Code with Jason
Code with Jason
258 - Errol Schmidt, CEO of reinteractive
In this episode, I talk with Errol Schmidt from Reinteractive about community involvement and sales strategies. Errol shares how he targets Salesforce by teaching their account executives about Heroku, positioning himself as the go-to expert. We discuss how developers are in sales whether they realize it or not, and the importance of relationship building.
Hey, today I'm here with Errol Schmidt, Errol welcome.
Speaker 2:Hey Jason, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:Doing good. So you're located in Australia and you recently made a trip to the United States for RubyConf right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. Yes, I'm from Melbourne in Australia, which is in the south of Australia, and, yes, came over for the RubyConf, which I loved, the company that I see I've already interacted with a sponsor and it's, you know, I think it's sponsoring these sorts of events I think is super important. Just from that viewpoint of you know, we've got to back up the community.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, that is obviously something really important to allow these sorts of events to happen. I organized my own conference, sin City Ruby in Las Vegas, and this is actually the first year that we're doing sponsors. But it is making it so much easier because, as I'm sure you're aware, the conference business is not a lucrative one, at least not for most people.
Speaker 2:Certainly not lucrative. That's so important, so incredibly important.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and if you, if you can have sponsors to kind of make it a bit less risky, if nothing else, then that helps out a ton yeah, and you know I mean as a sponsor I I sponsor events in australia as well.
Speaker 2:You know it's it's questionable the marketing value that you get out of those. Um, and when I have a marketing team that looks after our company, you know, does that sort of stuff and I talk to them about this and they say you can look at it from one of two viewpoints. From a company, you can look at it from purely the sales viewpoint how many new leads are you going to get out of going to an event like that? Or you just look at it from a branding exercise. You know what's the PR value? And that's really the the viewpoint that I take. It's that latter one. It'd be out and say, hey, I've got five new leads and here's all the new customers that I've got. But that's not the reality of it and it's not necessarily what I expect either.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. You know, when I first put on Sensitive Ruby. Well, actually, every time I think because it's been done. Oh, I guess just twice. It's been done twice. This will be the third one in 2025. People sometimes ask me like, so how'd it go? Like, what did it do for your consulting business? Think anything good?
Speaker 2:came of it.
Speaker 1:And I'm like well, I don't know, Like ask me in 10 years. Like these things are not immediate, immediate and they're often not attributable either. It's like I personally do all sorts of sales and marketing activities, but there's no way that I'll be able to attribute every, every outcome to a specific cause yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely one of the interesting things that's happened over the years in the past.
Speaker 2:We have done as a company a lot of community events like install fests and those sorts of things. You know, get a bunch of brand new people into a room and teach them how to use Rails. You know, teach them how to set it up on their machine and get started on their machine and get started. And then I'll go to a local ruby event years later and someone will be up on stage doing their talk and they're going to say you know, I got my start doing an install festival, three interactive, and that is such a great thing like it's. It's a little bit touching, actually. You know that we were able to help them get their start. You don't even have to be acknowledged for that, honestly, but it's just so important to know that you contributed so positively to that person's life and that person's career. And then they're on stage now giving that back to the community.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. You know, I have kind of a dual minded approach to these things. I look at these things in one way which is like a wholesome, altruistic sort of way, and then there's a cold, hard calculated, selfish sort of way that I look at them and, luckily, like they overlap perfectly, you know, like the good, good, wholesome, selfless things and the things that bring me personal material gain are like the same things. So it's kind of a nice coincidence that, uh, it's kind of like that ben franklin thing uh, do well by doing good.
Speaker 1:um, right, yeah, yeah, yeah um oh, I was gonna say something but I forgot. Um, yeah, I'd never heard of an install fest before.
Speaker 2:Um, install fest, oh okay yeah, right about that I mean it, it, it is exactly as it says on the label. It is uh, we get a couple of our senior engineers and we promote on, you know, the social media or promote on the you know the meetup type websites and get, I don't know. I think you know it's usually somewhere in the range of about 10 to 15 people into a room just one evening, pick a city, do the event and then literally you just talk people through setting up rails on their machine. You know, set up Ruby, set up rails and do their first hello world. You know, right there in the room and it gets them over that initial barrier of you know, that idea of it's too hard to get started on rails or it's you know I'll never be able to do this. You know that sort of mindset that you can sometimes get.
Speaker 2:So it's typically typically, you know, typically, the people in the room are ones that have, you know, done some programming. They've got some experience. Maybe they've done python at school or um, you know they have a background in another language and they're like, you know, rails, there's a future there and so we get them started. It's a and it's a fantastic thing. So you'll get like 15 people in a room, but at the end of that they they, you know can then progress their own education and within a short time they can find themselves getting a job as a junior developer. Like it's not that hard actually to get started on rails as a junior dev yeah, yeah, or at least from a technical perspective.
Speaker 1:It's not that hard to get started and it's's even easier now, like with AI and with things like Docker and Kamal, although those things have a learning curve of their own. You can have a Rails app completely going on your computer in just minutes with a single command. Getting a job is, sadly, a different story. Often, getting your first job is always really difficult, and it's even harder now than it has been in years past. So that's a bit unfortunate. But yeah, at least from a technological perspective it's easy to get set up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd agree with that, when, whenever we're hiring, uh, I always like there's a always a lot of really good list of really good developers to choose from when I'm hiring. So it's never really it. I hate not being able to hire people is the truth, you know, because there are so many good people out there. And it's another interesting fact that when you go to events like ruby conference, you see so many really good developers and they're going hey, you got any work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'd love to hire everyone, just not the the economic practicality of it right, yeah, um, and now more than ever, like, there's people with 10 or 20 years of experience who've been looking for a job for months and they haven't been able to find anything. I can only imagine how hard it is for people who are just getting started, and I've even known people who have left the industry because they were looking for a job and couldn't find anything and just gave up and went to a different career altogether.
