Interviews 2.0, Part 4: Irina Podobnaya of TrackMage

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season where we are doing a series of interviews again. We call this Interviews 2.0. And we are wrapping up in this episode. This is part four of our interview with Irina Podobnaya of Trackmage. And we get into the weeds a little bit this time around. We are going to continue sort of where we left off, talking about effectively right sizing a product and finding the best solution for your customers, whether it is a very simple thing. There's a simple problem that's easy for them to solve that can be done maybe very effectively cheaply or sometimes there's a lot of there are a lot of complexities that are part of their problem that they may not understand and helping them understand and navigate the various options that are out there, whether that is to select your product or maybe sometimes your product is not the best fit and there is something that they are going to be better suited to and then maybe come back later and purchase your product when it is a better fit for the problems they are facing at the time. I'm again a little bit of spoiler as we get into this. So rather than me go and digress a bit, let's get back to our conversation with Irina. Yeah, that is a challenge with those when you've got a solution that that has a lot of things that you don't they don't necessarily have to be surfaced. And so the customers there may be a lot of functionality and features that you do that they don't see it at all. And if they don't see it, they don't see a value in it. Yeah, there is another thing that happens with developers is that like whenever I show the tool to a developer, they are saying, they can write it overnight. They don't know like this is just like this is the tip of the iceberg that you see what they showcase on their home page or when you just sign up for a trial account. You don't know all the edge cases, all the special like drop downs under the drop downs that happen only in those specific cases. So when we were getting into the solution, we just didn't know the extent of complexity because like we just like we built something that was essentially resembling an Excel spreadsheet. But later later we realized like, OK, we need we need something different. And that's like that's how it happens. So don't be like when you're a developer and you're looking at someone else's solution, don't be fooled by this like seeming like simplicity of a solution. You don't know what's happening, really, because like there are so many things that you have to handle, even the billing. Like, let's talk about billing like a major pain. One thing before it, because we're getting sort of close on time, I want to thank you for that. But I do want to because you mentioned it early on as maybe give you a little bit of a soapbox to talk about shoestring budget and open source software and sort of what you've because it sounds like you're very much an advocate of that and how you or maybe what you would even sort of promote to somebody else. If there's somebody out there saying, I can't start my business because it's going to take too much time, too much money. And the startup is not what I can do. Obviously, you you pushed all that aside and you've created something. So maybe what are some of your words of wisdom or what you've learned in going down that path? So the first thing that's like in like anticipating founder of a software as a service would do is sometimes they sign up for AWS account or whatever, whatever account like Azure, Microsoft Azure. So they just try to use the same stack that they're they're using at their job. And that costs a lot of money. AWS or Google Cloud or Azure, they are not the cheapest on the market. That's why when we were starting, like we were even looking for bare metal servers because bare metal is like, OK, you've got this enormous hanger of like 300, 300 meters. Put whatever you want. And it's only going to cost you like twenty dollars per month. Well, the same thing that is going to be like the tiniest instance on Amazon. So like that would be the first thing that you could consider, like consider alternatives to those mainstream cloud providers. Consider something like DigitalOcean, Hatsnir. Where was this? I'm forgetting it, but because we increase the prices, we move to Hatsnir. So that's why I cannot even remember their name, shame on them. You don't increase prices when they're trying to save a cost. All right. So then the thing was like that's the first. The second one is like project management and cooperation and communication. A lot of people sign up for Slack. Slack starts eating your messages after 10,000 messages and you start losing history and like, oh, that thing that I mentioned last month. Like that's why we had to go for a self-hosted solution. There are a lot of tools out there, but we settled for Mattermost because this is where the closest you can get to Slack without paying the Slack fees. So the Mattermost, you have a mobile app and you have a chat tool. Whatever you like, what else do you need? Or maybe you can even consider some social media platforms to go instead of like Telegram, for example, like in crypto space, Telegram is mainstream. So they literally use instead of Slack, they use Telegram channels. It's very similar in functionality and you get those like fancy, I don't know, dancing spiders or other smiley faces that you can get on those social media. So yeah, when code management or pipelines or all that, we settled for GitLab because GitLab is like very solid. They have all the functionality you need and you don't have to pay the fees. So a big bucket and GitHub, the very pipelines, we just thought that like, it's not worth it on GitLab. We get everything we need. And so far we haven't gone over the limits. So we never needed any of those paid features yet. So, right. What else in terms of