Code with Jason
Code with Jason
312 - AI, Observability, and Entrepreneurship with John Gallagher
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In this episode I talk with John Gallagher about changes in AI over the last 18 months and the impact of luck on success.
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A Snail-Mail Newsletter For Devs
SPEAKER_01Hey, 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. Drew Bragg from Philadelphia says Nonsense Monthly is the only newsletter I deliberately set aside time to read. I read a lot of great newsletters, but there's just something about receiving a piece of mail, physically opening it and sitting down to read it on paper that is just so awesome. Feels like a lost luxury. Chris Sonnier from Dickinson, Texas says just finished reading my first nonsense monthly snail mail newsletter and truly enjoyed it. Something about holding a physical piece of paper that just feels good. 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 nonsense monthly dot com. That's nonsense monthly dot com. I'll say it one more time nonsense monthly dot com. And now without further ado, here is today's episode. Hi, thanks for having me. When do you think is the last time we talked?
SPEAKER_02Eighteen months ago feels about right.
SPEAKER_01It feels about right.
SPEAKER_02Could be longer.
SPEAKER_01And I feel like a lot has changed since then. I was thinking about AI in particular. And AI has encoding and stuff like that. It's it's just so much different even when it was that long ago.
SPEAKER_02I have many thoughts. Yes, of course, 100%.
SPEAKER_01I'm sure you do. I'm sure you do, and I'm uh I do too. And just uh before the show we were you know catching each other up on what we've been up to. Um you mentioned that you're working on your business. Um I mentioned that I got a a job. I was doing consulting, and then in at the very end of March 2025, I got a job. I work at Cisco Meraki now. Right, nice.
SPEAKER_02Nice. And what are you doing for them at the moment?
SPEAKER_01I'm a tech lead on their dashboard build team, they call it. So like all the build and deploy systems at um at Cisco Meraki, which is an organization within Cisco. Um we work on on those, especially the build systems, not as much the deploy systems.
Luck, Privilege, And Opportunity
SPEAKER_02Wow. Um I actually one of my friends, um one of his friends was a very early investor in Cisco, and he's now uh a billionaire. He he was in right on the ground floor, um, bought some stock, or I think he was gifted some stock as part of his his employment contract. Um ten years later he sold it for I I I think I think my friend said something like a couple of hundred million or something.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_02And then reinvested that and now he's sitting on who knows how much money, but more than a billion dollars.
SPEAKER_01Well, as Rod Stewart said, some guys have all the luck. Maybe it wasn't luck, I have no idea.
SPEAKER_02I think he's a very, very smart, very switched on, very savvy guy. So, but I think you know, you can be smart, switched on, and savvy, and end up with very little in the bank, can't you?
SPEAKER_01So Yeah, that's true. You can uh if you're smart but you have bad luck, it can all get wiped out through no fault of your own. You kind of have to have I I guess you don't necessarily have to have any special good luck, but you do have to have an absence of really bad luck.
SPEAKER_02Definitely, definitely. And I um I'm always pondering luck, and some people say the harder you work, the luckier you get, and that's absolutely true. But there's always a built-in part of luck, for me at least, uh the way I see the world is I'm lucky to have the brain I have. I'm lucky to have been brought up in the country I've been brought up in, in the economy I've been brought up in. Oh my gosh, like looking back, nearly 50. I'm gonna be 50 this year, and my first computer was an Amiga at the age of 13. And I mean, I look back now, and my parent like one of my parents didn't work, and the other was on a cleaner's wage. Now, an Amiga 500 in 2025, I looked this up the other day, is worth not worth, sorry, that amount of money back then, it was 400 pounds to buy an Amiga back then. That in today's money is more than a thousand pounds.
SPEAKER_01Oh wow.
SPEAKER_02So I can imagine a cleaner trying to buy their child, you know, the modern iPhone or something, um, and it's not something that the child actually needs, but the child is just really drawn and and so somehow my parents made that work for me. So again, massive section of luck, and I immerse myself in that thing, and my brain is just drawn towards these problems, and I am now in a very, very fortunate position, gamefully employed by a great employer called Dynatrace. Um, I'm doing what I love, which is observability, I'm building a business. So, all of these things, I mean, obviously, people say, Yeah, but you've had to work hard to get them. But the luck is that I have to have had my brain in order to have been drawn to the things that I wanted to work on. You can't work on software for 15 years and be keep pushing yourself to do it. I just wanted to do it naturally, and so that's luck. What what's luck? The fact that software engineers are really in demand, maybe not now so much, but traditionally, and so all of these things of luck. Yeah, um, I see almost nothing but luck, uh, and maybe like two or three percent hard work.
