Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast

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 are continuing our season. This is the 18th where we're going through a bunch of interviews. This episode, we are into part three of our interview with Irina Podobnaya, and we are getting into some really cool stuff at this point. We're going to get into some of the things that excite her even a little bit more. And you can tell the way that she is sharing with us. In particular, we're going to talk about building her team. And then we're actually going to get into some ways that you can help your customers. She is an approach that I have always found is one of the better ones to use as a business, where you are more of a partner with your customers as opposed to just the vendor. You're helping them succeed and not just helping them buy whatever your product is. So I want to go ahead and give plenty of time for this. And we will dive right in our conversation again with Irina. So the next one I want to go because that's a great positive and negative, I guess, from your SaaS experience. Actually back to when you originally were talking about being a project manager and you learned things a little different building software from managing a project. There's some of these details in that. And one of the things that sort of sparked a question and you describe me that is, how did you go about building your team? How did you go about, you know, because you know you, I think you had you came from this I know what a project is I know sort of who has to be there I know some of the things that I know the the boxes that have to be checked to deliver software but now you realize you have to get into those a little bit more and have the right resources to do those things. So, how did you go about actually putting together your team. I'm so grateful for this question because that was like one of those questions. Please ask me about the team, please. Yes, like, yeah. So, when it comes to the team. I, like, for the years I worked on over like 50 projects with different developers of different tech stacks. And I had, like, I've been through thick and thin with hiring firing managing developers. So, the only thing that I had like after that experience was like this long list of good developers with whom I worked with. So, these are the guys that I reached out to the very moment, I actually wanted to like jump and start my own software. So we had this amazing angular developer, whom I worked with on the previous project in Singapore. There was another amazing HTML CSS guy, whom I used on all the like maybe like 20 projects already. So, he was like the solid tried and true. So, the wizard of responsiveness because like, he can make any design responsive right out of the gate he just has the mind for it. And like when there was the third guy was the backend developer who has very like solid architecture experience plus DevOps plus like the Swiss Army knife for all the back end needs. So, yeah. And the only person that I had to hire that I didn't have any like people who I can snatch it was the QA person, because I understood that like okay yes developers we can develop. Right, but we need a QA person. And originally I just went to the root like all the cheapest QA person like there isn't much to do there. I had to learn that lesson because like after that, and then I started testing myself like I click on the button 500 error like I click on that 404. Okay, yeah the key person probably isn't doing a very diligent job like I should try another one and like we had to try maybe like seven different people until we found our QA who stayed with us. But still again, it was tough, even with that person. Even though they had the QA knowledge they had to understand the logic, the business logic, and that's when we just had to transition to like a more intelligent more tech savvy, even like automation engineer because that person also was writing automated tests, the Selenium, or yeah, we transition from Selenium to Cypress because of the tech stack. Basically, I just had like a big contact list from from the previous experience. That was the initial time. Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome when you can have that you can have people that you've got that personal experience with you'd say hey I've worked with them in enough situations that I know they're good. So I'm going to start with them. Now did, did you start like 100% diving yourself into this or is this one of these where you said hey I think I want to build this, and then started, you know, sort of getting some people together and, you know, do a little work on the weekends late nights, you know, take a few hours here or there or how did you, how did you sort of move into from what you were doing into the, the track major role. So, I, since I was a project manager on like freelance basis. I had several customers already. That was just another customer who didn't pay me, and I paid them to do it. It was just like another customer project that I had to manage initially. And it didn't take too, too much time because it was initially the same steps like we were framed the experience we did. And then like the first version of the design was so so like, yes. So I just had to dedicate maybe two or three weeks to really just designing the system, and the first version was out there. And then I had to spend maybe two or three months. But that wasn't like that wasn't the thing. We built our actual lending page, only in one year, since we built the software. That was like the big mistake like we were not marketing people that were it. But there always needs to be the other side like the sales, the marketing, like getting it out there. And I'm still like, I'm still figuring it out like I still wouldn't say that like, okay, we have every like all the ducks in the role and like the marketing, the media placement, and all the stuff like it works. So it still is