Jerod Santo: …because why buy the Apple TV anymore, when you can just buy the Roku?

Jerod Santo: I’m just messing with you. So maybe it changes the question… I think the question I’ve always asked myself when buying a new laptop is “Can I get away with a MacBook Air?” And I think maybe the question now is “Why buy a MacBook Pro?” versus “Why not buy a MacBook Air?” because I think this is the starting point for any decision if you’re already decided to go MacOS. “Well, do I need portability?” because then you might go Mac mini at this point… But for Apple laptops, the question is “Why buy the Pro? What am I getting there?”

Jerod Santo: Right. I mean, if you look at RethinkDB a few years back, they were never on Hacker News; they’ve got lots of GitHub stars. Quality product - anybody who looked at it… The technology inside RethinkDB and the [unintelligible 00:48:41.16] old school term, the developer hours into it are massive, and it was over my head… I said, “Wow, this is really impressive.” The consistency and the guarantees they were able to make about data quality… And yet, one of the things – okay, this is just his post-mortem; in any failure, there’s thousands of inputs for that output. But the fact is that developers are a tough market to sell to, especially when “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”
How is Gun gonna be different? Because when I look at it as a potential user - you’re trying to get users, of course, because people need to be using Gun for it to be useful… Is this gonna be around? So why is Gun different? Why will Gun be around ten years from now?

Adam Stacoviak: Well, I just think about story, right? We folks – like, even Jerod and I, the reason you’re on this call is because you had a conversation with Jerod, he took a liking to you… I’m a fan of Castro, prior user, and I think we all buy the Why, not the What. And if I go to the Castro website right now, there is no Why happening here. It’s the same old Castro. There’s no announcement of your story, there’s no mention of really you… Even if you go back to the blog post that was what Jerod just asked about, which was this bleeding user scenario, “The future of Castro podcasts”, December 2023 - like, you could have gone back and updated this blog post to say “There’s new ownership here. See this new posts. We’re so excited.” That’s why I asked you if you had regrets, because it seems like you’re not telling your story. You need to tell your story.

Kate Bradley Chernis: Okay. [laughs] You’re doing a great job going with me. So the theater of the mind is when your imagination has to play a role in the act of the storytelling. So when you are reading, it happens. When you are listening, it happens. When you’re watching, it doesn’t happen, because all the pieces are there in front of you, so there’s nothing for you to fill in the blanks. So that parallel was really interesting to me, and one of the things… I read that book, “This is your brain on music”, where it dissects the neuroscience of music listening.

[06:04] So when your brain, Chris, listens to a new song, it must instantly access every other song you’ve ever heard before, in that moment. So what it’s trying to do is to find familiar touchpoints, so it knows where to index that new song, and the library of the memory of your brain, and its tugging on nostalgia, and obviously memory and emotion… All the things that build trust. Trust is why we buy.

Similarly, Daniel, if you’re writing me an email, or a Slack message, or a text message, I’m gonna hear your voice in my head. And your voice has that same idea, right? Like, there’s this sound component to it. So if you’re doing a great job, you’re going to try to figure out how to write in a way that’s tugging on nostalgia and memory, and emotion and trust.

So I took these ideas out of radio, and there’s another story for when we’re having a beer in the middle here, but suddenly, I had a marketing agency… And my first client was a little company you know called Walmart; this is the boring part. So I built Walmart one hell of a spreadsheet system that took these ideas and translated them into writing. And I got them 130% ROI year-over-year for three years. When we built Lately, Lately was designed to replicate the spreadsheet system I had built for Walmart. And at that time, the industry we were in - it was called Marketing Resource Management.

Adam Stacoviak: Gotcha. I see. So it says even when you go– I mean, we’re in the details here, but we’re just curious on how the… You know, when you’re a developer, you obsess over the experience of your users. And when you have to– when the hurdle is “Where do I buy it from and how do I buy it? Okay, do I love the software? Can I try this software?” All these steps in between you and the user actually enjoying all your toil, all work, and how you even maintain the indie aspect of your life - solo developer, that’s how you like it; these are the hurdles you have to deal with. And that’s why we’re in the details of this. Because even when I go to the app store, the thing I’m presented with, if that’s my way I like to buy software on a Mac, which is probably pretty common, right? That’s why people buy Macs. They have the store, and you can go there, and their security, or whatever the reasons are they go there, I’m presented with not a price, but the button that says “Get”.

