Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: Welcome. I'm glad you're here. Have you ever heard of Stack Overflow? Jeff Atwood is a co-founder and one of the key people who brought that influential and successful network of Q&A websites to life.
Jeff now brings his community building prowess to his work at discourse, a fast growing community SAS company. Jeff knows what it takes to innovate in the digital world, and there's nothing magical or glamorous about it. It's all about fear, discomfort, and iterative experiments.
Jeff: The things in life that really push you are the things that are going to feel scary. And what feels scariest of all is putting something out there. It's like, [00:01:00] well, I don't know if it's right. I don't know if I did it right. I don't know if it looks good. I don't know if people are going to like this.
Maybe it sucks. And you've got to push past that fear. That's a good fear to have. That means you're on the right path, but do it anyway.
Amy: Jeff is one of my favorite people to talk with. I know you'll enjoy his stories and insights as much as I do. Listen in.
Welcome Jeff, to the Getting2Alpha podcast.
Jeff: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Amy: For those who don't know you, give us a whirlwind tour of your background. How did you first get started in design and tech and how did you decide what to pursue along the way? What were the signals?
Jeff: I had been fascinated with computers from a fairly early age.
I have my dad to thank. I was very involved in like the Atari 2600 era of video games and my dad insists, he's like, no, no, no, you can't, can't play these games. You got to write your own games, Jeff. That's what you got to do. So he insisted that I had to have a [00:02:00] computer and I was like, okay, well, if I get more games or games to play, that sounds cool to me.
And we got computers and I just loved the little worlds that you would get immersed in on the computer. Like those worlds were Fascinating to me in a way that maybe was kind of actually a little unhealthy at some levels. So historically, I've just always been super into the little worlds that you can create and participate in on your computer.
And that's my background. That's where I came from. And then I also picked up blogging in 2004. I was a programmer at that time, professionally, I graduated from college and, you know, I was doing my job. And I noticed that in Google search results, there were a lot of results that were blogs that were really helpful where people were just sharing experiences they had, sharing their insight.
And I had previously thought of blogs as like a diary. It's like, well, that seems silly. Why would you post your diary? That doesn't seem useful. It doesn't seem interesting. But once I started getting all these search hits, the blogs that were helping me, I was like, wow, this is useful.
Like this makes sense. [00:03:00] And I wanted to start a blog because. I loved software so much. Like, I just love the process of building software. I love the thinking that went into it, the engineering, the usability, all this stuff was so interesting to me. And the people I worked with weren't necessarily as interested in programming as I was.
They were programmers, but it was just kind of their job. For me, it was like, Something I was fascinated with and wanted to explore even outside of work. And I didn't really have an outlet for that. So the blog became in 2004, Coding Horror. My blog was like a New Year's resolution to, you know, post one or two things a week.
And really explore what programming was and how it worked and why it worked. And, uh, that blog over time became very, very popular. By 2007, it was so popular that, It made my day job seem a little quaint that I would go into work. I would interact with, you know, 20, 30 people, or I could write a blog entry that like, you know, tens of thousands of people would see and read and respond to.
So work started to seem like [00:04:00] something that I did in addition to my real job, which was blogging that actually let me reach a bunch of people and really explore topics that I was interested in. So from that blog experience of where I had all this energy in my blog, I knew that I wanted to build something.
I was like, okay, I got this big audience that's paying attention to what I'm doing. And that's such a privilege, like to have people pay attention to you is important and powerful. And I was like, I want to do something good with this. I want to take this energy, build something. But I didn't know what it was.
So I started contacting a bunch of people online that I admired that were doing cool things. And one of the people I contacted was Joel Spolsky, who had run a blog for a long time called Joel and Software. And he said to me, he said, Jeff, you know what we should do? We should build. A site like Experts Exchange, but without all the used car weirdness that goes on on that site for programmers.
And I said, Oh, that sounds amazing. And that became Stack Overflow. That's the project that we started in 2008 that became Stack Overflow, which is a Q&A site for programmers, and it's actually a network [00:05:00] of Q&A sites. And then by 2012, we had kind of. Built Stack Overflow. I was getting, frankly, a little burned out.
Like that was my first startup experience. So I put like everything I had into that, like probably in an unhealthy way. And we had, we had also had twins. We were, we found out we were having twins. I had a son in 2009 and we found out we're having twins in 2012. And. Between the company being an amazing place, like Stack Overflow was doing what it was supposed to do and becoming all the things that it was supposed to become, I was getting very burned out.