When Intelligence Becomes A Trap
SPEAKER_01Interesting. Yeah, I reflect on that sometimes too. You know, I'm a white American male, and it's like on the slot machine, that's just like 777, you know. Um, and that you you you can't ask for a better hand to be dealt to you, and yet life is still really hard. Um like I I look back at what I've accomplished even with these advantages, um, and it's still hard, and I'm still like uh nowhere near where I am trying to get to and stuff like that. Um and it's hard to tell. Uh it it's hard to tell. Like, if I had been born in a different place as a different person and stuff like that, how different would it be? And something that's um that's really hard to argue against is like if you're born with um a powerful mind, um, that's a huge advantage over being born with Down syndrome or something like that, you know? Um and and so the the like social racial gender, whatever, all that stuff. Um that's one thing. But like if you're if you're not smart, like that's the worst uh handicap that you can possibly get, and I was lucky in that way to be at the other end of the bell curve.
Nervous System Mastery And Emotions
SPEAKER_02And yet, and yet, arguing against myself for a moment here, I think people who are um less smart I'm getting into very dangerous territory here. Uh, but I I think I look back at some of the people who built really, really successful businesses, and they had no opportunity to overthink it because they weren't approaching it intellectually. They were approaching it as as I have these four things to do to sell my business to the public. And if I don't do these, I'm gonna go under. So they knuckle down and they do the four things and they keep it simple. Whereas for people like me, often I think that intelligence can be a handicap because I read a podcast, I listen to a book, and then I start thinking all these grandiose thoughts. Well, I can link that idea with this, and my partner's already always saying to me, but what action are you going to take, John? Oh, well, I'm I'm I mean I'm not really sure, but it's super interesting, right? I can link this idea with marketing, and this idea says, Oh, I tell you what I could do, I could do this. Are you going to do that? Well, probably not, but I could. And so I end up spinning my wheels because I intellectualise everything. And sometimes you just got to do the hard work and show up, and it's gonna be rough, it's gonna be brutal, it's going to be emotionally draining and emotionally challenging. And sometimes the smarter of us amongst us can actually start to invent all of these mind games, like inventing our own mind prison or something, you know, which is really, really hard. This must mean there's something wrong with me. Now let me introspect what might be wrong with me. And I think for a week and I come up with a oh, I might be this or I might be that, and I'm gonna read a book on therapy, and I'm gonna and before I know it, I've lost sight of the fact that it's going to be hard. And that's I suppose a revelation that like it's really, really freaking obvious, right? But it's a revelation that I've had in the first few months of uh first few weeks of this year, and maybe a bit towards the end of last year. I went on a course at the end of last year that was just beyond amazing called Nervous System Mastery by a guy called Johnny Miller, and he taught us all how to master our own emotional, emotional nervous systems, how to calm ourselves down, how to move ourselves out of fear, how to embrace fear, how to actually move into fear and discomfort and anxiety. And when you listen to everybody's stories, on we had these massive Zoom calls with maybe like 90, 100 people, and you'd invite random people to share, and loads of different backgrounds: white, non-white, um, Asian, Latin American, whatever, and loads of different age ranges, like people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, all the way up to 60s, maybe even 70s, and we all had the same problems. We all had the same issues with emotional attachment or emotional avoidance. And I heard this phrase from Joe Hudson that I really love. Uh, Art of Accomplishment podcast, absolutely incredible podcast. If I had one pick for it, that would be it. Um, I'm probably skipping along to the end now. But he said, every problem is an emotional problem. Every problem is an emotional problem. And I've argued the case with people about this, um, but I'm increasingly in agreement that that's the case. And he said, if you don't believe this, then think of yourself as homeless and imagine that you knew being homeless was going to bring you boundless joy and endless energy, and you were going to be living your absolute best life by being homeless. You'd want to be homeless. Obviously that's not the case, but the point is, another thing from Ali Abdul I heard recently was um he said entrepreneurship is funny because lots of entrepreneurs uh forget about the balance of tactics and emotions. He said 80% of being an entrepreneur is emotional. It's an emotional journey, and 20% is a tactical one. But very often the emotions will hit us so hard that we then think, oh, there's something wrong with the tactics. I'll watch another YouTube video, I'll make another new maybe email newsletter is the way for me to go. And so we keep changing tactics, but the tactics don't help because the core of the problem is we're uncomfortable, we're feeling uncomfortable going out selling our stuff. We're feeling uncomfortable. So it's an emotional journey. It's an emotional problem being an entrepreneur, and that really clicked with me. And that is what I'm that's what I'm focused on this year is facing up to the emotional challenges of being an entrepreneur instead of choosing a new tactic and running away and switching this, switching that. No, like I'm going for it this year.
Every Problem Is Emotional
SPEAKER_01Wow, I am so deeply upset that we only have an hour today instead of like six hours to dig way into this stuff because that is so true. Um, and we actually uh I recorded a podcast like three or four podcast episodes ago, um, with with uh Christian Jenko, and we got into all sorts of taboo topics. Um but we talked about uh this this topic of emotion and how we only do things for emotional reasons. Um and it all goes back to evolutionary biology. Um and yeah, what you say about like entrepreneurship being 80% emotional, 20% tactical, that really rings true to me. Um because it's like okay, uh I had a former boss who helped me understand the distinction between like uh having a desire to like solve the puzzle, like he phrased it as like solving the Rubik's Cube, versus just like, and this is me talking now, uh digging the ditch. And a lot of entrepreneurship and just a lot of life in general is just digging the ditch. It's not intellectually interesting. You just have to dig that ditch, and it's boring and it feel it might feel stupid, it might go against your instincts and emotions and stuff like that, but you just have to do it, and that's uh the difficulty is doing something that feels wrong uh but is the right thing.