Zed Shaw: Yeah, so my response is basically “Show me the cash.” Let’s say you join the Python Software Foundation, or Software Freedom Conservancy - I don’t know if they do any of this, but if you’re a member of that, if you’re in the Python community, if your project is there, and then they’re constantly begging for money but they have these giant corporations that are a part of it, then you not that they’re not actually a part of the community that they claim to be.

I think the other thing would be if what you see is suddenly there’s these directions that benefit the Googles and the Facebooks and whatnot, and sort of screw over the individual developers, then these are not neutral organizations. And I think that’s the biggest thing. I think even a lot of these organizations, they pretty much exist just to make sure that these companies have free resources.

I think my favorite example is GitHub. GitHub hosts all this open source, and they have investors that invest in Google, and in other projects and companies and whatnot, and when you try to make money off GitHub - they’ve shut down projects that help developers make money on GitHub. And every time I’ve said, “Why does GitHub not have a Buy button?” Why can’t you go to GitHub, as a company, and say “Yeah, I wanna just buy your license, and you give me premium support, or something like that.” Because if they gave these developers easy access to revenue, to money, then all their investors would lose money, because the complements would suddenly go up in value. So now the price of the complement that they’re using - the web server they use, the small orchestration framework or whatever they’re using goes up, because “Oh, well if we want support, we’ve gotta go and pay this guy.” But you should be paying that guy; you shouldn’t be getting your support for free.

So what I’ve started to sort of realize is there seems to be a motivation or even a concerted effort to make it so that open source developers can’t make money… And I believe the two things to that are open source developers kind of deserve it. There’s a certain thing about, I don’t know… The way they run their projects and the way they run their show seems to be that they’re just open to it. And then also, the companies that are doing it - I don’t know if it’s super conscious, but I know in my case it was very conscious, that they were trying to make it so I couldn’t make cash, and to take the project after I gave up… So I’m kind of curious if it’s with other ones.

Kendall Miller: [laughs] So we were – I had just come back into town after some time away, and I was meeting with four old friends, and we were sitting around at a brewery, talking about “Why can’t I buy a bottle of whiskey called “I did SOC2 and all I got was this bottle of whiskey”? So the list of names was immediately very long. And Rishi, my business partner and I stuck around after the other two guys left, and Rishi goes “Well, Kendall, I, I think this is maybe a good idea.” And I said, “Well, Rishi, I think this is a good idea.” And he goes, “Well, I’m not messing around.” I said, “Well, I’m not messing around.” He said, “Well, I kind of think we should do it.” I said, “Well, I kind of think we should do it.” And the next day I was on the phone with a distillery saying “Hey, how do I buy a whole bunch of liquor if I want to do this?” And we ended up in a partnership, and it’s worked out.

Adam Stacoviak: And then the parts we can’t – that I won’t really go into, but that other side on the rebuild side is also offering support, and financially-backed services. So why not just buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the first place? We’ve talked about that in side conversations, Jerod…

Daniel Stenberg: [01:00:20.02] There are things in motion that I should not talk about. But selling support in general for curl is actually hard, because it’s an old, established, very functional and actually rock-solid product. So a lot of those people – and you mentioned Netflix. Netflix is a fun example. They don’t use – at least they didn’t use to use curl for the actual film/movie transfer. They just used it for UI and things related to selecting the actual, whatever you’re streaming. But there are other companies - I know at least two - that have much, much, much more higher volume of curl use. This company with the blue logo, they did – I talked to some people seven, eight years ago, they did 1 million curl requests per second on average. And that’s a high-volume use of curl. You would imagine that those guys would be willing to buy curl support. But so far, I have not managed to get support from them, because it just works for them. They think it’s sort of – why would they buy support? It’s been working for I don’t know how many years, and they think it’s good.

