Episode 223 | What to do when your partner quits, defining success and charging more for a self-hosted app

Startups For the Rest of Us

Episode 223 | What to do when your partner quits, defining success and charging more for a self-hosted app

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[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us, episode 223.

[00:02] Music

[00:08] Mike: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products. Whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.

[00:16] Rob: And I’m Rob.

[00:17] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on this week Rob?

[00:21] Rob: You know, a lot is going on. Things are moving quickly. Growth is kicking in for me again, and it feels good to be past that first part of the year. I have a couple more books I want to talk about. The first book is called “Innovators” and it is written by Walter Isaacson, and he’s the guy that wrote the Steve Jobs biography, the definitive guide, and he has written several other biographies, a very, very good writer. I love his journalistic approach. I recommend Innovators if you want to hear the history of computers, dating all the way back to the 1700’s, and then he walks through how each group influenced the next group so it’s fascinating. You know, again, it’s not going to help you launch your startup or anything but it’s a really cool story. I actually had to fast forward the Steve Jobs era and the Microsoft era, because I’ve read so many books about those specific time frames that it wasn’t interesting. I’d heard it all before, but I did like the way he tied that together with the whole computer age of basically the 1940’s to the present. So if you haven’t checked it out I would recommend that book.

[01:22] Mike: We got an email in from Phillip Dirkson and he says, “Hi Rob and Mike. As you mentioned in the last episode on the “Stair Step Approach” launching multiple WordPress plugins over the years has allowed me to finally quit my nine-to-five gig and go with this full time. It’s been a long and gradual process. Podcast listener since episode number one, four-and-a-half years in the academy, four micro confs and two and a half years since my first paid plugin launch. But I finally got there. I can’t thank you enough for the guidance during this journey over the years.”

[01:46] Rob: Yeah, awesome. Phil has been to every micro conf we’ve had in Vegas, and he’s actually here in Fresno and, so he and I hang out now and again. So it’s really cool to see him go on this entrepreneurial journey and eventually hit that point where he’s been striving for, right? It’s what we’re all looking for, the ability to quit our jobs. So a hearty congratulations to Phil.

[02:07] Mike: So I went to “Big Snow Tiny Conf” last week. It’s put on by Brian Casel and Brad Touesnard. Brad is out of Canada, and Brian is out of Connecticut. So what they do is they put on this conference. It’s a twelve-person conference, but they basically just rent out this house, a bunch of people show up and they are all entrepreneurs and looking to build businesses. And we went out on the slopes for several hours each day, and then talked business into the wee hours of the morning. So it was a lot of fun. It was really interesting, and there were a lot of great stories there and I’m going to be keeping in touch with a bunch of guys.

[02:40] Rob: That sounds cool. It’s really nice to have those small venues where everybody can really bond and it’s not a big room of people. So the other book I wanted to talk about today, it’s called “Essentialism” and the subtitle is “The Disciplined Pursuit of Less”. And in essence the author goes into talking about how to make choices and where to spend your precious time and energy instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for you. I highly, highly recommend this book if you have not read it. Even if you are already into saying no a lot and being aggressive about your own time, and about not letting other people make choices for you and put things on your calendar. A lot was reinforced for me, and I think I may go back and listen to it a second time. I took some notes, about half of it, sixty to seventy percent of it, I’m already doing. But there were some edge cases that this author goes into and I think it’s a very powerful look at how you can be in control of all aspects of your life; your personal, your professional, your family. Yeah, I was really impacted by this book and I think you should check it out.

[03:45] Mike: Very cool. So what we’re going to be doing today is we’re going to be going through a bunch of listener questions that have come in. Last month when we put out a call for new podcast episodes we also caught an influx of questions as well. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go through some of those. And the first one comes in from Greg Millett and he says, “Hi. I need some advice. I worked on a product with a partner. He’s the main expert with the product idea, and is also the sales person with contacts. I’m the developer. Our plan was I would build the product and he would sell it. Now as you might expect this was a huge mistake and a sad story follows. I worked three hundred hours on the product. Initially my partner was proving valuable. He even secured an initial customer. Then he got too busy and I’ve basically not heard from him since. This leaves me with a working product I can’t push forward. He has the contacts, he knows the audience. Without him I can’t find customers or be as convincing. So my question is this: Do you think I can learn enough about the audience to be effective at marketing it? The only thing I’ve tried unsuccessfully so far is messaging potentially interested people on LinkedIn. How would you approach gaining a foothold with an audience that you don’t know well? I’d hate to let the product go since I’ve put so much work into it. Thanks.”

