In this episode of the Business of Laravel podcast, host Matt Stauffer interviews Michele and Mathias Hansen, the founders of Geocodio, a SaaS that provides hassle-free geocoding, built with Laravel. They discuss their motivation for creating the service, born from their own need for reliable geocoding data, and explore the challenges and benefits of working together as a couple, including how their roles have evolved as the company has grown. They also highlight the importance of listening to user feedback and customer input throughout the development process and share their experiences in hiring and building a remote team.

• Matt Stauffer Twitter
• Michele Hansen Twitter
• Mathias Hansen Twitter
• Geocodio Website
• Michele’s book - Deploy Empathy

Transcript

Matt Stauffer: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Business of Laravel podcast where I interview business leaders who are working with and within Laravel. I've got some wonderful guests today. This is my first time doing two guests, so we're going to see how it works out. So I'm going to ask you all to get started just saying, hey, can you introduce yourselves and say, who are you, what's your business, and how is Laravel involved? And we're just going to get started from there. So I'll hand it off to you.

Mathias Hansen: I guess I'll start them. I'm Mathias and this is...

Michele Hansen: I'm Michele. Yeah.

Mathias Hansen: We co-founded Geocodio in 2013.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Mathias Hansen: We do run on Laravel. And I think we started out with Laravel 5, the first beta version of Laravel 5 back then.

Matt Stauffer: Nice. So let's talk about Geocodio really quickly. I know what it is, but I have to do my thing where I pretend I don't have any idea. So for somebody who's never heard of it before, what does the service actually provide and who are you targeting with that service?

Michele Hansen: Right, so I have a, sometimes I have a little bit of a developer description for this and I have a non-developer description.

Matt Stauffer: Okay.

Michele Hansen: But basically what we do is geocoding, which is the process of converting addresses into coordinates and coordinates into addresses.

Matt Stauffer: Mm-hmm.

Michele Hansen: That's what we do at a very basic level. Our niche in the market is focusing on the US and Canada and on use cases where people need additional data that you can only get when you have the coordinates. So for example, if you want to know census information or congressional districts or time zones or tons of other kinds of data, those coordinates are basically doorways to other pieces of information. And so where we sit and what we do for people is basically they no longer have to hit five different APIs to get the one piece of information they actually care about. Instead, they can get it all in one API request or in a spreadsheet from us. So our goal is to save people time, effort, hassle, and money when they are dealing with location data.

Mathias Hansen: Really optimizing for developer happiness.

Michele Hansen: Yeah, from the beginning.

Mathias Hansen: As easy and simple as possible. That's our goal.

Michele Hansen: It was fundamentally built for use cases we had ourselves, which is part of why it was built with the tools we love using, like Laravel, but also very much built as the product that we want to use and making it as seamless as possible as a developer experience as we could.

Matt Stauffer: That's so cool. Okay, so you mentioned kind of you wanted to build the thing that you wanted and it's so interesting because Taylor talks about that so often. He says I built the tool that I wanted to have. And so it's really fun hearing you all say like, yeah, we built this because we wanted it. After all, it feels like that's the inspiration for a good product because you're not always throwing out these hypotheticals of like, what might someone want? You're like, we need this now.

But also a good experience because you mentioned developer experience and like if you're the developer using the thing, it's certainly going to be a good experience for you. Can you tell a little bit about what you all were building that motivated you to do this in the first place? Like what was the story of the creation of the project?

Mathias Hansen: Yeah, so we built numerous apps and different things using geographic data. So they kind of kept coming up. But one thing in particular that really was the breaking point was we used to have this app that basically let you find convenience stores and grocery stores around you that were open at the time you're looking. So this was back when Google Places didn't exist and Yelp wasn't as much of a thing, in terms of having reliable opening hour data.

So we built this app that had tons of grocery stores and convenience stores and things like that. And we used to map them on a map. We need to get the coordinates so we can figure out which ones are closest to you. And we were using Google Maps at the time for geocoding and we kept hitting API limits, like how many lookups we were able to make every day. And at the time, there wasn't really a pay as you go option. So either there was a free tier with some very hard limits, or you had to pay $10,000 a year as a starting point to get their enterprise product or something like that.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Mathias Hansen: And it just wasn't an option to pay at least $10,000 a year. So long story short, we sat down and tried to prototype building our own geocoder.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Mathias Hansen: And the idea was, even if it's not very good if it's just good enough, that actually works for our use case. It just has to be somewhat accurate. It doesn't have to be super fast. We are computing all these coordinates ahead of time and things like that. But if it was free for us to use, we didn't have to worry about all these limits. It'll be great. And that's what we built. And we started using it ourselves. And it was like, it was like half decent, it worked alright.

So we decided, why don't we try to charge for it? Maybe someone else could use it as well. This kind of also played into it at a time when we had our first daughter and we were starting to look into daycare and daycare costs were absolutely insane. And we were trying to figure out how to make a little bit of extra money on the side to make everything work out. And we're like, well, let's try to charge for this thing we built.

And we had a lot of feedback right away. We were actually fortunate enough to be on page one of Hacker News,

Matt Stauffer: Oh cool.

Mathias Hansen: which was really exciting. We were on the front page for 24 hours. We got tons of traffic from it. We didn't get very many paying customers.

Matt Stauffer: That's Hacker News for you.

Michele Hansen: We got some though, which was a huge surprise to us.

