How Price Sensitive Are B2B Customers?

Show Notes:
Links:
Mighty Cal
Hook RelayProfitwell RetainFloor Is LavaBen Curtis Twitter
Full Transcript:
Starr:
So what were you all talking about before I jumped on the call?

Ben:
We were talking about Derrick's new startup Mighty Cal.

Starr:
Mighty Cal.

Ben:
Looking pretty nice. I was telling Josh how I like the virality of it. If you're using Mighty Cal and you share those links with someone, then they're going to be like, "Oh, that's cool. I should use that too." And it's just going to help the spread. I really like that kind of... I was reflecting on Honeybadger. It's like, well we just don't really have an opportunity to get the kind of-

Josh:
Wouldn't it be fun to have that aspect of it? They got that with Drip too. That was their big thing with the Drip widget, so I'm sure Derrick, he knows what he's doing.

Starr:
We tried to do that a bit when we did our... When there's an error on your website, Honeybadger can display a form for user feedback.

Josh:
The problem is... Yeah. And it's got to be a developer who is seeing it, and then... When developers try to do something, hits an error, and then is like, oh, I should add that to my app right now. Like I just got a fail whale or something.

Ben:
Yeah, I think the population of calendar users is probably a little bigger than the population of web developers.

Starr:
That's funny, because I thought that you were going to say that the thing you liked about the idea is... I'm assuming. I'm making assumptions here. But the relatively low ops burden.

Ben:
Well, yes. There's that too.

Ben:
The problem, Starr, with the whole ops burden thing is now we're good at the high ops burden thing, so now we're supposed to take on more apps like that, so that we can leverage those skills.

Starr:
Yeah.

Josh:
That's kind of our thing. Which we are. Right?

Ben:
Exactly. Our next one, Hook Relay, is going to be a pretty big ops burden too.

Starr:
It's like, what does your company specialize in? It's like, well we have a variety of products, all of which process a ton of traffic. That's just what we do. It's just traffic processing.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Our specialty is running services that you don't want to run yourself because it's a pain in the butt.

Starr:
That is pretty much every service. We should run a house cleaning service. I'm in dire need right now. So speaking of, I was late to the call, and I may actually... There's a chance I may have to run. There's a chance there may be a bunch of noise later on, because, well, a couple days ago my water heater just burst open. It was just like somebody blew the Hoover Dam in my little girl's room. Just been dealing with that, doing a lot of wet/dry vac-ing. Getting a lot of use out of that $30 investment.

Ben:
Have you been to the Hoover Dam?

Starr:
No, I haven't. I haven't

Ben:
You should totally go check it out. It is awesome.

Starr:
Well, now that I know what it would look like, what it's failure mode looks like, I'm not sure I want to go there. And yeah, so anyway I thought I vacuumed up everything, but it turns out there's... Your hot water pipes in your house have hot water in them. It's like when you have a straw in a drink and you hold one end of it, and then you pull it out and there's still drink in there. Well, I didn't think to go and open all the hot water faucets when I was draining the heater originally.

Starr:
And so as people were just sort of randomly accidentally turning them on, the water in the pipes would flush back into the hot water heater and then drain out again.

Josh:
Oh no.

Starr:
So I had to go take care of that. Oh, and I learned a few things I'll pass on to our listeners because I think one of the cool things about our podcast is the breadth. Some people may go deeper than we do, but we cover a pretty wide variety of topics.

Josh:
It really is the whole founder experience.

Starr:
Exactly. Exactly. Part of being a founder is dealing with your water heater bursting. And yeah, so I've got these friends. They're a couple. The husband is a maintenance man, and the wife is a forensic engineer. I was telling y'all about this yesterday, and that means that she goes in and whenever some building gets screwed and people get sued over it, she goes in and documents everything. It's like, who messed up here?

Starr:
And so I talked to them about it. Once water gets under laminate flooring, it's just a goner. You just have to pull it up. There's no way about it, because the water is never coming out. And so yesterday I pulled up half the laminate flooring, and then the guy I just mentioned, the maintenance guy helped me pull the rest of it up and did the baseboards and cut the drywall around the bottom where it soaked in there. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

Josh:
Yeah. Fun times. You said this happened in your daughter's room? In Ida's room?

Starr:
Yeah. Yeah.

