Episode 26
· 51:58
In this episode of Product People, Amy Hoy gives a deeply personal interview on her past programming on an Apple 2C, selling her My Little Ponies to buy a Power Mac, and how she ended up building her first products. First, I'd like to tell you about some great sponsors that make product people possible. If you want more insights into your development process, then I'd recommend you give sprint.ly a try. It's going to help you answer questions like: How long will this project take? What's slowing us down?
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Speaker 2:Hey, this is Justin and this is Product People, a podcast focused on great products and the people who make them. And today I'm joined by Amy Hoy. Hey, Amy, how's it going?
Speaker 3:Hey, pretty good. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm doing well. Doing well. Hey, Amy, I'm sure there's a lot of people who know who you are, but for those who aren't familiar with you and what you do, can you just give maybe a background on what you're doing right now?
Speaker 3:Yep, I'm talking to you. I think the audio doesn't cut out again. Seriousness, sort of. My husband and I run a software service product called Freckle, which we started in 02/2008. And that is half of our income and the other half approximately is from my class, 30 by 500 and related.
Speaker 3:I teach other people to do what we do business wise, how to create a business, a small, like sort of targeted product that makes money in the anti big funded startup kind of way.
Speaker 2:And some people might be familiar with your husband. Who's he?
Speaker 3:I don't know. I suddenly forget. My husband is Thomas Fooks. He's sort of a world famous JavaScript programmer. Right now, he's a little bit like Elvis, a little later stage in his career.
Speaker 2:He isn't
Speaker 3:like that. Thomas is famous for creating Scriptaculous, which was the first JavaScript animation framework. He was a core committer to prototype. He was a core committer to Rails. He is now the producer of Scripty two, which is sort of Scriptaculous Reborn and Septo, which is a jQuery replacement.
Speaker 3:It's API compatible, but it's like a tenth the size or smaller. It was aimed at mobile only. Just a bunch of stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think some people would look at you and say, you you guys as a couple are kind of like a power couple. You've got, you know, on the one side, you've got these great bootstrapped businesses. And on the other side, you've got, you know, these development chops. How did did you get into all of this?
Speaker 2:Have you like from where you building stuff from the time you were a kid? What's kind of your your backstory?
Speaker 3:I started programming probably around seven years old. I used to spend an inordinate amount of time at the library kind of crawling around and looking at stuff. And at home, we only had an Apple 2C computer.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I'm 28, so that was very much out of time. Yeah. And I found some really ancient books on basic. And I thought basic, basic, basic. That appeared to be what my computer does.
Speaker 3:So I took it home and I wrote some of the programs from the book and then fiddled around and, you know, messed with it and had some fun. I had this, until I was 17 or 18. I had this cycle of where I would try to get into programming for a little bit. I would get really stuck. There was no one to help me.
Speaker 3:So I would and the books, the books really suck. Programming books are awful.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I actually have a similar experience trying to teach myself how to program and I just, I'd get going and then I'd get stuck. And then, yeah, same thing. I was like out in the country, there's no one to ask.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But when I got to be 17 or 18, I had, you know, people around me who could help me and I learned PHP and SQL and got super into it. Mostly because I was I had been doing design and app design and web design for a long time by that point, freelance. And I was really tired of having to rely on other people to build what I wanted. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So for me, was all about the control and then I kind of really super got into it. And then I discovered Rails and then we started our business and now I don't really program anymore because my time is more impactful elsewhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Now, were you always into a business, like from the time you were a kid?
Speaker 3:Yep. Because my mother was a single mother and very, very bad with money. So I was obsessed with money. The only way I got a newer computer was because I figured out how to put the money on my own how to get one that I could afford off Usenet.
Speaker 2:Oh, no way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, totally. I was 12. I bought myself a power, granted an older power PC, a Power Mac $7,200 was $1,200 I was 13. I had come up with the money via like a year long strategy.
Speaker 2:Wow. And where was this? Where did you grow up?
Speaker 3:Suburban Maryland.
Speaker 2:Suburban Maryland.
Speaker 3:Wasteland. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So what's it like? I've never been to Maryland. When you say Suburban Maryland and then wasteland, what's that like to grow up there?
Speaker 3:Well, everyone where I lived was an asshole. Not joking. Yeah. I have some stories that could curl your, would curl your toes, but it's just not interesting to tell. The only place to get coffee, like out and about before Starbucks came to the shiny new strip mall.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The only thing our town was known for was the mall. And it wasn't even a very good mall. Before Starbucks came, the only place you could get coffee was at either a gas station or one of those sub shops that didn't have a name, which is say like subs and pizza.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And none of it was good. Yeah. Yeah. It was just everything. It was just crummy.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And everything sucked.
