink Sale. So as I started like looking into building this kind of a product, was like, okay, there's a couple options out there. And me being like, I don't know, kind of naive and maybe lacking in self confidence, was like, oh, you know what, somebody's already built an online invoicing tool.
Speaker 2:Like, I can't do it now sort
Speaker 1:of thing. That's right.
Speaker 2:You know? Which now my my opinion has totally like flipped. Yeah. You know, like people like If there's a lot of people in a space it's usually because there's a lot of opportunity there and even if you just do something a little bit different like you have a little bit different take on it, your value proposition is different. You can succeed in a crowded space.
Speaker 2:Think actually Amy Hoy tweeted the other day something about the whole idea of saturated markets being bullshit. Yeah, yeah. Which I totally agree with. So but any in any case, that's sort of what dissuaded me from actually building out the the invoicing app which Okay. Looking back on it, I kinda wish maybe I had had actually stuck with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But yeah, that was one of the first things.
Speaker 1:So how did you get Photojournal? What was the genesis of that idea?
Speaker 2:So yeah, again, there's a few more other ideas that I kind of thought about, talked to a few people about. Some were kind of like, I wasn't totally in love with any of them. And then at the time I was working for a company in town here called Lyft Interactive and we had been working on a product that let photographers build an online portfolio. So it's it's pretty basic. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But yeah. It was like, you know, photographers could sign up, upload their photos, organize them, and have an online portfolio. So I started to, I guess So not only did I build that product while I was there but I did all the support.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So I started to, I guess, kinda get to know photographers are interesting people. Like, they've Again, you don't wanna paint everyone with the same brush. But there's like There is kind of like an overall photographer personality. Okay. And
Speaker 1:they're cool Like creative.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're creative. They're like they're pretty like laid back. And they're just like I really I really enjoyed like it was kind of the I had done tech support in the past for other companies and I mean I didn't hate it. But you know, there's certainly like bad days where someone would like yell at you or You know, it just wasn't always like awesome but Yeah.
Speaker 2:Pretty much every every encounter I had talking with them The product was called Prade and it's still available at getprade. Okay. But pretty much every interaction I had with Parade customers was awesome. I was like, okay, these are cool people and like, you know, being like a I consider myself fairly creative. The other side of the coin was we're getting to like build these like beautiful photography based websites.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So it was kind of an interesting interesting space. And then I started to get to know a couple of photographers here in town through another friend of mine. And they needed a they needed a blog. They were like pretty big into blogging but they wanted to do a few other spin off blogs.
Speaker 2:But they didn't really wanna use WordPress. They didn't wanna use some of the existing options. So they kinda came to us to me and my friend John. So he's he's the guy that I co founded Photojournal with. Kinda came to me and John and asked
Speaker 1:What's John's last name?
Speaker 2:John Smelquist. Smelquist. Yeah. Okay. So our friends are Rob and Lauren.
Speaker 2:They came to us to to build them a blog. While working at Lyft and working on Parade, we had had people ask about blogging functionality. And in the first version of the product it was there but it was pretty crude and pretty bad and nobody used it. Mhmm. Which we incorrectly attributed to people didn't want photography blogs.
Speaker 2:Looking back on it, I think the problem was just our implementation was really bad and nobody wanted to use it because it was bad. It was literally tacked on as an afterthought. Yeah. So so in the meantime, we had other people asking for a better blog. And so when this opportunity to build a custom blog, photography blog for Rob and Lauren came up, we were like, you know, why don't we make it into something that anyone, any photographer can sign up and use?
Speaker 2:And so obviously there was a little bit of like a potential conflict of interest with my day job at the time because
Speaker 1:we
Speaker 2:were building portfolios and I was going to be trying to build photography blogs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How did you deal with that?
Speaker 2:Well, Micah, he he's the principal of Lyft Interactive. Him and his wife, Christie, run it. And they're they're super cool people and they're pretty like I mean, Parade was kind of like a side thing. It wasn't Lyft's bread and butter. Lyft's primarily an agency.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So, you know, so they didn't have a ton of they were relying a ton on on Parade. So it wasn't a huge deal for me to have something in a similar space, I guess. Yeah. And and we we we originally talked to them about even partnering on it.
Speaker 2:And originally that was gonna be the case. Okay. But they kinda decided that that was getting to be just too many too many things for them to handle, like a photography blogging business, a portfolio business, and then also trying to like the agency at the time was really small. It was like, you know, I think three or four people. Okay.
Speaker 2:So they they really wanted to focus on the agency side of things. And so they kind of they kind of bowed out and, I guess, gave us our blessing gave us their blessing to continue on with Photojournal.
Speaker 1:Okay. So So you and John decided to build it together?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Could you quickly talk about like what legal work did you and John do? Did you guys sign anything? Did you know, did you open a did you start a corporation? Did you open a joint bank account? Did you just shake hands?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We like John and I had been friends for a while in college and like he was you know, we're very similar in that like he loves building stuff. And he's got an entrepreneurial side as well. So while we were in college, we started a we just registered a partnership just at like the the registry's office. For all our American listeners, that's roughly the equivalent of the DMV, I suppose.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. But, so we just went in there and it's like, actually you know what we did? I was talking to my mom one day and I was like, I don't know how to do this. And my family has like, has had a few businesses in the past. And so my mom, she's like, she's an awesome like administrator.