So it is a challenge. But yes, I know it’s used everywhere, and of course I’m getting help, because I’m worthless as a business myself. So I realize my limitations here. I’m not the business guy. I’m not doing most of the sales conversations. I leave that to actual sales people. But sure, we try to interface and talk to pretty much anyone we know that is using curl in high volumes, and in sort of mission-critical situations where it is really crucial for them that curl continues to work.

And it goes up and down… And sure – I mean, I still work on curl full-time, so it at least pays me so that I can continue doing this.

But we also explore other ways to charge money for curl-related things. So there are, of course always – maybe not just selling support is the only way we should do this, and maybe it’s not even the best way. I don’t know. I alluded to it, I have some other things in motion; there will be some other things going forward, curl business-wise. So I think it is a pretty good brand, it’s a pretty good product… I think there should be ways to sustain a business around it.

Adam Stacoviak: Never. So when I rip a 4k disc – and that’s why I happily buy a 4k. I will buy it all day long. Because one, I get 4k and 1080p, so I can skip transcoding or I can have both versions of it, or whatever… It never happens with 4K content. So I just – like Top Gun recently, I watched it for the first time in my own home theater. I waited. Yeah… I have 120-inch screen, Christina…

Adam Stacoviak: No, I think it’s – your Why is exactly right. Pursuing the Why is exactly right. Pursuing the Why is the hard part. And you have to say – if you’re out there and you’re on either side of that fence, if you wanna live in that world, then that’s how it’s gonna be. But if you wanna live in this other world - and I think this other world is this idea of this democratized way to build services that are accessible to everyone - then you’ve got to buy into your Why.

Adam Stacoviak: So given your analogy of “Why would I buy a home?” Expensive, mortgage payments, debt - typically, for most people… Some people buy their homes outright and own them, which is awesome… Why do you think people would do that (to go on that analogy) and not care for the thing? What is it that keeps people from caring for themselves, given how important this body is, this mind is, this soul is to me to be me?

Kyle Mathews: This is a classic problem in open source, for open source commercial companies… Because yeah, open source is not cheap to create. We’re spending 3+ million dollars a year paying engineers, designers etc. to work on Gatsby. It’s a very complicated piece of software already, and it’s just getting ever more complicated. We have investors who expect us to make money… Anyway, so we wanna turn this into a sustainable business, that can keep investing more and more in Gatsby and in the overall experience for building web applications and sites.

The model we’ve arrived at is called open cloud. It’s different than open core, because open core came from more the era where the expectation was you download the software and run it on your own servers… And with the rise of more cloud services type things, a lot of open source companies are turning to a model where their – they kind of developed the capabilities of being the best in the world at running the open source software, and providing various cloud services around it, that people need.

A really great example of this that not a lot of people think about is GitHub. Because GitHub is a commercial open source company. It took Git, which is a phenomenal open source project, and then they added hosting. They’re super-good at hosting very large Git repositories; you never even think about it. You just git push and pull… Well, except for the outage yesterday and last week. [laughter] Anyways, it’s okay. Actually, I was gonna say [unintelligible 00:34:39.09] They’re pretty good though, all the same. And they offered the hosting, the infrastructure, because it’s sort of annoying to set up a VM and pop Git on it, and keep it secure, and all the other crap that you have to do to run Git… And they added collaboration. They invented the whole pull review cycle, which has revolutionized how we do software.

And I think that model, of providing infrastructure for open source and providing collaboration around the open source is the model that balances the freedom and hackability aspects of open source that people love with the need to create a sustainable business model. Because a cloud service is just not something that any user – because the problem with open source is when the commercial entity has similar ambitions and goals and capabilities as the user. Because then there’s that conflict. Because why would I buy your silly little add-on, when I could just write it myself? It’s kind of silly.

But in GitHub’s case, do that many people really want to run their own Git server? They need to learn how to do backups, and security, and everything. There’s some, but it’s an infinitesimally small percentage. And the same thing - does an agency that’s building Gatsby sites wanna set up a Kubernetes cluster to run Gatsby builds, and monitor it, and all that jazz? And there’s a handful, but again, it’s an infinitesimally small percentage of that.

[36:14] Also, by combining our deep expertise in Gatsby and the deep expertise and capabilities we’re gaining in running cloud services, it’s a very powerful combination that we can continue to optimize both together, and provide a really superior service to people that are using Gatsby.