Speaker 2:Right. Yeah, it's unfortunate. I had this interesting experience recently. A guy approached me who was a former employee of Rear Directive and he'd spent a few years working for a single company, being a senior developer there, finished up middle of the year last year and was probably three or four months without full-time work after leaving that company. And he approached me soon after leaving that company and said hey, I'm looking for work. You know, something comes up. It was a few months before something came up and it inevitably did. So we gave him the call, did the first interview, but around that exact same time he got two other offers at exactly the same time. So he took one of the other ones. So I mean I'm glad that he found good employment. It's just unfortunate it took that long, but it's the way it goes, yeah it's always how that works.
Speaker 1:Whenever I've been on a job search, it's like nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Four things at once it's for whatever reason.
Speaker 1:That's how it always works. How it always works. So even though, errol, you and I have only known each other a short time, you've managed to inspire me because I watched what you did at RubyConf and obviously you and I spoke at RubyConf and I really, first of all, I respect what you did at RubyConf. First of all, I respect what you did at RubyConf. The initiative to put on that event that you put on so, dear listener, errol put on kind of a dinner at RubyConf to which I was kindly invited, and that was a really nice opportunity for a few people at RubyConf to get to know some new people and to hang out with some people, in my case, people I knew from before already. I got to see them again and then when I spoke with you, errol, I could tell that you're a person who really likes people and you enjoy meeting new people and you're easy to talk to and stuff like that. And that is very similar to my like sales approach for my consulting Right, because the way that I look at it is.
Speaker 1:I want to start by turning strangers into friends, and then I can turn some of those friends into clients is the idea. I imagine you must look at it in a similar way. But I'm curious from your perspective. What inspired you to put on this event? How do you think about sales and all that stuff?
Speaker 2:Yeah, let me go back a little bit. When I started in this industry, I started as a, dare I say, a PHP developer. You can cut that bit out if you like, jason. Well, actually, no, not even true. I actually just started pure HTML. That was my. You know, that's where I got started, before anything else, you know, before anyone even considered server-side, that's what I was doing.
Speaker 2:So I've been around a long time and I discovered pretty early on that if I was going to make it in this industry I'd have to sell myself. I'd have to. You know, I have to promote myself. I have to be able to sell the thing that I'm doing. It's not good enough to just sit in front of a computer and enjoy doing that. So sales became a thing Now.
Speaker 2:Maybe I was always able to, Maybe I was always extroverted enough to be able to sell and to talk, but I realized early on that, you know, I'd have to sell myself. So, moving into present time, I think that's my, that's probably my skill set. Yes, I'm technical and I understand enough to be able to talk to clients and so on, but being able to sell something is a skill unto itself and it's something a lot of developers don't necessarily have and that's not necessarily a problem because they're great developers, they're fantastic developers but it's not the same skill set as being able to go out and sell yourself and and promote yourself, and it's something that I guess developers can miss out on. And that's one of the reasons why they fall into that trap of, hey, I don't have enough work or I don't know where my next job is coming from, because they're not necessarily great at that and they might be the best developers in the world, but who knows about it? Who do they tell about it Exactly?
Speaker 1:If I may just interject, I think for most developers, it probably never occurs to them um that they are in the sales and marketing business, whether they, they want to be, or not, and now more than ever it's.
Speaker 1:It's really needed, um, and when you're looking for a job, you're on a sales and marketing endeavor and it really matters now. It's a zero-sum game. There's I don't know how many developers and how many jobs, but it's very competitive more competitive than it used to be and so you have to win the competition, and so you have to be stronger at sales and marketing than the other developers right, yeah right, that's exactly right.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right. And and now I'm in a position where you know I've got a company and you know there's 30 odd developers and I have to make sure that everybody's got work, if you know what I mean, like you know I don't want.
Speaker 2:You know I've got to make sure that all of those mouths get fed, sort of thing. Um, I don't look at that negatively, of course, but you know sales is like that. You know I hate to say it, but that thing that makes the world go around, if I'm not out there selling the company, selling rails, selling what we do, then you know those developers don't. You know what do they do. So you know it's an important responsibility and there's a lot of developers out there, a lot of guys working by themselves. You know for themselves, um, that that need that. You know, if you're not going to fall into that big consultancy job where you've got six months of certain work, then you have to be selling yourself constantly exactly.
Speaker 1:Another side comment there are so many freelancers or would-be freelancers who wish for a scenario where they can outsource the sales and marketing to someone else and they just do the work. But I think what they don't realize is the sales and marketing is a responsibility. If you have somebody else do that, it's it's, it's a, it's a dual thing, uh, and you can't separate the two. It's like a responsibility and a privilege and an ownership, and like the person who can and does make the sales, they own the thing um and if you have somebody doing the sales for you, they're not doing your sales for you.
Speaker 1:You're doing their programming work for them. You don't you work for them in that case, they don't work for you, uh-huh yeah, right, yeah, yeah I.
Speaker 2:I don't know your experience, but you know, in the early days I tried out a few of those websites that would get leads for you and wasted an enormous amount of money doing that. And the few jobs that I did get from those tended to be really poor quality leads as well.