Josh:
Did she get a cool story out... like her bed is now a pirate ship or something, or an island.

Starr:
Well, she's really into the fact that she just has a concrete floor now that looks all gnarly. She's just going around being like, "I love it!"

Josh:
Maybe you should just leave it. I mean, she's happy with it.

Starr:
Yeah, I don't think that's going to work out. It might affect the resell value.

Ben:
The actual story is that she really wanted to play the floor is lava, and so she-

Josh:
My kids are obsessed with that. They love it. Yeah.

Ben:
I saw someone tweeted about that, talking about watching the show that's on Netflix.

Josh:
The Netflix show, yeah.

Ben:
I haven't seen it. But this person said, "Yeah, I watched it for about eight minutes, and then I got too bored. And I think I would've stuck around longer if the floor actually was lava."

Josh:
I mean, that's a pretty good commentary. My kids are two and four, and this is a show that is conceivably for adults, I think. But my kids just can't get enough of it, and it's one of the few things that we can actually watch as a family and they will sit through a whole episode with us. So it's more for their benefit. But yeah, I think if it's keeping the kids engaged that long, I don't know if it's the thing I would be watching after they go to bed.

Ben:
So really this is the way for Netflix to build brand identity with the young kids, so that they'll be hooked for life.

Josh:
Yeah. But it's not a kids show, as far as I can... I mean, it's like a family show, I guess. But I don't know.

Starr:
I do get really strong Double Dare vibes from it. I was a big Double Dare fan back in the day. So she doesn't get a cool story out of it, but I think I do because the way I found out about this leak was that I was downstairs taking a bath, and I just hear, "I need to pee." So I'm like, oh okay, whatever. So I get out of the bathtub, and I go out there, and I'm noticing there's water all over the floor.

Josh:
Oh, no.

Starr:
I'm just like, "Ida, what? This is too much." there's a big hissing sound coming from her room.

Josh:
It's like a parent's worse nightmare.

Starr:
Yeah. Yeah.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
But then the thing is she didn't even notice any of that. She just woke up and had to pee. But I think it was because there was this big giant hissing sound in her room.

Josh:
Yeah. That's hilarious.

Starr:
That might be TMI. We might lose our G rating for that.

Josh:
I think we'll be all right.

Starr:
Yeah. Well, yesterday, or I guess earlier this week we did our second all remote conclave, which is great. I like talking to you all. And for people who haven't listened to every single back episode, what's wrong with you? But our conclaves are sort of our quarterly meetings where we get together and set plans for the next quarter and do everything like that. And since we live in the apocalypse now we do this remotely. We sort of switched.

Starr:
Instead of doing one big day, we do a series of one to two hour meetings, which is actually pretty nice. It's a bit more relaxed. You guys still like that process?

Josh:
I didn't think about this until you said that, but I don't like that this was our second quarterly remote meeting post-coronavirus. Is it already... are we there? We're the second or third quarter now of dealing with this.

Ben:
Yeah, I hadn't thought of that either.

Starr:
I guess so.

Josh:
Oof.

Starr:
It does feel like we're still in March. Are we going to place bets on how many quarters we're going to be...

Josh:
How many quarters until we see each other in person again?

Starr:
How dark do we want to be on this show?

Josh:
Yeah. I'm going to take 2030.

Starr:
Okay, there you go. That is...

Josh:
Going for the long bet.

Starr:
Oh, my gosh. I hope not.

Josh:
You got to have an outlier just in case.

Starr:
I hope that isn't the case. I hope that isn't the case.

Josh:
Ten years from now, I'll be like, yeah, I nailed that one.

Starr:
Yeah. I don't even know at this point. But we discussed some pretty interesting stuff. It was kind of a light conclave. Last one, last quarter, it was pretty intense because we just had the pandemic starting, and we were like, "Okay, what are we going to do to address this? Do we need to change up anything?" So we decided to do a couple things to see what we could do to lower churn, because we figured churn might be an issue as companies are a little bit more strapped for cash perhaps.

Starr:
But then it turns out the stock market is just doing great. So I guess nobody is strapped for cash. Yeah.

Josh:
Everyone is obviously doing fine. The S&P is up.

Starr:
Gravity just doesn't exist in this world. In tech, gravity just doesn't exist I guess. I don't know. But then I hear about different tech people who've lost their jobs and stuff, so it's just... I don't know.