Speaker 2:And so so what did you have any business mentors growing up? Like when you were a kid and you were,
Speaker 3:you I all alone.
Speaker 2:How did you learn?
Speaker 3:Books. Like I said, I spent a lot of time at the library. I read everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And was there a particular book back then? Do you remember a particular book? Like what was the first book that you read that you were like, yes, like, I want to do this. I want to do business.
Speaker 2:I want to make money. I want to figure this stuff out.
Speaker 3:That is a good question. I always wanted to make money. Probably the first business type book that I remember was Spin Selling.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:I must have read that when I was 13 or 14. By which point I had let's see. Nope. That was a little bit later. I started a website, a Daily Mac news and opinion website, I guess when I was 15 that made money off advertising.
Speaker 2:Oh, really?
Speaker 3:Yeah. What
Speaker 2:was it called?
Speaker 3:It was called the Daily Mac.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I ran that for years. I've always was kinda hustling to try to get money. Yeah. So I don't remember a single point when I started.
Speaker 3:When I was, I guess, 12 or 13, maybe, oh no, it was middle school. It must've been 12. I would sell, we got a CD burner for some reason. I had a Mac by then. And I would burn mixed CDs for people at school and charge them money for it.
Speaker 3:And to buy that Power Mac, I sold all my My Little Ponies in a whole big bucket, big bucket for $80 I sold a bunch of my toys in the yard sale.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I was just always into it because there was no other way that I was going get money. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Were you like, were you were you as confident back then as you are now? Were you a confident kid?
Speaker 3:I mean, not to the degree that I am now, but let's just say that I was always contrary. People, every, my parents and everyone else spent their my entire life telling me I couldn't do stuff and they never seemed to notice that every time they told me I couldn't, I would do it anyway and they never like adjusted their viewpoint.
Speaker 2:Interesting. So they would say, you can't do that. And you say, yes, I can. And you go out and do it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And they would never seem to notice. My parents literally told me you will end up working at seven
Speaker 2:Eleven. Interesting.
Speaker 3:And for people who don't know what seven Eleven is, it's like a quickie mart.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so, and, but when they said that, that didn't depress you. It just made you feel like you wanted to not do that.
Speaker 3:So when you listen to advice or opinions, you have to consider the source. My parents had made a dog's breakfast of their entire lives. So, I was like, well, your advice didn't get you very far. So, and you don't know me, clearly.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because I rustled up $1,200 spent myself a Power Mac when I was like 13. I So, was like, it just rolled off me. Didn't believe it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wonder, like, because that kind of determination. I remember being a kid and just loving business. Like, would like stay up late. There's this business show on CBC, Canadian television called Venture, which was all it was at eleven at night.
Speaker 2:It was like all stories about people that had started businesses. And I remember being really young and loving that show and loving business. But I was so shy. So I remember trying to sell things, and I was just so shy and not confident at all. Were you more confident than that?
Speaker 2:Like, were you fine with selling and trying to pitch people things and?
Speaker 3:I was certainly really socially awkward in certain situations, but not in others. It wasn't universal. I guess when I wanted people to like me, I felt super awkward back then. And didn't know when to start a conversation. I would interrupt people, but I wouldn't mean to, and it was just, I would say long jokes that no one would get, and then I would feel awful and blah blah.
Speaker 3:That was super I was super awkward in a lot of ways, but I guess I had no problem talking to the lady who bought all my My Little Ponies, for example, that I recall. I did car washes and all kinds of stuff. So I guess not. I guess it was sort of depending. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I wasn't shy talking to adults.
Speaker 2:Think it
Speaker 3:was other kids mostly.
Speaker 2:Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. I can remember, like, trying to go door to door and selling, like, know, like gifts out of a catalog. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And just wanting to do it so badly and just being so shy. Did you ever try to do that? Go door to door and sell stuff?
Speaker 3:I did some fundraising for my school. We sold like fancy tissue paper and stuff, but in sort of a pattern that would define a lot of my life until the past, I don't know, five years, six years, would, the one time I did it, I mean, we got all the stuff delivered to us personally after the sale was over and we were supposed to go distribute it and I never did. I did not follow through.
Speaker 2:Fulfillment was the problem.
Speaker 3:Fulfillment was, yeah, follow-up. Follow-up Yeah. Was my
Speaker 2:Okay, so let's fast forward a little bit. You talked about being 18 and had you started freelancing at that point?
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, I've been freelancing since I was 14 or 15. I dropped out of high school in ninth grade.
Speaker 2:Oh, are you serious? Yeah. You dropped out of high school in ninth grade. Yeah. And just started working, doing your own business right away?
Speaker 3:I was already doing some stuff, but yeah. Wow. That was there for me. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And were you was this all stuff on the web?
