Code with Jason
Code with Jason
293 - Cory Zue, Solopreneur
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In this episode I talk with Cory Zue about his solopreneur journey building SaaS Pegasus, a Django boilerplate product. We discuss AI's potential impact on the business of selling code, the financial anxiety that persists even when things are going well, and content marketing strategies for technical products.
Links:
Hey, it's Jason, host of the Code with Jason podcast. You're a developer. You like to listen to podcasts. You're listening to one right now. Maybe you like to read blogs and subscribe to email newsletters and stuff like that. Keep in touch. Email newsletters are a really nice way to keep on top of what's going on in the programming world. Except they're actually not. I don't know about you, but the last thing that I want to do after a long day of staring at the screen is sit there and stare at the screen some more. That's why I started a different kind of newsletter. It's a snail mail programming newsletter. That's right. I send an actual envelope in the mail containing a paper newsletter that you can hold in your hands. You can read it on your living room couch, at your kitchen table, in your bed, or in someone else's bed. And when they say, What are you doing in my bed? You can say, I'm reading Jason's newsletter. What does it look like? You might wonder what you might find in this snail mail programming newsletter. You can read about all kinds of programming topics like object-oriented programming, testing, DevOps, AI. Most of it's pretty technology agnostic. You can also read about other non-programming topics like philosophy, evolutionary theory, business, marketing, economics, psychology, music, cooking, history, geology, language, culture, robotics, and farming. The name of the newsletter is Nonsense Monthly. Here's what some of my readers are saying about it. Helmut Kobler from Los Angeles says thanks much for sending the newsletter. I got it about a week ago and read it on my sofa. It was a totally different experience than reading it on my computer or iPad. It felt more relaxed, more meaningful, something special and out of the ordinary. I'm sure that's what you were going for, so just wanted to let you know that you succeeded. Looking forward to more. Thank you for this. Can't wait for the next one. Dear listener, if you would like to get letters in the mail from yours truly every month, you can go sign up at nonsensemonthly.com. That's nonsensemonthly.com. I'll say it one more time. Nonsensemonthly.com And now without further ado, here is today's episode. Hey, today I'm here with Corey Zoo. Corey, welcome.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, thanks. Good to be here.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Um, so as I mentioned pre-recording, I've been following you online for a while. Um, you've been doing some interesting things over the years. Um, I'm not sure where to start, um, but maybe you can tell us about maybe you could start with what are you up to now and and just anything you want to say by way of introduction.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, okay. Um geez, what about what I'm about to do now is is uh sometimes hard to explain. I should have a better uh line for this. But I I've decided when I go to like a dinner party and people ask me about my job, I usually say I'm a solopreneur. Um and that I think of that as being like someone who has their own business but mostly does it alone. And so yeah, I I kind of work on uh technology products, mostly web apps. Um the thing that I work on the most is a SaaS boilerplate product, which is kind of like a configurable code base that you can buy from me. Um it's called SAS Pegasus, and it's in sort of the Python Django space. But I spend a lot of my time building my own hobby projects, apps. I do some uh amounts of consulting work and um and a lot of uh a lot of random things as well, I guess. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. And also, as we mentioned pre-show, uh you live in South Africa.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, that's right. I am American. I was born in Boston and I moved here for what was supposed to be like a two-year work transfer about 10 or 11 years ago. And um just kind of never felt ready to leave this place. Um, so have I been living here with my wife and now two kids uh for the last 10 years or so?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, interesting. I knew that you lived in South Africa, but I didn't know if you were from there or somewhere else. Um I I'm curious, I have to ask about that. Like, what is it like being an American living in in South Africa? Like uh I know it's a broad question, but like how is it different?
SPEAKER_02:It's I mean, it's it's great overall, I would say. Um one of I mean one of the nicest things about living, I mean, so first of all, like Cape Town where I live is beautiful. It's got mountains, it's got beaches, it's like I think if it was closer to like literally anything, it would be like one of the most sought-after places to travel and to live like in the world. It's just happens to be really hard to get to, which is great for keeping out a lot of people, although it's not so nice when I want to go home and see my family. Um, but yeah, I mean, in terms of being an American living here, I mean, like one of the nice things is that like so I my businesses are all sort of online, and that means I earn sort of dollars mostly. Um, the dollar goes a really long way here. So being sort of like a upper middle class American kind of puts you in the like uber wealthy segment here, for better or for worse. Uh, but what that means is you can have like a really nice quality of life um living here, uh although you kind of end up in a little bit of a bubble, which is it's a long complicated thing that I won't touch on too much. Um when we when we first moved here, we mostly hung out in sort of like the expat community. So we made friends with a lot of uh other Americans and a lot of sort of like British people and Australians and Europeans.
