Spoiler Alert! The Apple Vs Hey Fight Explained and Who’s Right?

Show Notes:
Links:
HeyWorldwide Developers Conference
David Heinemeier HanssonJason FriedHerokuAndrey ButovConfiguring Fastmail to act like Hey
Full Transcript:
Starr:
Okay. Now we can talk about how terrible the world is. No.

Ben:
So speaking of Apple. Yeah, it's been interesting. So I've been watching all the hubbub over the past few days about Hey and Apple.

Starr:
So what is Hey?

Ben:
So Hey is this new email service from our friends at Basecamp.

Starr:
I still call them 37signals, because we go back.

Ben:
Way back.

Starr:
They let me do that.

Ben:
And also an app. So of course, their web application comes with an IOS application, which has caused a bit of a kerfuffle in the Apple world over the past few days. Which is funny that the timing is such that it's right before their Worldwide Developers Conference. That's interesting. But I was thinking about it this morning-

Josh:
Yes, it's very interesting. Some would say it's a little more than a coincidence.

Ben:
I bet you that we will see Basecamp releasing the company version of Hey very, very soon. And when they do, I bet you that the IOS app will be cleared for takeoff. Because I-

Josh:
Ah, because then it will be a company app, right, in air quotes.

Starr:
Oh, yeah.

Ben:
Exactly.

Josh:
Y'all can't see my air quotes, listeners. But ...

Starr:
What is the kerfuffle, as you called it? What's going on?

Ben:
So Apple won't let Basecamp update their IOS app. And in fact, have somewhat threatened to removed the existing app from the store because-

Starr:
But the existing ... I'm sorry, the existing Basecamp app?

Ben:
No, the existing Hey app.

Starr:
Oh, the Hey app.

Josh:
Yeah, it's the new, their email client. Yeah.

Starr:
Yeah.

Ben:
Because they do not support in app purchases for the Hey subscription, which costs $100 a year. And of course, David and Jason are not willing to give Apple any cut. And Apple is saying, "Well, our rules are you got to do IAP if you want to have an app that does something that's tied to a subscription."

Josh:
They want 30% or something.

Ben:
30%. So I bet you, again, that company thing will come out real soon now. And as soon as they do, Apple will be like, "Okay, well since it's not an individual thing, then of course we'll let that app in." Just like a bunch of other apps that are currently in the App Store, like for example, Fastmail, right.

Josh:
The argument is consumer versus business, right.

Ben:
Right.

Josh:
The rules for consumer apps are different from the rules for business apps.

Ben:
And Basecamp, they're making quite a stink about this whole thing, saying it's highway robbery, and it's taxing the internet, and all this kind of stuff, right. But this is a thing of marketplaces, they charge you a fee for being on their storefront. That's just the way that these things work. It's not new, right. And we do the same thing with Heroku, right. We pay Heroku 30% of all the revenue that comes in through people using our service through Heroku. And that's just the cost of being on the platform.

Starr:
So let me ask you, I think I may have misunderstood this slightly. So in order to have any ... I guess, for new apps, Apple is saying that if you have any type of subscription service, it has to be purchasable through the app via Apple's payment purchasing thing that's equivalent to Apple's version of PayPal, or whatever.

Ben:
Yeah. If that app is a personal app.

Starr:
If it's a personal app.

Ben:
And not a reader kind of app, like Netflix falls into the thing of readers I think. So that's-

Starr:
Wait, what?

Josh:
Oh, I didn't know the reader distinction.

Starr:
I was just going to ask about this, because Netflix, yeah you can't sign up through the App Store for Netflix. So what's the difference?

Josh:
Oh, because it's read only. It's just content you're viewing or something.

Ben:
Yes. Yeah.

Josh:
Oh. So if Netflix let you upload videos like Vimeo or something, then they'd have to ...

Ben:
Well, imagine if you download the Netflix app, and there was nothing you could do unless you had a paid subscription, right.

Josh:
Oh, yeah.

Ben:
Then if there wasn't a special exclusion for Netflix, there obviously is, right, then Apple would say, "Well, the app doesn't do anything useful, we don't want that kind of app on our App Store." And that's the argument for Hey. It's an email app that can't load email from any other service except for Hey, and you can't use Hey unless you have a paid account, a paid personal account.