MarTech, like marketing technology, we have like, like a junkyard of a lot of tools we tried and a lot of lifetime deals that we bought. Because like lifetime deal is often like open source, but you cannot fix it. Because like, you get it. So I'm like, yeah, it's very bad, but you don't have the code to fix it. Yeah. So yeah, for the knowledge base, we settled on a solution called Helpy. Like it's not ideal. I would probably argue if we use something like a blog engine, like Ghost, we would have been better off. But we went for that one. Like we have a lot of content there. So I'm still considering switching over to something that has like a full scale capability of like a support engine plus a knowledge base. And there were quite a few tools we are considering. One of them was a very interesting tool, ArcSys. And yeah, ArcSys actually is a marketing platform plus a chat widget, plus a knowledge base, plus whatever you need. And it's built by Mongolian developers. Have you ever heard about Mongolian developers? I haven't before ArcSys. So yes. So what actually happens in Mongolia? So now we know that it exists, like it has ArcSys. Yes. So rather solution that we're using for sending emails, because in software as a service, you still need to follow up with all those emails and convert, like send notifications or even like the lead magnets that you are using in the funnels. So we are using Motic. Motic is also self hosted, open source. It has a lot of plugins, even for direct outreach. That plugin was written by us, by the way. Yeah, because we were extending the solution. So yeah, that was the fun part. Because of open source solutions, the only thing that you have to be careful about to not get sucked into the community of that, we did for Motic at some point. And at some point we were saying like, okay, we're developing this feature, but whom we're developing it for, for track major or for Motic. So I'm like, okay, yeah, that's where we draw the line. Like, okay, track major first. What was our problem? And then what else, what, what other problems might be there? Because we, we had like, we have a lot of open source solutions in the business. Well, that's a, it's great to, it's always great to hear somebody sort of rifle through those things like that is to say, cause I've been in that too, where it's what do you use? Well, we use this, we use this, we use this, we use this, we use this, we use this, we didn't go, yeah, you don't necessarily have to go and get like Microsoft teams or something like that. You can get the best of breed. Analytics analytics. The postcode I already mentioned, but the one that records the sessions of the users and you actually see what they're doing also like this functionality isn't available elsewhere because quote jar charges like $200 or something per month. And then the next solution was Matomo. Matomo analytics is like Google analytics, but open source and you can control it. And you can literally see probably some data that Google is currently not showing you. So yeah. And another thing was that ad block, for example, blocks all the Google analytics scripts, but if you have the open source solution, like I mean, Matomo, you can rename the URLs and ad block doesn't pick it up. So you literally, you see all the analytics that you typically don't see. Oh, see, and that's the nice thing is you can sort of extend those or like you said, you know, you, you find something that's it's close, but not quite there. You can write your own plugin or you can, you know, you can always extend it and work off of that. So excellent. That was, that was exactly what I was hoping from saying, Hey, hop on your soap box for a second and talk about that. Yeah. Um, I have taken up a bunch of your time, but I, and I've enjoyed every second of it. It's great conversation with somebody that obviously you love what you're doing. The other, this is like, you know, you, you had this, this itch that you had to scratch and now you, and like you said, you've got this, you can tell you've got this little bit of the project or solution you've built, but you've got this big picture that you're still working towards the, you know, that vision that's, that started you on it. So it's, uh, this makes for, it's always a great and entertaining conversation to have something like that. Yeah. And it's really enjoyable to talk about the technical stuff, but I don't typically talk about it because not a lot of people understand the technical side. I think it's like, it's really like, okay, can I talk about Docker? Please. We'll have to let you come back and we'll just have a long conversation about Docker and you mentioned Kubernetes and some of those containers and that, that whole space, cause that could be, uh, that could be quite a rabbit hole to go down sometimes. So, all right. Well, um, I think we'll wrap it up then. Is there, uh, is there any, uh, if somebody has any questions or anything like that, or they say, wow, track mage is exactly what I want is it, would you just send them to your page or is there certain places you like? Hey, I would send them, I would send them to our API docs and docs.trackmage.com. Uh, so we have a lot of capabilities to integrate with our solutions. And, uh, if there are some interested developers with, uh, something that's related to e-commerce, uh, reach out to me. I would love to collaborate, uh, because, uh, like integrations are of a live blood, uh, of, uh, track mage. And, uh, that's why we integrated Zapier and integrately. And, uh, like now we're looking at some of those, some of those, uh, open source platforms that are alternatives to Zapier or like N, uh, eight N. And other things. So like developers, uh, you're welcome. Uh, and API is not gated API is not, uh, even, uh, I mean, paid. At this point, because our solutions there for some reason, they are, uh, reserving very API only for enterprise level customers, like, Oh, you