Digging The Ditch Versus Solving Puzzles
SPEAKER_02Yep, I did 250 cold calls um for a previous business that I uh that I started, and at the beginning, of course, I was petrified. Surprise, surprise. Um, and once I got beyond 50, 60, 70 phone calls, I kind of I always had this feeling of unease when I went on the phone, and then at the other side of it, I always felt like yes, that was great. And now I look back on it and I all I see is adventure. At the time it was like, oh my people would say to me, Why are you doing this? Why are you putting yourself through this? Like, well, the tactic says I show up on the phone and I phone these people, so that's what I'm gonna do. And I just knuckled down and I did it 10 calls every night, and I remember this one guy, like I was phoning mostly businesses in America. I remember this one guy phoned up, and I was selling lead generation at the time. So I said, Um, uh excuse me, I had these different patterns that I would try on at the beginning. Excuse me, are you interested in, you know, this English guy? Are you interested in uh maybe boosting uh leads for your business? And he said, Uh, do you realize you're calling me from the UK, my friend? I said, Yeah. He said, No, I'm not interested, but like had all these interesting uh uh yeah, uh interesting experiences doing that. I'm really faced up to my own um you know, my own anxiety, my own fear. And the way that uh I got over that fear was incredibly counterintuitive. Uh and I've used the same technique previously, which was actually relax into the fear. So the fears there, instead of trying to push through it, which I'd always done, just force myself, just apply more pressure. You've got to do the course, you've got to do it, John. You've you've you've blah da. I would say, okay, I'm feeling great fear. Oh my gosh, this is really, really scary. And then I would just relax my entire body, like getting into a super cold bath, like it hurts, but you're relaxed, or I was relaxed when I did it, and that meant and in fact, I can I took recordings of some of these calls, and I could see on a day where I was more relaxed, I would have more success. And when a day where I was tense, people could tend sense like the nervousness in my voice, the tension in my voice. When I was relaxed and I really didn't care that much, the conversations would just flow better.
SPEAKER_01Interesting. Yeah, that rings true as well. It's it's like I I've noticed that phenomenon before. Um, you know, business and dating have so many parallels. It's like when you're wh when you act like you uh don't don't care that much, uh it it works out better than if you act really desperate or whatever. Um that makes a lot of sense.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I've I've also been reading a book called the The Mum Test, the Mom Test, by I think it's Roy Fitzpatrick. Have you come across that book?
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah, uh-huh.
Cold Calls, Fear, And Relaxation
SPEAKER_02What I'll do for any business is first thing to do is contact customers, get some discovery calls going, like obviously ideate my niche, who I'm going after, what problem am I solving, and then phone people up um and ask them about this problem. And if they have the problem, they'll tell me all about it. They'll just like spill their guts to me and they'll they'll talk my ear off. And actually, I think it's a bit more subtle and a bit more complex than that. Now I'm only at the beginning of this journey with my new idea, so I'll tell you in a year if this hypothesis works out. What is the new thing? So the new thing is I've got a few different ideas, um, but there are kind of two that stand out, or maybe three that stand out. One is reducing observability costs for companies. Um, I've also worked with Dynatrace, so I'm not going to be able to go into a customer who's using Dynatrace and reduce costs, that would be a clear conflict of interest. Um second one would be testing in the age of AI. So, how do how do we build the skills that I've learned over 15 years for how do we test effectively? How do we make sure we have confidence our software works and being able to put deterministic tools in the hands of agents so that they can check that what they've done is correct. Um, because I don't see enough investment in testing, testing mindset, testing methodologies. We're still quite immature in this area as an industry, I think. And then the third one would be reducing downtime for companies through the power of observability.
SPEAKER_00Interesting. Very interesting.