Josh:
Yeah, all you can do is log in.

Ben:
Right.

Josh:
Right. Yeah.

Ben:
Right. So I totally see Apple's stance on this. And a lot of people are thinking they're being jerks about it. But I mean, Apple is saying, "Hey, we have a big platform, and you are reaping the benefits of being on our big platform, so pay us."

Josh:
Yeah. Well, it seems like the bigger question is, is it a good idea to basically just build for one platform?

Ben:
That's definitely the question, yeah.

Josh:
If you're going to start a new company, is targeting solely ... Just building IOS apps for instance, is that a good idea?

Starr:
You want to target IOS and Blackberry.

Josh:
Right. Get that IOS Blackberry electron port or whatever.

Starr:
Yeah, you play them off one another.

Josh:
React Native. Does React Native target Blackberry?

Starr:
I don't know.

Ben:
Probably.

Starr:
My mind is just exploding right now.

Josh:
Yeah. I find it funny just the level of outrage on both sides. It seems like there's two very vocal camps on one saying, "Basecamp is just drumming up all this outrage as a marketing strategy, and it's just like billionaires squabbling over 30% of their empires or something." And then on the other side, obviously you have DHH and everyone else who's upset with Apple. But to me, it does seem like there are more pressing matters in the world right now than-

Starr:
Yeah, you think? You think? Just a couple things.

Josh:
I could think of a few things.

Starr:
Just a couple more important things.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
One thing about this, it's sort of ... Okay. First of all, I have to say, so I was reading Tweets from Andrey Butov a friend of the show, and ... I hope I can say that. I hope he doesn't get mad at me for saying that. And-

Josh:
Well, he built our IOS app, right.

Starr:
Yeah, he built our IOS app. So he's a friend of Honeybadger I think, and we're a friend of his. And he's like, "Why are people taking sides on this? This is two companies that both make a ton of money just arguing over a percentage. Why are people taking up arms about it?" And that made me think. Well, that was an interesting take, because I feel like Basecamp, 37signals, their shtick is, "We're bootstrappers." Jason Fried goes and speaks at bootstrap conferences and stuff.

Starr:
But really, Basecamp is in a league beyond pretty much any bootstrap company I know of that is in that world. So I don't know, it almost seems disingenuous to me of DHH to be like, "Well, I'm just a little guy, and y'all should feel sorry for me. I'm going to use my public platform to complain to Apple." And I mean, yeah, Basecamp is much, much smaller than Apple, but it's like, I don't really care.

Josh:
Yeah. I think they're still, they're a bootstrap company to me. I mean, technically they're bootstrap. They bootstrapped the company to start it. Yes, they took investment from Jeff Bezos. But the model for that was not the same as most companies that take investment to grow the business I think. I don't know. I could go either way on that. But how pure do you have to be to qualify as a bootstrap company?

Ben:
Are they a true Scotsman?

Josh:
Right.

Starr:
Someone has got to do a Scottish accent.

Josh:
I mean, yes, they are the most successful. They're also one of the most ... They're one of the oldest. And to be fair, how many employees does Apple have versus Basecamp's? They're under 100 still, aren't they? Yeah. I don't know. Yes, they're raking in the profit. And I like to think, if we ever reached their level, we would be too. But yeah, I don't ...

Ben:
I just feel its kind of silly to complain about having to pay a platform's fee when you want to be on the platform so you can get the benefits of the platform. Hey, if you don't want to pay the 30%, okay, yank your app.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
To be honest ... Oh, sorry.

Ben:
And if you're not going to do that, why aren't you going to do that? What is the value that you're getting that you're insisting on having an app in the App Store? Okay, if you can say what that value is, now all you have to do is decide whether that value is worth 30% of your per user revenue. That's it. It's a simple math, right. I think it's whiny entitlement to say, "Oh, well, we're special. And we shouldn't have to pay because of X." Or, "Apple can't charge anybody this because it's just rent seeking." Well, they built the platform, they're bringing the customers to you, they're adding value.

Starr:
Yeah, they own the apartment building. They're seeking rent for their apartment building.

Ben:
Exactly. If you don't want a bed, then don't rent an apartment.

Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Starr:
Yeah. I think what's kind of interest ... What bugs me about the DHH position is that it invites smaller bootstrap people to be like, "Yeah, this is something that's against us, and this is affecting us badly." But now that I'm thinking about it in more detail, the thing that strikes me is that this is a situation that is really only going to affect people who bring their own market.

Starr:
Basecamp and DHH have their own massive following, right. And they're bringing a ton of customers. And so they just want to have a place where people can download an app, and have their customers use it. But if you're just starting out ... I remember when we were just staring out, and we were getting our extension on Heroku, it was like, "Sure, great, we'll pay 30% because we don't have any customers. If you can get us some customers, we'll be happy to pay you 30% for them."

Ben:
Yeah, totally.

Starr:
Yeah, it's just-

Josh:
And if that is your primary launch marketing channel, and you are good, your app is good, then you could get featured. There are avenues to advertise your service through the App Store as well, which I assume become more attractive to Apple if they are actually making money off of you. I mean, one would think.

Ben:
Yeah. I think the workaround is, you just make sure that it's not just an individual subscription. I'm really excited to see, if they launch the company thing, which it's already in beta. You can get an invite to it, right. So we know it's supported, and it's coming soon. I just can't wait to see, once it lands, is the whole IOS thing, does it go away? Yeah.

Josh:
Yeah. Well, yeah. And then they're better for it.

Starr:
Is that what we do? Do we have a company account, or are we just grandfathered in?

Ben:
Well, I did wonder how does this affect the Honeybadger IOS app? Because it really doesn't do anything if you don't have a paid account, right. But we don't do it just based on individuals, it's based on teams, right. Somebody can-

Josh:
Yeah, it's business.

Ben:
Somebody can be paying for multiple people to use the service, the app. So, whew, we're okay I think.

Josh:
Well, all I had to say on the whole thing is, if we're upset over billionaires ruining the world, and we've reached DHH as the one that we're ranting about, man, we're really screwed.

Starr:
Oh, I don't really care about DHH. I don't fundamentally care about any of this stuff. I'm just saying, DHH is not ... This isn't the everyman versus Goliath. This isn't like ... It's like, "Man, capitalism really sucks because they're sticking it to DHH." This company who makes how many hundreds of million dollars a year? It's like a cock fight between capitalists. Let them do it, fine. Bet on sides. Who cares? But fundamentally, it's meaningless to me.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
That's fair.

Josh:
So you tried, Hey, Ben. As did I.

Ben:
I did, yes. Thanks to you.

Josh:
Starr, I tried to get you in with my invite. I thought that my invite had three, and I only gave it to three other people. But maybe it included me in that or something.

Starr:
Yeah, maybe. I'm left out in the cold. It said, "Sorry, invite code invalid."

Josh:
I was real excited to get you in there. Yeah, luckily-

Starr:
Now we really see why I am sticking it to DHH in this episode.

Josh:
Because yeah, it's interesting, Starr, that out of the three of us, you're the only one who hasn't been invited.

Starr:
I know, right. I'm standing out here in the cold. I'm just trying to sell my little matchsticks to make money.

Josh:
Well, luckily I think that you'll still have a good chance of getting Starr as a username out of the three of us I would say.

Ben:
Yeah, at least you won't have to pay $1,000 to get your first name as a username.

Josh:
Right.

Starr:
I don't know. It costs 10 bucks a month though, right? Or 100 bucks a year.

Ben:
100 bucks a year. But if you want a three letter name like, I don't know, Ben, then you have to pay $1,000.

Starr:
Yeah. I'm not sure I want to pay another $10 a month for another email account. I've got too many email accounts.

Ben:
Well, I happily pay Fastmail for my email.

Josh:
Same.

Ben:
I have my own domain. So I get email at my first name, @bencurtis.com. And been doing that for years. And for the longest time, I had that hosted at Gmail, back when that was free. And I don't know, a year or two ago, I decided I want less Google in my life. And so I switched from Gmail to Fastmail. I don't know, I have five or six domains that I actually care about email for. And I love it. I love Fastmail for email, it's great.

Josh:
Yeah. I use Fastmail too. And actually, this whole Hey thing, because I went and tried, I've tried it out. And I think it's cool, and it has a lot of really good concepts. But I haven't come to the conclusion that it actually simplifies my email at all, just because I have different email accounts. And I have a fairly complex setup. And I've done a lot of optimization of my own email process. So I've got a lot of, I guess infrastructure set up to manage my email. And Hey just seems like a very ... You'd have to go all in on it. And it's not full featured enough to go all in with everything. So until it is, it ends up just being another email account or whatever.