Speaker 1:That's my experience exactly.
Speaker 2:I probably got one really good job out of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You find you're just going for the lowest common denominator in those. So anyway, I mean, I don't know. I think the best advertising, the best promotion, is still word of mouth. Yeah, do a great job for somebody and then they tell their friends and then you contact them and it goes out as a network from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the positive side of word of mouth. The negative side of word of mouth is it's very uncontrollable, it's passive. Um you, you can't, you can't control when it comes in and when it doesn't you can be out there planting seeds, but when those seeds will?
Speaker 2:bear fruit.
Speaker 1:You never know, right um, so right. So I and it sounds like you know you also um, I'm always out there trying to, trying to be almost as aggressive as I can in planting those seeds and stuff like that. So I'm not just relying on fortune, uh, that hopefully enough fruit will come at the right time and stuff like that. And why is that different from using those lead services and stuff like that? I think I know, but I don't know if I can articulate it off the tip of my tongue.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, my experience. As I said, it tends to be lowest common denominator. It tends to be people who don't value the work. I'm not sure exactly why that is either, but I remember picking up jobs from those sorts of websites where people would expect extraordinary things and pay the least amount of money for them. That was my experience, and I don't know if that's changed, if that scenario has changed now, because obviously I haven't been in that marketplace for a while. Maybe it has. Maybe people's expectations have tempered a little bit or become a little bit more realistic. I'm not sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, maybe it's because some markets attract people who don't have any better options. The only reason they're there is because they don't have any better options. The only reason they're there is because they don't have any better options. I explained this to somebody one time with recruiters.
Speaker 1:Often jobs end up going through recruiters because it's kind of a last resort when an organization wants to hire somebody, the first thing they do is, well, if they know anybody already who they want to hire, then that's going to be the first people they call um. Second, they go to their employees do you guys know anybody who who might be good for us to talk to um? Then they put out job ads and in my experience it's kind of a last resort that they go to a recruiter and say, hey, can you find somebody? And then those people who are using recruiters I hate to say that it's like lazy, but it kind of is where it's like, hey, you just do the work for me.
Speaker 2:You bring me some jobs.
Speaker 1:You know, those aren't always going to be the highest quality candidates. So it's like the people who end up in that market are the people who they're, who are there either because they don't want to do the hard work or because, again, all their other options didn't pan out and so they have to go to this yeah, that exactly my experience when we're looking for employees.
Speaker 2:Exactly that path. You know, what cvs have you got? Who do you know in the industry that's looking for work like these are the people you go to first, and then it's to the current employees who did you know? And I find that when an employee vouches for someone hey, I've got this mate, or there's this guy I used to work with, or something like that they're vouching for that guy and they're going to give you good names and that's almost always the case. Um, that final thing of going to the employment agency and yes, I've definitely done that and you sometimes get great candidates from them and you sometimes get the very worst candidates from them um, and it is, it's a lot more hit and miss, that's for sure.
Speaker 1:Like you tend to hire three people to get one really good person out of that line, what, which I guess is fine, like, if that's what it is and that's known, then fine yeah, yeah, um, and you know what, what is different about the way you go about it and the way I go about it, um, different from, like these, these marketplaces and stuff, um, I think you know I'm just kind of thinking out loud. I think part of it is you create opportunities for yourself to appear earlier in that pipeline. If you can develop relationships with a lot of developers, for example, then when the boss says, hey, do you guys know anybody we should talk to, they might mention your name. Even better sometimes is develop a relationship directly with the boss and then when the boss needs somebody, they reach out to you directly. I think that's a big part of why that's different.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely A hundred percent. And just sorry bringing it around because you mentioned that dinner that we did and I know that was the question you actually asked before I was going to sidetrack on things Doing that dinner was really it was.
Speaker 2:Whilst it was something I put on, it was actually the brilliant idea of Arnash, who was the general manager of Ruby Central. He was obviously primarily responsible for putting on the entirety of the Ruby conference and and did an amazing job. Him and his team did an incredible job. I thought I don't know what it takes to put on an event like that and I, you know, I will probably never know because it just looks incredible to me, but it was brilliant. It was fantastic ton of people. But anyway, his idea, his concept, was to make the conference more accessible to, uh, the leaders in our community. Typically, these sorts of events are 80, possibly 90% developers, which is fine. It should be that way. But he wanted to make sure there was enough content and enough reason to attract the leaders in our community, the people who are guiding the community, and I'm talking people who are founders of businesses, ceos, ctos and, I guess, more VIPs in the community. You know people who are riding those gems that everyone's using, those sorts of people. You know those sorts of individuals. So he set up a group in Slack for that community. I think it's called Groovy CTOs or something like that that provides just a forum for those individuals to be able to communicate to each other, to be able to ask questions and, you know, lean on each other for business advice and things like that, which has been extremely successful. It's a busy Slack channel. People definitely are using it.
Speaker 2:And then he had a further idea which was to put on an event specifically for that group. So that's what I took on was that exact concept and I'm not sure how successful it was going to be. To be honest, like when we first came up with the idea and we started putting it together, it was like, well, you know how many people actually attend this, so we booked a room that held, I think it was, 28 people, and I was a little bit like you know, okay, we'll, you know we'll pay for that, but you know we're going to be able to fill that room up. And no one was entirely sure. In the end we were oversubscribed. We had, like I could have had a room of 40 people, I think. So that was impressive, like that was really good and we had.