Speaker 3:Yep. Yep. When I was 12, I started a website that I called kids on the internet and it got in dot net magazine. And I got my first freelance job when I was 12. I was invited to write for, oh gosh, what was it?
Speaker 3:It was some sort of short lived media company by Turner Broadcasting, some sort of like hip online site that they wanted to like compete with suck.com. I can't remember the name of Okay. Anyway, I get paid a $100 and that was my first experience being edited brutally. I had left a comment on some blog posts, like some pre blog, but journal news post thing and they had comments. I left a comment and they were like, yeah, would you like to write an article?
Speaker 3:And that was the start for me. But I've been doing, I started doing web design 1415.
Speaker 2:Wow. And were you building when was your first product? Like, when was the first time you can remember building a product?
Speaker 3:How do you define product?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. I guess it would be like something that you've made that I don't know. That's a good question.
Speaker 3:Here's of the things that I did for money. I wrote, I guess I was 13 or 14, I wrote a little book on Internet marketing, and I sold two copies on Yahoo Classified. It ended up costing more to print and bind than it did, that I made money off it. So I abandoned that.
Speaker 2:What was the book called?
Speaker 3:Internet Marketing Wiz Tips.
Speaker 2:Oh, awesome.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I, let's see. For a while, between like 14 and 16, I would resell IKEA lamps on eBay.
Speaker 2:Really?
Speaker 3:Because yeah. That was before IKEA was shipping stuff from their catalog.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So the only way you could get it if you weren't near an IKEA was to buy it online. And I would buy like $5 paper lamps and they would sell for like $15 or a bit more. And I would make $600 to $1,000 a month doing that.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:And I let's see. What else did I do? I mean, I used to rake in between 600 and $1,000 a month on my advertising on my website, my Mac website. Back when you, I mean, I ran a script on my own server that served up ads and reported CPCs. Let's see, what else did I do?
Speaker 2:I wrote
Speaker 3:book for a publisher when I was 16, but the publisher got bought by Prima. No, it was Prima. They got bought by somebody else and they dissolved it. They never published the book.
Speaker 2:Wow. What was that book on?
Speaker 3:Oh, it was a stupid formula book. It was, I book fast and easy.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It was $5,000 They're like, it's not like a real book, book. They pay you to follow their formula and fill out the details. Gotcha. What else did I do? The first real, more like adult product I made, I did some Photoshop web design stuff for Toby from Shopify before Shopify existed.
Speaker 3:No way. Yeah. Yeah. And I recorded a video of how I did it and he paid me extra for that. And then I asked, hey, do you mind if I sell this video to other people?
Speaker 3:And I I sold, I don't know, 15 copies for about like several a couple thousand dollars of revenue.
Speaker 2:And how old were you then when you when you did that your first kind of that that video product?
Speaker 3:21.
Speaker 2:Wow. So
Speaker 3:still 2020. I think '20.
Speaker 2:Fairly Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, I felt pretty old by that point. And I'm 21.
Speaker 2:And when did you was that when you kind of realized because now you've kind of become known as this person that says, you know, building products is where it's at. Like, that's the best way to run a great business. Is that around that point when you started to realize how powerful products could be?
Speaker 3:I did just tell you I published a little mini book when I was like 15, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so did you realize that right from the beginning?
Speaker 3:I knew it from the beginning. Yeah. When Basecamp came out in 02/2004, I was 19. And I had found rails after Basecamp because Basecamp, there was a beta that Jason Fried used to be part or I think it was Jason Fried. One of the 37 Signals guys was part of this design community I was part of, Invite Only.
Speaker 3:And I heard about Basecamp because he was talking about the beta. And so I had checked it out. And at this point, I had been designing complex software, web based software, and developing it as well. And I looked at that and I thought, wow, that's a really great idea. I could do better.
Speaker 3:And I started mapping out the plans of how I could make it more efficient as a user interface. And those plans just sat in my note taking app for, you know, forever. So five years and change later is when we shipped our first software as a service. So I didn't do anything with it. I knew it.
Speaker 3:I knew that was the way to go, And I didn't do
Speaker 2:what was holding you back?
Speaker 3:Discipline. Yeah, the willingness to stop doing other stuff and do that instead.
Speaker 2:Gotcha. And what, were you doing a lot of client work at the time?
Speaker 3:Yep, exclusively. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So even though you kind of realized at an early age, like that there was a lot of potential in products, it sounds like, you know, like if for paying the bills, were still on the kind of the consulting treadmill for a while.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. For a long time. I mean, I consulted from like '14 till like '25. So it's a long time. And it
Speaker 2:is why do you think it was so hard? Like because you had that realization of, you know, I could sell products. Why was it? Why is the discipline of building and releasing a product different than, for example, just working with clients?