We had the twins, so it was time to sort of take a step back and figure out what I was going to do next. And it made sense for me to, at that point, kind of like leave the company. Uh, let Joel run the company. And then I needed to figure out what I wanted to do at that point. And I took some time off and I realized that I needed a project to be working on.
Like it was unhealthy for me as a person to not have something to do. Not that my family wasn't amazing. Cause you know, it's an incredible experience to have these children and have these [00:06:00] interactions with them from birth. But at the same time, I needed to wake up and kind of be. on a mission from God.
Like, I feel like if I don't have a mission, I kind of lose track of who I am as a person. That's not healthy for me. So I started looking around at, like, you know, what I could build. And one of the things that struck me was when we built Stack Overflow, it was, it was very, we thought of it as kind of like, oh, maybe it's like a forum.
It's like a place where programmers go to discuss software. But the deeper we got into it, realized it wasn't about the discussion. It was about the strictness of having a question and having people, Answer the question. That was the value in the system. It wasn't like, let's have random discussions. It was I have a problem.
Help me fix my problem. And that focus made it a very learning oriented site, which was very powerful and very, very effective, but it didn't cover a lot of social scenarios where the information wasn't really the point of the interaction. And I noticed that Since we started the project in 2008, all the forum software that we had looked at was virtually unchanged.
And [00:07:00] occasionally, startups would come to me and ask me for advice because I look successful. They're like, well, you're Jeff Atwood, you founded Stack Overflow, you're a blogger, you must really know what you're doing. Which isn't true, by the way, but they think that. So they would come to me and ask me for advice.
And I was like, okay, the problem I had with this was that you're asking me for advice about a product that I probably don't use. And I said, well, why are you asking me? Why aren't you asking Your users, your fans, your audience. Why aren't you asking them what they think of what you're doing? Cause their opinion is much more important than my opinion is this outside, you know, air quotes expert, uh, talk to your community.
And some of them would say, Oh, Jeff, that's amazing advice. You're totally right. Let's talk to our community and figure out what we're doing. And they would, the next thing they would say to me is, well, what software do we use to do that? How do we talk to our community? And then I was like, it was like sad trombone would play because I realized there was no software that was good that I would want installed on my site that I could recommend to them for talking to [00:08:00] their community, the simple act of going to your community and interacting with your fans, your audience, the creators, whoever it is, that's paying attention to what you're doing.
You need to have a good experience. It's you can't just like. outsource that to Facebook or Twitter or whatever, you need to have a community that belongs to you, that belongs to your, whatever it is that you're doing. And that project became Discourse, where I wanted to create an open source platform for people to talk to each other, like discussion forums, but one that was modern and good and civil, and you didn't degenerate into the howling of wolves online.
You know, where you have these reasonable interactions with people in a place, in a clubhouse that belongs to you. So that became Discourse, and it's also fully open source, which I wasn't able to do on Stack Overflow. That's not really an open source project, but Discourse, my current project, is. It's something I could just give to everybody and say, here, here's this amazing tool, talking to your, your fans, for talking to the people that are paying attention to you.
Because I think that's, to me, that's so important. That's so central to everything that I was [00:09:00] doing, was talking to the people that were doing all the work in the system with us. That, that's where I am now. So currently my current project is the discourse project.
Amy: Does discourse Integrate with other systems?
Jeff: It does the main way of integration is through site navigation. If you think of like a website there will be a link on your website that says community or support or whatever word you want to use It's like the place I go to talk to other people that are doing this thing with us, right? So the level of integration, there can be deeper integrations is essentially single sign on and also navigational integration.
So you would be on the community area of the website at that point. So that's what this course is. And that's the main form of integration.
Amy: So, what made you want to pursue that after working on Q&A?
Jeff: Well, because Q&A is, it's, it's really laser focused on getting results, which is why it works so amazingly well.
And we could see from day one of Stack Overflow, it was working incredibly well because it was laser focused on two things, really [00:10:00] learning and getting work done, like actual work that someone would pay you for. So it was very, valuable because it was solving real problems that people had. It wasn't solving hypothetical daydream questions that, you know, why is the sky blue, you know, opinion questions like, which is better a or B, right.