[04:44] Rob: So, to begin, I think if you’re listening to this it’s obviously very painful to hear, because I can imagine being in this situation, and it sucks to have invested three hundred hours of time and then not be able to yield the benefit of that. If you’re going to go into a partnership like this, my biggest piece of advice is to have that partner be working the same amount of hours that you are on the product. Because this stuff happens, where you frontload it, and then the other person backs out. But if they’ve also sunk three hundred hours into it then they have the same sunk cost and they will be less likely to do it. So that’s kind of my advice, not for Greg’s specific question, but if you’re going to go into this the other person should be selling as much as you are. And there shouldn’t have been one initial customer. There should have been ten or twenty that are lined up. Now I know that takes a lot of work, but that would’ve insured — it would’ve been really quickly noticeable after maybe a month or two, if his partner wasn’t doing it, and then Greg could’ve stopped. But the fact that his partner bailed on him wasn’t noticed until everything was done and the software was there. To step forward and answer Greg’s actual question, the question is, “Do you think I can learn enough about the audience to be effective at marketing to it?” And the answer is yes. The question is do you want to, and do you have the motivation to do that. I mean, I think that’s the bottom line. If it interests you enough that you want to spend the next three to five years learning this market, learning who they are and how to market to them, then absolutely. I think you can definitely learn enough about a market. The question is do you have the motivation to stick with it?

[06:13] Mike: I think there are two things that strikes me that specifically came out of what he said, and the exact line is, “without him I cannot find customers or be as convincing.” I think it might be a fallacy to think that you can’t find the customers, but I think you can definitely learn to be convincing. As Rob said, it boils down to whether or not you want to. In terms of “cannot find customers”, the only thing that you’ve tried so far is messaging people on LinkedIn. There are probably a number of different other ways that you can try and find customers. There’s tons of different ways you that can try to do that. But. you know. we’ve talked about a bunch of them on the podcast. I mean there’s SEO, outbound emails, cold calls, all kinds of different things. But as Rob said “it just boils down to whether or not you want to.” One thing I would also keep in mind is that it may be possible to sell this product, but you might not be the right person for it. So it may very well be a good product and a viable product but are you the right person to do it? And I can’t answer that, that’s something that you’re going to have to answer yourself.

[07:14] Rob: Also, he could potentially look for another partner in this space. Because it does seem like finding a developer is always the hard part right? When a marketing guy wants to find the developer, or the sales person wants to find the developer, going the other way I imagine you could have some luck if you come and say look, “I built this whole product. Here’s the situation. Do you want to come on as a partner?” I think that’s another option to consider.

[07:35] Mike: Yeah, I mean a lot of it boils down to whether or not it’s actually solving a real problem, because otherwise you’re back to the position – where a lot of developers find themselves in – where they built a product and then they go to find a market for it, and it almost seems like this product was built and initially there was some collaboration and then suddenly that collaboration went away and you end up in a position not by design or anything but you don’t have the customers lined up that you were going to go after. So Greg, I hope that answers your question and good luck. Keep us posted on how things go.

[08:07] Our next questions comes in from Anders and he says, “Hi Mike. I saw a tweet from Patio11 and I thought it would be a good question for you too so here goes. What is success? How do you define it and how do you know when you are successful?” Anders I think is a really good question. I think that when you are trying to define success for yourself it’s a matter of what your long term life goals are. So, for some people they go out and they try to build a business, and they go out and get funding and hopefully are shooting for that hundred million dollar exit. And there are some people that that is what is important for them, and that is going to signify success. I think in the circles that Rob and I travel in, and a lot of the people who listen to this podcast, having a hundred million dollars is not necessarily the definition of success, although it is a marker of success. I think that in many cases, especially for me, success to me means that I have the ability to make decisions about how I spend my time in a way that makes me happy. If you’ve ever been in a position where you had a full time job, and you were essentially going through the motions because you hated it so much you just showed up because it gave you a paycheck, and that was the sole reason why you showed up, is because you’ve got a wife and kids and family and you’ve got to support them. So you go to work every day and you get that paycheck, and you do what it takes to get it. But if you’re lucky enough to be in a position where you don’t have to go through that and you actually enjoy what you do – to me that’s success.