Mathias Hansen: We could see we were definitely stirring the pot. We were like, there was some demand here. People were excited about this.

Michele Hansen: Yeah.

Mathias Hansen: There's a lot of constructive feedback too.

Matt Stauffer: That's Hacker News for you.

Mathias Hansen: Right. But that kind of just fueled the fire that people like to talk about this. That made us want to continue working on it.

Matt Stauffer: That's awesome.

Michele Hansen: And I think the fact that it came out of something that we needed in order for a product to be successful, it can't stay the product that you needed.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: It very quickly needs to grow and improve and be something that can serve many, many more use cases. For us, something that was scrappy and worked good enough was good enough, but that's not good enough for paying customers. And I think also there's a little bit of the psychology in that that...

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: you know, actually it was a friend of ours who said, hey, why don't you slap a payroll in front of this? Because we were like, this is nowhere good enough for anyone to charge for it. And a lot of work went into it before it was launched to make it better, to make it something that we were proud of selling. But I think we still have a little bit of that, I don't know if it's an underdog mentality, but I think having a product that we are proud of that is something that we feel...

Matt Stauffer: Mm-hmm.

Michele Hansen: justified in taking money for and that being something that we're really proud of putting out in the world and that we respect ourselves. That is something that has guided us the whole time is to always make it better and always be proud of what we're doing, whether that's the product or how we conduct ourselves as a business, how we conduct ourselves with customers, and with our employees.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: I think that came out of how the product was initially developed and has really guided us.

Mathias Hansen: And to be clear, a lot has happened since that first initial version.

Michele Hansen: If you go look on Hacker News, if you want to go chuckle and have, you know, it's kind of our drop box moment when someone's like, this is actually very simple in Linux, you just do blah, blah, blah. Right. Like there are those comments on ours as well. And it's so funny to look back on it.

There's a lot of critical feedback and honestly, it was correct to the point where I remember we were doing pay-as-you-go pricing only at that point. And I remember that we had integrated Stripe and everything. We had planned to make money on it. But when February 1st came around, we launched, was January 20th, 21st, 2014? And February 1st came around and...

I remember you ran a database query and it was like, people actually need to pay us. And you hadn't actually written the script that would trigger the charges in Stripe because we didn't actually expect anyone to pay us.

Mathias Hansen: Yeah, that wasn't important to launch, right?

Michele Hansen: And it was like $30, you know? But it meant that our first month, paid for the two little Digital Ocean droplets, right?

Matt Stauffer: Right, yeah.

Michele Hansen: Yeah, we made $10 and we were I mean, we were on top of the world. I remember I'd made this spreadsheet of like levels of success for this. And there was like, you know, an acceptable success was that we launched it and people used it like that. That was what we were going for.

Matt Stauffer: We made it!

Michele Hansen: You know, a disappointment was we launched it and like nothing happens with it, you know, and then a wild success was we launch it and not only do people pay us, but it covers its expenses.

Matt Stauffer: It's own cost, yeah.

Michele Hansen: Which seems like a really adorable goal. I was like, oh my God, we profited $10. This is winning. It's really funny looking back on that.

Mathias Hansen: I was listening to Aaron and Taylor and Ian talk about this the other day. And they're talking about being break-even. And how that's actually a huge success in itself.

Matt Stauffer: Yes.

Mathias Hansen: Not operating at a loss. So being able to do that, and again, being really scrappy, we had very low costs. Like the domain name was one of the most expensive things that we had to purchase, right?

Michele Hansen: Of course, we weren't even paying ourselves.

Mathias Hansen: No, no, no.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, right, we don't even consider that.

Mathias Hansen: We weren't even at Ramen profitable at this point or anything like that, right? But just starting, that's the cool thing, as a developer or working on tech, like doing a tech business. Is you can get started as long as you have a computer with a connection. You can really get started with very, very like, you know, you don't need very much funding to get started.

Matt Stauffer: Very low cost, yeah.

Michele Hansen: I think it was probably, you know, over six months, the development costs that went into it in terms of servers and whatnot was probably a couple hundred dollars. And, you know, I think anybody who is, you know, in a serious relationship or married to a developer just knows that server costs are going to be part of the family budget.

Matt Stauffer: Right. Whether or not they're bringing in any money, it's just going to be there. So.

Michele Hansen: Right, that's just in there. And so it was very, very scrappy to get it off the ground.

Matt Stauffer: All right, so I have so many questions. You guys are amazing guests, because I'm like, you just gave me so much to work with.

So there are so many really great points you guys just made there, but one of the things that really stands out to me is watching the interplay between the two of you. And I was curious if you could talk a little bit about like, what roles do you take in the company and what is it like running a company together with your partner? And is that something you ever expected to do?

Michele Hansen: It's so natural to us. So for context, we met at work.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, really?

Michele Hansen: And we were co-workers for a long time before we were together. And I was the project manager, and you were a developer on the team. You were my best developer on the team.

Matt Stauffer: Aww.

Michele Hansen: I want to say I left what, like a year and a half after we got married?

Mathias Hansen: Yeah, something like that.

Michele Hansen: Right? So for a while, we worked there and worked together. And so that was kind of normal for us. And then we both sort of went in our own directions. You went to work for a startup. I went to work for another company. I really wanted to be in a full-time product role. You wanted to be, you know, we'd been working at an agency. You really wanted to be working at a product company.