That doesn't really help you get work done, but exploring like, why am I having this problem and what can you tell me about this problem is, is really valuable. But that was also frustrating because it left out a whole continuum of human interaction that was like dinner table conversation. Yeah. You know, which is a lot of what the internet is.
If you look at an average street in a city, Stack Overflow would be like a school. It would be like a university or a middle school, something, some form of learning. You don't need a school on every street in your community. That would be massive overkill, right? But you do have, on every street in your community, probably a couple restaurants, a couple places for people to hang out, bars, whatever you want to call them.
Uh, and that's kind of what discourse is. And, uh, I felt [00:11:00] that there was a huge part of the internet that I wasn't able to, to give something to because unless they could fit their worldview into, is it based on data facts and science? Can it be stated in the form of a question that can actually have an answer?
Not hundreds of answers, not 50 answers, but like 10 answers, maybe a max. Then there was nothing I could offer you. It's like our software is not going to work for you. And Stack Overflow is very strict. People complain about it all the time because you go there and you ask a question, it can be downvoted.
It could be closed or put on hold is what they call it now. There's reasons that the system is very strict and what it will accept. And not everybody is cool with that, right? They don't want strictness. They want a place where they can go and just kind of let it all hang out. So it was nice to be able to offer the open source side.
The yin and yang of Q&A is very strict, very learning focused, and discussion is very loose, and it's more focused on how does it make you feel. It's not focused on getting work done, right? But it's applicable to a much larger percent of the interactions [00:12:00] we have on the internet. So I wanted to reach that side of the problem and give people great software to just hang out and have a good time and, you know, entertainment and what I call accidental learning, which is what Reddit does.
You go to Reddit, you don't really go there to learn anything, but you might. There's some accidental learning that can go on there where it's like you're paging through the encyclopedia and you're like, oh, wow, look, I never knew that, you know, random fact X, you know, that's interesting. I don't know when I'll use that, but it's there.
So that kind of accidental learning. is also very interesting to me. And that's the kind of things you get out of discussion systems.
Amy: So what's an example of someone or an organization that's using discourse right now, and it's just rocking their world.
Jeff: I would say game companies. It's extremely natural because discourse itself is, is trying to be not necessarily a flying car.
It's not trying to be so far future that you can't even recognize what it is. It still looks like discussion software. It still looks a little bit like a forum or a message board or BBS or whatever you want to call it. It's recognizably that [00:13:00] thing, but we did tweak the formula such that we want to be competitive with Facebook.
We want to be competitive with Twitter. We want to be competitive with Snapchat, even technically like all these. You know, newfangled tools that people are using. We need to have an experience that's the equal of those modern type of experiences. And I think gaming communities are very open to this because they play games.
Like games are always. a little bit alien, right? Like you have to figure stuff out and they're cool with that. You know, it's like, oh cool, something to figure out. That's fun. That's not an obstacle that's in my way. It's like, oh God, now I have to figure something out. It's like, no, awesome. Now I have to figure something out.
So they take very easily to discourse because they're open to this, this new challenge that discourse represents, uh, this new gameplay experience that it represents. It's, it's just different enough. What I liken it to is the difference between a blog and a Tumblr, right? So Tumblr came out and I was like, it's like a blog, but it's like, you know, a little bit more micro focused.
It's still people putting, you know, words, images and stuff on in a chronological form. It's not completely alien, but it's different [00:14:00] enough that people would say, I have a Tumblr versus I have a blog. So discourse is kind of like that. It's a little bit Tumblr y in the sense that it tries to give you a slightly different flavor experience.
And gaming communities, I think do really well. Like we have a site for Gearbox. Um, who, who did, um, you know, Borderlands, that game series, and, uh, Turtle Rock, who did the game Evolve. So those communities have been very popular, have done very well with this course in particular.
Amy: Awesome. I'd like to go back to Stack Overflow.
You were there from the beginning. How did the Stack Overflow reputation system evolve?
Jeff: It was definitely in the design from the very first day because one of the things we want to get to is programming is very much a peer driven experience. One of the jokes about programmers is the best way to motivate a programmer isn't to pay him more money or anything like that.
The best way to motivate them is to tell them another programmer has done it better than they could do it, right? Because it's this sort of showing [00:15:00] off what you know. I don't mean that in a negative way, like, I will show you up. It's more like, it's cool to show off what you know. And programming is, is such a weird discipline because it's so fractally complicated.