Speaker 2:I think you'll agree with this, jason. I think we had the right people in that room. I think it was a really good room and, for anyone who's listening, you know we got, obviously, you know there were several CTOs, founders, ceos and other assorted people of that ilk in the room and it was great conversation and, you know, a lot of people knew each other, which was great. A lot of people didn't know each other, and you know.
Speaker 2:So it was like, you know, making those connections and you know, just, you know we wanted people to feel like they could shape the future of the community. You know, if you're a founder of a company or you're a VP of a massive company, because those people were in the room as well, you know you have an opportunity to shape the future of Ruby and shape the future of the community and how it operates, and I think we're on the way to being able to do that. I mean, that exists regardless, but I wanted people to feel that and I think that was successful exists regardless, um, but I wanted people to feel that and I think that was successful interesting that's.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting to hear the background of how that came about and stuff, um, and I think there's a lesson in there. Um, tell me if I'm reading this correctly. Um, you know, there's always, there's always these like dirty jobs or like things that nobody wants to volunteer to do. You know, nobody wants to be the one to pay for things, nobody wants to be the one to organize the event and stuff like that, and so there are these unfilled roles in the world and if you want to step up and be the one to do the dirty work, the opportunities are almost yours for the taking. And I sense, errol, that you kind of volunteered and you're like, hey, I'll pay for this, I'll organize this, because you probably were making a wager that it would be a worthwhile use of your time and resources and stuff like that. Was that kind of the way you were thinking about it, or no?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's exactly right. I mean I don't probably put that much thought into it. It's not necessarily a thing of you know, I'm going to sacrifice my time or my money or something like that. That's probably a secondary consideration and I've got to add to that. I've got great staff in the business, like I have a marketing manager and like a community manager she's actually a BDM, but she does these community events as well. So between them they were able to do most of that organized, that I could, you know, step back from having to do all of that day-to-day work. And they were fantastic, like they were all over it and handled to do all of that day-to-day work. And they were fantastic. They were all over it and handled most of that work without me really having to think about it, which was fantastic. And then we found a guy in the city in Chicago who was a friend of our accounts manager, who was able to help me on the night as well and stepped in as a temporary know as a temporary staff member, so to speak who was just fantastic and handled the on the ground logistics for me. So I didn't have to worry about that. Uh, which worked out brilliantly. It was actually quite funny, jason.
Speaker 2:But when we were deciding we wanted to to get people to this event, one of the tactics that we employed was, you know, because we were worried oh, we're not going to get enough people in this room, how do we broadly promote this thing to enough people?
Speaker 2:So we put an ad on one of those meetup websites and you know, I I'm not even sure why we did this, to be honest, because it wasn't really that much good to us. But we put this ad on the on the meetup website, hoping some people would see it, and some people see it, but they didn't necessarily go through the registration process and we knew this was going to happen because of, you know, putting this up. It was only up for like 48 hours perhaps. So people arrived to the dinner from this Meetup website thinking they were just going to get a free dinner. So Chad, who was the guy that was working for the night, had to be a bit of a bouncer at the door as well, but he handled it brilliantly. He handled it so well that you know one girl that arrived she'd just got an internship with Google and she was just trying to build up her network. I mean, you know you can't really fault her for getting out there and trying.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so you know.
Speaker 2:And obviously he felt for her too, because he brought her into the room to at least introduce her to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was, it was funny, but he handled it really well, so anyway, yeah, I've had experiences in the past where there's maybe a meetup that should be happening that's not happening and so I'm like, well, somebody can take the torch and and do this, so I guess I'll do it. Or, more recently, um, a lot of meetups kind of went dormant after the during and after the pandemic, and so I kind of saw that as an opportunity because the meetups are always short on speakers.
Speaker 1:It's really a seller's market for meetup speakers. If you want to go speak at a meetup, especially these days, it's kind of yours for the taking, because meetup organizers that's like their bottleneck is having speakers for the event. And I was willing to do something that nobody ever does really, which is travel to different cities and speak at Ruby meetups, like I spoke at the Chicago Ruby meetup and the Boston Ruby meetup, and out of you know we're talking about attribution. I don't know if I can exactly make an attribution, but out of the Boston meetup I could say that I got a new client out of that. Again, I'm not 100% sure that I can attribute that, but I think so. And then I got a new like prospective client who I like worked with on a trial basis for a bit. That's still. That's still yet to be seen what's going to ultimately happen with that, but that's at least the the first step that I'm seeking when I go and do those sorts of things.
Speaker 1:So that's an example, dear listener, for you know, sometimes I think of it this way if you do the things that other people aren't willing to do, then you can get the things that other people aren't necessarily getting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree, we have this sort of our community the Ruby community, the Rails community. We have this concept of open source and we have this concept of community work regardless. So I think a lot of people in our community do fall into doing this, quite naturally. I'll talk for a moment about the founder of the company that I'm the CEO for. So, michael Linzer founded Reinteractive.