Mathias Hansen: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: We both really wanted to be at product companies, I guess. And even though our experience at the agency was amazing and some of our best friends came out of that. So we went our own directions and I remember we would come home from work, and there's always something you're frustrated about, even in the best job. And there would be times when you'd be like, I just wish you were the product manager on my team, or I wish you were one of my developers, because I know that I could just like, you know.

Matt Stauffer: Uh-huh. Yep.

Mathias Hansen: And speak the same language here.

Michele Hansen: Right. Yeah and it would just it was so often. And I think the working together to us always felt very natural.

Mathias Hansen: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: But I think there the bigger challenge was around, you know, is this business something that can sustain our family?

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: Is this really taking that plunge? I mean, I waited until... Much longer than most other people would like I waited until I was making four times my salary...

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Michele Hansen: Because we were so afraid that it would just kind of evaporate overnight. And I know, I remember you were chomping at the bit for a long time and it was just like, but like health insurance, that's like, you know, 30, 45K a year plus like everything else. We have to make sure this is stable. We have a family. Like there was just so...

Mathias Hansen: You're really putting all your eggs in one basket. Right. When you have, you're both relying on the same company. If that, you know, tanks, we're, we both hit at the same time. Right.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: But it got to a point where it just wasn't sustainable. And so then shortly after I went full-time, you went part-time. And then a year later, you were full-time. And that was, well, both literally and figuratively, that was coming home.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: Because not only were we both sitting in the home office every day, but that was returning to normal to be working together. And...

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, Uh-huh.

Michele Hansen: I think every relationship and every marriage is different. There are amazing couples who could never work together and would kill each other.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: And like that there are siblings who get along really well and could never work together. There are a couple who could work together. And I don't think it's really a judgment on the relationship itself. It's just, it's a very different dynamic, but to us, it is the most...

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: normal thing in the world and I wouldn't want any other co-founder.

Matt Stauffer: I want a little heart emoji in the video right now just to pop up right now.

Mathias Hansen: Same here. Can I get some bubbles in the screen?

Matt Stauffer: Exactly. That's awesome!

Mathias Hansen: And at that point, just to sort of take it from there, we talked a lot about like, okay, so where do we want to take this business? Where do we want to go? And we decided pretty early on that it was calm just to be the two of us.

Matt Stauffer: Mm-hmm.

Michele Hansen: It was very easy to make decisions. We both worked at companies that had, you know, a lot of meetings on a given week. We spent a lot of time sitting in meetings and trying to coordinate things between teams. And we were really excited at that time, removing all that overhead. And if you want to make a decision or, you know, figure something out, we can just talk to each other. If we're sitting next to each other, it's very easy. We don't have to go through a lot of people. And that autonomy and everything was really exciting.

So we actually decided back then that what we wanted to do was just as long as it's possible, we just want to stay a two-person company, just the two of us. We don't need to grow. And that's actually a really big thing. We wanted to just be stable and steady as is. We didn't want the company or the business to grow. We've talked to a lot of people in the start-up and bootstrap community and it's very uncommon.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Mathias Hansen: Not to want to grow the company like crazy.

Michele Hansen: Or I guess during that time, I guess. Yeah, we confused a lot of people. There are also a lot of people who assumed our business was not doing well if we hadn't hired people. So explaining that that was a conscious choice was always interesting. And I think looking back on it, I think, you know, we've since changed our approach to that. And we do have employees now.

Matt Stauffer: Okay.

Michele Hansen: I think quite frankly, both of us just sort of needed some time to come up for air after working in bigger companies and just really needed calm for some time until we realized, you know, even though we weren't planning on it, we've actually been growing and now things aren't so calm anymore.

Matt Stauffer: Yes.

Michele Hansen: And we do need to bring more people in. And that is how we get calm by bringing in. And so our perspective has changed,

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, but you had calm as like a...

Michele Hansen: but we both sort of needed like, what was it like two to three years of like cooling off period after leaving, you know, the quote-unquote corporate worlds before we were comfortable with that.

Matt Stauffer: It's so interesting because just the two of you does sound like the calm thing until you start thinking about like, what if you want to take a vacation or what if you want to eventually, you know.

Michele Hansen: Yeah, that wasn't super calm.

Mathias Hansen: Ringo! Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: Right. And so then you have to make a more complicated structure in order to bring. So I'd love that you're like each point we're using calm as our kind of like our North Star. And there are different times of the business where calm is achieved in different ways. And you weren't so stuck in the idea that two of us means calm that you couldn't adjust with it.

So you were able to, was there a moment where you went, hold on, hold on, hold on, you know, husband or wife, like, hey, you know, like, this is, we need to shift or do you just feel like your understandings of it shifted over time together?

Mathias Hansen: I think you hit it right on the nail when you said vacation. Because we realized, I guess it was about eight years in or something like that, we never really had a true vacation.

Michele Hansen: Was that two or three years ago then?

Mathias Hansen: Yeah, not too long. We hired the first employee two years and two months ago, roughly. And that's when we sort of realized we have not had a single vacation where we haven't been on standby.

Matt Stauffer: Yep, customer service if anything goes wrong. Yeah. Yep.

Mathias Hansen: Just customer service is a big...

Michele Hansen: Going on vacation while taking our laptops, right? Yeah.

Mathias Hansen: And just knowing that you gotta make sure you keep replying to customers. First of all, you can't just not reply for a week, but also not to have a huge backlog when you come back. And then you come back from vacation and it's actually really stressful.

Matt Stauffer: Yes, then vacation's not that peaceful, right? Yeah.