Josh:
Yeah. I think it's driven by sectors. I don't know if we were talking about this on this podcast but the indexes are being driven by a few big winners, I think. At least that's what I heard, and there's a lot of companies still losing, going out of business, et cetera.

Starr:
Yeah.

Josh:
This is now a financial podcast.

Ben:
Fortunately, like Starr you were mentioning our churn, we were pretty nervous a quarter ago, and in our conclave we looked back over the past quarter and some of the things that we did, and there hasn't been the flood to the exits that we were fearing. People hanging in there for the most part. We've had a few people take us up on our offer of we're offering a few months free service for people that are really impacted. And we have had some customers who their revenue went to zero, and so they asked us if they can take advantage of that. But overall the story has been pretty good.

Josh:
I'm happy with the measures that we took at the time. I don't know if given how things turned out, I don't know if I could've freaked out a little bit less or something for a few months. But I think we made some good decisions during that conclave. And we've implemented some good changes to... even thought it wasn't huge numbers, I'm sure we helped to prevent some churn, and maybe even... I think we're getting more customers than we were before with our new pricing. Yeah, I think that we made some good changes.

Ben:
Yeah. One thing I think was interesting is that we didn't make every change that we discussed. There were probably half the things that we thought about doing we actually did, and some of them are more dramatic than others. We kind of left the more dramatic ones off the table, and I'm glad that we did it that way, that we didn't totally freak out and try to do everything that we thought of, because it just wasn't really necessary. And it would've been I think a waste of time and probably somewhat anxiety inducing to bring all these changes in at one time. So I'm glad we held back a little bit on that.

Starr:
Let's talk about the-

Josh:
Yeah, we kind of did a lot of brainstorming and then chose the ones that seemed to make sense as we got into it.

Starr:
Yeah. So let's talk about the new pricing. I know we discussed it in more depth in another podcast, but we're talking about results and everything. What's the main difference between our current pricing and what we had a couple months ago?

Josh:
Well, we switched to... before we had a typical, whatever... I don't know. It's like four levels, or four tiers. Just across the board there's four plans you can choose from. We switched to a system that is a two tiered system where you can choose am I a team or am I business? And then within those two tiers you get things that appeal to that type of customer. And then we also tweaked, we switched the actual limits and actual numbers around as well. But it's kind of like a different UI applied to a similar pricing model.

Starr:
Yeah. It's a bit simpler, and also, at least at the lower levels, it's a bit cheaper. Right?

Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. We re-introduced... We had removed our cheaper, our entry level plan. I don't know. Was it last year? Something like that. Which at the time I think it worked well. It turned out that we didn't lose a bunch of money from that. Our reasoning, I think, was now this is a different time. People are a little bit less... they're less eager to buy things right now. So we decided we wanted to try being a little bit more competitive again.

Starr:
Yeah. That makes sense. So the result of that is that our growth and MRR, our growth and monthly recurring revenue, it's about the same from new accounts as it has been. Might be a tiny bit lower, but the actual number of new accounts that we're getting is significantly higher. So I think that's a real big win. We're all just shocked a little bit, because we're not used to making a single change, and then just seeing a pretty obvious result from it.

Josh:
Yeah, not when it comes to customer acquisition.

Starr:
I know. I know.

Ben:
I suppose looking back you say, well, if you make your cheapest plan more than half of what the previous cheapest plan was then maybe you might get some more customers. Guess that makes sense.

Starr:
Yeah. Maybe. But also in other times when we changed pricing, it hasn't really made a huge, immediate, noticeable impact in finance.

Josh:
Yeah. And I don't know. I'd be surprised that people are really that price sensitive too.

Starr:
Yeah. I wonder-

Ben:
This is the first time we've really reduced prices. So in previous pricing changes, they've always gone up.

Starr:
Yeah.

Josh:
That's true.

Starr:
It seems like you'd expect the reverse of that though.

Josh:
But even as we went through the process of raising prices progressively like we did, I don't ever remember having a huge drop off in signups either. It was always like, oh okay, we're going to raise this price. Maybe we're going to even double this price, or eliminate this bottom option and see what happens, and then nothing happens. People just continue to buy at the same level, which is I guess part of what probably reinforced my thinking that people aren't that price sensitive in this B2B, what we're selling.