There are so many little nooks and crannies of programming that if you make, say, three or four decisions in a row, I'm going to do A instead of B. Then C instead of D, and then E instead of F. You're already in such a weird place that only a tiny fraction of programmers have done what you're about to do, just because you made three or four common choices.
So everybody who's been down those paths is a small group of people. So if you can reach each other, you're always learning from each other. There are these little tiny complicated things, right? That you may use this once a year, you know, so there's all these opportunities for people to learn from each other.
And the upvote mechanism is a way of patting something back and say, Hey, that really helped me. Thanks pal. You know, you really know what you're talking about. That's cool. You know, and that reputation. Is peer acceptance of peer peers, not the system, not Stack Overflow saying, but other [00:16:00] programmers saying, Hey, this person really knows their stuff and that's cool, right?
You know, knowing stuff is cool, you know, winning is, as they say, um, you know, knowing is half the battle, right? And so that reputation system was baked in of like peer acceptance of the answers. And also to some extent, you know, there are downvotes, you know, so there's peer unacceptance of your answers. So that's another aspect of the system.
One of the funny things, Amy, that we put in early on was a cap. The reputation you get from other programmers upvoting your stuff. There's a limit to how much of that you can get per day. Because I didn't want people to spend all day on Stack Overflow because that's not really the job. The job is the programming.
The job is the work that you're performing by writing this code. Stack Overflow itself is not the job. And it was funny how many people Really didn't like this. They would fight this limit. It's like, you can't cap my reputation. How dare you, you know, I want to be on Stack Overflow all the time. I want to get all the reputation I can.
And I had to say that I was like, but you know, that's not the [00:17:00] job. You know, you got to have perspective about what we're here to do. We're here to learn to get better at our jobs. And it's good to do that. But it's also good to, you know, You know, be at work and writing your code, not playing the Stack Overflow game all day.
That was one of the funny little things that happened early on.
Amy: That is such a great story. And I think that story resonates with understanding what real value is. And also understanding what progress means when you're building a system like Stack Overflow. Progress doesn't really mean you're getting better at using Stack Overflow.
Progress means you're getting better at being an ace programmer because you're solving your problems.
Jeff: That's right. And the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. That's another hidden lesson. We don't say that anywhere in Stack Overflow. But everybody that uses Stack Overflow gets that because when you can really explain something to another programmer and they go, Oh, wow, I totally get it.
That totally makes sense. Then you have mastered that thing. You know, that's the skill that we're secretly teaching other [00:18:00] programs. Also, the other secret skill that we're teaching programmers is basic communication. Like, can you communicate with other human beings in a way that they can understand what the heck it is you're trying to say?
Because that's a skill! And if you can write a really good answer, it's good because It was clear, it was complete, and I could understand it. You know, maybe you made a little diagram or something. You know, people, they love that. I mean, my God, if you put a diagram in a post, if you want the secret to getting Stack Overflow reputation, put something fancy in your post, like a diagram or like, you know, some, some bulleted points, something cool that, that explains, right?
Like a, you know, that, that's the goal, it's communication.
Amy: So how did you decide which powers and privileges to attach as people leveled up in reputation?
Jeff: A big inspiration for a lot of Stack Overflow is Wikipedia. The idea that other people could edit your stuff, and that was okay. And this is again something that shouldn't be alien to you as a programmer.
Because programmers rarely work in isolation. And in fact, I would argue working in isolation is unhealthy as a programmer. [00:19:00] Because, you know, just having even one person look at your code or look at what you're doing and provide you feedback makes it so much better than it would otherwise be. So programming is not solo occupation.
Although, historically. It's funny, if you look back pre internet, it really was, like when I was getting started with computers, like the Commodore 64 and this really early stuff, it was just me in a room, in a book, right? That was programming. Those days are long gone. Programming these days is, you know, a bunch of programmers working together.
So the, the key insight that we had was like, you have to be cool. With other people editing your stuff now, not new users, not, you know, random people off the internet, but people that we trust. So as you get reputation from other users and stack overflow, you eventually get the ability, you unlock the ability to edit anyone's stuff without, you don't have to ask permission.
There's no approval. You just go edit it. Bam. Done. Right? I think that was one of the key. Absolutely. One of the key abilities want to get to early on was the ability. to collaboratively edit stuff and that this, this feels good and this is okay because A, it works for Wikipedia and [00:20:00] B, it should work for programmers.