The Mom Test And Customer Discovery
SPEAKER_01If I may, because I think there's overlap, I'll share what's on my mind right now. I think you're aware that I'm working on building a CI platform. And that is um that is going pretty well. I'm at the early stages. Um I have one paying customer working on onboarding a second, uh, but I'm not counting that kitchen chicken, not counting the chicken before it's hatched. Um but the the the the trajectory that I see this taking, uh, because sometimes I let myself just be undisciplined and think 30 steps ahead, even though it's not gonna be a priority anytime soon, is um build the CI product, grow it to a billion-dollar business or whatever. Um at some point along the way, I'm gonna have my own data centers instead of uh you know renting server space from somebody else. Uh I want to have vertical integration, and then I can become the next AWS and sell my um sell my uh compute time to to other people and put AWS out of business or something like that. Um obviously that's way down the road, pie in the sky, stuff like that. But I it's it's got me thinking about all these um adjacent things. Like uh Heroku has become a different thing. It's it's not the this wonderful thing that it once was, it's become this like corporate whatever. Um and I think there's room for another Heroku. Um and and if I'm in the business of continuous integration, I have uh you know, I'm I'm doing all this adjacent work with virtual machines and stuff like that. It seems like a fairly natural uh area to move into and stuff like that. Um and so the the one of the things I want to share from that is like uh the the way I approach that was like not to come up with something new, but to uh just take something that exists in both the case of of the CI and the hosting stuff. It's not a new kind of thing, it's just a better version of a of a category that already exists.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, um I've heard of this kind of playbook, if you like, and I've always um like one of the things I love doing, to be honest, the most is take something that's a bit rubbish and improve it beyond all recognition. So that the idea that you're starting with an existing that a niche is incredibly attractive to me. Um I'm starting with kind of a service-based business versus a product-based business. So that's that's a big um big distinction there. But I'm interested in what you see as the opportunity there to improve, um, because my two cents with is I've used every CI platform uh that I can find, and I dislike mall in some pretty major ways. So I think it's a pretty oh I need to be careful what I say here, but I'm just gonna say what I think. Uh I think it's a pretty stagnant area.
Three Business Ideas: Obs And Testing
SPEAKER_01And how's it yeah, and I don't know if the existing product uh product uh offerers uh are even aware uh what the weaknesses in their products are. Um and I know that this is an audio-only podcast, but let me just take about 10 seconds here and just real quickly show you uh what this looks like. Um so it's uh I I organize it kind of like an email client where on the left are your various test runs and then on the right is a big detail pane uh where it shows you your your test failures. So the the thing that I don't like about um GitHub actions and stuff like that, one of the things I don't like is when a test fails, they make it hard to see what failed.
SPEAKER_02Um don't even get me started. Oh my life, that is a huge pain.
SPEAKER_01Right, and and so here I know, dear listener, you can't see, but I'm showing John um uh a run that failed, and the tests that all ran are on the right here, and I sort them so that the failures are at the top, so I can just things that you care about are first. The things you care about are first, crazy, huh?
SPEAKER_02Imagine that.
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I just thought what was needed was just like an application of common sense to this area, and the the the ways that I thought it should obviously be are the ways that I'm making it, and this is gonna really resonate with some people, and I've found that uh probably most people it it doesn't at all, which which is fine. Um, but now I have to figure out how am I gonna find these people with whom it does resonate. Right. Right.
A CI Vision And Common-Sense UX
SPEAKER_02And there are obviously two major ways. Um Alex Homozy's uh quadrants immediately spring to mind cold and warm, and inbound and outbound. So there's four four ways. I don't know if you've read a hundred million dollar leads. No, I I've not actually finished the book yet, but I've read the intro to it, uh first few chapters, and there are four, it's a it's a very simple uh quadrant, and there's four kinds of leads, and that's really what we're talking about here, whether you're doing customer surveys or actually selling them an actual product, it's all I see it all as leads really. So there's cold and warm, and there's inbound and outbound. So cold inbound would look something like putting um, in your case, a post um into an engineering newsletter saying, Hey engineers, is it does it really like something like um how CI sucks and what to do about it? Or how how um how long do you spend figuring out what failed? Something like that. And then in your post you go on to like, and overall your expertise about well, you know, I've been here before, here's what it looks like in Circle CI, here's what it looks like in Jenkins, here's what it looks like in every single one of these cases, and you talk about the problem, and then people get in touch with you. And so that's cold inbound. Warm inbound would be you write an article like that, and you um maybe send it to friends. I mean, that's a little bit of outreach, but um, it's kind of inviting people to come into your tent and read the article, but the people that you know, and then likewise, warm outbound is sending your friends, colleagues, people who are in your first connections on LinkedIn, a message saying, Hey, I'm just wondering, is testing a problem for you? And then cold outbound, which debatably is the hardest, is DMs in uh LinkedIn, something like that, to people you've never met before saying, Hey, I've got I need to have 15 minutes of your time for a chat. Do you have time for chat? Which the answer will be no, because time is a limited resource and one day I'm going to die. So yeah.
Reproducible Failures And Local Runs
SPEAKER_01Yeah, interesting. Um I was gifted that book and I haven't yet cracked it open, but this makes me want to. Um here's here's what I'm doing right now. So first I like reached out to some people I knew, um, and that stirred up some leads. Um and now what I'm doing is um when I'm selecting podcast guests, um, often I'm selecting for people who who would maybe advance my interests in some way for Saturn CI. I put up a Reddit post recently um saying like, hey, I'm looking for podcast guests, I'm looking for founders of Rails-powered uh startups and stuff like that. And so far I've recorded a handful of interviews uh with those people, and my proposition is that some some proportion of those people will become friends, and then we'll uh develop a relationship over a period of time, and it'll lead to like, hey, uh, do you think you might want to try out this Saturn CI thing? That kind of thing. I'm not sure where that falls in that quadrant or whatever, but that's the way I'm doing it right now.