Josh:
Is $20 a month going to... Does it make a big difference? I would've expected kind of the same result on the way back down, to be honest. If it really doesn't matter that much to people, the same number of people would probably keep buying. I don't know. It could be also... We're not talking about we did make other changes to the pricing page. We simplified the pricing. I think we made some good changes around the whole persona thing. Is my whole business going to use this? Or is my team... Am I a team within a larger business? Maybe even a business that uses other error tracking services across other teams and my team just wants to try a new thing. Those changes could also be affecting the increased conversion.

Ben:
For sure. Yeah.

Starr:
One thing I just want to throw out for... I know you guys realize this but I want to throw it out for the listeners because they might not realize it. The one big difference, we talked about getting rid of our old micro plan or whatever it was called. Now we have another low priced option. But now a big difference is that we base our billing on traffic volume, and so there's a real natural upgrade path as people see what volume of traffic their applications send us and all that sort of thing. Whereas previously we tended to tier more on number of projects and things like that that were not quite... I don't know. It was something that was people had more of a choice. I mean, it was more discretionary, as opposed to how many errors you have. That's a little bit less discretionary. So I think it's a sound decision. I think it's not just changing our mind and going back to what we had with the micro plan.

Josh:
Yeah. For sure. That was a big departure from the way we used to bill. I like the usage based model for us. I think it works better.

Ben:
Yeah. And our next product is going to be even closer to that too. In fact, we could go down to just straight metered billing. I've thought about that, but I also want to support Heroku, and of course Heroku doesn't do metered billing, so you have to have some sort of monthly thing or tiered thing anyway.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah, I've been interested in this idea of just going to plain metered. Okay, you want to pay us a penny per thousand. Great. We just charge you, I don't know, five pennies at the end of the month.

Josh:
Yeah. It works. That's kind of what Heroku does. Isn't it?

Ben:
Yeah, basically. Yeah.

Josh:
They have maybe some base limit or something.

Ben:
Yeah. But it really messes up your projections and planning and stuff.

Josh:
Yeah, that's true.

Starr:
Oh, yeah.

Ben:
You can't really say, "Well, who knows?"

Josh:
Your revenue is literally tied to traffic patterns, which... Yeah. I guess that would be interesting. I guess you wouldn't have to duplicate. You could just use your actual ops charts for financial forecasting. You wouldn't have to duplicate your... you don't even need to prepare metrics or any of that stuff.

Starr:
One thing that seemed to be the case for every place that does just pure metered billing, though, is if you want support you got to buy a support contract. I don't want us spending an hour replying to somebody's email who's paying us $1.50.

Josh:
Right.

Starr:
Yeah.

Josh:
At least not until we have a lot of people paying us millions of dollars on the new product. Right?

Starr:
Right.

Josh:
We haven't dropped the name of the new product on the podcast yet. Right? We're saving that till the... Did we? I can't remember.

Ben:
I slipped it in a few minutes ago.

Josh:
Okay. So are we going to just let people scrub back and get that if they want to, and then we'll pretend like it never happened or... Okay. We'll do that.

Ben:
Maybe it'll show up in the show notes.

Josh:
It might.

Starr:
I read something that Amy Hoy wrote years ago that was like, "Just have multiple launches." So I'm all behind that.

Ben:
We are totally doing that.

Starr:
We can re-announce the name next week. It'll be fine.

Josh:
Yeah. We're going to try the multi-launch thing. Always be launching.

Ben:
We currently have filled seven of the 10 alpha slots for Heroku. So the way that Heroku works-

Josh:
It's exciting.

Ben:
Yeah, yeah. The way that Heroku works when you're building an add-on is you need to have 10 alpha testers using it before they will allow it to be lifted publicly in the marketplace as a beta. So a couple weeks ago we asked podcaster people to reach out, and they have. Thank you so much for all those who did. And we've had seven people. So we need three more to be able to finish that cohort. But the early testing that we're getting from these alpha testers has been useful and the feedback has been good, so things are looking up.

Starr:
Awesome. Should I do a little pitch? I don't think we've done a little description for anybody who might want to alpha test. Can I take a shot?

Josh:
Oh, for what it does?

Starr:
This will get me ready for working on the marketing site.

Josh:
Yeah, do it. We haven't talked about it. We talked about it last episode.

Ben:
When Starr wasn't here. Yeah.