Mathias Hansen: Suddenly because you have a big pile of things.

Michele Hansen: I mean, I remember, where were we? We were at, we were at some theme park.

Mathias Hansen: Oh, this happened several times. I know. I remember, I remember like not a year after it had launched. We were at, I think it was Universal in Florida. And like servers went down or whatever it was. And Mathias is like on his phone, you know, like in terminal, standing in line for a ride, right?

Matt Stauffer: Oh my gosh.

Michele Hansen: And then a couple of years later, there was another time when I think we were at Sesame Place in Pennsylvania. Remember that? And again, Mathias is standing in line for a ride SSHing into a server. And it was kind of like, this is, it took us some time to realize that maybe we didn't need to work like that.

I think for so long, we still had that fear of it going away from one day to the next. That a big competitor would come in and make a pricing change or whatever it is and just wipe us out. And also we were so grateful to have the business that we didn't mind because, the fact that we had the business and we had that extra income meant that we got to take that trip to Universal in the first place.

So we're like, well, if we have to do like an hour at work, that's fine because we wouldn't have gotten to take this trip without it. So it wasn't a big deal. And, but I think, you know, after 10 years of that, you start to wonder if life has to be that way, especially when the business was, you know, more than sustaining us and sustaining itself.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, what would it be like?

Michele Hansen: That we started to, as you said, so eloquently, I need this crocheted or embroidered on a pillow and put in my office that calm was always the North Star, but the way we've achieved calm has changed. That is like chef's kiss, truly. You should sell merch with that.

Mathias Hansen: I never thought of it exactly the way you did. Yeah, that makes so much sense.

Matt Stauffer: I'm just saying your words back to you.

Michele Hansen: You're the one who said it, so. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: That's cool. I love that. So as you guys are working together, you now have employees and the world becomes a little bit different because, and I tell everybody this, I'm like, if you want to be a programmer and you start a company, you're now going to be someone who runs a company, not somebody who codes.

Are you all finding that as you've built out a team, you're able to do less of what you enjoy, or are you able to still protect what you like doing and find joy in what you're doing now? Like, what is that shift being bent from being just the workers to also now being employers and organizers and managers and all that stuff?

Michele Hansen: If I could start for a second.

Mathias Hansen: Yeah, you start.

Michele Hansen: I think one distinction I would draw is that it's not that hiring employees means that we are able to do less of the things that are our core functional capacities, right? It's that having a larger business means that we are unable to do as much, you know, of the things that are our core skill set and that...

Matt Stauffer: Mm-hmm.

Michele Hansen: bringing employees on forces us to add new things to our skill set or maybe get better at things that weren't core to that before.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: But fundamentally actually gets us closer to being back in that place of working on what it is we're truly good at and what we can uniquely bring to the business. And like the expression of calm changing, the expression of what we can uniquely bring to the business...that also changes. And so we cannot have a static view of ourselves either.

Mathias Hansen: And I think, so there's just four of us right now. So it's not like we've grown significantly. We've also grown staff-wise slowly intentionally again, calm. So we got to the point where Michele and I have a lot of sort of management or HR tasks that are really eating up a majority of our time.

Matt Stauffer: Mm-hmm.

Mathias Hansen: I would say at least, so, so that's, that's, that's sort of one thing. Another thing is we've also, been really, clear on intentions when we were hiring that the roles are going to be very independent. And in fact, Michele and I live in Denmark now and, our, two employees are in the U.S.

Matt Stauffer: Mm-hmm.

Michele Hansen: and on different time zones actually, from each other. So it means we actually have a limited overlap in terms of working hours. So there's still not a lot of meetings and synchronous time, for good or for worse. That can also be a challenge sometimes. But we basically structured it this way and set the expectations from day one that this is how we work.

Matt Stauffer: Can we talk about managing a remote team for a little bit? Because I know there's a lot of kind of different ways. So at Tighten, we have an almost entirely synchronous team. I mean, people work from around the world. But if people work outside of the US time zones, we ask them to basically just work in our time zones. If they live outside of time zones, we ask them to work our time zones with at least like half a day overlap. And I know that Basecamp are like the biggest people who've written about remote. And theirs was all about async, it'ss all about writing things up, and then people will get to it when they get to it.

Have you found yourselves leading into any of the kind of the Basecamp ways of doing things as you kind of pass documents back and forth or are you kind of just making it up as you go?

Michele Hansen: I would say we are still figuring it out. I think each company needs to figure out for themselves what works for their business and the people within it. Basecamp, I mean, some of their writing was really formative for us. I remember reading some of their books, probably like a decade and a half ago now.

Mathias Hansen: It's been a while, yeah.

Michele Hansen: And yeah, were really formative for me and we've been talking a lot about the Basecamp employee handbook lately.

And I think for us, I wouldn't say that we're at the point where we can write and publish our own handbook publicly and say, hey, do exactly this.

Matt Stauffer: Sure.

Michele Hansen: Because we are still figuring it out. And companies change a lot from going from two people to four, five, to seven is a huge jump.

Matt Stauffer: Mm-hmm.

Michele Hansen: Five to 10 is a massive jump. That's a doubling in the organization. I think we're still figuring it out. We still have a lot of learning to do. I think we try to over-communicate to our employees that they should give us feedback on it. And if something isn't working or do something differently, we both each have a weekly sync at least, because we each sort of have one person underneath us plus additional meetings.