Starr:
So what is the thing they're trying to do that fixes email? I don't even know what the point is.

Josh:
So basically, they're trying to ... When I first signed into it and started to use it, I think they're taking a lot of good patterns that people have used, kind of set up with automation rules, and more complicated setups in the past, and are trying to create basically just a template that does that for you.

Josh:
So it has a screening. It screens everyone by default for instance. So when someone first emails you, it doesn't show up in your inbox, it goes to, what I think they call the screener. And the screener basically gives you a thumbs up and thumbs down on whether you want to receive email at all from that person. And then also, if you do want to receive email, you can tell Hey what type of email that is. So it's either something like someone contacting you, so you want that to go to your inbox, or maybe it's a marketing email, or a receipt, or et cetera. So kind of like Gmail's, whatever they call the label system, updates and promotions.

Starr:
Oh, cool. That sounds useful.

Ben:
Yeah, I think if you are don't have a 15 year archive of email, and you can be fine with just one email address, and you don't really have a lot of filters and automation in place already, it'd be great for you. If you're not an email junkie expert, then do it, because it has, like Josh said, some great patterns. When you said it implements some well known patterns, or ways that we've been doing, it reminded me of Rails. That's what Rails brought to web development.

Josh:
Yeah, it's Rails for email. That's great. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. But yes, Basecamp likes to do this.

Ben:
Yeah, exactly. Before Rails, there were templating, there wasn't NBC, there were database extractions. But it wasn't all in one package nicely put together. And so that was one thing that was really beautiful about Rails. And I get the same feeling about Hey. They've taken a lot of experience ... For example, I have a newsletters filter in Fastmail. All the marketing stuff, all the newsletters I subscribe to all bypass my inbox and go there so I can check it when I want to. And so I think Hey is formalizing these patterns that people have gained over time.

Josh:
As I was using Hey, there were some concepts that I really liked, that I don't really have implemented in my email. So yesterday, I spent a little time actually implementing. So I implemented a screener folder in Fastmail, because Fastmail filters, they have an option to filter basically any email that is from someone who isn't in your contacts.

Josh:
So basically, I just created a to screen folder, and created a rule that said, "If this person isn't in the contacts, put it in that folder instead of the inbox." And that's essentially what Hey does. I think I'm actually going to do a little blog post on this, because I took screenshots as I set it up. So I'll share that maybe later this week, or next week, or something. But I really like it so far.

Josh:
And actually, I don't know how much further I'm going to go from that, because really all I want to do is, I want to receive ... Email from a few people should go to my inbox, but the rest of it, I just want to scan and archive. That's my process in Gmail and anywhere else that I use email. So basically, I could just have it all go to this folder. I could whitelist just a few people. And then basically the screening folder becomes just like scan and archive. I can do that every day, or every week. And just add whoever to the contacts if they're a new person that needs to make it through.

Josh:
And that actually is a lot simpler for me I think. Or will end up being a lot simpler for me than even Hey is in the end. So yeah, I think my ... I think I really don't need Hey personally.

Ben:
I might try that. I hadn't thought about setting up my own screen or anything like that. But I like that idea.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
That's interesting.

Josh:
I'll throw that blog post together. But it's easy.

Starr:
That sounds really great. I wonder if it would work for me personally. I tend to, if I have a cabinet with lots of drawers, I will forget that the drawers exist, and then never look in them. So my email workflow of just having a big inbox with 1,000 things in it, and I have to go through each one is almost best for me, because it's just one place I have to look, and I know that I'll remember to do that. So I don't know. I would try it though.

Josh:
Yeah, I put mine right under the inbox, or actually even above the inbox if you really want it to be front and center. And then in Fastmail, you can color code the folders.

Starr:
Yeah, cool. I need to get on Fastmail. I'm still rocking Gmail.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
Like it's 2007 over here.

