Episode 66
· 39:56
Hello. Happy Thursday. Welcome back to another episode of Product People. This week, Marc Andre Connier from Montreal, Quebec. You'll hear in this interview how passionate Marc is about coding and how he turned that passion into a full time product business.
Speaker 1:He does products full time. He teaches a class. He has the great code club. So I think you're really going to like this episode, especially if you're a technical person who's looking to turn your passion into a product. Mark also goes into how he got over his insecurity, how he made that leap from being in a job he just hated to doing something he really loves.
Speaker 1:Before we jump into the show, let me highlight one of our recent iTunes reviews. Remember, you can go to iTunes, search for product people, leave us a nice review, and I might highlight it on the show here. We've got Aaron Mead from The USA. He says, man, I wish I'd known about this podcast for longer than I have. I've only been subscribed for about a week, and I've already listened to about seven.
Speaker 1:Justin asks the guests great questions and the guests keep it pretty real. It's been incredibly beneficial and motivating for me to see that some of these guys are just normal people who started off frustrated of all the time like I feel. One of my top three podcasts for sure. Thank you, Aaron Mead of The USA for your review. If you haven't already, check out productpeople.club.
Speaker 1:It's the community for product people, solopreneurs, bootstrappers to get feedback, to get motivated, and to have some accountability. Now let's get in to the interview with Marc Andre Colmier. Justin Jackson, Marc Andre, Connoyer?
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly. You it. I know it's hard to say in English. We're going do the interview in French if I you
Speaker 1:can fake it for a while.
Speaker 2:It's hard. It's hard. It took me a very long time to be comfortable speaking English actually.
Speaker 1:Know we should I reverse should have to speak French just so we're on equal footing.
Speaker 2:But the funny thing is now because I talk like when I talk about marketing and software and this sort of thing now it's easier for me to talk about it in English because I only talk about this stuff in English. But if like we're having conversation that is outside this context, I'm gonna have lots of trouble following if you're talking about like your vacation or something like that. I'm gonna like look for the words because I don't have lots of friends outside of the work who talk English. So usually all of my life, the remaining of my life is in French.
Speaker 1:You've got two lots. Your personal life is in French but your work life is in English.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:So I'm here with Marc Andre. Marc is an independent product person. He is from Montreal, Quebec, Canada and you all know I love having Canadians on the show. Mark, it's so good to have you. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2:Very good. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Cool. We're going to talk about basically the stuff that you've built, how you got to this point. So let's start from the beginning. How did you get into building products? What was the first thing you did?
Speaker 2:That was maybe five or six years ago when the, so I was, I initially got in the startup community in Montreal before that I had a very very crappy job. I actually was writing Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Access sorry type of programs. It was the job was awful and then finally I managed to get a job in startup community here in Montreal. It was wonderful right because I got to program in Ruby. But after some time kind of got tired and I read the book The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss.
Speaker 2:And that's actually how I got the idea to release my work to write a book and do my first product after reading the book. So I thought maybe I just should try it and see if it works for me. And I also got like to me the idea of like you know in the book they talk about instead of retiring later on like accumulating all this money and retiring when you're very old and do all the fun stuff later, maybe you should do them a little bit throughout your life and not just wait for when you're old and retired. So I thought that was a very good idea. Maybe like live a life where you don't like differ everything later on.
Speaker 2:So anyway, all of this got me to try to do a product so I set, I did everything they mentioned in the four hour work week. I set up, so I validated the idea using a very crappy landing page and the idea was I was there, I've been very passionate about programming languages for a very long time. So I thought I'm just gonna write a book about creating, writing programming languages. But I thought like who's gonna buy this, right? So it's pretty like niche idea.
Speaker 2:Not lots of people are as passionate about this stuff as I am. So I just wrote, created a very poor landing sales page. I drove traffic for two days maybe. I think it cost me like something like $200 and I got, and then when people click on the buy button which add a money number there, think it was $29 something like that. People were presented with a page that said, sorry like the book is not ready yet.