But hoping that, you know, part of why we hired them and can work with people who might only have two or three hours of daily overlap with us during a normal working day is because we trust them. And we try to do what we can to make sure that that trust is going both ways and that if it's everything from something that isn't working or something they just want to try to help us connect better, that they feel like that feedback can flow in both directions.

Mathias Hansen: Yeah. We're trying, as you're saying, we're trying different things. One thing we found particularly successful for asynchronous communication is basically sharing small video clips. We use a tool called Loom.

Michele Hansen: Yeah, we do a lot of Looms.

Mathias Hansen: Loom is fantastic. There are lots of other options out there for something like that. But that is a huge time saver because a lot of things that...

Matt Stauffer: Okay, yeah.

Mathias Hansen: would have been a meeting instead is just a video clip where you can kind of go through the problem you're trying to solve or, and here you have or something like that.

Matt Stauffer: That's awesome. Yeah, we use Slack for everything and Slack has recently added basically their own internal Loom and it has definitely encouraged us to use it a lot more when you just say, I can type this whole message or type, can we have a meeting or I could just click a button and record a five-minute video. And it's really impressive how much you can communicate there.

Michele Hansen: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: You were talking about hiring real quick there and that's one of the questions I wanted to ask you all. And I know, I'm guessing you have one developer and one non-developer, is that right?

Mathias Hansen: That's right.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Well, because this is about Laravel, I'm going to start primarily focusing on the developer. What was your experience like in hiring a Laravel developer? Because they get asked all the time by business people who are saying, hey, should we invest in Laravel? Our tech guy has us talking to you as a potential consultancy, but we're unsure about Laravel because JavaScript is the hotness. Can we actually find people who do Laravel? So every time I want to ask somebody, like, what was your experience like hiring for Laravel?

Mathias Hansen: So that's actually kind of interesting because when we hired, so his name is Corey, he's fantastic. And the story is, he was the first hire we did. And the story is basically that I used to work with Corey at a company I worked at previously.

Matt Stauffer: Okay.

Mathias Hansen: And he was on the customer support team and he was kicking butt. He was really, really great. And a nice person to be around and I was really happy to work with him, even though...

Matt Stauffer: Nice.

Mathias Hansen: You know, we didn't interface that often, but I was sitting next to him for a long time and he was a great guy. And I just happened to notice that he had sent himself through like a coding bootcamp. He wants to be a developer. And I noticed this just around the time that he just finished boot camp. And we were looking for some help on the custom support side, but we also wanted someone who was technical because a lot of the custom support is...

Matt Stauffer: Oh cool.

Mathias Hansen: you know, a very technical nature. Like oftentimes we work with code samples and stuff like that.

Michele Hansen: And I also wanted a technical marketing person to write, you know, example projects, code samples, like, you know, marketing to developers basically.

Mathias Hansen: So the boot camp he went through didn't really have anything Laravel specific or PHP even in it. But he worked with React and a bunch of technologies like that.

Matt Stauffer: Okay.

Mathias Hansen: We use that on our marketing website. And we also use Node in certain utilities and stuff internally. So as a small company, you're going to wear many hats. So we basically offered him a role of, well, we want some help with customer support, but we also want to offer you a developer role at the same time. And the whole developer relationships like, content strategist, all these kind of things in one blob. So his role is basically half customer support, half being like a content engineer is what we call it. So working on a lot of the technical stuff for the website documentation, code samples, some of our official client side libraries and things like that.

Michele Hansen: Actually, after we hired him, we learned that in undergrad he had spent a lot of time doing AV production.

Mathias Hansen: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: And so he's...

Matt Stauffer: Okay.

Michele Hansen: really amazingly adept at making videos and like loved doing it. And we're like, and he's like, can I do more of that? And we're like, yes, you can definitely do more of that, please.

Mathias Hansen: But as, as he's gotten more experienced and had more time, you know, in the field working on code and shipping code, we certainly got to a point where he wanted to, broaden his, you know, experience and learn more things. So what we started on last year was getting him set up with Laracasts.

Matt Stauffer: That's awesome. Nice. Love it.

Mathias Hansen: and I'm sort of getting the ball rolling on learning PHP and Laravel. And so slowly, adding, you're giving him different projects that involve Laravel. But that's just to say that, you know, it's also an option to hire someone who actually doesn't have any Laravel experience and transition into that role. Especially nowadays with so many different program languages, they all look like each other quite a lot. So switching from JavaScript to PHP isn't as massive of a learning curve as other things.

Michele Hansen: But it is funny that you ask about our experience hiring Laravel developers because while we hired a developer and then turned him into a Laravel developer, he'll be at Laracon with you. Or on the way of, you know, he'll be at Laracon with you in August. Or the Laracon US rather, not Laracon or Live.

Yeah. We are actually, I mean, for over a month now, we have been talking about hiring another developer who would, of course, be a Laravel developer, though we also need other stuff too. And so, I think this is kind of one of the challenges that we face as a small organization is...

Matt Stauffer: Ooh, okay.

Michele Hansen: both of us wear so many different hats and span so many different functions. You just talked about Cory, who spans several different areas.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: We're sort of starting that process of exploring it, but also seeing quite clearly that this is not traditionally going to fall into a box of one discrete role.

Matt Stauffer: Yes.

Michele Hansen: And so how do you find... those people that span multiple areas?