SPEAKER_01:And is your wife from South Africa or or somewhere else?
SPEAKER_02:No, my wife uh and I moved here together. We uh she's Canadian. Uh we were living together in Boston and then we moved here together. Um but the problem with befriending the international crowd is a lot of them like went back home essentially. Like there's a lot of transient residences, uh residents. So we since we've had kids and sort of gotten more settled, we've we've like made more inroads with sort of like local people who are you know here for for the long term, which which has been nice. But that that is sort of uh has been maybe one of the bigger downsides of of living here is just sort of like finding a community and and uh you know sort of people that that we like and that stick around for a long time.
SPEAKER_01:Mm-hmm. Yeah, that can be hard. I I lived in Austin, Texas for a couple years, and people would describe it kind of like a revolving door. People would come there and stay there for a bit and and then leave, because it's the kind of place where like I don't know, it's a bit like Hollywood for actors. Um if you're a musician, you might go to Austin. Um, you know, there's a couple big places, like Nashville or Austin are kind of the top two, or at least were the top two at the time. For like if you're a musician, that's where you go to make it. Uh and then also maybe like New York or something. Um, but anyway, Austin was one of those places. And and that's actually it was my story. Like, I'm a musician. I went there largely for music purposes, and then my rock star career failed to take off, and I I got out of there. So I I know what it's like living in a place where people don't stick around.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, makes sense. I think Cape Town is also very much like that, maybe for uh well, a little bit for nomads in general, and then also maybe for like sort of international like NGO, like nonprofit type of employees who you know do do a two or three year stint somewhere in Africa and Cape Town. If you're going to Africa, Cape Town's a pretty comfortable place to go. Um so they kind of end up coming through here and then they go back to New York or Washington, DC or something like that.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Carry on with their lives.
SPEAKER_01:Um, so let's talk about your your work stuff a bit. Um I I'm familiar with with Pegasus. I think I I don't remember how I even like started following you or anything like that. Um but but I'm familiar with I I I think I watched Pegasus like right from the start. Um from quite a distance. I'm not all that familiar with with the details and stuff like that. Um but I'm curious about that, how that has like grown and changed over the years, and then I'm really curious about how it has been impacted, if at all, by AI, because I actually thought of you the other day. Um by the other day, I mean like a few months ago or something like that. Because today you can just like you can say, and I literally do this, I'm like, hey, give me a Python environment. I want like Py env and requirements.txt and all that stuff. Because I'm not really a Python guy, um, but Claude Code can give me everything that I need, so it kind of obviates the need for some kind of a starter kit type thing. I'm curious if that has affected you. But anyway, broadly, can you tell us about that product and the journey and stuff?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, totally. And so it my guess is how you heard about me originally is like so my this arc of my career started when I left my job. I was the CTO at a startup-ish kind of company um that had, you know, it was a pretty big company by I don't know, my standards, which so it was like 150, 200 people. Oh wow and I got kind of burnt out and didn't decide I like didn't like the sort of like growing aspect of it. So I I decided I wanted to like do the solopreneur thing. And I during that period I was blogging a lot. Um, and so like every week I would sort of like write about what I had done that week, and I was trying to like build an audience and all that stuff. Um, so my guess is maybe that's how you I came on your radar. Um so I built a few of these web apps. Um one of them was like this tool to make place cards, and uh there was another one that sort of like gave analytics on group chats, and they're they were kind of silly little things that I was just sort of trying to figure out like can I build anything that like someone's gonna give me a dollar for or five dollars for, like that type of thing. And after I built you know, three or four of them, I kind of realized that I was like copying and pasting like the same code base core thing into each one. And um and I was like, oh, this maybe like other people are want to do this, they want to build a bunch of different projects. And so that was that was kind of like the genesis of Stats Pegasus. And I should say like it wasn't a novel idea, like this the idea of like this sort of like like uh paid sort of premium uh starter code base existed in like the Laravel ecosystem and and in the Rails ecosystem, and I kind of became aware of those, uh, but there was nothing in the Python Django world. So that was Pegasus, and then among all those little projects I was working on, um several of them made money, but none of them really made significant money until Pegasus kind of started slowly taking off and you know ended up being sort of successful enough that I could could quit contracting work and kind of like the other things that I that I had to pick up when the little project of becoming a solopreneur took longer than I expected or longer than I wanted.
SPEAKER_01:And can you put a timeline on this? Like, do you remember what year you started Pegasus?