Speaker 2:You know back in the day what, 15 years ago or something, he was part of the original Rails commit team, so worked, you know, on the early days on rails. Uh, his biggest claim to fame was removing lines of code. So, um, you know, rather than adding things, it was taking things away, which is always impressive. Um, but he also wrote the mail gem, which I think is uh, what are we up to? Like 600 million downloads, possibly more, possibly could be as many as 700, I'm not sure. But you know we come from this community of doing this sort of thing. I mean, you know I'm never going to do anything as great as writing the Mail Gem, but we all have a responsibility to our community to do these things and to make sure they're upheld for the benefit of everybody, and I think uniquely in our community, do these things and to make sure they're upheld for the benefit of everybody, and, I think, uniquely in our community. We have this viewpoint, and I know other programming languages have this too, but I have never seen it to this degree either.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's really incredible, um, how much work people do just volunteer work to keep everything going, and I appreciate it, because there's a lot of stuff that I would never be willing to do, like all this open source maintenance, like no, thank you, yeah if people consider a podcast like a public service or something like that, then I'm happy to do that kind of thing to support the community. That's great, but like open source, no. Thank you yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, A great friend of this podcast, Chris Oliver. You know I am in awe of him. Like you know, he runs a business and, you know, employs people and just you just keeps popping out. You know, here's another gem I thought of yesterday.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's an incredible individual yeah, he's a very productive person. Um, it's really impressive all all the stuff that he's able to put out there yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:We have these people dotted all over our community. I mean, he's an example, but, you know, by no means the only one. We have many of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Adarsh, the executive director of Ruby Central. I actually had him on the podcast not long ago, so do your list.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:If you're interested in hearing me and Adarsh ramble about all kinds of stuff, and we talked about menswear and just the most random stuff. There's an episode with me and I a few episodes back. So, errol you, you go to conferences, at least in the United States, probably in Australia as well. Can you tell me in general? I'm curious what kinds of events you go to conferences?
Speaker 2:uh, at least the united states, probably in australia as well, can you tell me in general, I'm curious what kinds of events you go to yeah, look, I, I am trying very hard to build up my relationship with various folks at salesforce. The reason I do that is because, uh, I have a passion. Some might call it misguided, but I have a passion for heroku um. I I still like the product, I like it's, the philosophy of it, of heroku um. That's probably sounds very strange because it's a commercial product and everything, but you know it was created to make life easier for Rails developers. That's its birth, you know that's where it comes from. And it was acquired a short time later, probably earlier than it should have been, by Salesforce and it wasn't really looked after from that viewpoint. You know it was developed into a more commercial product, which is good, and got widespread use, which is excellent, but it wasn't continued to be cared for from that viewpoint.
Speaker 2:Recently within Salesforce there's been a change of thinking and there's a new team there who really have the product's interests at heart, like they're trying to rebirth it. They're trying to give it a lease on life, which is, you know, bring it into the modern age and so on, which I find incredible and I really like it. I like what they're doing with it, I like the marketing around that. So just to explain that some of the things they're doing to modernise the platform, they're taking the entire thing and moving it all under Kubernetes or moving Kubernetes into it whatever the right term is which opens the door to a lot of things. The right term is which opens the door to a lot of things. They're providing AI inference inside the tooling itself, which is a very, very successful thing, because one of the problems that if you're trying to run AI on any application that you have the difficulty of how do I run it inside the server that I've got?
Speaker 2:So, let's say you've got a Heroku server or you're running an EC2 instance or something like that, how do I run my LLM in such a way that it's secure that it's only using my data, that it can't be accessed outside, that my data isn't being leaked outside of my application, all of that sort of thing?
Speaker 2:So running something simply and easily and knowing that it's safe and secure inside. So Heroku's solving that problem, and I'm talking about all things that are, you know, occurring into the future that are probably in beta at the moment. But I like what they're doing and so I'm trying to build this relationship with that Heroku team, which I think is really successful. They're a really good team, really really smart guys in there, and then that means building relationships with the guys who sell Salesforce, because the guys who sell Salesforce are the ones that need to be selling Heroku and they don't, because they don't know what Heroku is and none of them will be listening to this podcast, unfortunately. But so I make it my mission to explain what Heroku is and how they can sell it and how they can use it, and I actually find that, jason, to be incredibly successful. It gets me actual, like that's a one to one benefit?
Speaker 2:I don't mean every account. Yeah, it doesn't mean every account executive I speak to brings me work. But I know when I speak to enough account executives I get work. Like they call me up and they say hey, earl, I've got this guy, he needs an application bill, help me out. And so that works well.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm really interested in this because on my wall to my left you can't see it, Errol, but I have a list of the heading says someday clients. I don't mind sharing some of the items on the list. Well, there's some smaller organizations that I guess I don't want to share those, but I decided, you know, as long as I'm wishing, why not? Why not wish for the stars or whatever?
Speaker 2:So on this list I have.
Speaker 1:Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix, Like why, not. You know right, yeah, right, so far.
Speaker 2:Exactly, why not? Exactly, yes, go for it.
Speaker 1:Exactly, yes, go for it exactly because a lot of things in life it's like doing the big, uh, super rewarding thing is maybe no harder than doing the less rewarding thing. So if you have to do the work anyway, why not point your efforts at the thing that has the bigger reward? Um, yeah, and so mostly so far I've, like, um, formed relationships with whoever I can, and it's rather than targeting specific organizations. But I do want to get into that where I'm saying, ok, I want to try to get Amazon as a consulting client. How do I get into Amazon? And so I'm curious, because sounds like you're kind of doing this with Salesforce how do you specifically target Salesforce? Sounds like one thing is you go to the Salesforce conferences, but tell me about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so well, yes, I go to conferences, I make contacts, and you know it's just, you've got to do the grunt work. So, um, one of my staff makes contacts through linkedin and through linkedin makes direct, has direct conversations. From those direct conversations we book in enablements. Uh, so an enablement is just where I speak to an account executive or some other person, usually in a google meet, um, and we I go over. You know this is what heroku is, this is how it can benefit you, this is why it's better than over. You know this is what Heroku is, this is how it can benefit you, this is why it's better than the competition. You know that sort of thing. Give them the talking points and then usually out of that they go oh, I've got this client or I've got that client or I could, you know, make this introduction, and so they'll do that.