Speaker 3:There's no one to answer to. If you are not good at structuring your time, if you aren't good at managing your own stupid emotions, you will wait until there's a deadline or your client will be unhappy and you use that as a kind of a whip to make yourself go. And if you try to do that with products, well, there's no whip, right? Because you're building something new, there's no one who cares if you do it or not. So it's just emotional immaturity.
Speaker 3:It's a matter of trying to control your behavior by setting up external requirements. Like you can set your own deadlines for your own product, but you know that they're not real.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And so what was the difference? Like what happened between, you know, that five years from, you know, you taking seeing Basecamp and then shipping? Was it Freckle that you shipped first?
Speaker 2:Yep. Okay. So what happened in between there that allowed you to finally get freckle off the ground and out the door?
Speaker 3:So there's a couple of things that happened. I got totally screwed on a contract and got really sick and ended up having to take a job because I spent all my money. And I had that job and then I had another job and then I had another job. And I really didn't like it. It was nice to have, you know, money on tap, basically.
Speaker 3:But in there somewhere near the end, I worked with, say, Frank on Color Wars. Oh. Do you remember that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I was part of Color Wars. I I worked I did the designs for Color Wars. That was fun. It was really fun to ship something because I don't know if I mean, do you do consult you've done consulting. Right?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So how many of the projects you worked on as a consultant ever shipped?
Speaker 2:Oh, man.
Speaker 3:Basically none, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like smaller projects, you can usually get those out the door, but anything that was like bigger in scope, a lot of those never did ship.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's just one giant whack fest.
Speaker 2:Exactly. I had
Speaker 3:the same problem at my jobs. And that's when I realized it wasn't my fault that the people, quote unquote, in charge had these emotional issues where they would never let something be finished and get it out the door. And I was just up to here. I had spent ten years working, and I had so little to show for it. I worked on some amazing stuff and I could only ever show people screenshots.
Speaker 3:Right? Because it never got shipped. So or it did, but it was unrecognizable by that point.
Speaker 2:Why is that? Like, because that's the joke. Like, I just retweeted something yesterday that said our projects at 90% done, so we're halfway there. Like, why do you especially in big organizations, why is it so hard to get anything out the door?
Speaker 3:It's not big organizations. It's all Because they're made of people. And because people are all emotionally immature.
Speaker 2:So you think it's emotion it has to do with A 100%.
Speaker 3:Really? A 100%. And let finish my story and then I'll tell you my theories. I think about this a lot. So I could talk forever.
Speaker 2:Okay, let's do it.
Speaker 3:So I worked on Color Wars and I was like, fucking A, I can ship something and this is fun and people use it. And then later that year, I had been working on I've been using Twitter. I was I saw Twitter back when it was TWTTR, and the logo was that, like, creepy, sweaty logo.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That drooping green thing.
Speaker 3:It was so creepy. I signed up and I was like, I don't get it. And then I, like, deleted my account. Like, I was probably in the first thousand users and I deleted my account much too much a grin. I knew the guys were working on it.
Speaker 3:Right? Because I knew them from the rails community. We were pretty tight knit back then. Yeah. And then later, when it became a thing, checking it out, and there was, like, stuff on it, and to see what people tweeted.
Speaker 3:It was really interesting because of the the kind of data that people tweeted with stuff that would never get blogged. It was very ephemeral. Mostly people tweeted about stuff that happened to them or thoughts or things like that. It's not like today where it's, you know, 80% links.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Before it become like another content aggregation tool. Yeah. It was really interesting and insightful. You got little micro peaks inside people's psyches. Thought it was amazing.
Speaker 3:And I had seen this live journal visualization project called We Feel Fine.
Speaker 2:Have you
Speaker 3:seen that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I thought
Speaker 3:that was just epic. And I'd always been a fan of like Tufte's books and the information visualization. I mean, my thing, whole life has been making things understandable. Like communicating, really communicating and teaching has been my number one passion. And so I thought, well, I could do something, we could do something really amazing with this data and Twitter and they're not doing anything.
Speaker 3:So Thomas and I had a meeting with all the top people at Twitter in February was it 02/2007?
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah. February 2007. And they said I proposed them what we would do and they loved it. And the main purpose of the meeting was because Thomas was going to help them make their JavaScript faster. Because that was back when it was so slow to type in the web app that your typing lagged.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Remember that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh yeah.
Speaker 3:Thomas was like, I can fix the JavaScript performance issues in two days. And I'm like, that's great. And then we heard from him a month later and said, just, we said, we just can't get it together to hire you. And I was so confused by that because Twitter at this point was 15 people and they couldn't figure out the political wrangling to hire somebody to come in for two days to fix all their JavaScript problems. It's not because they decided to do it internally because those performance issues and the size of the JavaScript and the loading, that persisted for years.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I was like, fuck. I never get to do this thing. Yeah. The visualization of the tweets. And then one day, I was lying in bed.