Mathias Hansen: Yeah, so basically we decided that we need, we don't want to hire for multiple roles here. We actually want one person wearing multiple hats. And we need someone who's both an experienced Laravel developer, but who's also, you know, has some experience with DevOps or like the next systems administration and things like that. So we have, we have someone who can also,

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Mathias Hansen: have a bit of a view into the infrastructure side of things as well. So we are slowly starting to get the ball rolling in that. Although we are... I'm a little bit worried we kind of are looking for a unicorn, but I'm sure...

Michele Hansen: I also maybe like...

Mathias Hansen: We'll find someone.

Michele Hansen: I mean, it's kind of... It's totally a unicorn or maybe narwhal is a better word or something because, you know, it would also be amazing if they were kind of like... Nova Scotia area too, because that's the best time zone overlap, you know, in terms of like the most overlap with us,

Matt Stauffer: Oh yeah.

Michele Hansen: But also overlap with the U.S. so they can, you know, talk to people or like Iceland. So like if there's a, you know, DevOps, Laravel developer, you know, person in Iceland, Greenland, Nova Scotia, that kind of area, totally, we're, we're totally looking for a narwhal.

Mathias Hansen: Yeah, someone who likes to get up really early.

Matt Stauffer: Yes. Well, I'm trying to zoom out. My Google Maps is taking too long because it knows I'm talking with its competitor right now. But I think there are some areas of South America. So I would encourage you guys to consider looking in Brazil.

Michele Hansen: Yes, that's actually, I made a whole list. Yeah, Brazil was on there. There was I made a whole table of this. I think it was every there's like some places in West Africa, too, that are like a decent overlap and I think the challenge is like, well, we're in Denmark. Why wouldn't we hire for Europe time zone, too? But this person would really need to be available, you know, with at least four hours of overlap with the U.S. because all of our customers and employees are in North America.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah

Michele Hansen: And so that's really where we need the most overlap. But yeah, I think it's, I can't picture the map in my head, but it's everywhere from sort of like the very far west coast of Africa over to U.S. central is where we had to draw the line because U.S. west coast is too far from us. That's nine hours. Then there's no overlap.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Okay. So you got options. Yeah. Well, I want to officially recommend to any Americans listening right now that we have historically said time zone is our constraint, not continent. And that has opened us up to South America in a way that I think a lot of other folks are not looking right now who are traditionally just like North America based. And the number of capable, talented Laravel programmers who speak English pretty well in South America is much higher than folks are aware. And I think that's true outside South America, but then you run into time zone issues.

Mathias Hansen: Right.

Matt Stauffer: But if someone is just looking for programmers within the American time zones, the US time zones, I would encourage them to consider looking south. So.

Michele Hansen: That's such a good point, yeah. I think I don't mean to...

Mathias Hansen: No, that sounds really good. Yeah.

Michele Hansen: Yeah, not include them, because they are on my draft of the listing. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: Well, part of it is that we don't often think of the fact that South America is so far east compared to North America. And so it's just I didn't know at first that I was like, that's actually a benefit you can get there. So that's cool.

Michele Hansen: Yeah, yeah, yeah for sure.

Matt Stauffer: OK, so I want to talk really quickly about your experience as employers outside of the Laravel context. So you talk about hiring folks, but you hired somebody who's not a programmer. And then also you mentioned ops and you said, okay, well ops and HR stuff is not taking up too much of our time.

But one of the things I think was really fun that you said was when the company gets big, we're not able to do the things we want to do. And hiring allows us to get back to that calm. Is there an arrangement? Let's say you just had, you know, you know, the ability to hire three more people. Is there an arrangement where you said, you know, because I'm sorry, I keep coming to this, but like you said, I want to do what only I uniquely can do. And I say that I talk to founders all the freaking time and they're like, how do I organize and how do I hire? I'm like, you should only do what only uniquely that you can uniquely uniquely do. And the first thing you should be leaning for in terms of hiring, delegating, whatever is the things that you do that somebody else could do.

As you all have been building this company, what are the things that you have looked at that you said, I don't want to do that. And as it's gotten bigger, those are the things I want to delegate away that you haven't found the ability to delegate away yet. Like what would your dream be?

And it sounds like you're trying to hire a programmer. So maybe it's the stuff that that person's doing, but are there any roles or responsibilities that come along with sort of just like the meta work of running a business that if there was just a unicorn, not a programmer unicorn, but like a operations HR, whatever unicorn, you could just say, just if I never had to do that ever again, I would pay people money for. Is there anything that's like sitting there in your business owner mind?

Michele Hansen: I think not anything currently that really can be fully off-boarded like that, I think, but a huge motivation for hiring our finance person was the amount of time I was spending on sales taxes. And so we had to go through sales tax compliance in, was this 2022 now? And I had a virtual assistant for several years. That was actually our first sort of dipping our toes in the water was when I got a VA in.

Matt Stauffer: Love it. Love VA's.

Michele Hansen: 2020 through this company called Squared Away, which is amazing. They hire military spouses as virtual assistants

Matt Stauffer: Brilliant.

Michele Hansen: because they are a highly educated, highly competent group of people. But because their spouses are in the military, they have to move often. They have some different constraints on their life that make it hard for them to have a traditional nine to five job.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: And so I had several assistants through there. And actually, once I was dealing with all of the sales tax stuff, I asked my assistant if she would help with it. And she had previously been a staff accountant before marrying someone in the military and having a family and moving all around.

Matt Stauffer: Nice.