[09:33] Rob: I like that. For me I have these three parts that I’ve distilled it down to. And actually I took part of this from the “Internet Business Mastery Guide”, it was an episode I heard years ago. It really struck me and I wrote it down in a notebook. But in essence for me being successful for me requires three things to be in place. The first is freedom, the second is purpose, and the third is relationships. So freedom is basically being in control of my head space and being able to work on what I want, and when I want – so that I don’t have a salary gig. I don’t have a client telling me what to do. Now that’s typically the first thing that you need. So if you are working a salary gig and you don’t have the freedom and you want it, that’s all you need to focus on now, because purpose and relationships can come later but right now you need to get to freedom as quickly as possible. What I found is that once I did achieve that freedom, and I had products that were providing enough revenue that I didn’t need to work, then freedom wasn’t enough because I got bored. And that’s when you need to start thinking about purpose and relationships and so purpose can be many different things right. Purpose can be, “I just want to have as much time as possible to spend time to spend with my kids, or to homeschool my kids. or to travel full time or anything.” What is your purpose? I think that’s a deep, deep question. Like Mike said, you kind of have to ask yourself.

[10:53] I have kind of an overall purpose that’s to help other entrepreneurs, and to bring people together, and to use startups and entrepreneurship to provide a good life for as many people as possible. I have a very well-worded version of that in my notebook – that’s my purpose – but that is the gist of it. It’s to provide abundance for my family, and those around me, and those who interact with me. But every year I find that my purpose shifts a little bit, and it happens during that retreat that I take in January and so I do think that you might have slight changes in course there. And then relationships. I just don’t think a person can be happy if they don’t have relationships. It doesn’t mean you need to have a family or to be married but I think you need close friends. I think you need people that you can talk to and have a conversation with, and who know who you are. And if I had freedom and I had purpose and I was traveling the world and I had no friends and no relationships, I would be sad, and I think you would be too. So those are the three components that I believe that you need to be successful. And it’s always a balancing act because you never get there. You never arrive. You can get there and have all three of those in balance for a while, but then eventually it gets out of balance and you find that even though you think you have freedom, you’re actually working on stuff you don’t want to work on. So you have to reevaluate that, and you have to get back to it, but those are the criteria that I look at when I’m deciding if I’m successful today.

[12:10] Mike: And another question comes in from Adam Clinkett, which is very, very much related to this. So Anders’ question was “How do you define success?” and Adam asks “How do you measure success?” How do you know if you’re really succeeding? There’s a subtle difference between those, because defining success is what you ultimately want to achieve, but measuring it is sometimes a lot more difficult, because you don’t necessarily know where on that continuum of success you fall. Are you really close to meeting your goals? Or are you much further away? And sometimes there’s not a numeric value for that. Are you happy or are you sad? And it’s like, “Well, I’m a happiness level of eight out of ten.” And sometimes those are just really hard to measure. To answer Adam’s question, “How do you measure success?” I think it depends on what it is that you’re trying to achieve. Do you feel like you’re succeeding? Because you can be the poorest person in the world, but if you’re happy with what you’re doing then chances are you’re leading a successful life, and the success should be measured internally not by external factors. It’s not about how much money you make. It’s not about how many people view you as a success. It’s how do you view yourself? Do you feel like you’re succeeding? Are you happy with what you’re doing and how your life is progressing?

[13:21] Rob: Yeah, I measure success typically by looking back at the previous year. But I measure it by how much I’m enjoying what I’m doing. There are times when you’re not going to enjoy it, right? There are times when you have to work late nights, and times when you have to work too many hours in a week. There are times when you can’t be around your family or you have to do stuff that you don’t enjoy. But when I look over a longer swath of time – so maybe a ninety day period or a six month period or a one year period – that whole time should not be filled with those memories, right? It shouldn’t be filled with, “Boy that really sucked.” You know “That year really sucked.” Like I probably made a wrong turn at some point if that’s where I am. If a thirty day period really sucked, or I’m going into it and I’m saying “This is going to be hard for the next sixty days, then when I come out of that of course it’s going to feel bad. But over the longer term I measure success with that freedom, purpose, relationship stuff. But you have to do a rolling average, rather than look at it every day, because some days are going to be better than others. There’s like micro and macro, to be honest, because if I’m working on a single business – let’s say I’m trying to grow Drip – then my success metric tends to be month over recurring revenue growth. And I think that’s pretty easy to measure. And then you step back and it’s like, “What is your life success metric?” And that’s the criteria that Mike and I talked about earlier. So I think it depends on what scope you’re looking at when you do ask about success.