Josh:
The other big discovery I made this week was how Fastmail handles forwarding. So I now have both ... Because I have to other, I have Honeybadger, and then I have Hint, the consulting company that I'm a part of. And both have an email account. And so before, my workflow was basically, I had the same workflow duplicated across three different email accounts. But now I have my two other Gmail accounts forwarding into Fastmail. And then Fastmail has an identities feature that actually integrates with Gmail. So you can send, you can reply. So basically, it's three email accounts in one. And so I basically have just one process now where I can manage all of my email accounts. And it's really fast.

Starr:
Oh, awesome.

Josh:
Fast. I guess that's why they call it Fastmail.

Ben:
Here's another cool thing about Fastmail. So like I said, I have five or six email domains all pointed at Fastmail. And I have each domain set up so that you can send email to any address, at any of those domains, and it will come to my one inbox, right. So I can use that for spam tracking, or if I sign up for a newsletter, I can sign up with some random email address @bencurtis.com. Right. So the thing that's cool ... A bunch of email providers do that. But the thing that's cool about Fastmail is, if you have that set up, and an email comes into one of those throwaway email addresses, and you reply to that, then the reply will come from that same email address that it came to.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
Oh, nice.

Josh:
That's like the same identities feature. Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah, yeah. So that's pretty handy. So you can still keep up the charade of having this other user specific email address.

Josh:
I do the same thing. I never thought about the catch all thing, because I always worried that I'm going to get a bunch of ... Do you ever get random people emailing random spam? Spam.

Ben:
Of course, yes.

Josh:
So I normally, I do the same thing you do, but I just use the plus syntax with my name, so Josh plus whatever tag I want for the service I'm signing up for. But Fastmail also has, they have an aliases feature that not only can you create aliases on your own domain, but they give you a list of 30 plus different email domains that they just give you for ... Well, it's not for free, because you pay for the service, but it's included. And you can create basically an unlimited number of email addresses that work the same way. They come in, and then you can reply to them. So I've used that before for specific ... If I'm signing up for something that's potentially really spammy, I'll create a special ... There's no way of knowing that it's ... It's not even at my email domain.

Starr:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, it's for you black hat SEO forums.

Josh:
Yeah, right. Yeah, so we'll put in our Fastmail referral code right here, and ...

Ben:
Totally.

Starr:
Just go to fastmail.com/honeybadger. Don't do that.

Josh:
If you do, you'll be extremely disappointed.

Starr:
Yeah.

Josh:
Yeah, it's cool.

Starr:
Ben Findley is setting up some podcast advertisements, right. And we were talking about doing that sort of vanity domain thing. But in the end, it just seemed simpler to have people mention us in our little sign up, "Why did you sign up?" comments section.

Josh:
Oh, yeah. You mean doing a Honeybadger IO slash the name of the podcast, or something?

Starr:
Yeah.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
Yeah, and we're looking into conferences and we don't have conferences. Conferences are just gone.

Ben:
Yeah, so Ben wanted to do a coupon that allowed people to get a credit. You sign up and you get X dollar credit. But Stripe doesn't support that. So we've done coupons before for these podcast sponsorships, and conference sponsorships, and the coupons have always been either for a dollar amount off, or a percent off.

Starr:
Okay. Let me stop you there. So what's the difference between $10 off coupon, and a $10 credit?

Ben:
So credit, you'll consume over time, right.

Starr:
Okay. So the $10 off coupon only works on the one months billing cycle.

Ben:
Or three months, or six months, or whatever you specify.

Starr:
Yeah, but one payment.

Ben:
Right.

Starr:
It doesn't get depleted across multiple payments.

Ben:
Right.

Starr:
Oh, okay. That makes sense. Yeah.

Ben:
So I love the idea of having sign up credits, that's cool, because then you can, for example, play with a more advanced plan, right, try out some of those features, whereas, a dollar off credit, or coupon, wouldn't give you that same ability to test it out for free, right. So I wish that Stripe supported that. But in leu of that, like you said, we're just going to do the manual thing.

Starr:
Ah, that makes sense.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
But speaking of coupons and pricing, the new pricing that we launched a few weeks ago seems to be working okay.

Starr:
Oh, tell me about that. I don't know anything about that.

Ben:
Yeah, well, I'm not-

Starr:
I don't like this tone in your voice. It just doesn't sound good.