Speaker 2:The other way that I do it is I walk into a conference or an event and I find people to talk to. So that means going to those big Salesforce conferences. So the next one is TDX in March, which is like the developer conference in San Francisco, and then obviously Dreamforce later in the year and there's a few smaller ones through the year. But a small Salesforce conference is still 40,000, 50,000. Maybe that's not a small one, maybe a small one is 10,000 people.
Speaker 2:Greenforce is like 48,000, I think something like that. So you know it can be hard work finding the right people in a room like that. So the work then becomes getting yourself onto the lists for various dinners and events and drinks and that sort of thing, and that's actually where the work gets done. You know, doing those sort of after-hours events, meet the right people and inevitably do so.
Speaker 2:The last Dreamforce event I was lucky enough to through you know persistence and everything else had a meeting with the then CEO of Heroku. So they brought in a new CEO, which was an ex-AWS Kubernetes guy, bob Wise. He's since moved on, but he was the CEO at the time. So I managed to book a meeting with him and he brought along a couple of other executives and that half hour meeting turned into a two hour meeting because he was interested in what I had to say. Um, which was great.
Speaker 2:You know that that was just, you know, hard work and we eventually got to the right people and that's opened up all sorts of doors as a result. Interesting you talk about, you know, yeah, you talk about getting contracts with these big companies. I'm in the middle of um becoming a vendor directly for salesforce so that we can test out some of those new features that they're working on, which I'm very, very excited about. And it's a process, jason you know, like, yes, doing work for a big company is the same as doing work for a small company, but there's this process beforehand which I don't know, we don't always talk about, but it can be a bit of work sometimes.
Speaker 1:I've gotten a taste of that. One of my clients is the University of Michigan and it was a process to get in the door and to get the whole thing going. Many months of just waiting and getting the right person to do the right thing and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right. And then the long, long question is that you have to fill in all sorts of interesting information. Okay, Luckily I haven't had to do that yet for any clients. But yeah, I've heard stories about that whole process.
Speaker 1:There's a couple of parts I don't understand yet. So obviously it's a lot of hard work to go and identify these people and have these calls and stuff like that. Surely you're not just doing this out of the goodness of your heart to evangelize Heroku and stuff like that. So I'm curious like what's the motivation behind doing that exactly?
Speaker 2:Look when one of those account executives originates and says, hey, I've got this potential deal. Now, this might only happen a couple of times a year, like you know, maybe four or five times a year. But if they call me up and say I've got this client, they use Salesforce and they want to use, they want an application which is going to pull some information out of Salesforce. You know, so Heroku is a good tool for them. They'll call me up, I'll come into the meeting and usually this is how it goes, because they've already been sold Salesforce, so they're already a client, so they already trust their account executive at Salesforce. They've got a Salesforce partner working for them, which means they've got their Salesforce instance set up or in the middle of being set up. So they just need this application built and they see it as just part of this whole ecosystem. So really they're like 90 closed on it.
Speaker 2:So when I come in, I don't really have to discuss things like pain points or I don't really have to sell everything. All I have to do is just tell them we're the right company for you and because the account executive has brought you in, they've already vouched you as well. They might have brought one or two other partners in, but generally, you know, you know I'm probably going to be the better partner because there's not a lot of heroku experts out there, yeah, so yeah, that makes sense to me because if I, for example, have a relationship with a plumber and I need an electrician, I might go to my plumber and say, hey, do you know any electricians?
Speaker 1:Because I don't know anybody. And he might say, yeah, this guy, jim, and already like Jim, is the top pick. Just because you know, I don't know anybody else and I'm probably not going to go out and evaluate five different electricians. And I'm probably not going to go out and evaluate five different electricians.
Speaker 1:I'm probably just going to go off of my plumber's recommendation for Jim, even if he's like yeah, I don't even really know Jim that well, but like I know, this guy and if he does say like I've worked with Jim for years or whatever he's great, then it's like a no brainer, I'm going to hire that guy, no question. So that part makes total sense to me. The other part that I don't understand quite yet is from the account executive's perspective at Salesforce. My naive what I imagine is these guys would hear from you and they're like okay, this guy wants to talk to me about heroku. Like why does he want to talk to me about this? Like what's? I'm surprised that they like give you the time of day.
Speaker 2:So there must be part that I don't understand yet right, yeah, okay, so, uh, I think it's the philosophy of how Salesforce works. Salesforce sells a product, you know, let's call it their core CRM sales cloud service cloud. Now where did account executive sells that? They are 100% aware that that product has to be customized and set up for the client they're talking to. Salesforce doesn't, per se, do that work, you know, unless you're willing to spend a lot on their professional services. So in almost every instance, they have to recommend a partner that's going to do the implementation. So there is a philosophy and a viewpoint of that already within Salesforce.
Speaker 2:Now, when it comes to Salesforce partners, there's a plethora of them. There's, you know, thousands of companies who will do that setup. So, if you're an account executive, you've got plenty to choose from. If it's a Heroku deal, though, if they want to sell Heroku, there's a very much smaller number of people they're going to be able to call to do that work. And, you know, when it comes to the yeah, when it comes to the APAC region, you know Australia Pacific region, where you know probably the best one for that. There might be one or two others, but I think we're probably top of the list for most people and I've got those relationships.