I mean, all programmers should be able to work together in a way that's not destructive by editing each other's stuff.
Amy: That's awesome. So why do you think, looking back, Stack took off and succeeded where Experts Exchange didn't?
Jeff: Well, Experts Exchange didn't like their audience. I mean, they did a lot of things that were not really respectful of the audience.
Like one of the key things they did was essentially we won't show you the information unless you pay us. They made a big like dog and pony show about you would come to the site, you would be there through Google search trying to solve some problem. They're like, there's an answer here, but we can't show it to you because it's a secret.
And only, members can see the answer and it just feels awful, right? It's not even really true because for Google, like you can't do that to Google. You can't have the answer on a page and not show it to people that come there through Google because Google is like, no, we're not having that. Like it doesn't even make sense from a user perspective.
Right? So there was a way if you scrolled way, way, way, way down the page. You could get the answer, but it was just this horribly slimy interaction, right? [00:21:00] Day, second, zero of your interaction with experts has changed and they make you feel so bad about what you're doing. You know, that I think was, that's it.
I mean, it was just, they didn't care about their audience. Cause, and the funny thing too, is the people. With the questions and answers were just regular users. So they were taking someone else's content and putting it behind a paywall that was like not even really a paywall. It's like a secret paywall.
You had to have this little trick to get around. It's just a horrible interaction. It's not respectful of the community. It's not respectful of the person that comes there. It's, it was easy to do better than Experts Exchange because they were like a model of like what you don't want to do to people that come to your site.
Amy: So, now that you've been working at the forefront of innovation, you know, your early blogger, Stack Overflow, very influential early site. What do you know now that you wish you'd known earlier about how to innovate successfully?
Jeff: I think it, it's pretty simple, Amy. I think that the first [00:22:00] thing to think about is like start yesterday, whatever it is you're thinking about doing begin because getting started is this huge hurdle to getting anything done.
Like you have to first build some version of it. And it's not going to be exactly what you wanted it to be. I have a rule of thumb that, and it's been true on with this course, my current project and with Stack Overflow, it takes you three years to build the thing that you originally wanted to build anyway, and you will only be able to build that through the feedback that you get by getting that first version out there.
So start yesterday's my primary piece of advice and get something out there, even if it's not that great. Cause you know, You have to be a little bit uncomfortable. The things in life that really push you are the things that are going to feel scary. And what feels scariest of all is putting something out there.
It's like, well, I don't know if it's right. I don't know if I did it, right. I don't know if it looks good. I don't know if people are going to like this. Maybe it sucks. And you got to push past that fear. That's a good fear to have. That means you're on the right [00:23:00] path, but do it anyway, because getting it out there, Means you're going to be able to proceed to the next step of making it better, because when you build things in your mind, when you build things that no one else can see, you're not, probably not building the right things.
And Stack Overflow was completely contingent on the people in the system doing the work. They're the ones interacting with the system. They're the ones that need to be satisfied with it. Not my mental idea of how Stack Overflow should work. We had ideas, but when the rubber meets the road, it's about how is the community Reacting to what you put in front of them is a good bad.
And there were so many things that we, you know, we either got wrong or needed to tweak or could make a lot better in a very simple way where the community could point it. Hey, if you did this, it would be so much cooler. I was like, Oh my God, you're right. That's awesome. Right? Like start yesterday and put it out there as soon as you can and get feedback on it and just start that iteration machine.
The iteration machine is the most powerful thing you can harness as an [00:24:00] entrepreneur. Um, the iteration machine of putting it out there, getting feedback, making it better, putting another version out there. That's the job. That's how you get things done and get to that as soon as you can in the process.
Amy: That's awesome. You said that with a lot of passion. Do you see a lot of first time product owners and first time startup CEOs making this mistake?
Jeff: I would say it's pretty common because nobody wants their baby to be, nobody wants people to tell them their baby is ugly, right? Because there are people that are going to tell you that your baby's ugly when you put it out there and it doesn't feel great.
But at the same time, you know, there You have such power to take that feedback, fold it in, make it better, and say, you know what, and think about earlier in your life, there's this festival called XOXO, it's by Andy Bayou, they don't do it anymore, but there was this guy that went on stage, and he explained, he does mashups and art and stuff like that, but he explained, like, he started doing this at age 10.