mostly product based. So the product is where it's working solidly more features, this integration, this integration. Thank God we have integrations because that's marketing. People, people come from those platforms, they find us in Zapier, they find us on Shopify store. But when it comes to like marketing, I would even argue that all those people who are currently considering starting their own project, don't start the project, create a landing page, try to promote it, see what you get. See what you get from people. Do you even get any ounce of interest, like just like a long stare in your direction, because I'm not even talking about money at this point. Just start from the other side, the one that you hate, the one you probably don't understand like those rich marketers, right? Start from the other side. So, or get somebody who is very good at this and partner with them, you will not regret this decision because if you build it, like remember this famous phrase, you build it and they come. Doesn't happen anymore. It's overcrowded market, whichever niche you're taking. Even if you are creating something that is really like the bleeding age innovative, something like, I don't know, like NFT, I don't know, NFT, AR, VR, something. It's just technology. If you don't get people on board, if you don't get people to use it, it's just technology. And a lot of times I see that developers, they debate like, oh, which tech stack to use, this or that, this tool or that tool. Doesn't matter if it doesn't do what the customers actually want to, wanted to do. It's like you will have maybe a couple of stars on GitHub or like a couple of hundred stars on GitHub. Those don't pay the bills. So, yeah, remember that, like we've been joking around about this song. We will not be counting dollars, we'll be counting stars. Where is this song? It's about the desperate developer who has been developing their own project for a long time and they posted it on GitHub and they got like, we will not be counting dollars, we'll be counting stars. Come on. So were you able to, because that, and that's, I think that's a lot of time from whenever a developer creates a product, that's almost always the problem is, yeah, they're not marketing, they're not sales. Don't really think about it and they focus on, I've got this great solution. Which problem? Yeah, now I need to find the problem. I've got this great solution. Now I need to just find the problem. It's like you got to make sure who, and then you got to find who's having that problem. So how did you, how did you, did you like hire out somebody to market or was it something again where you were able to go back to prior customers and sort of how did you, how did you initially do that marketing? Well, through pain, blood and tears, I guess. So since we were launching the software on like shoestring budget and like in free time, I just bought a lot of courses from the marketers. I actually know probably about more solutions in the marketing space than I know about anything else like MarTech, like ask me about a tool that does X, I'm going to tell you like the top five solutions. That's what it was. But again, I was nerding out about the marketing and like I was buying courses upon courses. It didn't translate into action. Because then whenever you know like you literally like, it's almost like poisonous knowledge, because you know how it should be, but then you just cannot do it alone. You have to gather the team to do everything perfectly, but you know how the perfect looks. And that's like, that's the plaguing image. And I would argue that it's probably better if you just create like a notion page instead of like a landing page, like notion page with a page of your solution. Get it out there on social media and see what people do with it, or just like create something that is not software because when you start writing code, you are already committing to supporting it to extending it to just continuing to do it. But that's not easy when you don't have any support or community or any positive feedback at all. I have seen this interesting case, one of our developers, he was developing his own project that was literally like angular plus symphony together, something. It was called, I don't remember what the tool was called, and I don't want to give any bad PR to that person. But the thing is, he posted it like he literally worked on it maybe half a year, posted it on GitHub, got three stars, got discouraged in three, like in two or three weeks he was already looking for a job like okay like that project is dead, nobody wants my project. But that's literally like where you start like you, you don't just post it on GitHub, you need to do something about it, you need to build this anticipation maybe, or at least awareness of like, okay, my solution, my solution, you use it on Twitter, like a lot of developers use Twitter extensively. Tweet about it like every day, tell them about it, and see if you can gather enough followers to actually anticipate like oh, when is it launching, when is it launching? That's a good point. Yeah, so you got to get, you've got to get some, you know, they call it some buzz somewhere, you've got to get something for people to say hey, okay, now I, like you said, at least you get a long stare, people are like hey, that looks like that could be a cool thing. And then, and sometimes you'll get that feedback where they'll say, oh, that'd be great, does it do this and you can say, sure, it will. Or, or what could happen, they will say something like, but the tool X already does that. And that's going to be your death sentence because the tool X is like the primary go to in this space, and you're saying like, but I never discovered the tool X, but you never did the research. We discovered our 120 competitors only after we started, we were in the development for three years. Like, we had no idea there were so many people in the space doing similar things. But like, when you