Speaker 2:So there are many people in Salesforce that will vouch for me, or at least I hope so. If they're listening to this, they're probably like, oh, that guy Hopefully they'll vouch for me and they'll be able to say, yeah, errol's the guy you can talk to, and and so that works. So it's been. You know, I've spent a lot of time getting into this position and making sure that that's not all hot air as well. Like you have to do a good job if you, you know you're as good as your last job, right? So if you, if you do a good job, then someone will call you again because you've got that success to base it on, and I think we do that okay.
Speaker 1:So yeah, the good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I'm understanding the good thing about this yeah, yeah, go, yeah, when I, when I do this, you know all of that hard work is those earlier years and all of those enablements and all of that. So when I pick up one of those jobs, it often can close within the next week Not always that fast, but it can be as quickly as a week and I'm closing, let's say, the UX phase of that work. The UX phase might be something that our lead UX team does over maybe three or four weeks, so they'll do that work. Work leads to the full development work and then that leads to the ongoing maintenance. You know we'll continue to look after roku, will continue to to iterate on their application over years of work. So, without you know, without the expectation of this, that one phone call can be worth could be $500,000 over a few years.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So it's very worthwhile.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah. Yeah, and it's been a similar experience for me. You know, back when I was a nobody, I would reach out to prospective clients. You know, often on these job boards that we talked about and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:It was a very difficult process and I kind of had to prove myself, which makes sense, because when you don't know somebody, you want some reason to believe that they're going to be a good bet if you hire them. But now it's a bit different most of the time, because people are reaching out to me and they know me, at least by reputation, and so the question is not should we work together? The question is just like can I afford it? Pretty much, is the question right yeah, yeah and, and that's a much nicer conversation to have.
Speaker 1:I much prefer that. Um, and, like you said, there's a lot of work that happens up front in the years leading up to that. Um, if, if you were to take all the money that I've made consulting and divide that out over all the work that I've done on podcasting and speaking at conferences and stuff like that, I never want to know what that number is because it would be depressing, um, but I feel like it's worth it. Um, yeah, because, again, it's just so much nicer to have that conversation of jason may I please hire you than me going to someone else and saying may I please work for you?
Speaker 1:it just goes so much better, um, and the, the fees are so much better and all that stuff. And I'm being a little bit facetious, like I'm sure that the ROI is very positive, even though I've done a lot of this unpaid work.
Speaker 2:the reward for that definitely feels very much worth it Of course, yeah, because we get exchange in all sorts of various ways. Right, it's not just the money that you receive, it's, you know, the goodwill and the knowledge and the thank yous that you get from your clients. All of that is just as important. I mean, obviously we still have to pay the bills and I have to pay the staff and everything, but there is nothing quite like it when a client says you guys were amazing, you know, you were the best, you were the best. That is that.
Speaker 1:that that makes it all worth it yeah, that's great um, yeah yeah, yeah, and, and going back to that event we were talking about, um, I've had this half-baked idea for a while to do something similar at my conference, um. So again, dear listener, listener, it's called Sin City Ruby. It takes place in Las Vegas. The next one is happening April 10th and 11th 2025. And I have this half-baked idea, like on the weekend that follows the conference.
Speaker 1:The conference is a Thursday and Friday, so that weekend often people will stay and make a weekend out of it and I had an idea to take a small handful of people maybe CTO type people, that kind of thing and we can go on a hike in the desert or something like that and have, hopefully, some kind of productive conversation where we share our uh, I don't know opportunities that we're thinking about or challenges that we're facing.
Speaker 1:something like that, um, we all uh, take some kind of uh hallucinogenic drug and uh, and, and you know, hold hands or something like that, um, but but something like that where we get to form a very deep personal connection and again something that's very productive, uh where we?
Speaker 1:get into things, what I find often and I'm curious if you ever have this experience. Um, when you're in a leadership position, there are things that you don't want to talk about with your subordinates. You don't want to talk about with your subordinates. You don't want to talk about it with your superiors If you have somebody above you nor do you want to talk about it with your peers.
Speaker 1:What you really want is you want to have some disinterested third party to talk about these things with, and preferably somebody who knows the lingo you can talk to your spouse about these things and, and preferably somebody who, like, knows the the lingo, like you can talk to your spouse about these things, and that's great, but for one, they're only going to have so much patience for your stories and stuff um, and for two it helps to have somebody who's like working in the in the same industry um has it.
Speaker 1:Have you encountered that at all yourself?
Speaker 2:uh, yes, and not never put thought into it honestly, but the conversations I have at a conference with, say, someone who's a CTO that I might have only just met, is very, very different. Like I found myself having conversations with people about what tactics do we use to create and generate leads I mean similar to the conversation we've just had. Used to create and generate leads? I mean similar to the conversation we've just had. But, you know, you know how do you crack this holy grail of getting enough leads in the front door? Or what do you do about employees that might be underperforming? You know, like discussions like that that you might not have with, well, you definitely wouldn't have with anyone else. Like I wouldn't have that conversation internally, maybe the conversation on the leads, but even to a different degree, I definitely wouldn't have that employee conversation internally. It's just not appropriate.