And I was like, Oh my God, that's amazing. [00:25:00] If you could start at age 10 doing this stuff, imagine how good you're going to be by age 21 compared to other people that started later, right? And it's a big part of his story. He was also homeschooled and other stuff. And his parents were very encouraging of like, You know, you don't have to go to school, but you just have to learn stuff.
So he's able to start at a very early age, learning all the stuff that he was interested in and making. And he's gotten really good now, right? As a result of starting really, really early. So if you're questioning, like, when should I start? How should I start? It's like, well, my primary advice is, you know, start yesterday.
Start as soon as you can. And the quicker you'll get to being somewhere really good.
Amy: Drilling down into that, both you and I know, It's tricky to build something that's innovative and successful. That's just a very tricky path to walk. And you need this blend of having a vision, you have to have some vision, but then also this iteration machine really getting smart feedback.
One of the things I've learned [00:26:00] is who you want feedback from changes over time, depending on how far along you are, how early you are in your iteration cycle. So on your projects and when you advise other, you know, startup people who come to you and say, Hey, you look successful. What do you think? How do you manage the shift from the people that you're going to test your ID on and actually pay attention to early on?
And then the people you want to pay attention to later when you're further along.
Jeff: You bring up a good point. So I think before you even start, there's a certain amount of research you want to do about here's the thing I want to build. Other people have probably built things similar to this in the past, but you want to research not just the successes, but actually the failures.
So I think there's value in research before you start. I'm not saying just go build immediately. Don't even think just build, build, build. I'm saying, you know, You know, try to get to that pretty quickly. But the phase of research, of understanding what worked and what didn't work, is really quite important.
Like when we started Discord, I was [00:27:00] like, well, I'm gonna go research every discussion forum software I can think of. The good ones, the bad ones, the ones that aren't here anymore. And just understand the history of what people have built here before. Because, you know, nothing is really new. There's probably somebody that's tried this idea before, uh, in some fashion.
So start with that. Do your research phase and understand successes and failures that came before you. Understand the industry that you're looking at building in, right? And then once you have something, you probably want more than one person to build it. You know, I'm a big fan of the buddy system. So assuming you have, say, two founders at a company, you're going to get good feedback from each other because you're going to have different ideas about stuff.
That's your initial circle. Feedback from you know, your co-founder, other people at the small company that you're at, and then you widen the circle a little bit to like, okay, people that we trust, people that we know that like, know us or would be interested in what we're doing, you can widen the circle to sort of like trusted friends, okay, trusted friends, look at what we're doing, and we did this on discourse very explicitly, we widen the circles, like, okay, let's invite people we know that we can kind of trust to look at it and give us feedback on it, and that was us [00:28:00] broadening the circle, and then finally, pushing through from that to like an actual beta of running a community because discourse is discussion software.
So we had to find some community that was willing to be on this beta software and give us feedback to it. And then we went from one beta to two beta, three betas, and then broaden the circle even more. So it's, it's really broadening the circle.
You don't have to jump directly from something nobody has ever seen, something that's on the internet for every random person in the world to, you know, Send me email about you can do it in a more progressive way, just to make sure that you're on the right track, because we got great feedback early on on discourse of like what they liked, what they didn't like, what we got wrong.
But I do want to say, like, no matter how much feedback you get early on, it's just going to take three years to build the thing the way it needs to be built, because It's so hard. It's crazy the things we do in discourse that I'm like, why didn't we think of this two years ago? We're idiots. Like, this is ridiculous that we did not think of this stupid thing that we were doing.
That was, you know, very obvious. Everything seems obvious in retrospect [00:29:00] until you do the work. Nothing is actually that obvious in my experience. It's all about getting it out there and doing the work and turning on that iteration machine.
Amy: What do you feel is your special superpower as a creative person?
What's your sweet spot? What really lights you up?
Jeff: Well, I think you've probably gotten hints of that on this, on this call. It's, it's that I, I love building things with communities. I feel like my superpower is that I'm very good Processing the feedback that I'm getting, listening to it, interacting with that feedback and then building based on the synthesized feedback from the community.
To me, this is so good that really discourse is the product that tries to give you Jeff as an experience. Like, look, if you take discourse and you put it on your site and you actually interact with your customers, with your users, with your fans, whoever they are on a daily basis, as part of your routine, they will make you better.