Speaker 3:I had been thinking about it for a long time, like in the shower, I would imagine all the features and stuff that we would do to make information visualization really neat, and how it would be different than we feel fine, and how, what we would share with it and all. And one day I just woke up and I was like, why would I wait for them to hire me to do it? I can just do it. Mhmm. And so we did.
Speaker 3:We did. I was gonna actually do it using the JavaScript, the search API, which outputs, used to output, I don't know, RSS, and I was gonna then convert it using a gateway to JSON. I was just gonna suck it in and do the Twist story, the CPM Twist story. But we ended up using a Thomas decided that that was not the best thing and so he came up with a structure that we use Ruby and a Cron job and blah blah. Still mostly JSON though, and so on and so forth, and made it to Story and people fucking loved it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Got everywhere. We got in the Wall Street Journal. You know, we got we got all over the place.
Speaker 2:That that is when to a story is when I originally heard about you because I was trying
Speaker 3:to think like, like,
Speaker 2:did I first even and to me, this is really interesting, like how people discover other people or, you know, and because I like I discovered 37 signals because my boss said you should read Getting Real. And that's an interesting kind of gateway into that whole world. Right? And I learned about you and Thomas through Twistory. And it was literally like I had checked out Twistory once and then I went back another time and it was probably like the fifth time I said, Who's behind this?
Speaker 2:And then it's just like Amy Hoy and Thomas. And it's like, I don't know you guys from Adam. But once you start digging in and then you start following people's blogs. So that whole thing is interesting to me that sometimes you can release a project and people hear about it and then there's this kind of continuation afterwards.
Speaker 3:Yep. Yep. And actually it made us a lot of money.
Speaker 2:Really? Yeah. How did it make money?
Speaker 3:I will tell you.
Speaker 2:I can't wait.
Speaker 3:In 02/2007, when we did this, I was working at LimeWire. Okay. And it was in many ways the perfect nerd job, but the CEO who owned us looked at us as his toy. Limewire used to make quite a lot of money.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And I therefore made a lot of money. And I had profit sharing. And the actual LimeWire JavaScript client team, they were totally dysfunctional, but I wasn't part of them. We were on a different floor. We were doing this cool social artists network web thing.
Speaker 3:It was gonna be really neat. And he kept because we couldn't didn't finish it in, like, two weeks. He kept coming down and changing stuff. And I found out later, I could've just ignored him and just kept I'll be like, sure, Mark. I could've ignored him and just done whatever I wanted to do because no one ever got fired from my wife, like no matter how egregious their behavior was.
Speaker 3:And I wish they had done that, would have enjoyed it more, but I cared too much. I was constantly trying to manage him and then the new guy he hired who sucked. Yeah. And it was just driving me crazy. So I had ended up taking a month long trip to New Zealand in 2007 to give a user interface design workshop at Webstock and they paid.
Speaker 3:So I got paid for the trip. They paid me, I don't know, 6,000 New Zealand dollars, plus they paid for my airfare. And then I had like money to hang out. So, I mean, it was basically like a free trip. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Far, far away. So I talked to Thomas and they're going down with me, it's very early in our relationship, and we spent a month down there. And I was, I've got my timeline screwed up here. Sorry, go back. This was after Twist Story.
Speaker 3:This was after Twist Story by Twist Story was like May or June 2007. This was, I guess, first Yes, this is the first few months of 02/2008. This was February 2008.
Speaker 2:And Okay. Have they heard of you through Twist Story? Was that kind of the driving force behind them wanting you to speak?
Speaker 3:You know, I never asked. It's a good question. So, sorry, backpedaling. So Twist Story was like 2007. I quit Limewire in September 2007 because it was just driving me batty.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Absolutely crazy. It was like living in Dilbert. Lots more money and parties and when you're really cool. It was wonderful, but awesome.
Speaker 3:Like I've been ruined for any job ever. Google tried to recruit me and I was like, well, can I do all this? They're like, no. Never working at Google, but nevertheless, quit. I quit and I formed a consulting company with my friend, John, and we did user interface design.
Speaker 3:And we were working for big clients like Bear Stearns and a bunch of startups that ever fucking shipped anything. Like there's this one client, every time we'd go back there, they would have fewer people because they just couldn't get it together.
Speaker 2:Oh no.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, I don't feel too sorry for them. It's a long story. But it's their own stupidity, really. So I've been doing that for like six months and then we went on this trip to New Zealand and New Zealand in 2007 had no fucking internet.