SPEAKER_02:Uh I would have to look it up. I mean, I so I've been doing this about eight or nine years now. Um my guess is I did other stuff for the first two years, which would mean that Pegasus is kind of maybe seven years, six or seven years old, would be my guess. Um I remember like right before COVID, um, the Placecard app was still like my biggest source of income. And I remember I was Pegasus had been launched, I guess, earlier, like a year before. So that would have been I guess like sort of like mid to late 2019 is probably when I first launched Pegasus, and then I'd been working on it for maybe like six months before that.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Um and so yeah, I mean it it grew pretty steadily, like slowly and steadily, um sort of every year since then. Um kind of like leading into the AI era where now it's kind of like it it bounces around a lot, uh, but it's it's maybe sort of like flatlining or or possibly declining a little bit now. And I suspect it at least has something to do with kind of what you were you were getting at with AI coding and um and the fact that like a lot of people, you know, you can just plug into one of these cloud code or you know, level or bolt or whatever you want it to be and like spin up a new code base. And so I think I think um more and more people are starting to do that, and it is um it is something that I think about a lot in terms of the future of Pegasus and uh to what extent it is an existential risk for just like the business of selling code versus a uh sort of like a shifting landscape that I need to adapt to. And depending on you know how many sales I've made that week or my mood, I'll either be uh I'll either be sort of like completely pessimistic and like, oh, it's it's over, um, or I'll be optimistic and be like, well, you know, the AI is is growing the market of coders. You know, it's it's turning people who couldn't code before into coders, but but they still want to start with something that uh you know wasn't just vibe coded and one-shotted by an AI. Um and so it's it's certainly true today that I I think there's a lot of value still in Pegasus and products like Pegasus in terms of like like being battle tested and architecturally sound and making like solid technology choices. That said, like at the rate of AI progress, I'm not confident that that will be true, you know, two years in the future, five years in the future. Uh so it's it's a big question for sure.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah, like um who knows how much AI will progress how fast. Um, but I never want to be in a position where I'm like betting against AI getting really good really fast. Because like, yeah, I I think I'm far from alone when I say, like, I don't think I you know, the the scenario that we have today with AI assisted coding, like I did not see that coming. Like, I didn't necessarily think we were ever gonna get to the place we are now.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, I remember when it was sort of like co-pilot and it was like this, you know, annoying autocomplete that one three times would be right, and then the rest of the time it would kind of mess up. And then yeah, similarly, I I didn't really expect agents to take off and be as useful as they have become, and and quite quickly. So yeah, I think you're right. I think it's it's not good to bet against the rate of progress of AI. And um and yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Here I am. Yeah, yeah. Um, so I want to talk more about that. Um, and I'm also curious to to go back to maybe the more like personal stuff for a second. Um, you know, the what you are uh ostensibly living the dream. Um, you know, a lot of people would like uh a lot of people would would would kill to be in the position that you're in where you you left your regular job and now you're a solopreneur. Um and you know, from the outside, it might appear that you've you've made it. Um you you rode off into the sunset and now like you're just all set and you get to do whatever you want 24-7. But obviously, like for various reasons, I know that it's like it's not what it seems like from the outside. Because I know people who have like gone through similar journeys, but um and there's things like you know, uh with a job, the worst thing that can happen is you get fired and you have to get a different job. And that's like bad, but it's not the end of the world. But if you have your own business, you know, I know people who have had their own business, and if something happens and the business becomes like uh economically valueless, at least not enough to support a person, and then it's over, and then they have to go get a job and stuff like that. So there's always that like worry at the back of people's minds. And then the the other part of it is like even if you don't have to work at a job, like somehow your time gets like filled up and you don't have like unlimited time, you don't get to just do whatever you want all the time exactly. It's like I I I I learned this when I took a vacation for the first time where I didn't go somewhere, but I just stayed home. And I had all these plans for like hanging out with my kids and getting projects done at the house and stuff like that. And then the two weeks went by and I'm like, fuck, I got like two things done this this whole time. So much less than I expected. And it was like, yeah, I don't know. Just anywhere you want to take that. I'm curious.