SPEAKER_02That would be warm outreach. Okay. Warm outbound. Yeah. Um yeah, uh, the specifically in this product, I mean, I know like the mom test talks a lot about not trusting people when they give you fuzzy promises. Oh, if you did this, I'd definitely buy it. Or like in the future I might use that, or any of that stuff, but my two cents and the thing that's coming to me immediately when I see your product is the one use case that no CI comes even close to for me is there's it seems bonkers because it's it's like it's the most obvious use case to me is a test has failed in CI or a set of tests has failed in CI. How do I reproduce that on my local machine? I want a single button where I've just click copy, go onto my local machine, paste, and it runs the exact lines, the exact tests on my local machine, and then I can debug it.
Positioning Before Scale
Clear Pain Beats Vague Promises
SPEAKER_01Right. Yeah, so it's it's a little bit um so I want to I I want to avoid being speculative because I've uh I've burned a lot of fucking time in my life on business attempts that never went anywhere. Years and years. I I've I've been trying since 2008, it's now 2026. So uh what's that 26 minus 8 is 18? I've been trying for 18 years. Um so I'm I'm I'm trying not to uh I'm trying not to go in unproductive directions. So the reason I say that is because I don't know what I'm offering yet, and I don't know to whom. I know that I have this thing, and I know I know that I like it, and I know that I I feel like I have a good reason to believe that other people would like it, um, but I'm not sure who they are and why they're gonna like it. It's like I recorded this album, I think this album's pretty sweet, but I don't know who my fans are gonna be yet and and why they're gonna be into it and stuff like that. So I don't want to spend all this time saying like it's easy to see what failed, because it may be that I open up the doors and the people come in, and it turns out that the people are here, they're here for some reason that I totally didn't predict. So I'm doing this uh manually, just grabbing people by the lapels and and dragging them in, and and uh and then after I get a handful of people using it, because again, I got one paying customer working on number two. Once I maybe have four or five or something like that, uh maybe some commonalities will emerge, and I could say, Oh, okay, you like it because blah blah blah. That's what I'm offering. At least that's what I'm offering to you, because it all it may also be that uh there's not just one offering, there's a couple different offerings, uh, each of which resonate with a different kind of person.
SPEAKER_02Interesting. So do you have without giving anything away, obviously that's top secret, but do you have a a read on why that customer is paying for it?
SPEAKER_01Um that's a good question. I need to talk to him more because uh I kind of didn't even realize until now uh that I that I didn't have that much of an understanding, but I can tell you one thing that that he was very um that he found very appealing, which is that the setup is trivial. Um it's not like some custom YAML format, the way that GitHub Action, Circle CI, GitLab pipelines, basically all of them are. It's nothing like that. It's just a Docker Compose fig and you a Docker Compose config and then you just plug it into Saturn CI so you can run it locally. Um and there's nothing new to learn. If you know Docker Compose, then you know how to use Saturn CI. And if you don't, that's why God invented AI. You can just point uh the AI at the docs and say, make me a Docker Compose config for this, and then push it up and it'll work. So that's what resonated with him, which you know obviously you couldn't even have known about because you didn't know anything yet about how the config works.
SPEAKER_02Interesting. So just so I'm understanding, would it be um I have a Docker Compose file already, and I add a chunk of config for Saturn to that Docker Compose file, and it runs the Saturn CI service alongside my app?
Lead Quadrants: Cold/Warm, In/Out
SPEAKER_01Close. Um I'm trying to think if there's actually anything that's like specific to Saturn CI. Um is there? I don't think there is. Uh yeah, I could be wrong on that. It's been a while since I've actually set up a new Saturn CI project. Um but but what it is, you you would copy and paste and and make just a variant in a folder called.SaturnCI. Um and and then by virtue of the fact that it's in that folder, SaturnCI would know that it's there and it would just pick it up.
SPEAKER_02Ah, I see, okay, cool. Because that is definitely a pain point um for me is YAML. I mean, who loves YAML? Hands in the audience, please. Oh, there's an empty room with no hands. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Right, and there's that that painful cycle where you have to upload it, let it run, you see it fail, then you have to figure out what you did wrong, make a change, push it up again, blah blah blah.
SPEAKER_02Whereas with your approach you can run it locally.
SPEAKER_01Exactly.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's very cool. So um it will be interesting. It will be interesting to see if you could market it on that one pain point alone. Because I bet you any money you could.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's an interesting proposition. Maybe so.
SPEAKER_02I mean it's the it's the data that you've got so far. Now obviously that kind of boxes you into a corner, and I I get it, you want the full range of people with all these different problems, but it might be you could I'm just like spitballing here, it's your product, but you could start with that problem as a way of hooking people in, and who you know don't have to stick with that problem. Maybe you hook a bunch of people in with that problem, and then they say, Well, actually, Jason, there's a much, much bigger problem that I've got. It's blah, whatever.
Marketing CI In A Stagnant Market
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I um um again, I think it's like uh first I have to figure out how to uh what's the metaphor? It's like this this doesn't work, but it's like first I build the airplane and then I put the wind under the wings or something like that. Uh it's like I don't want to like try to automate it uh before I understand what it is. Like I don't want to mechanize it before uh like I I want to hand build the first few cars before I make a factory to build the cars.