Speaker 3:People had internet in their homes and it was slow, but was functional. But like, you would expect the hotel would say, oh, yeah, we have Wi Fi and you get there and it would be like 300 bytes per second. And they're like, sorry, it's run by a third party. We can't do anything about it. Nor will they call them to fix it.
Speaker 3:So I was basically offline for a month. Wow. Poor John had to hold down the foot without me.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:On another project that would never ship, right? The guy wanted like 80 designs for the same page. And I was so relieved not to be doing that. And having all that time off, was like, fucking hate, I'm never gonna do this again. I hate it.
Speaker 3:I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. I hate consulting. And so I realized I had to stop. I had to stop. So I came back and kind of started formulating my plans for withdrawal.
Speaker 3:But by that point, Twistori had gotten the eyes of a lot of marketing people who are mostly really obnoxious. But I heard from Undercurrent, that was a really nice digital agency and a guy who later became a friend. And they wanted to repurpose the story, like a tweet stream of certain keywords you could switch through for the tennis channel for some sort of tennis event, I forget which one.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:And that led to more work and more work. So we next time, by a year later, we were doing work for, Pepsi and Ford and a bunch of other Thomas and I.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And they were, like, licensing Twistory for their own kind of purpose.
Speaker 3:We built really huge, really interesting, really smart natural kind of natural language processing type things for Pepsi for South by Southwest, which was just epic. And Pepsi was a great client.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:All the other people were terrible clients. And so by the end of it, by another year of that, I mean, we'd brought in, you know, several $100,000 in consulting, but I was just like, no more. I can't do this anymore either. So by that point, we'd launched Freckle. We launched Freckle in December 2008.
Speaker 3:So came back from New Zealand, knew I had to quit. That was, we got back in March. We were packing up my house and arranging our wedding and there I had come up with the idea for Freckle, the concept for Freckle, shall we say, and sketched out the user interface. And we started building it that summer while we were moving back and forth between Philadelphia and Vienna and packing up and doing our wedding. And then after our wedding, we got really serious about it and we shipped it in December.
Speaker 3:Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So how long did it take to build the initial version of Freckle?
Speaker 3:It took, I mean, like one to two days a week for three months.
Speaker 1:One to two days a week for three months.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I once figured out that it was about the equivalent of watching Buffy all seven seasons.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Plus a few extra for each of us who worked on it.
Speaker 2:And by this point, were you like more disciplined?
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We shipped I was like, there's nothing that's gonna stop me. I'm not gonna have another project that doesn't ship. So we shipped it without password reset.
Speaker 3:We shipped it without the code that would lock you out. If your credit card didn't work after thirty day trial and all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Nope. How much did working with other people help too? Like, was that does that play into the discipline of getting a product out the door?
Speaker 3:So we had two partners who had their own consulting company. They worked with us to get the first version of Tristory out the door, and that was great. Sorry, freckle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, first version of freckle out the door, yeah.
Speaker 3:First version of freckle out the door. But afterwards, got the teamwork did not work. So, but during the process of actually building it and shipping it, I mean, it was still me who was like, Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, not going do that. Nope, I'm going ship without it. Nope, nope, nope.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I tried to rule it with an iron fist because when you're in it, it's so much easier to say, Oh, we have to do this, we have to that. I'm like, Nope. You do not have to have the code. What's gonna happen if we ship without the code that locks people out after thirty days, their credit card doesn't work?
Speaker 3:People might get a few free days of work or we could fix it in the next thirty days before the trials end. It's like, why? Yeah. Why would you not ship without that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Which is different than like, you know, sometimes people say like the pure kind of developer mindset where they're often thinking about, we got to cover all the bases. But the person that's saying no is on a very different that's almost the polar opposite where you're saying, well, now what's the minimum thing we could release? We don't need to cover all the bases for this first version.
Speaker 3:Right. Exactly. And
Speaker 2:actually, think I've got a ton of other stuff I could talk about there, but I think we'll leave that there for a second. One thing I want to make sure we get into in this part of the show, because we'll have another episode next week with more, but how did you get into teaching and the 30 by 500 class? Could you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 3:Yes, I could. Thank you for asking. So I mentioned earlier that I've always been really into teaching and I don't remember like why or where that started. It was always something I was really interested in. And I started off teaching people about Mac stuff and tech stuff with my website, Daily Mac, back when I was a teenager.
Speaker 3:I had read David Pogue's columns and stuff and I thought, that's amazing. I wanna be like that. And I don't see why people act as if this tech stuff is super hard to understand. And so I would write a series of articles explaining what cache is and what the, you know, the bus is in terms of computer hardware. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And you know, how memory works and stuff like that, as well as teaching, you know, how to do stuff. Yeah. This is something that was really interesting to me. I guess teaching someone's like hacking their brain, really. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So it's always been something I've been interested in doing. And I always am very analytical about what I do. So when I had seen all of these projects that I worked on as a consultant fail, and fail, and fail, and fail. I had been thinking about why, why is that? And then I was determined not to make those mistakes with Freckle.