And then the collaboration bits - there’s all sorts of stuff that we can do, that once we’re tied into your development and content workflows, there’s a ton of things that we can do to make the experience phenomenal, not just for the developers, but the designers and content people, and the marketers etc.

That’s the sort of thing that we think is a great balance for everyone, because Gatsby – the open source bits are 100% open source. We’re not holding anything out of it. But how we do the builds is intimately tied into our cloud services and optimized so that everything is just humming along. The connections to – you know, when you set up a CMS, we manage that for you, so that it’s sending the right webhooks, with the right… Because a lot of these services will let you embed information into the webhooks, so we do everything to optimize what they send, and how we pull the latest data, so that we can optimize… It’s just like this big, complicated chain of events that have to happen in order to have really fast builds, and we optimize all that for you… And we develop a lot of, again, sophistication and capability around that, which no individual developer working on a web project with Gatsby would ever do.

Anyway, it’s like, we developed this capability and we can offer that scale to anybody who wants to use Gatsby for a very reasonable price. And then anyone using Gatsby can hack at it all they want, and do whatever they want with it. We think that’s a really great balance for people.

Adam Stacoviak: I really can’t see how a vacation fits into that personally, but maybe it’s like where to go potentially… But this car, “Should I buy this car?” Well, if you’re the kind of person that doesn’t really need this car, why would you buy the car?

Adam Jacob: Yeah, for sure. About 13 years ago I ran a consulting company that did automated infrastructure; I am a systems administrator in real life, that’s my actual thing… And I had spent a lot of time doing automation, and building automation for a string of different companies. Eventually we started a consulting firm, me and some friends. We went out and our consulting firm was doing great; we were building a lot of automated infrastructure for people, but we were struggling to maintain it after we built it. So that led us to build Chef. We wanted a better way to manage bigger infrastructures, spread across more people.

We hooked up with a guy named Jesse Robbins. Jesse of Velocity, fame and former Amazon.com master of disaster. It was Jesse who was like “Hey, this should be a company. We should actually take this thing and build a new product, raise a bunch of capital, and go for it.” So we did, and it really super-worked. We built this product called Chef that did configuration management. You describe how you want a service to work when you run it; it sees if they work the way you described, and if it doesn’t, it figures out how to fix them.

[08:12] Our original business model was that we were gonna open source Chef itself, and then we were gonna run all of the server-side infrastructure as a SaaS. This was right at the peak of SaaS hype; this was when SaaS was taking over the world, and that was the business model everybody was gonna choose. It turned out that was not the best business model for enterprise software; they weren’t quite ready to let their configuration information go out to a random person’s SaaS. But the open source part of what we did - we open sourced it under the Apache license, on purpose, knowing that we were sort of opening ourselves up to competition, but that it would garner the biggest possible spread of adoption for Chef… And that’s super-worked.

We had companies like Engine Yard, BrightScale… There’s a pretty long list of those early cloud providers and the early people who built on top of those cloud providers, all of whom built stuff on top of Chef because of how the license was constructed and because of the way that we built that community, in a pretty open and collaborative way.

As we grew, that changed into selling on-prem software. We went from being “It’s all open source and you run it as a SaaS” to “It’s mostly open source, but we sell proprietary software, too”, so we became open core. And we were always what I would call a pretty loose open core, versus tight open core. The difference there would be tight open core is like there’s core features that exist in the product that you don’t get unless you pay me money.

If you wanna back-up the database - that would be tight open core. Things that everybody needs. Loose open core means you build stuff around the core software, and then I monetize that. So if you wanted to buy a web UI, or you wanted rule-based access control in the server… Some of those things maybe you do. But it was disconnected from the core value prop; you could still just use the core of the software to do whatever you wanted, without having to do a lot of work.

We stuck with that model. We still had a SaaS, we still sold on-prem software, but sort of going back and forth through that and managing both the community, managing our business, what features are in, which features are out, why do people buy… And then most recently we took a long look at our business and why people were buying the software, and it felt like we were sort of on this treadmill of constantly putting features either into the commercial product or out, but ultimately people were buying the product because the product worked. The product itself, Chef, and the thing it did for them - that’s why they bought it.