Speaker 2:Just put your email. I'm gonna let you know when it launches. And I got maybe five sign ups and I think it was a very pretty good conversion rate and that gave me lots of confidence and I realized wow like people on the internet are ready to give me money for something that I'm gonna create. That it doesn't exist yet And the fact that a landing page was awful was even like more sort of more as a proof to me even more because it was crappy and I knew that I could make something even better than that landing page.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I
Speaker 2:started and wrote that first book which was called like Create Your Own Programming Language and it did pretty well. So it took me maybe two, three months to write it and package everything. I already had some source code ready for that so just wrote the text. But it was very small at the beginning right because as I said in the intro I was not very good at writing English and speaking English. So it was lots of typos and grammar mistakes and whatnot.
Speaker 2:So it took me forever just to write 40 page I think or 50 page something like that. Wow. That's how I got a first version.
Speaker 1:I want to back up a little bit and I want to go back to when you're at that crappy job. How old were you then?
Speaker 2:I just got out of university. Think maybe I was 20 I guess it was 26, 27, something like that.
Speaker 1:Okay. Out of university, you took computer science or something?
Speaker 2:Yeah, did a software engineering degree in software.
Speaker 1:Okay. So you get out of school, you've got your software engineering degree, you get this terrible job.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think one thing that's interesting, I just want to go to that spot there because I talk to a lot of people that are maybe in a similar position. They're working at a job they don't like.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And there's something about being in those jobs that sometimes doesn't make you feel very good about yourself.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah totally. I remember feeling crappy and I had to like at maybe each lunch or each three or four hour I had to take a walk because I had to get out of that office and then during that walk I would talk myself into you're gonna get over this, you're gonna find something better and I had to convince myself because that was just too much. I was on the edge of just like dropping everything and switching career. That was as bad as it gets as a first job.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Did you have a sense that you were capable of bigger things or like how confident were you at that point in your life? Did you have the confidence it took to go and create your
Speaker 2:own thing? Don't think it was not driven by confidence at all because I had, no I'm not gonna see zero confidence but for just to give you an example of how low my confidence was is I and then I got that job and one of the reason why it was so crappy is because the people there at that job didn't care about programming at all. They didn't enjoy it. For them it was just another job. And all the people working there shared the same vision and whatnot.
Speaker 2:So that to me that was not something I, I would not meant to work at a job like this. I wanted to work with other people who were as passionate as me. And I knew that I could go like to meetups, like user group meetups, the Ruby user group meetup and meet other people and there were also lots of, they called it demo camps where people could demo their projects and whatnot. I knew about those things but I was like too shy or too not confident enough just to go there and meet people. So that was like as low as my confidence was very low.
Speaker 1:Yeah and so just in that place, because we all know people like this now and there's some listeners that are in this place where I think sometimes they don't realize how much those jobs in those situations are kind of squishing them down and making them not realize how
Speaker 2:Yeah, miserable. It makes you miserable and the longer you stay there the longer it's going to, the more miserable you're going to become. Well or until I think at some point where you're gonna realize it's too much and I think two things are either are gonna happen at that point is either you give up, You're just gonna say, all right, this is just gonna be a job for the rest of my life and you stay there, you accept the fact that you're not gonna enjoy your job and you stay there and just as a, like you switch your brain off when you go to the job. That was something I didn't wanted to do at all. Or I think the second option is you do something, right?
Speaker 2:You find how to get out of that hole which is very hard. And for me how I got out of that hole, well I'm not sure if I realized I was doing this and that was the reason how I got into the hole, but I was doing projects on the site. Because like I was not challenged at all in my job so I, it was also a personal need I needed to code something that was I felt passionate about and I felt I was challenged about. So I started doing projects on the side. I built multiple things, I don't remember all of them, but I think I copied like a chat application, copied Dig, I copied Reddit.
Speaker 2:Like all these sites that I enjoyed, I copied them. I implement my own version and I also always like love problems where you try to implement something in as little code as possible, right? So I kind of implemented Reddit and maybe I think 100 lines of code or something like that. So I always found this like an interesting challenge. So I keep doing that, doing that and doing that and kind of without realizing it, built in a pretty good portfolio, right, of projects and all this stuff.