[14:41] Mike: So thanks for the question Adam. Our next one comes from Calin Jordan. And Calin asks “When should a bootstrapper get insurance?” And second question is, “How much time and resources should you put into security?” Good questions. When should a bootstrapper get insurance? I think the answer to that is when you have enough to lose that the likelihood of a bad event happening is getting more and more likely to the point that it makes sense to get that insurance. I know that talks probably around the issue a little bit, but let me throw together a couple of examples. If you’re making, let’s say, a thousand dollars a month from an app, the chances are good that going out and getting a ton of insurance for that is probably not wise. But if it’s your full time employment and you’re making, say, ten thousand dollars a month from it, it probably makes sense to go out and get some kind of insurance, especially if you’re touching other people’s machines or you could negatively impact their business or lose their data. Those are the cases when you might want to start looking at it, but there are businesses out there that operate with no insurance for years and years at a time, and they don’t get insurance until after they’re five or ten years into it. There are some businesses who never get insurance. The purpose of insurance is if something happens then they will cover it or at least cover some of the damages. And this comes down to risk. Are you comfortable taking that risk? How likely is it that something bad is going to happen? [16:06] Onto your second question, “How much time and resources should you put into security?” This ties back a little bit to the insurance. I think you definitely want to do the bare minimums in terms of making sure that people’s data is secure. So that doesn’t necessarily mean you go in and encrypt all of the user data. There are certainly cases where that makes sense, if you’re dealing with any sort of personal or private health insurance information, or anything like that. Or credit card numbers which you probably shouldn’t be storing anyway, those are the things that I would probably keep in mind but the reality is that you want to put time and effort into security when it makes sense, and it won’t make sense until after you have something to protect. If you’re spending a lot of time building a product, and building all this security mechanisms into a product when for the product itself it doesn’t matter, and people aren’t paying you for it yet, then you’re focusing on the wrong thing. You’re doing optimizations for something that it may not matter in three or four months because you may have very well ended up shutting it down because people are not buying the product.

[17:03] Rob: This is a tough one, it’s kind of like “I’ll know it when I see it.” You spend the minimal amount of time possible to feel confident that you don’t have any gaping holes or don’t have any holes as much as possible that you’ve locked stuff down. There are best practices, and you can of course dive in and try and do credit card or bank level security on everything and, like you said, it’s premature optimization. So you kind of don’t want to do that unless you do have social security numbers or really, really important critical information. But then there are just the best practices of web development; of salting and hashing passwords, and of having all your ports closed, and not allowing or using multiple passwords and having strong passwords for everything. That’s the kind of stuff where that’s the accepted best practice and that’s as far as I would go today.

[17:52] Mike: Yeah, there’s companies out there that have billions of dollars at their disposal and they still get hacked. You look at companies like Adobe and Home Depot. These companies have billions of dollars at their disposal and large security teams, and they still lose data and they still get hacked. The reality is that if someone is actively targeting you there is absolutely nothing you’re going to be able to do to stop them. They will get your data if they want it.

[18:16] Our next one comes in from Kevin Taylor and he says, “Hi Rob and Mike. I’m a long time listener and fan of your podcast and a lifetime member of the Micropreneur Academy. Keep up the good work. I’d be interested to know how you’re planning to deal with the EU VAT rules?”

[18:28] Rob: Yes there were some EU VAT rules that were passed. The interesting thing is if you’re in the U.S. nothing changed for us. This only impacts people who are in the EU. And if you’re in the EU then you need to research this because it’s not trivial, right? It makes things vastly more complicated. Obviously we don’t give advice, either way, on if you should be paying this or not. But if you haven’t, and you continue to not, then really nothing changed with this law. It only impacts EU based businesses.

[18:55] Mike: Yeah, the thing I would point out is that, because we’re based in the US and this is a tax law it does make it pretty difficult for us to answer or give specific advice. What I’m going to do is I’m going to post a link in the show notes to www.EnterpriseNation.com. They have a “Five Steps to VATMOSS” infographic that you can take a look at, which kind of walks you through whether or not you need to register, the dates that you have to register by, and additional information about it. It’s pretty high level, but it’s at least a starting point. And again we’re not CPA’s, we’re not attorneys, we can’t give specific advice along those lines, but we can kind of point you in the right direction in terms of helping you find the information you need. So Kevin I hope that helps out.