Speaker 3:And we also, right after we shipped Freckle, we shipped our first ebook together, JavaScript Performance Rocks.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:The beta version. That was in February, right before we went down to New Zealand again. So we did two things at once. Pretty epic. While consulting.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And a year later, the 2009, Freckle was growing, but slowly, we had these problems with our former partners. We had to buy them out. I don't remember exactly which happened in one order, by the way, but somewhere in there. And we had this hell project with Ford that was supposed to be a two week rush project.
Speaker 3:I had a bad feeling about it. We took it on. It ended up being two months of hell.
Speaker 2:Oh, no.
Speaker 3:And so, yeah, maybe we we got paid, you know, like $50 for it. Mhmm. But I was just like, Fuck, I don't want do this anymore. But Freckle wasn't earning enough money to live off of by far. It was like, I don't know, $6 a month or something by that point.
Speaker 3:So I had to figure
Speaker 2:The out classic product problem. Like, you've got something that's kind of growing slowly, but at the same point, you've got to feed the kids and pay the mortgage and all that stuff.
Speaker 3:Yep. And our apartment and stuff and Vienna were not cheap.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But see, and I've seen this happen to a lot of people. They'll look at that and they'll go, well, I just can't quit. But that's not my way. I love quitting things. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I quit everything I can possibly can. Yeah. And was like, well, fuck it. I'm just gonna have to figure out another way to come up with the money.
Speaker 3:So, I mean, we had sold the ebook, that made quite a bit, but it was a triple. Like, it made quite a bit in aggregate. And I thought, what do I know and what can I do that people really, really need? And I don't usually recommend people start with themselves because they're not disciplined and more objective like I am. I'm just a very analytical person.
Speaker 3:So I don't tell people, look at what you've got. But that's what I did. Because I had been always observing the problems people were having.
Speaker 2:Also,
Speaker 3:I call that safari. It's another story. But I realized that I knew so many people. One set, they were getting like sucked from one startup job to another and, or consulting or whatever, and they hated it and they could do amazing things. But like me, several years ago, they had, everything they worked on got shat on or fucked over or canceled or never shipped.
Speaker 3:On the other hand, I knew a lot of people who wanted to do products, but thought that they had to go be funded. Had to like get funding, that was like their priority. They didn't understand there was an alternative. Then they also didn't know what to do other than that, and they didn't know how to do it. They didn't know how to market or sell anything.
Speaker 3:They had no idea to figure out what people wanted to buy. So I said, all right, well I know having sold the ebook and having sold Freckle to, you know, hundreds of people and everything we had done had made money. So I thought, all right, well, here's the intersection and I'm gonna teach a class. And my friend Alice came over for New Year's to Vienna and I had decided to quit by then. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And we laid out all the questions and problems people had trying to do what I do. And we sort of outlined a class and I started selling that. First, I did a three hour teleconference that I charged a $100 for.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:To see if anyone was remotely interested. And I did not launch it the way I teach people to launch things. It was very much, I announced it on my blog the week before and I got nine people and I went through some stories and some lessons that I learned and the number one feedback was more. So that's how I knew that I should just do something bigger. That was the first year of hustle class, became 30 by 500.
Speaker 2:30 by 500. And tell people that what's the significance of the numbers 30 by 500? What is that?
Speaker 3:First, never name a product like that. I constantly say it wrong. I trip over my own tongue. It's awful. You were so clever at the time.
Speaker 3:30 by 500 is a formula that I used to tell people in the startup world. It would make their jaws just drop.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They've never thought of it that way. What it stands for is if you can sell 500 people something for $30 each month, just 500 people a month, whether that's recurring or not. That's a $180,000 in revenue a year. Yeah. That's a lot of money.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And to reach 500 people on the Internet or if you use subscriptions to maintain 500 people on the Internet month to month on average across the entire Internet is not hard. I mean, it's hard, but it's not difficult, And I it is very achievable, and you don't have to take on the world and you don't need funding or whatever. You can do it on your own and $180,000 in gross, even though you'll be taxed at a higher rate in most countries. It's a great income.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I remember hearing that formula and just kind of feeling like for the first time, woah, like that. That's doable. I know how hard it is to get a customer and then get another one and build it up to 500.
Speaker 2:But I just thought that that is that's actually doable. Yes. Before we close off this this section here, you've recently changed that class. What's going on with the class now and when's the next one coming up?