spend enough time in the industry and you listen hard to the social media and like who people mention, what do they say, you discover like okay, yeah, this is like indirect competitor competitor. And then you do similar stuff but differently like da da da da da. And then you have like a whole a whole list of like 130 solutions. That's, that's the unfortunate truth of our current landscape in the software as a service industry. Like the typical would be the email sending software. Can you name like out of the gate like 300 tools, I can. Well, that's, that's, that's a good and a bad thing when you, the, the pros and cons there when you know that and you're in a sales call of some sort you've got a customer that you're selling. And that's the worst thing is when they said well how does that compare to x and you're sitting there going I have never heard of that product and you're trying to figure that out versus when you say oh yeah I know what that product is this is the three things that they do great. We do all of those better or they do them differently and this is why we're a different product when you can. I think on both sides that when people have been in those situations and as you definitely want to be in the situation where you can say oh yeah I know what you're talking about, even if it's some random niche product that three people have ever bought. But when you've got that, you know, sort of in your, you know, in your hip pockets you can say yeah that's out there but this is a, this is why you want us instead of them. And the unfortunate truth is that sometimes customers may compare you to a freaking plugin. Like it's like a WordPress plugin free lines of code like, but it does very similar thing in the customer's mind, you are compared to all those plugins. They are not comparing you to only like market leader of a leading platform, they are comparing you to like the thing that board developer wrote during Saturday evening and posted online, and you are compared to that. Yeah, you can always be outraged by that but that's the, that's the truth. That's how people like see you like oh but I got the I don't know like recommendation from my aunt Karen, and she said but this is the best. I mean, educating customers about especially when you're in something like that like you know you could be grouped as a, like a shipping app or a tracking app or a notification app or something like that and that's, yes I guess you fall into those categories and you got that's where it's that's part of that education and customers to say like that's all of these, you know, 4 billion solutions that are out there that are technically a tracking, you know tool of some sort. They're not the same. This is, this is what we've taught. This is what we mean when we say that we're going to help you out here's here's the solution here's here's what our dashboard looks like. And that's not what the customers we want to hear because they just want to solve their problem, or have some kind of guidance in terms of how do they run their company, or how do they run this specific process in their company. So, that's why I'm saying always like the track manager is not what it's supposed to be because it's supposed to be like the full cycle tool. It only covers like this one step right now, just like but we continue to push it forward and forward and forward and like it's it's, it's getting wider, but it's still not quite very yet. And my dream is to literally just build the solution that I wish I had in China, because at that point we only had like like put together like duct tape, plus Excel spreadsheet. So all that in the business. And now I just realized that at some point, then we were already like one year in development. I was asking the question like, but the tool doesn't do anything. We don't display it doesn't exist for the customer, like it does. And on the back end, but it just like we cannot work with it. We have orders, we have products, we just don't have them in the interface. That was the problem. And that seems like a perfect point for us to wrap this one up. And we will come back with our fourth and final installment of our discussions with Irina in the next episode. So that's it for this episode. Wrap this up, talk a little bit more about Track Mage and some of the ways that she can help. She's going to continue to offer a lot of suggestions and recommendations. The next episode in particular is going to be full of name dropping essentially of some of the products, as we see how she grew from being a, I guess, it may seem derogatory, but really just like a simple project manager to being someone who is very knowledgeable in her industry. The tools that are out there and not just her specific product, but software development and even I think I would go as far as a company building and bootstrapping and how to utilize things like open source and some of the tools that are out there that are really much more accessible than I think a lot of people think. Where you can actually do some very high end, provide high end solutions for your company and your customers without the high end costs and timeframes that are typically associated with them. But I don't want to spoil that too much. So we will come back next time and finish out those discussions. 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 Develop-a-Nor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of Develop-a-Nor. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the Develop-a-Nor site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Brodhead or Source Code of Happiness. You can get it on Kindle. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our masterminds slash mentor group. We meet roughly every other week. And this is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of IT. We have a presentation every time we talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at develop-a-nor.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.