They will tell you what you need to be doing, what you're doing right, what you're doing wrong. Now, the art of this is you're going to get 90 percent of the feedback you're going to get is not going to be actionable. It's going to be, [00:30:00] for whatever reason, I'm not blaming the people that are getting feedback.
It's just this, there's a lot of reasons that feedback can't work for you at a current time. Like, maybe they're proposing some feature that it would take you years to build, right? You can't build that now. It's not really useful feedback. Or it's just crazy feedback that doesn't make sense that reflects one person's view of, that you don't agree with.
Or maybe they don't even understand what the product does, right? But the 10 percent of feedback for people that really get you and really understand what you're doing, almost as good as you understand it, or even better than you understand it, is pure gold. That is the stuff that I am essentially panning for gold in this river of feedback, right?
And that's what discourse is. It's a tool for panning for gold in the river of feedback. And it's also kind of a lifestyle because I wake up every day, I get on discourse communities. I talk to people using discourse. I use it myself, selfishly, right? I eat my own dog food. That's part of the process.
That's the process. It's like, how can we make this house we live in? Better. We all live in the same house. How can we improve this house? Because it's this most brilliant and amazing software house that we can change [00:31:00] so easily. Unlike actual houses, right? We can just imagine stuff and make it happen. So it's such a privilege to live in the house with people that are willing to live in the same space as you and your roommates.
You live in the same house. You know, you're walking down the same path, so discourse is a tool for walking down that path with your customers, with your users, with your fans and panning for the gold and the feedback, because it's there, the gold is in them, their hills. I'm telling you, and that's the only way I even know how to build a product.
So I might actually be biased and sense that it's probably possible to build products with zero feedback from the community and have it be amazing. But I don't know how to do that. The only way I know how to do that is with the feedback of the community. Walking alongside you as you go.
Amy: So that's fantastic.
You're really pushing the boundaries of social communities online. What trends in online social interactions are you following these days that are impactful? For what you're [00:32:00] doing, whose other work are you paying attention to?
Jeff: That one's still very tough for me. I would say, you know, we look at what really large companies are doing.
We look at what Facebook is doing, what Twitter is doing, these companies that become this enormous network of people that are willing to spend time with each other in this product, right? That is, I think, what we're looking for. But also, In a sense, we're building an alternative that we're saying, look, Facebook owns all that stuff, which isn't wrong.
I don't have any position about that, but it's just a fact of life. Whereas with discourse, we believe a key tenant of community is that you own the community that you participate in. It's not owned by one giant, you know, Walmartopia it's owned by all these vibrant groups that have their own spaces and can be exactly what they want to be.
So I guess what I look at is the inexorable power of centralization, where it's easy for people to be on Facebook and because they're on Facebook, it becomes the default mode of communication for everything they're doing because, you know, you're just [00:33:00] falling down the well of success because you're already there in the first place.
So the art for us with this course is building experiences and communities that are powerful enough. That you're willing to travel to them. You're willing to go to this community to have this experience. You're not going to sit in the well of Facebook and have everything just delivered to you passively.
You're going to actually seek out these communities. Like what does it take to build a community that's. You know, vital enough that you would go there every day. And that's the art. And I don't think there's any one answer to that question. I think we look at a lot of tools, look a lot of communities. We look at, for example, Reddit is one we look at, which I think has a lot of negative qualities as well as positive qualities, but there are reasons that people go to Reddit and I think there's parts of Reddit that really, really work.
And the art for me is building the Frankenstein monster of the things that are working. Uh, and synthesizing those into an open source tool that we can give to anybody so they can just have a civilization in a box, basically. They open it up [00:34:00] and they have all the tools that help them build a community that actually works that people would want to go to.
So our enemy is really just sloth, basically. It's like you have to be willing to go there to have these experiences. So that's the challenge for us.
Amy: What's the business model of the company?
Jeff: It's hosting. So what we sell is hosting the software itself is a hundred percent free. It's very easy to install.
We have a 30 minute install document you can install in the cloud. It's very, very easy, but the way we make money is through hosting. So you sign up with us, you push a button and then bam, on the other end, you have a discourse community.
Amy: Got it. Well, I look forward to checking more of that out. Thank you so much, Jeff.
This has been really mind expanding and fascinating conversation. Thanks for joining us and taking the time.
Jeff: Yeah, thanks. I hope it was useful.
Amy: It was awesome. Talk to you soon.
Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website, [00:35:00] getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.