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Well, that's why that's why I I always try to go somewhere when I go on vacation. Because it is useful to like kick you out of your habits, you know, otherwise you'll sort of it's like, oh well, maybe I'll just check my email and kind of get into things. Um but yeah, I mean in terms of the business, like I think running a business always has some downsides. And um a lot of my choices have been made to mitigate some of those downsides. So for example, like I pretty early on decided like I didn't want to build an app that was mission critical. Like I didn't, I didn't I wanted to be able to like go camping for four nights and like not have access to the internet and not have to like figure out who's gonna like cover support if something like if the server blows up. And so like Pegasus very specifically was designed around that model in the sense that like there's never like a production, like a P1 bug in a code base. Like like you have the code, like if there's a bug in the code, you can wait four days for the bug to get fixed. Like so, like I'm not I'm not hosting people's, you know, critical data and and things like that. So that that that sort of like stressor element was reduced. Um but the financial strain is really hard to get out of your head, even when the business is is like doing well, and it's like you know, like you said, it it does sound like living the dream, like you know, for a long period of time, like Pegasus earned more than I needed, and that's great. But then, you know, one one month it goes down by 20. And then like, okay, that's still more than I need, but is that a trend? Is that like is that a did that just step down permanently or is it trending down, or is it a anomalous month? And and because uh Pegasus, which is you know, the most of my income in revolves around like a one-time sale model, it does bounce around quite a lot from month to month. And so like it's you know, it's not always easy to see trends in the data. And and so like you can get really mentally, and I have gotten really mentally like anxious about sort of things that on absolute terms look totally fine, you know. Um and that that part doesn't really go away. The nice thing is, at least for as long as like AI at least doesn't replace coders entirely, like my outcome of getting like you were saying it's fine having a job because you get fired and then you just get a different job. And like if my businesses go to zero, I I still have presumably the skill set that I could get a job. And so, like it is the worst case scenario, is not that different apart from the sort of like psychological aspect of like having like put all this work into this thing that then has died. And and that that part is tough. Like it's it's tough to admit. Like, placecard me uh is easier to talk about because it was less of my um my you know for revenue generating stuff. Um, but so this place card app that I made, it it had a very I mean, so first of all, it like went up and up and up, and then COVID happened and and that totally killed it because people weren't having weddings and events anymore. And so like nobody needs place cards. And so like kind of overnight, like my biggest source of independent income just like got squished. But at least that like was outside of my control. But then like as I've spent most of my time in the last like four or five years focusing on Pegasus, I've pretty much neglected a lot of my other projects, including that one. And what happens when you next neglect the project for that long is like you know, competitors pop up, like your your SEO gets kind of stale, like you know, you go from number one to number two to number three on Google, like you don't do like LLM optimization, so you don't show up in like chat GPT recommendations, and then all of a sudden, like it goes, you know, like you're it's like a 20% drop, and then another 20% drop, and other and and you basically just sort of like see this thing dying, and it's yeah, it sucks. But it's also like, oh, but I don't like maybe I could work really hard to save it, but I don't know that I can, you know, like the other thing that is tricky about having your own businesses is like like there's there's not like you you can't like offload the accountability of like doing the right thing. Um like when you when you're working for someone and they like tell you to do a job, you do the job, then it's like, okay, like that was a nice clean transaction. I did the thing you asked me to do, you gave me some money, like great. Whereas like if I'm trying to like rescue this sort of like tanking business, like I don't know whether spending a hundred hours like you know making contents or you know, whatever the thing is, like if that's gonna work or it's not gonna work, and so like you're just you're dealing with this uncertainty all the time, which is uh also very taxing. So I don't know. I I just kind of rambled for a while there.
SPEAKER_01:No, that's that's why we're here. Um yeah, I'm experiencing that a bit right now. So I've I've mentioned this a bunch of times on the podcast. I'm working on a CI platform called Saturn CI. It's a competitor to like GitHub Actions and Circle CI and stuff like that. Um and it's like really slow going, um, as these things tend to be. Um I I've I've had several false starts where like somebody agrees to become a customer and I get them onboarded, which is kind of a process at this point, especially because like each time I onboard somebody new, like some technical snag is revealed that's like unique to them that hasn't been encountered yet with any previous customer. Um so I've gone through that, and for whatever reasons, each person who's gotten setup so far has never actually like stuck. Um and with this, at least I know that like people need CI. Like it's not a question of like this category of product is a good idea or not a good idea. Like, I at least can be secure in that, and so I know that like the only reason this can fail is if I do a bad job, you know, it's not gonna fail because the idea sucks, it'll fail because I did a bad job. So all I have to do is like not do a bad job, but easier said than done. That's not even the way to put it. Like uh it's it's not exactly about doing a good or bad job, it's just like figuring out how to make it work or something like that. Anyway, like it's a lot of like like you said, like what should I do to get more customers? Like, should I keep having more uh one-on-one calls with people I know? Because I've been doing that, and that's been like working in the sense that it gets people in the top of the funnel. Um, should I be doing like writing blog posts and getting traffic to the website and stuff like that? I've been doing a little of that, and that's good. But it's like any particular thing that you invest in, you you really don't know what kind of payback it's gonna have, if any.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I I think you said it's it's um it's kind of about execution, but the the thing that I would worry about, and I don't know if you worry about this, is just like like your competitor is like the biggest company in the world, you know. Like if you're if you're competing against Microsoft's you know, owner of GitHub, um, then that's tough. I'm glad you bring that up.