Speaker 3:Thank you for asking. I love these softball questions. So the class up till now has been three or four months long, and honestly, it was always a lot of theory. I love theory. And I wanted to impart the theory to people so that they would understand how to look at the world differently.
Speaker 3:But most people aren't like me. Alex keeps telling me, my teaching partner, he's like, Amy, you're an anomaly. That's what my Twitter bio says. I put the Amy an anomaly. Alex came up with that, and he also came up with crazy charity, but he's right, right.
Speaker 3:I would love to read a theory book that I wrote basically for March, but that's not the way for you to learn most effectively. So the last class, we added a bunch on habits and motivation, and that made a huge improvement in people's follow through. And we ditched a lot of the theory and taught people through exercises so they could figure out the theories for themselves and see the patterns themselves. And that has made a huge improvement. But four months long is too long.
Speaker 3:It's too long for me. It's too long for the students. People are just so tired by the end and it's just not effective for that. So despite the fact that 30 by 100 brought in a lot of money last year, dollars 400,000.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:Which I shared with Alex. We are not doing it like that ever again because of the outcomes and because of the exhaustion and because I want more people to be able to get the information that they need at the time when they need it and the level that they need it, that they can use it. So we're doing two different things. Actually, we're doing like four different things this year. The first thing was our launch round table.
Speaker 3:That was a three hour online conference, all online with three of my students who had just launched products. It was all about the launch sequence. How to build up momentum to launch to sales. That was all it was about. It was three hours.
Speaker 3:It was like $200 or less. So that's something that people who aren't ready or interested, nor even need a four month class can get benefit from. And then we're doing Bacon Biz Comp, which is the May, which is a very small, intimate bootstrapping products conference. So that we can learn from each other and meet other people who are doing what we do and have a sense of community and start to build that. That's open to anyone.
Speaker 3:And whether you do thirty hundred or not. None of the speakers, none of the headline speakers are 3,500 people. I made that, did that on purpose. And then June, we're doing a two day ultra intense, 100%, like exercise focused bootcamp of the following 3,500 approaches. Writing pitches, because if you have the greatest thing in the world, but you can't get people interested in it or sell it, it's like it doesn't exist.
Speaker 3:So we're doing what I call pitch first development, which is you write the pitch, kind of like the back of the book promise. Like you pick up a book on business or something, you read the back and the back tells you what you're going to get out of it and why you should read it. And I suspect that a lot of authors write that before they write their book. Creates goal and interest point for your readers, potential readers, and it also creates the goalposts for you as the developer. So we're going start with pitches and the stuff from pitches comes from data.
Speaker 3:So we're going teach people how to do the customer data mining that I do called Safari. And then we're going to show them how to pivot that into the marketing strategy because it all comes from the same data and how to use that to structure the product itself in two days.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 3:So we're not going cover launching. We're not going to cover like habits, you know, that kind of stuff. It's really razor focused. But two days, full days, all online. So anyone can attend.
Speaker 3:And that's going be $1,500
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:For reference, the last $30,100 was 2,450. This is 1,500. The next longer 3,500, we're going have a four week or possibly five week intense thing where you do like a, like training, like physical training. You're basically gonna be doing 3,500 for two hours a day for five weeks or four weeks.
Speaker 2:Of a Exactly. Traditional
Speaker 3:You get the whole process. Yeah. And that's going be more like 4,500.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But if you attend the two day bootcamp, you'll get $500 of credit for the longer class if you decide you need it. But I feel like a lot of people who are self motivated, who are, you know, responsible for their own, meeting their own deadlines and stuff, who move themselves forward, who already have that skill, can get 80% of what they need out of the two day boot camp, and the rest is easily learned elsewhere. I want to make
Speaker 2:sure The longer classes would really benefit anyone who really wants kind of like just the the habit of going to class every day, doing assignments, having that kind of daily, you know, what's the
Speaker 3:word? Practice.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Daily practice. Yeah. So exactly where can people, if they want to sign up for when's the boot camp coming up?
Speaker 3:The boot camp is June.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:And we haven't officially announced it yet. This is actually the most we've said publicly so far. But by the time this podcast is out, I will have a blog post up on unicornfree.com and you can sign up to be invited there. You put your name in the email list and then, you know, you'll be the first to hear. Only really do launches to my email list anymore because So that fills up the
Speaker 2:if people want to get on your list, go to unicornfree.com and sign up there.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to part one with Amy Hoy. If you've enjoyed this, stay tuned for next week because Amy's back for part two. You can follow Amy on Twitter. She's AmyHoy. You can follow me, Justin, on Twitter at MI Justin.
Speaker 1:You can follow the show on Twitter as well at ProductPeopleTV. If you like the show, please give us a review in iTunes. It's as easy as clicking five stars, and it really helps the show get noticed. Until next time. Thanks for listening.
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