Ben:
Well, I do watch the revenue closely. And the revenue does not indicate that this is a super win for us. So I think more time is required. You can't judge new pricing with just a couple weeks worth of data. But early indications are that it's either neutral or somewhat negative. So we'll see.

Starr:
But also, the economy is on fire.

Ben:
Yeah, that makes it tough.

Starr:
It's really hard to know what's caused by what these days.

Josh:
The economy is bad. I mean, we introduced a much lower price point. So people are going to be defaulting to that initially. I mean, it's obviously not going to make as much unless we get a exponential amount more people signing up or something.

Ben:
Yeah, I think the intent of the lower pricing was to be more attractive to people signing up. And that, I think has born out. We've seen an increase in the numbers of people signing up for paid accounts.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
So that's worked. I just, yeah ...

Josh:
Yeah, it's-

Ben:
So hopefully, over months, we'll see-

Josh:
It's going to take a while.

Ben:
Yeah.

Josh:
I mean, if it works out, it'll have to work out in the lifetime value or something, right. And yeah, I don't know either.

Ben:
We'll make it up in volume.

Starr:
I'd rather have more ... I don't know. I'd rather have more people paying us than necessarily have the total amount of money they pay us be a little bit higher.

Ben:
Distributes that risk.

Starr:
Right.

Josh:
Yeah, same here. And yeah, I don't know. It's always been amazing to me how few signups we've actually had over the lifetime. We don't have hundreds of people signing up every day, right. And it's really, I mean, it's a slow drip of customers coming in over time. And it's always been amazing to me how big of a business you can build with just that slow drip of customers. So I mean, the fact that we haven't ... Yeah, I don't know.

Josh:
It's also made it a little bit difficult for me when we're making pricing changes, because we're not like Zoom or something where we can get statistical benefits of an analyzing the rate of signups, and figure out how our pricing is affecting it. So for me, anything that moves the needle on more people signing up, and assuming they stick around, and maybe even pay us more in the long run, if they ... You can't get introduced to Honeybadger and like it enough to bring it with you to your next company unless you have the opportunity to use it now. So anything that adds customers, I'm usually pretty positive on that.

Ben:
Yeah.

Starr:
Yeah, one time a couple years ago, or several years ago, I was ... Remember when everybody was like, "A/B testing. You got to do AB testing." There were all these presentations like, "Yeah, I did some A/B testing, and I found that if I changed the color of my signup button from blue to green, we made 50% more money that year." And that was all ... I mean, okay, yeah it was all lies.

Josh:
That was Google.

Starr:
It was all lies. But also, it's impossible to do any kind of A/B testing unless you have a ton of ... Unless your sample size is large enough, right.

Josh:
Yes.

Starr:
If you've got a really small sample size, then ... And these A/B testing tools will actually calculate it for you, it was like, "How long do you need to wait to get some meaningful data on this?" And it was like, "Two years." Just like, "No. No, thank you. I'm just going to go back to guessing."

Ben:
Well, we have had a few more customers sign up since the last time I tried A/B testing. So maybe the time frame would be a little shorter than two years now.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
Yeah. I mean, but it's been more than two years. Maybe we should have just left it running.

Ben:
How's that test going, Starr?

Starr:
Yeah, it's like, "Well ..." I don't know. I don't know. We've changed the website a little bit since then.

Ben:
Yeah.

Starr:
Yeah.

Ben:
I like our approach of longitudinal testing versus parallel A/B testing.

Starr:
I like the way you say that. Longitudinal.

Ben:
It makes me feel more sciencey.

Starr:
That's true.

Ben:
It's a longitudinal study.

Josh:
Sciencey. Sciencey should be the word of the year, or the decade. Yeah, I'm glad you're keeping track of that though. And it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. The flip side of the whole pricing thing is, if it's not working, or we realize we're not making enough off of people initially signing up, we can always raise the lower end of the pricing a little bit. And then if that doesn't reduce the rate of signups, then that's a good sign. That's a good signal for us. I think it's always been a pretty good signal.

Josh:
Because we did that in the past where, when we were charging too little, we just started bumping the price a little bit. And then you can watch that. And usually, it doesn't matter how many signups you get. Usually, if it's going to impact you, if it's going to have a big impact, you'll see a little bit of a dip or something. At some point, people will stop paying. Versus, there's usually never a point, there's rarely a point where, when you drop the price, people ... You're always going to get more people or whatever.