[19:36] Our next question comes in from Chris Willow and he says, “Hey guys. I have a software product in the SEO niche with two options: self-hosted or hosted. This is cheap for bigger SEO shops who get a lot of value from the app, so I’d like to charge them more for self-hosting. Say I add pricing tiers based on the number of clients they have, which is common for SAAS apps? The problem is there is no real reason for limiting a self-hosted app besides getting more money, so it could be hard to explain why we’re doing this. What’s your take on pricing plans for self-hosted apps, and does it even make sense to add limitations? Thanks, Chris.” I think in my mind it does. If you take a look at just about any server based application software, there are limits on the different tiers of that product that you get based on the amount of money that you pay for. Let’s take a long-standing example of like a mail server. I remember buying a mail server software a long time ago, and if you wanted five users it would cost X dollars. If you wanted ten users it would cost X plus whatever. [20:32] So there are definitely reasons and justifications for charging people more for a product that is going to offer them more value. The trick is finding out what those tiers are. And I think what you can use is if you have your SAAS app, and you are giving them an option of some kind say for the number of web sites they are able to manage their SEO for, you can limit it based on the number of sites, or you can limit it based on the number of accounts, or the types of reports. There are lots of different ways that you can segment that customer base to figure out what is important to them, and then charge the people more who are going to fit a criteria that would fall into that bucket. So let’s say that it integrates into something like SQL Server. Well, there are different editions of SQL Server that will have advanced reporting options, and if you hook into those chances are really good that they have an advanced version of SQL Server. So you can use that as a justification that says, “Hey, if you want to hook into this it’s going to cost extra.” Because you can reasonably assume that if they were paying that much extra for that version of SQL Server then they have the money to pay more for your application.

[21:39] Rob: Yeah, I agree with Mike. Chris mentioned in his email that there is no real reason for limiting a self-hosted app besides getting more money, so it could be hard to explain why we’re doing this. I would see how it goes, personally. I think the limitation is that they are a bigger company. This has been done since the beginning of software sales, right? This is how every enterprise software sale is done. So you’ve got to see how it feels, but this is the way to maximize revenue on that. I would almost take it a step back and ask, “Why do you have self-hosted and a hosted version?” How critical is that self-hosted version? I would move toward SAAS personally, just because of the maintenance, and then this question doesn’t even need to be asked. Or if the self-hosted one provides the vast majority of revenue, then why have the SAAS version? Why not just double down on self-hosted? If you have a fifty-fifty split I’d be surprised, but I would tend to lean towards hosting infrastructure itself, so that support is so much easier. You don’t have to deal with everyone’s crazy server configurations, helping them install on their own servers, and all that stuff.

[22:33] Mike: Our next question comes in from Chad, and he says, “Hi Rob and Mike. My app, “Pint Track”, is a loyalty program tracker specifically for bars. I’m in private beta with one bar and about a thousand users right now and gearing up for a public launch next quarter. Your podcast has already given me tons of ideas for both marketing and development. Here’s my question, I’ve recently finished reading Slicing Pie by Mike Moyer. It describes a system of dynamic equity split that founders can use to compensate employees and co-founders based on work invested, rather than using static equity grants. Have you guys seen this book, and if so what do you think of the plan or of the dynamic equity splits in general? Have you ever done anything like this before and if so how did it go?”

[23:09] Rob: This is a really good question actually. I had seen the “Slicing Pie” book, I hadn’t read it. Mike and I have researched and looked at an infographic and an explanation of kind of how this split works. I’ll say a couple of things. One, this is non-standard, so it’s going to be hard to find pre-done documents that can define this. I know that, as an example, Y Combinator has released what they have called their “SAFE” documents, S A F E, it’s an acronym for something and they’ve basically released those documents. So if you’re going to do standard equity splits, where you have vesting and that kind of stuff, then you can use their documents. But if you’re going to do something funky like this then you’re really going to need to hire a lawyer. There’s no chance I can imagine you writing this up and having this working because it’s complicated. That’s the other thing is the complexity of it. If you ever wanted to raise funding, even an Angel Round, I think you might run into issues because this is non-standard. When you tend to step outside of the lines on these things you are running a bit of an experiment right? If there haven’t been hundreds or thousands of companies that have done this – much like have done the standard four year vesting with the one year cliff of stock options – you’re kind of being a “canary in the coal mine”. And so I think it’s an interesting theory. I question if I want to be the “canary in the coal mine” on something like this, because it is pretty serious. The big objection I see on the home page of Slicing Pie dot com is you and a friend go fifty-fifty on a new business, you do all the work, he still wants fifty percent for doing nothing. Now what? Well the way you tend to get around that is you tend to have stuff that vests, and if that person is not working on it then their employment ends and they don’t get the stock. And they have to work a year to get twenty-five percent, and then every month after that they get a certain percentage. So, you know, it’s interesting. I like the thought of it as a thought experiment. It does seem perhaps a little complicated. But if you showed me ten companies who had done it and it had worked for them. I’d also be curious if employees like this — because if you have folks who have worked for startups in the past then they are going to know this whole stock equity thing, that the way that everyone else does it, and I think you’re going to have to explain this to every new employee you hire because no one is going to understand it.