Speaker 2:And so she's like, Well, let me look into it. And two days later, she sent me this package and it was like, she had basically summarized the difference between partnerships and corporations and all these different things.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:She talked about the different paperwork you need for each and like in which scenarios you would choose which over which. Then she was like, you guys should do this. So so mom my mom was like super helpful. Starting through some of that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So so anyway, what me and John did was while we were still in college, we started a partnership, just simple partnership. I think it cost $60 to register. And we started doing consulting work. This was before Photojournal came along.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And so and so we had had a joint bank account and we were running this small consulting business together. And then when Photojournal came along, we knew we were gonna have to incorporate it at some point, but we kind of deferred that until the last possible moment. We continued to develop it as part of our partnership. And then like a month or two before we launched it, we we actually incorporated. Gotcha.
Speaker 2:And and we just did that online through staples.ca and I think it I think it was like $600 or something like that. But
Speaker 1:Yeah. Interesting. Okay, so you and John decide to build this product and talk about your motivation. Like what was the primary motivation behind wanting to launch this business?
Speaker 2:Well, I think at the time, I would say I was fairly naive about about running a web business. Like I had done some freelance work but I didn't really know. I mean, I guess, I mean, SaaS wasn't brand new, but it was it was fairly new. And there certainly wasn't, I guess, like the the amount of resources now that are available. Plus I was younger and just dumber.
Speaker 1:So the
Speaker 2:motivation was really to like, let's build something that's gonna be fun to work on. That's gonna help our friends. And that, you know, maybe we can grow into a business where, you know, it's just me and me and John going like, maybe one day we'll have an office and it's just the two of us like hacking on forward journal.
Speaker 1:And we
Speaker 2:we called that the dream. Yeah. And so we're like, you know, if like, I don't photojournal would go down or something, we'd always just say like, you know, the dream. I think he he came up with this came up with a slogan that he would drop every once in a while and it was so cheesy, but it was hilarious and awesome. Was teamwork makes the dream work.
Speaker 2:So that was the unofficial slogan of Photojournal behind me.
Speaker 1:That's what kept you guys going.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Through the tough times. So the next question, how long did it take? I wanna say it probably took I would say from idea to launch, probably took maybe a year and a half. And that went like that included we we actually built I mean, this was kind of before the whole idea of of being lean or whatever.
Speaker 2:But we kind of, I guess you could say pivoted a few times in there. We we sort of built a first version for our friends, Rob and Lauren, who needed it for their blog.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And we used that to like launch their blog on. And but we weren't happy with like some of the like some of the way the tech worked and just how the overall system was architected. We had really gone overly ambitious with trying to modularize all the different pieces. Because we were like, oh, well this is this is software engineering. We're doing a good thing by like breaking things up.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. It ended it ended up being really difficult to roll out changes and things like that. So and I mean, we had like different parts of the app lived in different source code repositories. And like it was it was really difficult to to work on. So we're like, you know what?
Speaker 2:This is like we've got one one blog on here and making changes is already painful because of like the way it's set up. So we we pretty much like we looked at like, do we refactor it or what do we do? And we ended up just deciding to rebuild it. So we we basically rebuilt it and ported their blog over to the new platform. So that added some of the time.
Speaker 2:And then, yeah, other thing too that like, I mean, again speaking to our naivety and especially mine and my, I guess, sense of perfectionism. Yeah. My feeling was that when we launched, this thing had to be polished and it had to be like, awesome. There couldn't be any bugs in it. It had to like, it had to be flawless at launch, which, you know, extended the development time a lot.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And and I mean, like, now looking back, that's that's the one thing that I would out of all the things that I could do differently, if I could do it again, that would be the first thing is like, get something out there and launched as soon as possible. I mean, we we kind of got lucky because it ended up it ended up working out not too badly because we had kind of a list of people who wanted to use it. And when we did our launch announcement, we had a lot of people sign up and and become paying customers. And I don't know how many of those would have happened if like if the product was a little bit buggy.
Speaker 2:And maybe not as polished or as fully featured. But so we like, I mean, in some ways it was successful to like put in the effort to make it really polished, but I think it would have been even more successful. And we would have learned things sooner if we had launched it, you know, sooner without laboring over all the small details first.
Speaker 1:And we're gonna leave it there for now, but next week, Kyle gets into all the juicy numbers. How many people signed up at launch? How many people does he have using the product now? And what is he hoping for in terms of growth in the future? Please thank our sponsors, sprint.
Speaker 1:Ly on Twitter at sprint.ly. You can follow us on Twitter as well at ProductPeopleTV. And if you could give us a rating in iTunes, we would love you forever to search for Product People and click that five star rating. Really helps the show get noticed. See you next time.
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