Michele Hansen: And so as that side of the business really ramped up, not just with sales taxes, but also with just following up on invoices and getting things paid and signing up on procurement portals and all that kind of stuff. Once I realized that was, and I think you were the one who was like, you don't need to be spending all of your time on this.

Mathias Hansen: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: And I think that's really where we help each other too, is kind of to push each other to say, this is really not a core competency for you, and it's exhausting you, and this is a very clear thing that we could delegate.

Matt Stauffer: Yes.

Michele Hansen: And so she was my assistant for two years and then we brought her on full-time.

Matt Stauffer: Love that.

Michele Hansen: And so that worked out so well. Also, again, we already trusted her. We already knew what her capabilities were. And so that was a really great transition. And I think for us, we were hesitant about hiring for a long time. And so starting out with a VA and you can get a VA who's doing everything from bookkeeping to organizing events or scheduling or helping with sales or whatever that is, that's that kind of thing that you have to do, the meta work that you have to do, but for you is draining or time-consuming or not fulfilling or something you're just butting your head up against and dread. A really, really good transition. And we paid squared away a finder's fee for hiring her away. And I was...

Mathias Hansen: No hard feelings.

Michele Hansen: I was very happy to do so because they saved me from going through a long hiring process to find someone.

Matt Stauffer: That's brilliant. I hugely support people using VA's in general and especially in the context you're talking about when you're not ready. I mean, first of all, I tell people that if you're not ready to hire, contractors are a great way to go because contractors don't expect that you're going to have to work for them every single week. You're not now under the gun to add an extra several thousand dollars to the payroll every two weeks.

You know, it's this much more flexible thing where we can give and we can come back and nobody can be upset if you're like, hey, I don't have any work for you this week. So in general, contractors are great. And then VAs are great because just like you said, like you find like if you're going to be using this VA, well, you say, what things do I not want to be doing right now? What things can be delegated?

Even as I'm teaching people at Tighten who aren't owners of the company, I'm teaching them like, hey, you have too much on your plate right now. I want you to identify what pieces of your job can be turned into sort of like a system or a process and be done by somebody who doesn't know your domain knowledge but has a brain. And then let's delegate those over to the VA. It's really an underutilized resource, I think. So I'm really happy to hear that you all not only used one but actually eventually ended up hiring. That's a really cool experience.

Okay, so we are running short on time and I have so many more questions for you. So I'm trying to kind of limit them down. Okay, if somebody else heard your journey from you know working in the corporate world and being a project manager and our product owner and a developer and then now having this wonderful successful business that kind of like takes care of the family stuff like that and they wanted to follow that same journey that you did... Is there any one piece of guidance or advice or recommendations or warnings that you would give to them if they want to kind of go in the same direction you did?

Mathias Hansen: I think the idea of bootstrapping and being lean has really made it possible for us to get to the point where we are. We actually didn't have to take major risks for the first several years because we could work on weekends and evenings as time permitted.

I think the big thing for us now we have been doing this for so long is to keep our spirits up and keep going. Right? Because there are also bad days. There are days where you're like, why are we even doing this? It's even worth it, especially early on. Sometimes like we spend all this time on this, like, and we just paid for $30 servers, you know, is this worth it? That's another way to look at it, right? But I think persistence is a really big thing. And also, I think it's also important not to be talking about this is talk about all the things that didn't work. Cause if you talk to any successful, founder or startup, you ask them about all the things they'd done before and you would hear a long list of things that didn't work out.

Matt Stauffer: Yes.

Mathias Hansen: We've built so many things individually and so many things together prior to this. And this was the one thing that actually turned out to be something bigger than just like a fun little side project. You never know, you know, what's going to stick.

Michele Hansen: And, you know, to add to that, I think it's emerged to me through this conversation that flexibility is a really core theme. Being flexible in terms of what, what is it we're building and, and how, how is it we're going to get to that point of having a full-time product. Flexible on how we follow our North Stars of being calm or delivering a product and an experience that we're proud of, but also starting from the point of building something that you needed yourself, that will only get you so far. And in many cases, it won't really get you that far.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: Equally as important is the thousands and thousands of emails we got from people in the first couple of months after launching saying, hey, this is great, but can you do this? Can you do that? And 90 % of them, we actually didn't do anything with that, but we were open and listening to people. And the 10% we did take is part of what got us to where we are today. And we didn't stop at that point.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: The feedback and that ongoing conversation with customers, but also ongoing conversation with ourselves about what is it the product we want to build, what implications does that have for the kind of business that we're building and the kind of life that that implies. Being flexible on the implementation of the dream is really, really important and...

Matt Stauffer: Hmm.

Michele Hansen: not getting overly attached to any one specific execution of something. If you kind of pull back any idea you might have, right? There are two pieces kind of sitting in that little idea of the box. There's a problem you're solving, and then there's the way you're gonna solve it. And I think if you can kind of extract that a bit to just the problem you're trying to solve, which for us was developers who were frustrated when they have to do geocoding.

And then you realize, oh wait, hold on, there's actually like 10 different ways we could be executing on this.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: And it's not just one problem, one solution. There are tons of different solutions to this. And so starting to figure out, okay, well, we had this approach. What do other people need? And how does that shift this? And so being consistent on what it is we are trying to achieve, but also being flexible in that.