Speaker 2:And so at some point how I got out of the hole is that I saw online like video ad for a job in Montreal which was my dream job because they recorded a very nice looking video and it was for a startup in Montreal was kind of the one of the hottest startup in Montreal at the time. But one of the first to get lots of money like they had nice offices and famous people as the founders. And it was also the, but the main thing for me is that what was in Ruby, right? So I could spend my old days programming Ruby which was what I wanted to do. So when I got the, I got a job interview but since I was like a nobody, didn't add lots lots of experience and I had no recommendation in the startup community.
Speaker 2:I was not known at all. So I kind of printed on sheets like the code that I, the code that I was most proud of. Like presented my project. So I built my portfolio. I just showed them this to them and I think they were really impressed and I got the job.
Speaker 2:I did other things too. I think I applied. Oh yeah, remember I applied with usually you know you send an email with a cover letter or something like that. Yeah. By email.
Speaker 2:So I kind of instead of just doing a typical what I said, like cover letter, I did wrote some code that read, Ruby code that read as a cover letter. So you could read the code like normally, like a normal people could, a non programmer people, person could read it and understand. When you executed that code it showed them my resume. So I think they got impressed for that so that got me to pass the first step to get an interview and then in the interview I impressed them a lot with my portfolio of projects that I already completed. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then I got a job because of that.
Speaker 1:So part of the step for you of getting out of that first stage that can really affect some people for the rest of their lives. They never get out of that stage. But part of it for you was taking this leap of saying, You know what, I'm going to, in this case it was apply for a job. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Yep, exactly. Totally. In the job, my job at the time also was pretty hard because they supported me throughout my study and whatnot so and it made me feel guilty and all that stuff. It was like an easy decision at all. One of the, not the artist's decision but at the time it was by far the artist's decision I had ever had to take at that time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think this is a good just a good thing to recognize that for doing something that you're really passionate about. In your case, it's clear that you're really passionate about code like you
Speaker 2:Yes, love to totally. I love to code. I love writing code.
Speaker 1:So the path is you have to take kind of a series of leaps and sometimes it might mean, you know, I'm going to apply for a new job and that can give you the confidence that you need. I remember I've done similar things. I was feeling really stuck in a job and I just started saying, what why not just start applying for jobs while I'm in the job?
Speaker 2:Sure,
Speaker 1:yeah. And I applied for a job at thirty seven Signals and ended up getting a job offer. And I remember that whole experience of going there and spending a day with them and getting to know those folks and then getting an offer. That was all very good for me just to know I can do this. I can do other things.
Speaker 1:There's other options. And I just think that's great to identify that in your path part of you getting unstuck was getting that other job.
Speaker 2:Yeah exactly. Well I think the secret is that you have to be proactive. You have to do other stuff on the side and I've been doing this my whole career where even when I was in the job that I loved I always did stuff on the side because I think like that's your asset. That's your investment, you invest your time. When you leave your job it's just you're gonna be able to write on your resume but that's it.
Speaker 2:Maybe you can give them as a reference and they call it but what's gonna help you? Is that gonna help you get a job at whatever you want to get at Google or if you want get one on Apple, I don't know. But I think the, but the thing that will always stay with you forever will be the projects that you are gonna have realized. Because they know this, you've made this on your own. You've created this on your own, on your own time.
Speaker 2:You've put your passion into it. And then you can also show the result, right? So you, because if you do something at your job, you leave that job, then that's the private property of the job that you just left. So you can kiss goodbye all the work you've done there. You cannot use that to promote yourself later on.
Speaker 2:So it's kind of, don't really, I really feel like it's like your asset as a, for your career is the projects and the stuff you do on the site. Even though like they can become out of date or obsolete, you can still print them on a sheet or whatever you want and show them to people even though they don't work anymore.
Speaker 1:Exactly. I want to get back to your first product in a minute. Sure. But I'm interested, some people say don't pursue your passion. What's your take on that?