SPEAKER_02100%. I'm just suggesting that when you're hand building those cars, as you're hand building them, you could have a very specific car in mind that you're building, I guess is what I'm saying, rather than the kind of because what I always think of is um I come across so many sales pages. I used to, I actually don't as much anymore. Seems like the people's marketing game has increased a little bit, but I used to come across a lot of product pages, and I would say something at the top like, the next best way to automate your spreadsheets or something. Like, what does that mean? And you'd read down and there'd be all this confusing it does this and it does this, and I'm like, yeah, but what is it? What's the pain that you're solving? What's the number one problem you're solving? I get to the end of the page on it, I have no idea what this even is. I'm closing the browser. Whereas it actually could have been something that I would have maybe been interested in. So I always think that um the most powerful marketing pages, at least for me as a consumer, are the ones that have a very, very clear pain and it's front and center in the in the headline, here is the pain, and you either go, doesn't resonate, or oh my gosh, yes, let me read more.
SPEAKER_01Um yeah, yeah, and it's interesting because like um is that the way that people choose and buy uh, for example, CI products? Um people are deeply irrational. Um, and there's so much like uh cargo culting and stuff like that, and it might be that somebody picks Circle CI just because there's like a critical mass, and that's what they've used in the past, and stuff like that, or they use GitHub Actions because they've similar reasons.
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01And what is actually on the website doesn't matter at all, and they're not even gonna be entertaining, like they won't even um it it's like what I put on my website doesn't matter much because that part of it isn't even part of the decision-making process. I I think that's not quite it, because like I think it does matter what's on the website, but you know what I mean?
Simplicity Over YAML And Setup
SPEAKER_02Like the the Yeah, well, those people are never gonna try your products anyway, because they're going to have all of these other hidden reasons.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and by the way, I I wonder what's on the Circle CI website. I just have to go there now. Interesting, it says in big letters, AI code make you nervous question mark.
SPEAKER_02There you go, beautiful. Like, I'm not a massive fan of the product, but yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but who knows? You know, um, is that uh is that actually doing anything for them or not?
Hook With One Pain Point
SPEAKER_02The the entire history of marketing and Alex Hamosy and everything I've read would suggest yes, it absolutely is. Because whether we want to believe this are developers or not, whether we like the uncomfortable reality, this is just my truth. My truth is people buy things because it solves one of their top three problems and because it's freaking obvious. Good marketing is not clever, it's not like nuanced, it's not subtle, it's bam. Do you have this problem, yes or no? Are you motivated to fix it? If so, come on in. And you still get massive attrition, obviously, like you know, 0.01% conversion rate. Right. Um, but when I was uh when I was doing the landing page for my book, uh I applied some of these principles. Now I'll never know what the conversion rate would have been if I had it's not like I've A B tested all this stuff, but um a surprising number of people I drove to that landing page bought the book. The conversion rate is pretty high. I can't remember, but I think it might be 3%, 4%, something like that, which is pretty good. I sold almost no copies at all, but I was uh maybe like 150 copies or something, so we're not talking like masses of data here. But the people that I was targeting, at least the vast majority of them, but had never heard of me, had no idea who I was. It was a completely it was actually a.NET audience that um I ran some paid ads um from this newsletter to it. And when I looked back at that marketing page, like I did a lot of things wrong with the book, I think. But one of the things I did really well, I think maybe, was targeting people's actual pain when they were reading books. And I knew that because I'd known my pain. So targeting a pain, and again, hundred million dollar offers by Alex Homozy. Absolutely mind-bogglingly great book, and it just completely changed. Have have you read that one?
SPEAKER_01No, no, I I have it somewhere because somebody gave it to me, but I haven't cracked it open.
SPEAKER_02If you are building a product in twenty twenty six, uh that is the most important book I would say to read, especially if you've got a product. Because he talks about ironically, this is wish we had more time, but this is um it's like the uh what versus how in software development but applied to business. So the what versus how is um if I'm abstracting some uh if I'm abstracting a chunk of code into a method, the method name in my world, it's better if the method name is what is happening inside the method, not how it's happening.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
Herd Behavior And Developer Buying
SPEAKER_02And everything I know about good design decouples the what from the how. You don't want to know necessarily using Stripe to send the payment provider. You don't necessarily want to know that you're using MailChimp to send the emails, because then you can switch to another email provider. And to some degree, that there's there's parts when that logic breaks down. Sometimes you do want to use specific features of MailChimp. But anyway, if you kind of take that as read, then Alex talks a lot about the author. And he said, so many people make the mistake of thinking what's in the box is what you put on the outside of the box. So what I mean by that is people say things like, Oh, what what what do you do? What's your business? They say, Well, I sell online courses for software developers to learn how to code, let's say. They say, Oh, tell me more about that. And the person says, Well, you get a Slack community and you get 16 videos and you get bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla. That's just what's inside the box. That's not interesting at all. That doesn't make somebody want to buy it. What makes somebody want to buy it is the promise, what you see outside from the outside of the box, which is the what, not the how. How you deliver that, well, you can only get somebody interested in the how once you get them interested in the what. What is the pain that you're trying to solve, and why does it I don't care what's really in the box that much. Tell me what you're going to improve about my life, and then they go, Oh, that's interesting. Then they open the box and then they want to know, and that becomes part of the purchasing decision.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, all this stuff is so interesting and it's so complicated. Um, and it's it's like also simple in certain ways, but also extremely complicated and nuanced, and there's like exceptions and contextual details and stuff like that.