SPEAKER_01:And I yeah, continue. Yeah, go ahead. No, yeah, the yeah, I was gonna say, um, that's actually like kind of an advantage, I think, because there are certain things that that tend to happen to companies as they get really big. Um, you know, they tend to the well, they have a lot of baggage, um, and they have a lot of inertia. And I kept waiting for like I actually had this idea before GitHub Actions even came out. Um, and then GitHub Actions came out, and I'm like, well, this is pointless now, because like anything I could do, them with their uh immense resources, they can just duplicate anything I could possibly do, so I can't differentiate differentiate myself in any way at all. Um, and then like half a decade went by and they didn't improve their shitty product like at all. Um and so then I like I I started work in earnest on this product. Um and and what they can't what they can't do is like all of a sudden start having good taste, you know. And even if they wanted to like totally redesign the product, like everything's so baked in, it it becomes like there's there's a period of like innovation and then a period of extraction. And I think they're like in an extraction mindset, if I would have to guess, kind of like Apple is now, like they're not innovating anymore, they're just extracting. And and once a company goes into an extraction phase, like you can do things that they just don't even want to do, and so you can you can beat them in those areas.
SPEAKER_02:Interesting. And is it is it not a problem that they have sort of like like CI is not like code, like it's not free, you have to have a server somewhere, right? Um so that yeah, like I mean, I I use GitHub Actions for almost exclusively. And one of the reasons is like it has like an incredibly generous free tier. Um, so like how do you compete with that as sort of like I assume you're not like funded or like uh you haven't raised like millions of dollars that you can dump into free servers or right.
SPEAKER_01:I only spend many hundreds of dollars of my own personal money every month to to keep it going. Uh it hurts. Um but let's see, what was the question? I I'm I'm blanking on what you were even asking.
SPEAKER_02:So yeah, well, like I mean, so so the last kind of shot I took um was I don't know if this was two years ago or three years ago now, but it was it was kind of right when um people figured out rag, like retrieval augmented uh generation, which is basically like like context aware LLMs, and that that technology has like totally changed over the last two years. But for a while, it was basically just like okay, you do you have like a knowledge source, you search over it, you like find the right results, maybe you do some fancy vector stuff in there, and then you like feed the context to an LLM. And and so I built this product called Scriv AI, which basically like I used it on Pegasus to make a bot that like you could ask it sort of a generic question, but it would like answer based on like the Pegasus documentation and like information from the Slack community and stuff like that. And it was it was cool. And it you know, it worked reasonably well for the tech at the time, and I I got a handful of customers on it. Um and then like I realized like I was like you it was like every day you would just like hear about oh this company raised 45 million dollars to do the same thing. This this company just like you know, and and and AI kind of like CI, although maybe more so back then, um like is not free. Like every time every time I you go to an LLM and you you know are getting to answer something, you're either paying one of these open these AI providers per token, or you're running some beefy server somewhere that's running, you know, some Chinese model or llama or something like that. And so like it was like I sort of gave up on that product because I was like, I just like I don't have the capital to like play in this game. Like it's just like like I I can't compete when these these guys are going to be spending millions of dollars not only in like sort of free service, but also like to acquire customers. And so I kind of was like, I was like, yeah, like I I think I could I I could keep going here, like there's something here, but it just feels like the market is too scary. And and I think maybe the difference between that and CI is that like that's an emerging market where everything is being invested in right now, whereas like CI is maybe more mature, and you have the phenomenon of the you know, sort of the bloated incumbents extracting value, and um which creates more room for like the innovative, you know, user-friendly up upstart. Whereas like in this AI knowledge-based search space, it's probably more like everybody's an upstart, and the only difference between me and the other upstarts is like they have you know millions more dollars than I do.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, you know, there's something Steve Jobs said about Microsoft, which is that they just have no taste, um, which like was and is totally true. And you know, there's a big difference between like an iPhone and an Android phone. Um and and no matter how much money Microsoft has, they're never gonna be Apple in the ways that Apple I'm gonna say was Apple. I I just have such a contempt for what Apple is now. Um but my my product, um, you know, it as cliche as it is, like I'm I'm trying to not trying, I'm like very in inspired by Steve Jobs and Apple, and I'm trying to make it like actually good. And I'm um I have a uh reaction to all the jobs that I've worked at where they're like we want the best people, we want to make the best products and do the best work and stuff like that. It's like bullshit. Like you're not even trying to make something good, like you're not even trying. Um and so that like double speak like frustrates, not double speak, just like duplicity of like saying one thing and then doing another. Um it just pisses me off so much. And so I wanted to have a chance to do something where like I'm actually gonna try to make it good, and I'm gonna actually make it good, so that when people use this product, they're like, holy shit, this is