I think if I had to give concise advice about that, I couldn't because there are so many things that go into it. I chose to write a book about one very specific part that goes into that about how to actually listen to people and get something useful out of it.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: Because you can't just build a thousand different products for a thousand different people with feedback, right? Because it is complicated and it's hard. And I think that's something that people should know when they know that themselves and maybe it makes them feel better to know that this journey is difficult. And if you're struggling, you're doing it right because it's hard. But that doesn't mean it's not possible.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mathias Hansen: On the line, one more time, parts of what Michele said, talking to customers and listening to your customers is the number one thing that has shaped our business. And it's been so important for our journey to really understand all these use cases and what the customers really want. And we barely scratched the surface on that, but that is something Michele has spent a lot of time and really poured her heart into. And it's really, really paid off and shaped where we are now.

Matt Stauffer: Hmm. That's awesome. And my next question, second last question was, is there anything you want to plug? So let's plug the book. Tell them about it. Tell the people about the book.

Michele Hansen: Yeah, yeah. Well, the book is Deploy Empathy, a practical guide to interviewing customers and... Looking for a book around here. We have one here. There we go. I initially started writing it because I had all these developer friends who wanted to have their own product businesses but kept running into this kind of point where they had built what they needed themselves and it grew to a certain level.

Matt Stauffer: Love it. Fantastic. And we'll link that in the show notes, everybody.

Michele & Mathias And maybe that was a couple hundred dollars a month. Maybe it was zero. Maybe it was a couple thousand. And then it would just kind of flatline. And I would start telling them about, like, you know, well, talk to your customers. What are they saying? What are you learning? And I was kind of met with a blank, confused stare. And so it really came out of like writing the book that my developer friends needed in order to learn how to talk to people about this. And it's grown so much more beyond that.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Michele Hansen: But yeah, that's...

Mathias Hansen: One thing I want to mention is I'm really excited about going to Laracon in the U.S. in August. And definitely come talk to me or Corey if you might be interested in working with us. We are hoping to meet a lot of awesome people and talk to a whole bunch of people there. If you happen to be on the European side of the continent or in the vicinity, we're putting on a Laravel Live in Copenhagen, which is going to be the first Scandinavian, unofficial Laravel conference. So definitely check it out. We've got a great speaker lineup. Unfortunately, Matt is not joining us next year.

Matt Stauffer: Maybe next year, I'd love to. Yeah, that's so fun.

Michele Hansen: Yeah, I'm actually going to be speaking about how you can use some of the...

Mathias Hansen: Speaking of the great lineup.

Michele Hansen: ...of the tools that I talk about in Deploy Empathy to get ahead in your day job. How to be a more valuable part of the team.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, love that.

Michele Hansen: Yeah, and I guess, I mean, if someone happens to be that, you know, DevOps senior Laravel developer Narwhal we're looking for that's in Nova Scotia or Brazil, also let us know or maybe find Mathias at Laracon.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. We'll put both of your Twitter accounts, all your social and everything like that in the show notes.

Okay. Well, that sounds great. So I have one last question for you. And again, I can ask you a million more, but I'm trying to keep us in a time constraint. If a perfect client landed today and they said, you know what, this is so good, we just want to buy you out, here's $100 million, step away, what would you do tomorrow?

Michele Hansen: Farming stuff. I would go prune the apple trees.

Mathias Hansen: Yeah, we talked a bit about this, you know, thinking about the far future. The big thing is, I don't know what I would do.

Michele Hansen: Yeah.

Mathias Hansen: Like, I would, I would be bored, I think.

Michele Hansen: Yeah. And I think my dream job, my dream job is to work with you. And I have that. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: Oh my God, you're so cute!

Michele Hansen: So I don't know why I would. I mean, it's just, it's just like, what can another company offer me that would be better than being my own boss and working with my husband and then the people we have chosen to work with. I just struggle to, and maybe this is my own naiveté or something, but I just struggle to understand what would be better than that.

Mathias Hansen: I could put putz around the house for six months and work on a few things.

Michele Hansen: You would go nuts.

Mathias Hansen: But then I would get bored.

Michele Hansen: No, it would be like six hours.

Matt Stauffer: Wow. All right. So you'd be like, thank you for the money, but we're going to keep doing this and maybe do a little bit of farming on the side.

Michele Hansen: Yeah, and that's what we do now. So how is that any different?

Matt Stauffer: That's life. Yeah, so basically your life is perfect. I love that. Well, you guys are wonderful and delightful. I'm really excited to be able to see you all in person soon. Michele, are you also coming to Laracon US or no?

Michele Hansen: No, I will be manning the fort, but I will be in Copenhagen.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Yeah, I guess when you got kids, yeah.

Michele Hansen: No, I won't be there.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, okay, well I look forward to seeing you Mathias in person, Michele, we're gonna find some time someway. But thank you all so, so, so much. Also, by the way, I used Geocodio and love it, so also thank you for the product, but I think that was like baseline, but a fantastic experience.

Mathias Hansen: That's so nice to hear.

Matt Stauffer: But thank you for sharing all this with us, there was so much good stuff in here. I didn't even think about how much value I would get from seeing your relational dynamics, and it was such a freaking joy seeing you two just look at each other and I'm like, my god, there's so much love in this room. So thank you for sharing, thank you for teaching us, and thank you for being here today.

Mathias Hansen: Thank you, Matt.

Michele Hansen: Thank you so much for having us.

Mathias Hansen: We really enjoyed it, yeah.

Matt Stauffer: And for the rest of you all, thanks for hanging out and we will see you all next time.