After a lot of soul-searching and looking at the business model, we decided that what we were gonna do is open source everything. Rather than have any proprietary software at all, we were gonna follow essentially Redhat’s model, where we were gonna open source all of the software, and what we do is build a distribution called Chef. And if you want that distribution called Chef, you have to buy it from me. And what you’re paying for is both the means of that production, my support, you’re paying for the marketing, you’re paying for all of those things that surround it. But anybody is free to take that software and build a distribution of it, and to distribute it under whatever terms they want to. They just can’t call it Chef.

That’s the most recent evolution of Chef’s open source business model, and that’s been working great. They’re having the best quarters they’ve ever had, we have customers who weren’t paying us, who are now paying us, because of that change… So it’s been working pretty well.

From a community point of view it’s also been working well. Before this change no one knew how to build a release of Chef, but Chef. If you didn’t work at Chef, this wasn’t a thing you could do. Now there’s a relatively robust community of people who are building new releases of CINC, which is the community distribution of Chef. They’re hosting it at the OSU Open Source Lab. There’s a much richer ecosystem for the software than existed before we’ve made that choice. So that sort of brings you up to date, I think.

Travis Kimmel: We stay in close touch. He is no longer in the gig he was in, but yeah, we stay in close touch. We flew out there and met up and we were like “What did you like about it? Why did you buy this thing?” The read there was that the pain was just so extraordinary that people would wait two minutes for the page to load, and pay for it.

We had this really lightweight launch, we didn’t really do anything about it. We weren’t really out there selling it, we were just sort of letting people in. I think at the time we didn’t even have a way to charge – we had a bunch of payment functions that we didn’t have. We couldn’t log people out of the app if they didn’t pay, because we hadn’t built that feature yet.

Mike Perham: Yeah, and people have – you know, some of the pushback I got on my initial announcement was “Oh, people should just use job library X, or use Rabbit” or “If you’re not only pure in the cloud, why would you use this instead of SQS?” or something like that. But that’s kind of like asking “If the Honda Accord exists, why would you buy a Toyota Camry?” or “Why would you buy a Ford F150?” Well, they’re different things; they mean different things to different people. Different brands mean different things; they have different capabilities and different opinions, and different use cases for different business apps.

A business app that needs to scale to billions of jobs per day might be better off using SQS, where you can sort of scale infinitely, but your ops headache is gonna be commensurate with that choice. So what I find is that the people that use my stuff tend to be smaller shops that don’t mind paying $1,000 or $2,000 to solve a problem immediately. They just don’t want a lot of ops headache, and they don’t wanna roll their own, so they’d rather pay me to give them a pre-baked solution that has all the opinions already baked in and solves a well-known problem, and then they can get on with their life.

Adam Stacoviak: Okay… As you should as a CEO, you’re like “Why? Because we can buy this right now…”

Mat Ryer: Yeah, why are all the Buy Me a Coffee buttons changed to Buy Me a Rum? [laughter]

Baruch Sadogursky: Okay, I’m going to turn on my Twitter bot farm right now. Because of my Twitter bot farm, that’s why Elon Musk didn’t buy Twitter. [laughter] Because they did manage to find it, and they know there are a lot of bots them, they know who owns them, and that’s me.

John Nunemaker: Yeah, that was pretty cool. That was actually kind of like a – I won’t say accident, too… Because I was kind of maintaining it, because everybody else had kind of moved on, and so I just kept it running, and occasionally would add things to it, and stuff; honestly, in my free time. And I remember we started getting a couple support requests here and there, people wanting to buy it… They were like, “Hey, is it for sale?” And I remember asking, and everybody’s like “I don’t know if it’s for sale. We’d have to vet the buyer.” And that kept coming back. So finally, I was like, “Alright, this isn’t gonna happen. It’s just dying right now. So if we don’t do something with it, it is gonna permanently die”, and I was like – I just like it, again, because looking back, it’s the theme or the thread that ties a bunch of that story together. So I was like, “You know what - I’ll vet the buyer. Are you guys okay if I vet the buyer?” And everyone was like “Yeah, that sounds fine.” “Everyone” being my manager, and other people, levels up. So I was like, “Alright, I’ll vet buyers.”