Speaker 2:You know, would I speak to the founder of Reinteractive? Well, not really, because he's not a day-to-day part of the business. He's, like you know, running another business and so my conversations are, you know, here's where the finances are at, sort of thing. So, yeah, it's very, very important to have these conversations, like we have to have them, and it's important to be able to have access to a room where those conversations can be held, one of the reasons why that Slack channel is great. I mean that Slack channel. You're not necessarily going to have that conversation, but just you know where do you ask those sorts of questions? You know, maybe it's a business related thing, maybe it's a security related thing. You just want to ask. That is appropriate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting, yeah yeah, and some of my most enjoyable client engagements have been the ones where I have been hired for specifically that or maybe that's not what I was specifically hired for, but that's what it ended up being where me and my client end up forming a close personal relationship. It almost gets blurred between personal and business matters that we talk about, because it really is all one thing. What I haven't figured out yet is how to communicate that service to people.
Speaker 1:It's for one not necessarily something people exactly seek. They know that that kind of thing is valuable, but maybe they're not looking. They don't wake up and say I want to go hire somebody to be kind of my business therapist or whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I haven't quite figured that out yet.
Speaker 2:I think there is an incredibly big market this is not exactly what you're talking about, but maybe similar enough a very big market for the fractional CTO. Most companies that I speak to and I say this without exaggeration, most companies that I speak to have technology at their core. They've got this Rails app. That really is their business. Their business revolves around this application, and yet they have nobody in their business that really understands the app, understands the technology considerations about that, the security.
Speaker 2:What does it take to keep this thing maintained, maintained? What does it take to keep this thing running as the business needs? What's the future of it? You know, what are we doing in one year and two years? They're not thinking about any of these things. Instead, I just get the call that goes our applications two versions behind what we do about it. You know, and then you know, of course we'll fix that, but this company needs a cto. They need a cto and maybe they can't afford a full-time one and maybe there's not a position for a full-time one, but they need somebody who can give that advice. And maybe that's not quite that personal level that you're talking about, but it could be as well, and there's a lot of developers out there that I think are just fantastic developers and really could fill that role for a company. It's ongoing work, it's long-term work and it could be one day or two days a week, but it could be very, very well paid and it is performing a service that company doesn't even know they need yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting. Yeah, that's something that I would not be opposed to doing. I've never done exactly that before. I hesitate to label myself a fractional CTO because I don't want to call myself a fractional anything. It's like when you hire a personal trainer, for example. They don't call themselves a fractional personal trainer, it's just you're getting an entire personal trainer. It's just being a personal trainer doesn't take 40 hours a week.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just you're getting an entire personal trainer it's just being a personal trainer doesn't take 40 hours a week. Yeah, yeah. No, you're right, that term fractional doesn't always make sense and I don't like it either, but it's the one that gets used. So, yeah, but I understand what you're saying.
Speaker 1:Maybe, um, maybe, the business is lacking that like senior level technology person who can speak both the technical language and the business language kind of serve as a liaison, help set high level direction, that kind of thing yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you know, we'll do ongoing work for a company who doesn't have that sort of person internally and it becomes a little bit almost random what work is being done, like it's not being set with a long-term strategic viewpoint and we find ourselves having to fill that role. But it's not our role either, like I don't want to be that. We're not trying to be the CTO for that business. We're. You know we're not employed to do that and you know that's not our. Not that I want to be irresponsible about it, but that's not the job that we're trying to do for that company and I would like to see them have that senior leadership there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting, yeah, what I keep coming back to. It took me a long time to arrive at this conclusion and it's still a tentative conclusion, but I think the way it has to start is I have to form relationships with people and have a chance to talk with them in depth about the work that I do, because it really does call for some explaining and, like you kind of said a second ago, sometimes they don't even know that they need or want a certain service until you describe, describe it and tell them yeah, it's like that Plato's cave thing where they don't even know what they don't know or or what they are missing out on, and then, once they find out what they're missing out on, it's like wow, uh, I can't believe I've been missing that this whole time.
Speaker 2:I really need that right, yeah, yeah, no, it's it, that's exactly right. I don't even know, like what you know, you talk to someone who's got a business of 10 or 12 people and you say hey, you need a cto. They're like what's a cto? Interesting, why do I need a cto?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah, yeah, um, on that note, uh, we should probably wind up pretty soon, but I want to make a couple, I want to share a couple things with you, dear listener. We have a couple opportunities to meet and hang out in person. One I mentioned Sin City Ruby. That again is happening April 10th and 11th in Las Vegas 2025. And you can get tickets at sincityrubycom. I'll briefly mention, uh, chris oliver, who we mentioned earlier in the episode. Uh, we'll be speaking there.
Speaker 1:Um, jason charns, arena nazarova, a lot of, uh, well, not a lot of speakers there's going to be seven or eight speakers total but some really great speakers from the ruby community. Um, again, sinityrubycom is where you can find out more about that and I am going to be visiting San Francisco soon. January 16th is the date that I'm going to be speaking at the San Francisco Ruby meetup and so, dear listener, if you happen to be in the San Francisco Bay Area, I'm going to show up a few days prior to that and I'm just meeting people, hanging out with people. I'm going to be bringing a whole bunch of copies of my book Professional Rails Testing to give away for free when I'm in.
Speaker 1:San Francisco. So, dear listener, if that would work out for you to hang out in January in San Francisco, I'd love to hear from you. Jason at codewithjasoncom is how you can get a hold of me and Errol before we go. Is there anywhere you want to send people online?
Speaker 2:I mean, yes, definitely hit up the website reinteractivecom, and you can always speak to me directly as well. I mean, just find me on LinkedIn and send me a message, because I love talking to people.
Speaker 1:So get on to me. Well, Errol, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks very much, jt, it was an absolute pleasure.