Josh:
Yeah. So I want to hear Starr's take.

Ben:
Go for it.

Josh:
Go.

Starr:
Okay, so when you're building a web application oftentimes you have to use webhooks to interface with some sort of external service. And that's both inbound webhooks and outbound webhooks. And the thing is you want your webhooks to be super reliable for your users. If you send a webhook saying, "Hey, we processed this piece of information to your user's system," you want that to arrive on time and intact. Well, doing that is really, really, really hard, and a real pain in the neck. And there's lots of edge cases, and it sucks. I know, because I ran into all of them when I was building the first version of our uptime checker. It really sucks.

Starr:
That's why we built Hook Relay. Hook Relay is like just add reliability to your inbound and outbound webhooks. Hook Relay. Sign up now.

Josh:
That was awesome. Nice.

Starr:
Thank you. Thank you.

Josh:
We could clip that and transcribe it and just put it on our... That's the copy for the new website.

Ben:
For real.

Starr:
There you go. Yeah. What should people do if they want one of those slots in the alpha tester thing?

Josh:
There's three and only three. Right?

Starr:
There's only three.

Josh:
This is limited. There's only three, they're gone. When they're gone, they're gone.

Starr:
Yeah.

Ben:
Act now, supplies limited.

Starr:
Registration is ending at midnight tonight.

Ben:
You can email me, ben@Honeybadger.io. Or you can hit me up on Twitter. You can DM me. Stympy. But yeah, I'm happy to give you some info on how to get started once you email me.

Starr:
Okay. Awesome.

Ben:
For those who aren't Heroku users, because we've had a couple of our friends who are like, "Yeah, I'd help you test it but I don't do Heroku," I've been able to say, okay fine. We'll let you in anyway, but you have to have a GitHub account, because we're not doing authentication on our own. We're not doing email password authentication on this app. We're going to depend on third party's authentication. So if you really want to test Hook Relay and you don't do Heroku, you can still get in touch with me and I will let you in if you can log in with GitHub. And most people in our target audience are going to be able to log in with GitHub.

Josh:
Yeah. Are we going to support Apple's new...

Ben:
Sign in?

Josh:
Sign in.

Ben:
Probably not.

Josh:
I haven't used it for anything.

Ben:
I haven't used it.

Starr:
You can't say that, Ben. They're going to take us out of Apple Podcast now.

Josh:
Do we have to give Apple 30% of our revenue if we use their sign in?

Starr:
Yes, we mentioned our product on this podcast, so we've got to give them 30% of our revenue. One other thing that we discussed at the remote conclave was we've been trialing ProfitWell Retain for I guess two weeks now. Not too long. But this was another effort to reduce churn. And what ProfitWell Retain does, if you don't know, is it is essentially a dunning system. When you have lots of people who are on recurring payments, sometimes their credit cards stop working for whatever reason and you need to reach out to them and have them enter new credit card information.

Starr:
And if you don't do this, or if they don't act, they don't update their credit card information, well, then you lose them as a customer, and that kind of sucks. So yeah, ProfitWell Retain sends out emails to remind people. It has little in-app widgets that pop up and everything. And we had our own dunning emails in place, but we didn't have any sort of in-app stuff. So that's been really good so far. It's kind of too early to say exactly if it's something we want to keep. But so far, results are suspiciously good. I don't really believe in... I don't believe in miracles.

Starr:
No. I don't know. It just seems to have drastically reduced our churn due to failed payments. And I don't know. That might be a fluke, but hopefully it's not. And hopefully next month I'll be just singing the praises of Retain. In general, it seems to be a pretty good product. Integration was pretty easy. All the edge cases that... And of course because this is billing and we have a lot of customers already, and we had existing systems in place, I was worried about a lot of things. The rep answered all my questions about different edge cases. And they seemed to have thought about all of them before and implemented some simple behaviors.

Josh:
This is in addition to... Stripe automatically updates some cards. Right? So this is on top of that, like if that fails then this kicks in. Is that how that works?

Starr:
Yeah. It's pretty cool because in the user interface, it'll actually... it tells you how a individual customer was retained. And so it'll tell you if Stripe automatically... I think it's called smart retries or something. Wait. Is it called smart retries? I don't know.

Josh:
I'm not sure.