Pain-First Pages And Conversions
SPEAKER_02I don't I honestly don't think it is that like yes, you're right, you're absolutely right, because humans are complex beasts, but the way Alex breaks it down, and he has built-I mean, he has made hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in his life using these principles, and you know, he he keeps it so simple, and there's all these nuances, and it's tempting to kind of get drawn into the psychology, and like, but I think it's actually way simpler than I have been making out. But it doesn't mean it's easy, it's really, really hard because you've got to go through a lot of manual digging the ditch, as you say, to get to that promise, to get to that thing on the outside of the box that is going to draw people in. But once you've got that, and once that fit, that product market fit is there, once you've figured out the right problem to solve that draws people in, there's this bit in the book that I always love where he says, What is the what is the biggest advantage any business can have? I'll put the question to you. What's the biggest advantage a business can have? Is it like the best sales copy? Is it the best product? Is it the best customer service? Like what is it?
SPEAKER_01I wonder if this is a variant on a similar question I've heard. Um there's this Gary Halbert starving crowd thing where he asked his students if if your restaurant could have any advantage, what would it be? Best food, best location, whatever. And he said what he would pick is a starving crowd.
What Versus How: Offers That Win
SPEAKER_02That's it. He's lifted the whole thing. Um it's exactly that almost verbatim in the book. So I'm I've mangled a bit. You you did a far more accurate representation. But but that's it. Like the and then this Sequoia document that uh Benjamin sent me is fascinating because it says there's actually three kinds of problems. This is the first time I've heard this. I've done so much reading, so much learning. Um, and when I say learning, I just mean reading loads of stuff and sort of half implementing it, and then getting the fear that I'm a bad person because I'm spamming all these people and just doing something else and all the rest of it. But yeah, I've never I've never heard this idea, but this is really, really important for what we're both doing, I think. If you believe this document, who knows whether this is true? But this is this is Sequoia telling us this. So, you know, the VC, massive VC company, they probably know what they're talking about, I would guess. But they say there are three kinds of problem actually. The first one is a hair-on-fire problem. People are absolutely desperate for help. That is uh, you know, my business is about to go under in a month if I don't solve this problem. I'm going to lose the love of my life if I don't solve this problem. Um, you know, you get the point. Uh there's the second type of problem, which is a hard fact problem, which is kind of oh well, this is a bit rubbish, but you know, this is the way it is. I always have to configure the YAML for every CI. It sucks, but hey, what are you gonna do? Whatever. And then the third type is future vision. So that's Steve Jobs with the iPhone, basically, trying to come up with something that nobody has ever even thought about. So I'm not interested in the latter. I'm too old for that, I'm too cynical for that. Um, so what we're left is with two categories it's either a hair-on-fire problem, which I would argue being productive with AI is somewhere in that ballpark of a hair-on-fire problem. There are so many people who have got massive FOMO and engineering leaders seeing all of these engineers under their and in their remit moving too slowly, and they're like, How can I possibly take advantage of this incredibly revolutionary technology? And obviously, nobody's properly cracked that yet, I I would argue. And then hard fact is the kind of so with hair on fire problems, you've got to move at a very different pace. Like it changes the dynamic of the customer discovery, the business. So you need to be, you need to stand out from the noise, you need to be incredibly like above everybody else, you need to be best in class, and you're you're gonna be crowded out by lots of competitors. Whereas a hard fact category is more like it's a stagnant category. You're competing against habit. Oh, well, you know, I always have to configure the YAML. That's just what I do, and you're gonna come in and take away that part of my routine, Jason. Don't think so. And it's so it's a novel solution for an accepted pain. And the failure mode is people say, Well, this isn't really worth my time to solve this problem. Um, so yeah.
SPEAKER_01Interesting. Um yeah, I've I've I've thought about those different kinds of um kinds of issues in like vitamins versus painkillers type thing. Um and people are more motivated to avoid pain than to uh or or to avoid loss than to gain something and all that stuff. Um I was supposed to yeah, go ahead.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I've never really I've never really mapped it. I've heard that many times. Um yeah, I've never really mapped it to those two. Maybe it's just another reframing of those two, actually. I hadn't thought about that. That's interesting. I was treating it as oh, this is brand new information, but actually maybe it's not. Um but Sequoia basically say, you know, you can make you can make a business out of any of the three paths, is their point. Just because you've not got this insane, this incredibly, incredibly like pressing problem if you're not helping somebody out of a divorce or their you know, their house being repossessed or something, just because you're not doing that doesn't mean you can't make it. Doesn't mean you can't make money. It's just with the hard facts category, you need to accept that you're playing a different game, basically.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, right. Yeah, it's interesting the the different kinds of businesses and and it's different to sell them, like it's different to sell professional services versus a product, it's different to sell a book than it is to sell SaaS and all that stuff, all very different.