Speaker 1:I think the idea is that there's a danger in pursuing your passion because it might not connect with a real need out there that you can make money from or there's just a danger in making decisions too emotionally. But it's clear from talking to you that you're very passionate about code you've made a living off that passion. So what's your take on this idea of don't pursue your passion or pursue your passion?
Speaker 2:Well, guess it depends on you. You have to be realistic, right? My dream was to, I think one of a friend of mine quite a few years ago asked me like what's your dream job and that without really thinking I said just because I was doing like open source project at a time. I said oh I like doing open source work but I don't wanna like my project to be sponsored. I don't wanna anybody tell me what to work on.
Speaker 2:I just wanna work on project without any boss and people pay me to do it. So that's, I thought it was a pretty crazy idea and said, yeah right, like you're gonna do that someday. That's exactly what I do today. Like people, I get paid by people because I teach what I do at the same time. So that's the trick that I found to do that.
Speaker 2:But to answer your question, like if my goal was to like make a living out of programming languages and be a multi millionaire, I don't think that would, I'm not a millionaire, but I would make a very good living teaching what I, and the trick that I found is that instead, because I like to create small programming languages, I like like to there are less than a 100 lines of code or that like those tricks. I like to create very simple code. Like to refine my code until it's as simple as possible. So that those are all things that go well with teaching. I prepare my code.
Speaker 2:I make it as short as possible and as simple as possible to present it to people and then I teach how I did it. That's what I do today. That's how I make a living. So yeah totally. I just did with without really thinking about it, I just followed my passion and each time that I did a project, sometime I did projects like I had a project a few year, two years ago that I started was about it was called Dressed.
Speaker 2:It was a collection of real esteemed feeds. Did very well like the first I launched the first team and it did amazingly well. I started to build a list of people like lots of emails, but I didn't enjoy working on that at all. So I just stopped doing that and put more time in the things I enjoyed. I've always been successful doing that so far.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think the other thing is I'm just going make a few observations here. One, as I see a guitar behind you.
Speaker 2:Yes, I'm a very good player.
Speaker 1:I see some liquor behind you.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's when things don't go well that's where I go.
Speaker 1:So even just taking those two examples, you could be passionate about guitar, but unless there's people out there willing to pay you to teach them guitar or pay you to buy guitar products and you'd have to analyze the potential competition in that market too. The same would be for fine liquor like you could be a fine liquor, Marc Andre, the Quebecois liquor guy.
Speaker 2:Sure,
Speaker 1:sure. And maybe you could make a living doing that too but I think part of it, the idea of pursuing your passion, like pursuing your passion is fine but you have to kind of follow that down like
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true. You're true but I think there's something lots of people forget is that did our life lots of like you can sell to businesses like where people really need to solve a problem. Well, I sell to businesses too, but like usually it's people, my students, they ask their boss to pay for the course or to pay for the book. So that's how I say I sell to businesses where it's not really I sell to the people working at businesses.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But the thing that lots of you, I think lots of people forget when we're talking about passion and like trying to sell products are just centered about passion is that lots of people are hungry for passion. They have a real need for passion. Like you just mentioned the people that work at their end jobs, they don't really enjoy their jobs. They have a huge need to be passionate about something, but they just, they don't have the energy. They're just so down into that old that they don't know where to start to get passionate about something.
Speaker 2:Have to get passionate about code, example. To take my example. Is that like maybe somebody who's been working at a dead end job for five years. Imagine that guy who's been like just working on code. He used to love to code so much.
Speaker 2:And then I come in and I say, hey, like maybe you should try making a programming language with me. I think it's awesome. And then I show it some code and I show it how passionate about with this stuff. I love this stuff and I've been doing it for so long. And I keep doing it because it's so fun and then people get like passion is contagious and people pay for that because they, it's like entertainment, right?