actually like this is good. Like I enjoy using this instead of like 95% of software, which I hate using. Um, and I'm trying to bring back like um um beautiful design and stuff like that, like it actually like looks neat and it's enjoyable not just to use but to look at and stuff like that. And I'm not saying I've achieved that, but I'm like uh going in that direction continually. Um and and my competitors are never gonna like come from that same angle. And if somebody uses this, oh I'll I'll mention something else because I think you kind of alluded to it. Um the cost. Like the monetary cost of a product is only one cost. Like there's there's also uh the the cost that it incurs on you in terms of like frustration and time and toil and stuff like that. Um and I'm I I think oftentimes the monetary cost of a product is the smallest cost, and the bigger cost is what it takes to actually use it. Like a lot of people don't even know what they're paying for CI. And so, like the the tangible part of your relationship with the product is the way that you use it and stuff like that, and the cost is almost irrelevant. So that's how I look at that stuff.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, no, that that that tracks. I I agree with you. I mean, that's yeah one of the value propositions of Pegasus is like, you know, yeah, like it's kind of expensive, like you're paying, like, you know, four four hundred and fifty dollars for a code base, but if you charge$150 an hour for your time, then if Pegasus saves you three hours, then it's like paid for itself. And um and that is the sort of like like you know, the all that churn of like choosing a tech stack and getting a dev environment set up and figuring out how to deploy it and like like all the stuff that um sort of Pegasus just like deals for you is like like definitely saves way more than that amount of time. Um although developers like notoriously don't care. They're like, yeah, I'd rather spend, you know, why why why spend you know ten dollars for something when I can spend five hours building it myself? Right. And I I'm very guilty of that too. Like I didn't buy Pegasus, I made it, you know.
SPEAKER_01:So right. Um yeah, who do your customers tend to be? Uh I've I've I'm familiar with other um like similar products in the Ruby on Rails world. Um and and the customers can be a little bit diverse. Um sometimes it's people starting a new business who like don't have a whole lot of coding background. How about in your case?
SPEAKER_02:Same, it's it's quite diverse. Um, that group you just mentioned exists. Um in the Python world, there's it's kind of like a a variant on that group, which is the data scientists who have this cool data science thing, but they don't know how to turn it into like a web app. Um, and then there's like the sort of the class, the more classic sort of just like startup or uh agency, um building apps for other people, uh internal tools, and um and then kind of like maybe this is the first category, but just like people like me who you know try a bunch of different stuff and um want a way to sort of skip a bunch of projects quickly. So it's it's kind of all over the place, um, to be honest.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I'm really curious how you marketed this early on and how you're doing it now. Like, I think probably at the early stages of a product in a business, like the marketing is much different from what it is later on. Like in my case, uh You know, there's that whole Paul Graham do things that don't scale thing, which I think makes a lot of sense. Um, you know, first I'm going to like people I know personally. Because if somebody will use it just to be nice, like just because they know me and they want to support me, like that still counts. And that still like gets me started a little bit, you know. Um so I'll I'll take anything I can get at this early stage, and then later on, it makes more sense to like like for me now, like I finally have a website uh and exactly one blog post on that website, but I didn't even bother to do any of that stuff before I tried to pick this lower hanging fruit first. Um and I know that like posting on Reddit and stuff like that, um, people have this like extreme allergy to anything that remotely resembles self-promotion or anything like that. So it can be really hard to go through those channels. Um, so yeah, how how did you market this early on and then how did that change?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, uh so very early on, similar to you. Um and uh the what you were saying reminded me of a great book called The Mom Test. I don't know if you've read it, but I've heard it would recommend uh yeah. So it's it it's not exact it it's a almost opposed to what you were saying, in that it it it's saying like so the the punchline is basically like anytime you ask someone for input on your app, like they're gonna give you input as if they're your mom. So they're gonna say, like, oh sweetie, it's so great, I love it, like you did a great job. Um, instead of like giving you, you know, the more honest or harder feedback of like you know where the faults are or or whether they actually pay for it and that type of stuff. Um but yeah, so early on, um it was similar, like I had a small mailing list. I I had basically before I built Pegasus, I decided like I want to build something for people like me. People like me are uh coders who like Python and Django. So I started a blog called like Build with Django, where I just I started like making uh writing articles about you know stuff that I'd done open source from my wedding website and like libraries that I'd built and stuff like that, and um got like a bit of a like a very small email list of people who had signed up through finding that stuff. And yeah, I just I I would before Pegasus was even ready, I would email that list, I'd try to sit down with somebody, I'd like walk them through it, I would, you know, uh yeah, have like these long conversations about what they wanted to do and and where their pain points were and all that. Um and in the very early days, like every sale, like you know, I was making like one, two, three sales