need to be paying us at least $500 to get the access to API. I call BS on this. Like usually, like we should get like as many developers on the platform as possible. So, yeah. Oh, developers love to hear that. Yeah. Like let's integrate. I definitely will love it. Excellent. Well, all right. Well, I think then we will wrap this one up. I want to thank you again for your time and your enthusiasm and being able, I love being, I'm so happy that we're able to talk at a technical level and, uh, you know, let you, let you have a little bit of that conversation and then it's been a, uh, it's quite a, quite an educational experience on this side as well to just hear what you've gone through and what you've learned and how you guys approach that. Yeah. Well, another thing would be to like, if you reach out to me on social media and just ask a question like, Oh, which tool do you recommend for X? Like I probably know the tool. Really? Like, because like, even like for all the like MarTech experience, open source experience, like, uh, researching the tools, like, yeah, all, all kinds of, uh, tools. Oh, good. Next time we have to do any research on any tools. We'll reach out to you first. It's like, Hey, give us 10 tools you found in this space. And I'm sure we get a list back fairly quickly. Hmm. Yeah, definitely. Kendrick, like I can definitely recommend like off the top of my head, like this, this, this, this, this. So like for every kind of business case, I definitely I'm like, I'm open for collaboration partnerships, uh, integrations, like whatever you need. And we've got a very solid capability for integrating the solution inside, uh, of, uh, other solutions because we have the widgets, uh, and, uh, the code, like code snippets that you can integrate without actually showing that it's track major or something like that. So you can, uh, if you are technically capable track majors, like playgrounds where you're like, okay, this piece here, this piece there, and then you have integration and, uh, well, obvious, uh, well, this case would be to like, Oh, if you want to just provide shipment tracking updates, uh, in your Excel spreadsheet or whatever system you're using, use the API, uh, we have a lot of, uh, like a lot of flexibility there because we've, we've paid a lot of attention to making sure of a API is great, uh, and, uh, that it's extendable and, uh, actually, and we've got web hooks as well. Probably the best web hooks on the market because we were like, there was this, uh, just sorry to take a little bit more time, but there was this, uh, interesting case, uh, where the customer was actually demanding us to extend the web hook for this, for to handle this error, to handle the batches, like send it on time and like customize this, customize that at some point, the lead developer said like, sounds like, okay, like I'd rather cater to like a thousand, uh, customers who have like a moderate load than to this moron who's creating the load just because he doesn't understand how the web hooks work. So yeah, so sometimes like listen to your developers, like, or listen to yourselves, like if a customer is too demanding, like that's, that's, that's a bad customer to say like, okay, we're going to handle everything, but that use case, thank you. Exactly. Sometimes you got to get rid of them to make it a little easier to get, you know, help everybody else out. Yeah, that's it. Excellent. All right. Well, thanks a lot. Thanks again for your time and, um, hopefully a best of luck everywhere with your, with your product and building your team out and solving your, your big problem and working your way towards your big vision. Thank you very much. And, uh, yeah, I'm sure we need all the luck possible. So yeah, thank you. Thank you. You have a good one. We'll talk to you again. Bye. Bye. See you. Bye. And that will do it. That wraps up our conversation with Irina Podobnaya of TrackMage. She dropped a lot of suggestions and product names and, uh, has several ways that you can get a hold of her. She is very, uh, as you can tell, energetic and excited about the things that she has done. She is very much a, uh, one of those kinds of people that just loves building their company, loves solving those problems and loves recommending those solutions to others. So don't hesitate. If you think there's something that, you know, maybe TrackMage is a good fit for, you know, either your company or, uh, some of the fulfillment pieces of, you know, yourself or your customers, definitely reach out to her, help them build that organization. And like she said, you know, she's going to leave, uh, we'll have several links in the show notes for ways to get a hold of her. If you have some questions about either TrackMage or some of the things that they've done to build out their company and, uh, you know, drop her line and let her send her your list, send you her list of, you know, the hundred products that she has reviewed of whatever it is. That's, you know, solve the problem that you're looking for. Uh, cause it, there is a lot of stuff out there and sometimes it's very valuable to have somebody such as Irina that has looked through this stuff, has spent the time, has researched it and then, and turn that back around and help you, you know, maybe create a shortlist at least. I want to thank her for her time. It was, uh, it was excellent conversation I had with her. And I want to thank you for spending these, uh, these few episodes catching up. We are not done with our interviews. We will come back next episode and we will dive into our next series. Uh, again, it'll be a multi-parter, but again, there'll be a lot of good information for us to share with you. That being said, we'll wrap this one up. So go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers, the developer podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. 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