Speaker 2:People want to be entertained, want to see passion because they, it's contagious and they want to be passionate about something too. That's what, well, part of life is about like having fun while you're air. So if you're at the end job, some people need some help to be passionate or have some fun doing what they do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's great and it's interesting, you know, I mean there's obviously different people out there like Ruben Gammes for example might have a different perspective on this. He's very much he's personally tried to be a little bit more in the background of BidSketch whereas you are clearly in the foreground. You're saying, I'm passionate about this. I'm going to tell you how to create your own programming language and I'm going to inspire you to do this and to love it.
Speaker 1:Maybe talk a little bit about that, that decision for you to be front and center as opposed to like you could just have like one of your products is Great Code Club.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:That could be Great Code Club with no like you never show your face, maybe you have a bunch of different teachers. Why did you decide to make yourself so kind of front and center as opposed to maybe having a more anonymous type business?
Speaker 2:Well honestly I thought about it. I thought about hiring people to teach the courses for me and that sort of thing but first of all I'm not really good at delegating stuff so I tried it many times but always fail so that's part of the reason probably but but also as we've been saying is because I love this stuff so much. I love coding and sometimes I like it a little bit less. Some like months I like more and whatnot. So it's not like I'm always hyper and saying, oh yeah, have to code something.
Speaker 2:But so for example, like the Code Club was not only, was also part of the reason why I started the Code Club where the idea is like each month I give everybody a project to work on and I record a few videos just to show people how I did the project, and they can do it on their own too. They can do their own version. So that forces me each month to come up with a new idea. So I've created a server, created a pre processor, created a three d game, two d game, so I did all of that since the beginning of the year and it forces me each month to code something new. Which was part of, that's not the only reason I did it, but part of the reason was for me too.
Speaker 2:I wanted to force myself to get back into coding, explore things that I didn't explore before, and also to get passionate again, because I kind of lost my passion in the previous year just only teaching and promoting products and marketing and whatnot. So that was part of the reason too, back the passion for me. Also, mean, as I said, passion is contagious. So when I do those things and I'm passionate, I truly feel like other people will be passionate too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah I think that's a good point, is this idea of sometimes sometimes to fully realize your passion, you need to just start doing it regularly and for other people even if it was just one or two people. I mean, I remember when I started Product People, the podcast, at first we probably had five listeners, but this idea that I had to do it every week and I had to put it out and it was good for me too. This idea of like I get to talk about products every week, I have to force myself to get out of my comfort zone, I have to learn how to do all of this. There's something about that and doing it every week and having that accountability of having even five people that were interested really helps doesn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah totally. But I think you make it a good point where you have to set your, when you're getting started like a big problem I see lots of people because I like I teach a lot of people who are trying to become better programmers. So that's the big part of what I do and lots of people like they cannot get the motivation to work, to start working on a project. And a reason I found is because they set their self like too, too big of a goal. They have huge goals like I want to create this huge thing or this huge framework and it's gonna become more popular than Rails.
Speaker 2:Where if this is your first project, I can tell you right now it's not gonna happen, right. You have to start smaller so that's another thing I try to help people with with the club is that give them very small project, a realistical project. And then you build on that and you build in bigger and bigger projects. And I think it's the same thing with products. I see lots of people they wanna like you wanna do classes right away because they saw me do classes and I did very well say, oh I'm gonna start doing classes and it doesn't work because yeah I started with book first and I started with open source before that.
Speaker 2:So you have to I think Amy Roy has a very good analogy. She said stacking the bricks, right? So you start at the bottom, you start doing small stuff and everything you do builds on the previous stuff you did and at the end of you just realize you have something big because you've built so much stuff before.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So now let's get back to that first product. First product, you said you put up a bad landing page and you had five people sign up or five people pay?
Speaker 2:No, up. As I said on the button like they were kind of there was a fake buy button. They click on the button the price tag was there and then on the other page they saw and they saw that the book was not ready. I thought okay so at least they click the button they saw the price tag for sure because it's on the button. So they had to click and they realized that that's the price it's gonna be.
Speaker 2:So at least they were ready to go to the next step. So it's not a, you have a good point. It's not that like didn't pay so it's not very good validation but it's validation anyway. And also gave me lots of confidence like at the beginning where I just was the first time for me that was sell anything in my life. So I realized I could sell to other people, which was a big realization for me at the time.