a month, and so every sale was like a huge deal, and I would like I would be very handholding in terms of you know, how can I help it get up and running and like providing just totally unscalable levels of support and service. Yeah, what was the place they'd ask for a feature and I'd like uh I think it was$99, which that like saying that out loud is like like that wasn't a good trade of time, but um but you need to start somewhere, like you need you know every product I've ever done, I I I track I have I know how much time I spend on them, and so I can see like what my hourly rate, my cumulative hourly rate is on a project. And so like you know, when you make your first sale of$100, if you've spent you know 200 hours building that thing, then your hourly rate is like 50 cents, uh, which is terrible. But the whole thing with products is like, you know, two sales is like only a little bit harder than one sale, and then like a hundred sales is only like a little bit harder than you know, 10. So then the hourly rate like slowly climbs up, which is like a fun, a fun thing that I like to watch. But yeah, so I would I would do this very uh very sort of hand-holding, bespoke onboarding. I would like add features to Pegasus whenever they asked how to do something. And um my goal was basically to like have people be very happy that they had decided to use Pegasus um and then hope that they would sort of like spread the word. Uh as Pegasus grew, yeah. I mean it became more about um awareness for a long time, and and I I kind of did the same strategy where I would just like I would encounter some technical problem like for a long time it was like like Django just had really bad uh the ecosystem did not have any like canonical advice about like how to use Django with JavaScript or like with React. And so like I I would like try to build React with Django and I'd like to do all this research, and I'd be like, wait, why do why do you have to do it this way? And like, what's this and and then coming out of that, then I would be like, okay, like I like figured out this thing that and like I know that that content doesn't exist on the internet, and so and then I would like write, like I wrote this whatever, like six or seven part series called Modern JavaScript for Django developers, which um became like at least for a time, like the sort of like canonical way that like that like a lot of Django developers sort of used React and integrated like JavaScript libraries and things like that. And then interesting people would share that, and then you know, every once in a while, and it was it was 98% just like pure useful like contents, and then two percent it would just be like, Hey, by the way, like I'm explaining how to do this stuff.
SPEAKER_01:If you just want it done, like here's here's a thing you can buy that like and was was that was that material actually hosted on the Pegasus website or somewhere else?
SPEAKER_02:It was, yeah, yeah. It was on the Pegasus website. Yeah. So if you go to the Pegasus website, there's like a tab at the top called guides where I've like written a bunch of these things.
SPEAKER_01:Um Yeah, yeah, and I I can tell you how I how I think about that kind of stuff, and I'm curious if I have the same idea that if I'm looking at it the same way that you were and are. Um for one, putting out stuff like that, it like it it's it's obviously like not an ad for Pegasus. You're like putting out this educational stuff with some mentions of Pegasus sprinkled in, um, but you're still like attracting the same people. Um there's like quite a lot of overlap between the kind of person who who would conceivably be interested in Pegasus and the kind of person who's gonna read that blog post. So that's that's one way that I look at that. And I'm doing the exact same thing very consciously with with Saturn CI. My first blog post was uh uh well this first blog post doesn't really fit, but the the post was called What is Docker um and and it it used Ruby examples because Saturn CI only works for for Ruby. Um so I'm trying to attract Ruby developers. Anyway, as that goes, that's the idea to like attract Ruby developers and put out content that will be interesting to them. Um and the other thing is if you put stuff out like that, then maybe you'll get like backlinks and stuff like that, and it'll help your SEO. Not just for like when people search for specifically like uh Django, JavaScript, whatever, but if they even search for just like Python uh starter kit, whatever, I believe it helps for that kind of SEO, like it anything that helps any of your hes SEO kind of helps all of your SEO, as I understand. Yeah, that's been my booster domain rank. Yeah, so do you look at those things in a similar way?
SPEAKER_02:Totally, yeah. Um 100%. And and then the the last component of that was also uh building an email list. And so I and I did that in two ways. One was um every every one of those posts was just kind of like put your email here if you want to like get emailed next time there's um a post. And the one that was actually more effective was like, oh, like here's here's a demo of like what we're building today. And in order to use the demo, like it has to be like tied to a user account because I'm like showing this thing that only works with user accounts. So like you have to make an account over here. Um and then so when people would like make an account to go see the demo, they would um get opted into my email list as well, and then I could have like an email funnel of uh places where I could both send the blog post, but then also sort of like you know, talk more about Pegasus and what I was doing in the future that I was adding and things like that.
SPEAKER_01:And was that email list like a Corey Zoo email list, a Pegasus email list or something else?
SPEAKER_02:Pegasus email list, yeah. Okay, and so it's totally separate from my Corey. Like I have my own blog that has an email list, but I keep those like completely separate.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, okay. And did you like sign? I I'm just curious like who the people had a relationship with? Like, did you sign off as like Pegasus or as Corey or or or what?