[25:15] Mike: I agree with Rob. I think this is an interesting way of dividing the company, and it’s an interesting way of thinking creatively about it, but I think my issue is not necessarily with what this process is, or how it looks, but how do you define when somebody is no longer working for the company, especially if it is something that people are doing on the side. Because let’s say somebody hasn’t done something for two or three months. Does that mean they are no longer working for the product or the company? How do you define that? Are there specific rules about that? Is there a minimum number of hours that they have to work? And if that’s well defined great. If it’s not, then that’s when these types of things can start to kick in. The example that’s used on their website, if you do all the work and you’ve split the company fifty-fifty with somebody, do you have to give them fifty percent of whatever the benefits are? The problem, I think with that is, when do you define that they are no longer working for the company, and no longer entitled to benefits. Part of that goes with vesting, but even with vesting you can say, “OK, well you’re going to vest after one year of being involved.” But what happens if six months in they stop being involved, and then six months later they say, “OK. now I’m fully vested.” How do you define whether or not they are still working is really the fundamental question, and I think as long as you can answer that then things like this will come into play and you can get creative about vesting options and everything else. But until that question is answered, all of this stuff is kind of immaterial.

[26:43] Our last question comes in from Tom and he says, “Hi Rob and Mike. My little software company is growing and we’re hiring our first QA Engineer. In a past episode you both spoke about the testing tools you use for your products. I wanted to know what tools you’re currently using? Thanks, and I love the podcast.”

[26:57] Rob: So I’m not sure that we’ve ever spoken about our testing tools. Did we talk about unit testing frameworks? Because I had to ask my developers, because I don’t know anymore. But we use MiniTest, using Shoulda matchers – which is a gem – and Mocha for stubbing and expectations – which is also a gem. So that’s our unit testing framework, but we don’t actually use any type of QA or automated testing tools.

[27:22] Mike: Yeah, I haven’t used anything other than unit tests to be honest. I know there are different frameworks for testing UI’s, and hooking into it so that you don’t have to code directly against the code – so you don’t have to have your code arranged in a certain way, but it’s a little bit more fragile, because if you change the UI then you have to go in and rework those tasks versus hooking directly into like MVC frameworks so that you separated out all the different components that make up the application. But all I’ve ever done, really, is just rely on unit tests, and make sure that the inputs and the outputs of various things are working properly. And then do something more of a system test, where you’re not just testing a single function, you’re testing a string of functions that are supposed to work in a certain way. And then you set up your unit test to basically make sure that that system – or that set of components – is working properly together. But that’s all we’ve ever done. I haven’t really gone into the UI testing, or anything like that. Do you guys do any UI testing – aside from the backend code itself – or do you find that the UI tends to change subtly too many times to be able to add those things in.

[28:32] Rob: Yeah, we don’t. We don’t have any automated UI stuff, because the UI changes so quickly. I mean, Drip is still in such an evolution, and we’re adding stuff constantly. I think if your product was mature, and you weren’t constantly adding new things, you could think about doing some UI click-throughs. But we have thousands of unit tests. We have very extensive test coverage for our apps that we’ve built from scratch, and that takes a lot of the burden off of it. Obviously you can have UI issues and we do manually test those, basically we do not have an automated test suite that hits the UI.

[29:02] Mike: So Tom, sorry we couldn’t be a little bit more help in that. Maybe you’ll be able to find some people at Microconf who can fill you in on what sort of things they do.

[29:09] Rob: Today’s episode was filled with listener questions. And if you have a question and would like us to answer it on air you can call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Out of Control by Moot used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups and visit www.StartupsfortheRestofUs.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.