Speaker 2:Never sold anything, never thing that was good enough with like social skills or talking to other people to do this step of selling something for real money that would be in my pocket. So that was a huge realization for me, gave me a huge kick in the pants and that was kind of the start that I needed to build other things later on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well I think it is actually good validation. Mean the ultimate validation is people paying you real money.
Speaker 2:Of course, yes.
Speaker 1:I think what's also interesting about that, talking about starting small is one of the problems we have right now in the product people culture is that it's actually, it's still fairly young, but it's mature enough that people have read tons and tons of blog posts and a lot of those blog posts would say, I put that Buy button to validate it and I had 100, 200, 1,000, 5,000 people click it. In your case, you had five people click it and for you that was enough validation to get going. Do you want to talk about that a little bit because
Speaker 2:Sure, but I think this should not be misleading because I think there's a purpose for validation. Lots of people hate on validation, but I think there's a specific purpose and the purpose of validation is not to get leads or prospect. Not at all. That's not the goal of validation. Validation is to check that your offer converts.
Speaker 2:That's the only trick you're trying to do here. You're not trying to collect leads or qualify and whatever you're trying to do. So you're trying to do with when you're validating with a landing page, you're just trying to check does my offer convert with anybody or my target market anywhere on the internet. That's why it's so good to do it with paid traffic, right? So I would do this if you don't have an audience but also if you're really not sure it's the first product you're doing probably if you wanna don't wanna piss off your audience maybe you should try it but but I also I did this like five years ago.
Speaker 2:So the landscape changed a lot today so if you want to do an ebook now today it's a lot less risky than it was five years ago. Like five years ago trying to sell an ebook at $40 was kind of a new thing and people were upset. Like when I announced the book that it was $40 for 50 page PDF. Yeah. So but today if you were, I think if you were to release a 50 page PDF at $40 people would say, Oh, it's a little bit expensive, but okay, maybe it's good.
Speaker 2:The perception has changed a lot in five years I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What else were you doing while you were writing it? Were you promoting it? Did you have a launch list going? Not
Speaker 2:at all. Not at all. I knew nothing about marketing and launches at a time. Not all. So I didn't even add like an email list, a zero.
Speaker 2:But what I add, which was pretty considerable I think was, that's gonna feel like I'm bragging, but in my reputation. Let me explain, alright. Because I wrote, I was kind of lucky at the right time, right place at the right time. I wrote TIN which was a very popular web server at the time. It got used at the foundation of Heroku, so I kind of had a very good reputation at the time in a Ruby community.
Speaker 2:And that's how I like when I, the only thing I did when I launched the book is I announced it on Twitter and it, the ball started rolling from there. That's it, that's all I did. I just sent one tweet and then I I think I made in the first few months $6,000 or something, like in the first few which is when I talk about it, think about it today, it's not much today but back in the day to me was like wow, it's $6,000 that I made for the first time that I sold something online as an e book. It was huge for me. Was huge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome. Was just talking about this with I can't remember. I think someone was interviewing me on a podcast and my friend Dan Martell. You know Dan Martell from Clarity? Dan has done amazing, right?
Speaker 1:He's done better than all of us combined and in his world he says, If you can get one person to show up on the internet and pay you a dollar, that's amazing. What I like about that is he's recognizing that there's some success in even just creating something and putting it online and having anyone buy it. And I think the other risk we're at right now is that first time product people when they release their first thing they're expecting to do 20,000 or $30,000 or $40,000 on launch day, which could happen, but
Speaker 2:Yeah, it could happen but you need to have done something before that was either even bigger than what you're doing now or comparable. What I mean is if you never did open story, never wrote any blog posts, there's no way in hell you're gonna make like $40,000 on your launch. But if you did like some, even if you don't have an email list but you have been writing blog posts or I don't want to be specific but if you've been putting out values to people, helping people for years and you're really helping people and putting values out there, it's pretty sure you're gonna make lots and lots of money when you launch. That's not about just like building email lists. It's about like you get back, you get back the value that you put, you put first, right?