SPEAKER_02:Like Corey from Pegasus, yeah. Uh so I I like so my personal blog, like it's like a one-way door, essentially. So like my blog, anyone who reads my blog knows that I work on Pegasus and knows that uh like what's going on with Pegasus, because I I talk about Pegasus on my blog all the time and link to it. If someone just comes from Reddit or from one of my like articles, then my goal is that they unless they go searching around, they never know about my personal site or like you know, like the Twitter gets a little fuzzier because like I'm sort of like reposting stuff across the two accounts, but but I do try to keep like I don't I wanted Pegasus to like be its own brand and not be sort of just like an extension of me, which is not obviously the right thing to have done. Like a lot of people who have made similar products have done it on the back of like a personal brand, you know, like if you have a if you have a hundred thousand Twitter followers and you're like you're sort of like in the coding space, whatever, and then you like can leverage that to be like, oh, this is you know, this is Jason's boilerplate, and it's like you know, you know Jason from his awesome tweets, therefore, like you should buy his code. Like there's uh there's an element to that that does work for people. I always just felt a little weird because on my blog and and to some extent like in podcasts and stuff, like I'm I'm very transparent and um and oftentimes sort of like you heard me talking about AI, like I'm I'm a little like uncertain about what I'm doing at all times, uh including now. And that uncertainty is not something I necessarily want. Like, I don't mind if people find that out after they like have found Pegasus, but I don't I don't want like the average person who finds Pegasus to sort of like get all the like behind the scenes stuff.
SPEAKER_01:You're not gonna tweet from the Pegasus Twitter account, like, hmm, I wonder if this is gonna last. Yeah, exactly. Um yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, and the email list thing I I think is super important. Um to me, it's like kind of the backbone of of everything in a certain way. Um because that's like a list of people who have asked to hear from you.
SPEAKER_02:Totally. I will say it's like changing now. Like so like lately a lot of my content I've been doing more video stuff. Um and so like I'll I I do a lot of like video series while I'll just like again, it's sort of like Django educational content, but I'm just what it is is me building an app with Pegasus and just like talking about you know how that goes and and again, it's it's not an explicit advertisement for Pegasus, um, but Pegasus is there in the background, sort of like like getting you to want to use it if if you think it looks good. Um, but so yeah, video has I think I've I haven't been doing a good job with it lately, but that became a more important channel over the con over the writing. Uh and you know, ever like everything with LLMs now, it's such a it's such like a wild west in terms of like everyone's everyone's like trying to like you know post a bunch of sloth on Reddit in hopes that like GPT six will pick it up and start recommending their products and and stuff, but like the whole field of like LLM optimization uh is something that I find kind of even ickier than SEO. Yeah, uh but also important. Um yeah. So I I don't do I don't do any explicit LLM optimization now, but I think were I of sort of like a different mindset, um like if I if all I cared about was like making growing the bottom line or or getting more traffic at all costs, I imagine I might do more of that. Um I'm sort of like feel like I'm I have some like weird moral high ground where like I just can't I can't bring myself to like write write disingenuous slop on Reddit so that LLMs read it.
SPEAKER_01:But yeah, I don't see that as a moral high ground. That's just uh being a normal person, something like that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, although normal people are like not good marketers, like you put a normal person next to like someone willing to do something like that, and you know the odds are that no one's gonna find out about that person's product, which which is sad, you know. It's and and you just kind of have to hope that the right people pay enough attention that they figure it out eventually. And um and Pegasus has had a decent, you know, I think the average Pegasus customer is not someone who just like clicks by on the first thing that Google sends their way, like they it's like people who know they want to start a Django project and then they do a bunch of research and they sort of like you know figure out that Pegasus is probably right for them. Um and even if it's you know, it's not like the first thing recommended by ChatGPT or something like that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah, that's yeah, that that seems true. Like that doesn't seem like the primary way that people would find out about it and decide to use it and stuff like that. Um okay, we're we're pretty close to time, um, even though there's there's so much stuff that I would love to continue to to get into. Um but is there is there anything else that you'd like to share? Um, you know, classic share all your links and stuff segment of the podcast. Um, where can people find out more about Pegasus, your personal stuff, which by the way, I really enjoy. Anything like that?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean the easiest thing is probably just go to my website, um, coreyzoo.com, C-O-R-Y-Z-U-E. And um there's there's like a projects link where you can find everything there. Um, Pegasus should be Googleable. Um, and then I I have social media stuff linked from there as well. I'm not very active on social media, although I still post on Twitter X sometimes. Um but yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Um, well we'll put that stuff in the show notes. And Corey, thanks so much for coming on the show.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. This was this was fun.