Starving Crowds And Problem Types
SPEAKER_02Yeah, definitely. And um just coming back to the hundred million dollar offers for a moment, the the thing that really also stood out to me that might apply to your product as well is um he says that he he he leads us through in the book how to create an offer that is ridiculously successful. And he said obviously you start out with a pain point, but then you list out in extraneous detail every single reason why the customer will not buy your product, every single pain point that they have, every single reason not to buy, and also every single pain that they're trying to solve that's related to this. So, in the example he uses like um weight loss at a gym, which is how he made his money, um, really super crowded area, right? Like everybody's talking about weight loss at this time of year, and he got to the point where he could sell uh gyms on his program to help them treble their customer base or whatever it was, and they they paid him forty-two thousand dollars for his training, and he turned around all these gyms, and basically, like the average salary or something of the gym owner in the US is maybe a little bit double than that. So a gym owner was sacrificing half their salary to invest in this thing, and he's got loads of loads of great testimonials, um, and he made an incredibly successful business out of it. But he did that by combating every single pain point. So if he's selling gym memberships, he said you've got to figure out all the problems and then all the sub problems from that. So, what's the problems? I don't eat healthily, I don't exercise enough, whatever. But I don't eat healthily can be I'm I'm too lazy to cook, I don't have time to cook, I've got kids, I've got work, I have to go out to dinner, what am I going to eat at dinner? And then he said, You basically make a part of your offer that solves every single sub problem that that customer has. And he says, interestingly, if if you have 32 problems, if your customer has 32 problems and you don't address one of those problems, they won't buy.
SPEAKER_01Very interesting. And I imagine that comes from having a lot of conversations with people. Like um, I I read those couple books, uh, Scientific Advertising and My Life in Advertising by uh I forget the author's name, but these are from like over a hundred years ago. Um, and he said that advertising is salesmanship in print. Um, and so a lot of his uh advertising would come out of conversations because other you know, when you're just sending somebody a letter or an email or whatever, you don't have a chance to hear their objections. Um, so I wonder if Alex Hermozzi or whatever his name is. I I wonder if he um spent a lot of time selling in person. I guess if he's selling gym related services, that would have been better.
Vitamins, Painkillers, And Fit
SPEAKER_02He did. Yeah. He did, I believe I'm right in saying he did 2,000 in-person sales consultations. 2,000. Wow. Yeah, yeah, he has another book called Gym Secrets, where he says, if you set up your gym with this exact system that I've developed, you will yeah, you'll make a shed load of money. So he did things like super cool tri uh not tricks, but super cool things like so he would invite customers when they would come in, potential customers, to have a chat about their fitness, and he'd say, just wait in this waiting room for 10 minutes, we'll be with you soon. And they like they were ready for them, but they let them wait in the waiting room for 10 minutes and they plastered this waiting room with testimonials from floor to ceiling. The entire thing was an entire room of testimonials. So in the 10 minutes, what people did people do? They just looked at all loads of all these other people, like them, with the same bodies as them, saw the before and after.
Objection Lists And Proof
SPEAKER_01That's really interesting. Anyway, I know you have a hard stop, but yeah, um man, and there's so much to to dig into. But yeah, I I I want to loop something around and uh with the in-person uh uh sales conversations and objections and and stuff like that, those are the reps that I'm trying to get um by having having conversations with prospective Saturn CI users. Um are you interested in this? If not, why not? If so, why? And stuff like that. At this stage, most people just I think most people just don't don't uh get it. It's not interesting at all to them. Um which is again not surprising, and it's not a bad thing, it just is. But then a small fraction of people are interested in interested in it, and my task is to figure out what's behind that. And then what what are all your objections? And now I'll have to uh list out the objections and address each one of those specifically. Um but yeah, unfortunately I do have a a hard stop. Um I hope we can do this again much sooner than 18 months from now, uh, because I want to talk more about your uh three ideas that you brought up. We didn't get to get into those as much as I I would like to. Um before we go, is there anywhere you'd like to send people to learn more about what you more about you and what you're up to?
SPEAKER_02Uh yeah, thanks. So there's joyfulprogramming.com, which is my um blog, essentially. It's a substack um with loads of articles about observability in there. I'm very active on LinkedIn, uh LinkedIn slash dot com slash in slash synaptic mishap. Um and thirdly of all, I've got a link tree at link.tree slash joyful programming or one word. Um and I've been doing a challenge uh since before Christmas where I'm doing a YouTube short every single day. So uh there's all my thoughts about observability and testing and the state of software at uh my channel Joyful Programming on YouTube.
SPEAKER_01All right, well, we'll put that stuff in the show notes. And John, thanks so much for coming on the show.
SPEAKER_02I appreciate you having me. Thanks very much.