Speaker 2:So you first have to give before you receive. So if you've been giving for years without realizing it, was what I did with open source. I was doing open source because I really enjoyed the code. The following I've been getting at the value I've been putting out there with my open source work has paid off the day that I launched my ebook. And has been still paying off today, right?
Speaker 2:People take my courses only because I wrote. But the like this is just about passion. Like people love programming languages. It's also about once again about understanding how your tools work. Like we use programming languages all the time.
Speaker 2:So it's a very interesting experience and very rewarding and very important experience to understand how your tools are built inside. The fact there it's not magic, right? So it's a Lexer, a parser, a runtime, whatnot. All fit together and that thing has been the same for forty years. Like what hasn't changed in forty years in software, like programming languages, the way they're built hasn't changed in forty years.
Speaker 2:So I think it's a pretty fascinating world to look into and it can teach you a lot of things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like how you mentioned that there's two motivations there. There's the motivation of the individual programmer which is that individual programmer wants to learn, he wants to be passionate, he wants to push himself to beyond where he is at right now.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:The boss, she is thinking, I want to keep my people happy. I want to make more money. I want to save time. I want to keep these employees around for a long time. And so you're dealing with different motivations and it's important to realize that like yeah, for the individual developer you're going to be selling this but if their boss emails you and says, What's in it for me?
Speaker 1:You have to be able to say, Well, here are some things, some ways this could help you in the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah exactly. It's also in the way you're gonna design, that's gonna drive the way you design the sales page, way you launch your products. You have to think about this a lot too. So if you, for example, if you go look at my owning rails page and my page for my great Coke Club, you're gonna see like the team is quite different where the Coke, great Coke Club is more about like passion and helping people and that sort of thing where OnyRails feels more formal where it's like you have testimonials, a logo of a big company and like it's very like a structured way where I feel like The Great Cocoa is more a letter to somebody reading and if you read it from top to bottom it's really gonna be like you give, it should at least that's the goal. It's gonna give you an emotion or something you feel, alright, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:Yes, he's onto something and then you're gonna subscribe or get on the list because of that emotional reaction. Yes. Where Only I feel it's more like people need to reflect because the price is higher. So it's gonna be, Only Rails is more I try to provide proof that it works. We're at Graco Club.
Speaker 2:I try to get people on the list by just inspiring them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. If anyone is listening and you want to see the difference between the two marketing approaches, this is a great case study actually. So go to owningrails.com, that's the one, and then go to greatcodeclub.com and look at the difference between those two approaches. They are very different and I think people could benefit from seeing how you market to different audiences.
Speaker 1:I think that's really great. Hey Mark, thanks so much for your time today. Really enjoyed your perspective. I think what you're doing is great. Where can people find you online besides those two sites I just mentioned?
Speaker 2:I think on Twitter is the best place right now. So just Twitter M A C O U R N O Y E R. So I'm going to put it I guess in the show notes.
Speaker 1:Yeah I'll put it in the show notes.
Speaker 2:My last name, French Canadian name. So yeah that's the best way to find me.
Speaker 1:Perfect. Great. Thanks again Mark. My pleasure. Okay.
Speaker 1:Talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:Woah, there we go. That was Marc Andre Collier. Such a great interview. I really like his insight about especially serving different markets. You can have a market that is, you know, made up of individuals who are highly motivated personally to improve themselves, and you can also have a market of businesses who will pay money to, you know, make things better, to make things to save money, save time, or make money.
Speaker 1:So for sure go and check Mark out. I the show notes are up at productpeople.tv. If you haven't already, sign up for my product newsletter, JustinJackson. Cainewsletter. You can follow me on Twitter.
Speaker 1:I'm the letter M, the letter I, and Justin, M I Justin. And you can follow the show on Twitter as well at ProductPeopleTV. That's it for this week. I am so glad you spent your time listening to this week's episode. Come back next week.
Speaker 1:I'll have another one for you.
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