Starr:
Maybe I'm just making this up, but it will tell you how they're retained. Because Stripe offers that behavior where they will see a card is expiring and they will automatically update-

Josh:
Somehow they get the new expiration date and stuff. Is that what it does?

Starr:
Yeah. But that apparently doesn't work with everybody. And I guess sometimes cards aren't expiring, and sometimes the cards just change accounts. I mean, something happens and the card just becomes invalid.

Josh:
Yeah. Maybe they get canceled or corporate card, they switch to a different card or something.

Starr:
Yeah. I'm sick of cancel culture.

Josh:
Ooh. Spicy.

Ben:
On a related note-

Starr:
I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

Ben:
Since we're talking about payments and Stripe, can I rant a bit for something payments related?

Starr:
Yes. Go.

Ben:
It's not dunning. It's chargebacks. We don't have a lot of chargebacks here at Honeybadger, thankfully. It's rare that we do, but when we do it really gets my goat. It really, really does, because people, the ones that we've had anyway, are typically bogus. Someone says, "Oh, you didn't give me a refund when I asked you for it." Well, you never asked for a refund. Or, "It was a fraudulent charge." Oh, yeah? You've been paying us for four years. How is this fraudulent?

Ben:
We just had one recently where the company went out of business. So obviously they're not going to keep paying for services if they're out of business. But instead of canceling the service with us, we got a chargeback from their last month of service. And the reason was "refund requested, but you didn't issue the refund." I haven't even heard from you before. So I emailed the person, and their email is undeliverable, because the whole domain is gone. Okay, fine. Okay, well we won't be charging anymore obviously.

Ben:
But now are we not only out of the service fee for that month, but we're also out of the fee that Stripe charged, because they don't refund the processing fee. So whatever that was. And then there's also a $15 chargeback fee. So depending on how much that person is paying per month, that could go negative on that. It's just, ugh. It's very frustrating.

Josh:
And aren't chargebacks also... Are chargebacks bad for you processing capability too?

Ben:
Yeah. You get enough of them-

Josh:
It's like a spam report. Right? Almost.

Ben:
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, it's very rare that we have them, but man, if you're going to shut down your business, just cancel your cards. Don't ask for chargebacks. That's rough.

Josh:
I wonder who is the actual person who's initiating those chargebacks. Whose first thought is to call the bank and report? It makes me wonder if they outsource shutting down various systems to someone, like some accountant or something, or a lawyer whose policy is just to... This is a matter of policy. They make some sort of low effort to go and cancel things, and then they just chargebacks across the board or something. I don't know. I have no idea.

Ben:
Yeah. Hadn't thought of that. Yeah.

Starr:
I wonder if there's-

Josh:
I'm trying to see the good in people.

Starr:
I wonder if there's call centers in India where people just call around the clock to credit card companies on behalf of people demanding chargebacks for things.

Josh:
Yeah, maybe this is a startup that everyone is using. They write the letter for you, like it's been a journey, and then they take your statements, and they just go down the list and chargeback. Chargebacks for everyone.

Ben:
Starr, you said that the call center-

Josh:
They throw your data away.

Ben:
You said that call center thing, Starr. That reminded me of when I canceled the Wall Street Journal recently, and I had to go through one of those call centers just to cancel my account. They gave me the three different pitches while I'm on the phone. "Are you sure you don't want to save this much?" No, I just want to cancel. "You sure you don't want to save this much?"

Josh:
They're terrible.

Ben:
And it drives me crazy. Yeah. It's easy to sign up, but man, if you want to cancel, you got to turn over your birth certificate or whatever. And that's the thing that kills me when we get a chargeback. We try so hard to be so accommodating to people. We've had people contact us and say, "Hey, I've been paying you for a long time, but I haven't used your service for six months. Can I get a refund on all those transactions?" And we don't love to do that, but it's like, yeah okay. Sure.

Ben:
So that when we get one of those chargebacks, and it's like, "Oh, they were not responsive." You didn't even contact us. That's what gets my goat. It's like, oh man, at least give me a chance to help you out here.

Starr:
I wonder, you know how people contact us to handle refunds of Honeybadger energy drinks. I wonder if people are contacting Honeybadger energy drinks.

Josh:
That's a good question.

Ben:
Oh, you know? Yeah. Maybe.

Josh:
Yeah. Maybe they did contact someone and it was just the wrong company.