Ben:
Yeah. But I really love the plans. I love the, having the change up we made where we have the team versus business, and then the different traffic tiers. That, I think makes a lot more sense than the small, medium, large stuff that we had before.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
It does.

Josh:
Yeah, I think it's a good framework. It's a better framework moving forward even if the numbers change a little bit over time.

Ben:
Yup.

Starr:
Yeah. And regardless of the numbers, it's nice to have made the world make a little bit more sense. Because so much of the world makes no sense whatsoever. So it's nice, in our little corner, we've got our little Japanese garden.

Ben:
Doing our part to bring peace to the world.

Starr:
Yeah.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Well, I think next week, maybe next week, maybe two weeks from now, we'll need to talk about a new product release.

Starr:
Oh. You're going to be ready.

Ben:
Yeah.

Josh:
Going to drop a few hints here?

Ben:
Yeah, well if you're a web developer, you'll be interested. How's that for a hint?

Starr:
Don't give away the farm.

Ben:
Yeah, we can't stray too far from our current customers. We love web developers, so we have to build more products for them. But I will say that one person with whom I have shared more detail about this side project, this person said, because it could be infrastructure heavy, and we know a thing or two about infrastructure here at Honeybadger.

Starr:
You do. I don't.

Ben:
This person said, "I would trust you with this type of service, because I know how good you are at this sort of thing."

Starr:
Yeah, that's a great compliment.

Ben:
We're going to have to put that on the testimonials page when we do our launch page.

Starr:
Yeah. I have to say, so I was in Basecamp, and I was reading your spec that you wrote. And I was like, "Wow, this is actually really ..." I read it one time because I was in a rush and I read it, I was like, "Okay, that looks good, whatever." And then I came back to it later, and I was like, "This is really a good idea."

Josh:
I'm excited.

Starr:
So, go, Ben.

Josh:
I'm really excited.

Ben:
Yeah, so hopefully this week. Today, I created the official Amazon account for it.

Starr:
Oh yeah?

Ben:
Yeah. I was just doing it on the personal account before. But I do love ... So one of the things that I'm doing is segregating this from the rest of Honeybadger.

Starr:
Yes.

Ben:
Just in case-

Starr:
That's a pro tip. That's a pro tip.

Ben:
Yeah, yeah. Just in case something bad happens, or ... What were you going to say, Starr?

Starr:
I always just use separate AWS accounts for separate products.

Josh:
Things.

Ben:
Yeah. Because who knows, someone might come along and say, "Hey, I want to buy that thing." And it'll be much easier to turn over that Amazon account, versus trying to pull stuff out from a co-mingled account.

Starr:
I think I still may be hosting some files on S3 for old clients. I don't know. And it doesn't cost hardly anything. But I think I may still. Some of their files may be on my personal AWS account.

Josh:
Nice. Those were the days.

Starr:
Those were the days. Yeah.

Josh:
Well, I'm really excited about the launch. I just realized that I'm going to be off for two weeks starting Monday. So if this launch is happening in the next two weeks, then you might see me pop back in, because I don't know if I can keep myself away, at least from doing some signal boosting or something.

Starr:
Oh, that's good.

Josh:
And also, I'm really excited about the marketing side of it too, because there's a lot of good marketing opportunity I think, for this.

Starr:
Yeah, definitely. And I feel like we got to keep up this tradition of Ben launching gigantic things while you're on vacation, Josh.

Josh:
Yeah. I just realized, that really does fit that narrative. So maybe I should just go away. Maybe that'll actually help the success. Because it's worked well in the past.

Ben:
So if you go on vacation, and we deploy big new things, then I propose that, when I go on vacation, that you get a bunch of new customers.

Josh:
That works for me. Yeah.

Starr:
Yeah, I'm excited to see what people think about this. And yeah, see what we can do to push it going forward. I think that'll be great.

Ben:
Hope so. Is that a wrap?

Starr:
All right. If you've enjoyed the show, go to Apple Podcasts, and give us a review I guess. And yeah. And if you want to write for us, I'm still doing that. So publishing the old blog. Go to honeybadger.io. Go to the blog, and there's a write for us thing in the header. And until next week, this has been FounderQuest.

Episode source