And then as I was thinking about that over the weekend, I remember I was like, “Why don’t I just buy it? I’m already maintaining it basically in my free time. I wouldn’t be any different, except now I would have ROI if something good happens to it. I’d have ROI.” That, again, comes back to impact. So I think on that front, that’s kind of where – so I was like, “You know what - let’s try it.” Again, I don’t think I’ve thought about it until like we’re talking about it now, but… Common thread - you never know it until you ask. So worst-case scenario, when you negotiate, they say no.

[51:57] I remember I think I offered – I don’t even remember. At that point it was losing like $1,000/month or more, just from hosting, and AWS bills, and stuff, and I was like, “Alright, I’ll give you $5,000.” So basically, this shows that I’m real, I’m genuinely offering for it, and I will take on the burden of $1,000/month, vetting the buyer, all the problems that could possibly arise from selling it, and any possible negative impact of closing it down, or any of that kind of stuff.

I sent that up the tree, and at some point they were like, “Yes.” They dropped the price to like – I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about any of that kind of stuff, but it was like an order of magnitude lower. They were just like –

Adam Stacoviak: Super-niche. Great that it’s self-funded, but it’s super-niche when compared to, say, Welcome Homes, which is I guess kind of niche-y, but everybody needs – at some point you’ll buy a home. DigitalOcean - at some point you will run or use an app or service on a cloud server, but not everybody needs to buy a podcast ad. Why that for you?

Jerod Santo: That was like their major insight to why they wanted to buy some buildings…?

Erik St. Martin: It occurred to me one day, because I was looking at the piles of stuff I have here… Because I have a similar thing - when I’m tinkering with electronics, why am I gonna buy one chip from SparkFun or Adafruit when I can just buy like a hundred of them for a similar price from China? And then all that stuff acquires, and it’s sitting there in the drawers, and it occurred to me one day when I saw something you were posting, it’s like “I wonder what your stash looks like…”

Jerod Santo: Right. Are there options, are there Ring alternatives? I just recently got a Ring from my wife, and plugged it in, and… I don’t think Ring’s gonna disappear, because Amazon owns them now… Or is it Google? I don’t know. They’re owned… But they do give you video logging, and then after 30 days they’re like “Hey, it costs $3/month for this”, and I was like, “Wait a second, I already bought the Ring. Why do I have to buy–” And then I started thinking, “Well, I should have researched this more.” There’s probably alternatives that might be a little bit more open.

The hard part with that is it’s there on your front door, or your front porch, and you want it to be a nice-looking device. They do have a great experience, so I’m happy with the hardware and the software. Are there things in the world of Pi’s that are trying to compete with smart doorbells and camera devices and things like this?

Adam Stacoviak: It’s not a database somewhere. There is syncing if you’re using iOS and whatnot, of course, but that’s why I thought “Well, I can buy into this even if it does change”, because at some point someone’s gonna say “The new Obsidian”, or whatever it might be.

Justin Searls: And that experience has turned me into a pattern recognition machine where sometimes it’s hard to explain why my gut is telling me buy or build in this case; sometimes it’s hard for me to know - you know, maybe I’ll ask a pointed question to somebody who’s saying “Hey, we should do this versus that.” And after the fact I’ll be like “I don’t really know why that question is what came to mind”, but the signals, I think, start to mount when you have a lot of experience being in the position to make this decision, and having been burned by both ends of the spectrum. I like to think that this is one area where experience really does have a major impact on the wisdom of the decisions that we ultimately make.

Julia Liuson: Barely, and you’d go buy a physical box, right? That’s why we called it “box offer.” And if you think about the engineering structure from Microsoft, we had a development team (which I was on) and we had a test team. Then we had a program management team. And the test team played a very important role back then, because their job was to prevent what we called “recall class bugs.” What is a recall class bug? It’s that the bug is so bad, the physical boxes have to come back to Microsoft; they’ve been shipped all over the world, and they have to come back to Microsoft and get rebuilt. That is a recall class bug.