Ben:
Just the wrong someone. Okay, maybe I shouldn't have said-

Josh:
The wrong Honeybadger.

Ben:
I should peace out here. Okay.

Josh:
This just proves to me-

Starr:
Oh, no. No, I wasn't saying don't be angry.

Josh:
This just further confirms for me that we need alliances with the other honey badgers in the world, specifically for handling cross support requests like we've talked about in the past.

Starr:
What's the name of a group of honey badgers?

Josh:
You tell me.

Starr:
I don't know. A hurricane.

Josh:
Hurricane of honey badgers.

Starr:
I didn't have a funny answer. I thought that was y'all's job. I just ask the questions.

Josh:
It's definitely not flock, flock of honey badgers.

Ben:
If we can't arrange the cross company customer support, at least we should do a cross company affiliate thing, so we can get a cut of all that fine bitcoin action.

Starr:
That's a good idea. Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah.

Josh:
Yeah. I have to order some of those energy drinks. Although, after that-

Starr:
Oh, wait. Is it an energy drink or a supplement?

Josh:
It's supplement like protein powder, actually. Yeah.

Starr:
So we could do an energy drink.

Josh:
Like a literal Honeybadger energy drink?

Starr:
We could sell it to all the old school Mountain Dew chugging programmers.

Josh:
Yeah. Well, the new ones, they do drink energy drinks. All the Rockstars. I don't know if it's Red Bull.

Starr:
And fruit ninjas. That's my favorite energy drink, is fruit ninja.

Ben:
You made me think of a completely different tangent. All right.

Josh:
All right.

Ben:
100% related. Trademarks. Okay, so five years ago we registered our trademark, and I'm learning that at the end of five years, you need to renew your trademark. The thing is your trademark and your contact information are in this public database. So when that five year mark comes up you get tons of spam from companies who want to help you with your registration, renew your registration.

Ben:
So I've been swimming... My email inbox is overflowing with all these trademark companies. "Hey, you need to renew it." And of course you also get those ones in the physical mail that look like invoices. It's like, "Oh, here's your bill." This is not a bill.

Josh:
Like refinancing your mortgage.

Ben:
Exactly. Exactly. Interesting little tid that I learned these past couple of weeks.

Josh:
Sounds like a job for a Fastmail filter, or rule or whatever.

Ben:
But the funny thing is though, just one last little tid on that, I started getting these emails probably about a month ago. And our registration first renewal, you don't have to do it until you get to that five year mark, like on the same date. And that date actually happened this week. So these companies way out ahead of the actual trademark office. Because the trademark office will also send you an email saying, "Oh, by the way, you really need to renew."

Josh:
But they know that they're timing it ahead so that they beat them to it.

Ben:
Yep. Yep. Clever stuff.

Josh:
Lot of trademarks in the world.

Ben:
Yeah.

Starr:
That's wild. What if that was real life? What if that was what you spent all day thinking about? It seems like it would be kind of unfulfilling. I don't know. Some people find just money fulfilling, so maybe they would be okay.

Josh:
That's along the lines of people who just are outright scammers, and it's a little bit like you're hacking people. Maybe they get some fulfillment out of that-

Starr:
That's called murder, Josh. Hacking people is called murder-

Josh:
Not literal hacking.

Starr:
-and we don't condone it on Founder Quest.

Ben:
So if you're hacking people, then what is an exception in that context?

Josh:
Yeah. I don't know.

Ben:
Maybe the person having a heart attack. I don't know.

Josh:
They called the cops on you.

Ben:
Ooh. That would be exceptional.

Starr:
Well, it sounds like the plumbers are here to fix my water here, so I'd better go.

Josh:
Sounds good.

Ben:
Good luck with that.

Starr:
Yeah, thank you. It's good talking with y'all and to our beautiful listeners, just remember if you want to rate us, please do so at Apple Podcasts, whatever they're calling it these days. And if you want to write for us, we've got instruction on our blog at honegybadger.io. And yeah, if you want one of those three remaining alpha tester slots-

Josh:
I think it's two now. I think it's down to two.

Starr:
Oh, my God. We're down to two?

Josh:
Act quick.

Starr:
Oh, no. Oh, wait. It just put down to one. We've got one remaining alpha tester slot. Yeah, so get a hold of Ben at ben@Honeybadger.io. Yeah. Until next week, we will be your friends always. 

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