#2: Alex Krupp on learning and building with Django
Details
In this episode, Alex Krupp takes on his learning journey. Alex is a business major, but despite that ended up building and coding and awesome app, all by himself. Hopefully, you will get inspired and will learn something useful by listening to Alex's story.
Show Notes
Today I'm interviewing Alex Krupp. Alex is the founder of FWD:Everyone, a service that allows you to share email within private repositories. In this episode, we talk about his journey as a solo founder. He tells us about his experience learning and using Django for his project. Hope you enjoy this episode of the Built with Django podcast.
✉️ https://www.fwdeveryone.com
🦸♂️ https://www.alexkrupp.com
If you would like to support the project, you can do this via my Github Sponsors page.
Transcript
Rasul: All right. Hello everyone. Today we have, Alex Krupp, up on the podcast. Alex is a CEO and co-founder of forward everyone in platform that helps you read, share, search and discover useful email chains. He's also an author of pretty forward, which we'll talk about later. Alex do you have anything else to tell about yourself?
Alex: No, that's pretty much it. I guess for me how I came to this, like my background, like I studied kind of business and marketing in college and did that for a couple of years after graduating to waiting. And then only later started getting more into programming in Django, yeah. That's interesting.
Rasul: Okay. So we're a Django podcast. So you can start with some of the jungle things. As you mentioned, you are doing like a business degree, so you decided to learn it well college or afterwards, you want to build your specific project. How'd you come about learning
Alex: a few years after actually. So I think so I graduated from college in 2008. When I was in college, I took a couple of CS classes and I was always interested in, getting more into coding. But at the time web development, it was just like a lot harder than it is now. And at the same time, there was also like a lot less business advice, like on the web than there is now. So it was I think much more than today, like you really had to. Y and over the other. So that, so I kinda focused on business, but then, a few years later, after the advent of stack over flow and blogging and everything else, it became more obvious that like most people should just know and understand if not, be great at both. So that's how I started getting. Deep into like tech and Django. And that was like 2012, that I started going that direction. So
Rasul: you will, right now you would consider yourself more on the programming side or on the business side?
Alex: Both, I would say I've been doing more programming for the last five years, especially more than five years now, actually, but yeah.
Rasul: Cool. So when you started learning it with what we had challenges, was it easy, hard with Django specifically?
Alex: The specifically so I think the Jenga documentation was pretty good, even in 2012. I think the first version I used was like 1.4, where. I'm pretty sure custom user model was, has just been added. That was like the big feature. And yeah, I think the biggest challenge was just just with Python, there were still things with Python that I didn't know or understand. Like I w like I I think Just some of the syntax was like, like it's one thing to learn the syntax running the Python documentation, but then to actually recognize like in the wild oh, this is, a class or this is, or whatever, like Jenga just even though like it's not a very magical framework. Can feel magical if you don't like, if you're not like immediately recognizing like what Python structure is, things are and like how it works at a Python level. So that took a little while and I think yeah, I there were just, there were things in the, that, like the tutorial was here, everything going from the tutorial to the rest of it definitely at first it took me a while. Like I just wasn't efficient at like understanding the documentation for it would be frustrating. And it was like, cause I think that's the hardest thing about learning to code. Just getting to the point where you can like really Just to understand the documentation yourself. Yeah. I
Rasul: totally resonate with this because yeah. When I was learning Django actually general, I don't think jangle was the official documentation. That's how it was. It was probably will Vincent. He has some good tutorials on Django. It's a couple of books. And then, with mine, I look at documentation and I can actually read something, what arguments do you use or what it does, and then if it is a joint, when you understand it. So I totally resonate with you on this one. Do you remember what was the turning point? Cause you're saying, it was because you didn't have much experience with by then. And it was somewhat hard learning new thing. And then at what point you got to a tipping point where you didn't get discouraged, but rather you were like, okay, cool. I'm sticking with this. It's my cheesy now.
Alex: Yeah. So for me, so the way I started learning it was, I was actually trying to make like my nuts. Say like for react for one back in 2012. But it turned out the technology to do it just wasn't there yet. And wouldn't really exist for a couple more years. And I also realized that I just wasn't, I just wasn't ever going to be good enough in the near future DEC to actually be able to site and like a good way. But however I did. My initial idea was just to get good enough to make like a minimum viable product and then find a technical co-founder. And I actually ended up getting better than I thought I would. So ended up taking a job as a developer and figured like why not get paid to get better at this? So I spent a couple of years like working full-time as a developer actually. Yeah, partly because I wanted to get better and partly because I. Even though I have a good business background and have some good business related stuff on my resume. I was finding it easier to get like good jobs as a developer with zero development experience, then to get like good business jobs with a pretty decent like business background. So it was kinda like, okay, like it was a try yeah, so after a couple of years I started, I got a lot better, essentially. Like the first six months of my first job, I was basically giving me this. I was going to get fired like every single day. It just, but we'd go home like after every day. And just basically just teach myself for another, five or six hours after work. And eventually after six months I started getting the hang of it and then take a second job after a year is learning even more stuff. And went back to afford everybody a couple years later after Google released like a new Gmail API, essentially, that sort of made it possible to do what I was originally looking to do. And by the time I jumped back into it, he was like a lot, it was much smoother sailing.
Rasul: Did you do any interesting projects when you were learning? Cause you mentioned that the the foreword project was not possible at the time. So did you anything, hell
Alex: spawn? So I was so I w I was still working on forward everyone. Even though it wasn't pot. So like the. The sticking point at the time, or at least like the biggest sticking point, it was like very important to me that like the emails people share, whether publicly or privately should look actually be authentic. And there just, wasn't really a good way to authenticate them at the time. So it's like you could have people copy and paste emails. Onto a website, but it's then anyone can just make up any email conversations. So we're kinda like the magical they got lost there, that model for me. So yeah, so I did spend several months working on that before I realized that was the biggest thing. And then after I was mostly teaching myself, like angular JS at the time and JavaScript and I wasn't really building anything like using angular or JS or. I think Jay, I learned during that time there's maybe more Python or now, but yeah, they're there. So it was like reading a lot of books, but not necessarily in taking like your detailed notes on the books, but not necessarily building things so much outside of work at that point. I think just coding for work. All day, every day. Anyway, so there wasn't like a huge need.
Rasul: So you mentioned you will learn learning JavaScript and some of the front end stuff at the same time. What was easier for you? What was more natural?
Alex: That's a good question. I think I JavaScript, I guess it was easier in some ways, just because like I had already learned Python, but at the same time, like there's a lot of JavaScript stuff. It's just like super weird. Or even to this day where it's like I, I do a pretty decent amount of JavaScript, but even today there's stuff where it's got to remember what the gotcha. Like I remember there, the keyword, this there's four different things I can do depending on the context, but I still don't know. It's just like when I see code involving this, like I need to actually look up like what the thing is binding to, depending on the context. And I know there's so like I know all the weird quirks like that, but because it's even though I do it a lot, it's not like I'm doing it all day. So there's certain things that are like weird there for me, even to this day. The reason I
Rasul: ask is because I started it with a backend with Django and I know HTML and CSS came slowly, but I started understanding all the flex stuff, how to position and everything, and then JavaScript. I'm trying to learn it again, just pure vanilla JavaScript, and it's like time for me and never get it. I think just because I got so much better with Python, I can actually understand some of the things that was happening in JavaScript. As you mentioned, I just find it confusing. I always thought no front end the school just because that's what that's what people see. But then once I actually started learning, like backend, it's just simpler. It's more introverted. So for me, you just, you're stuck on a server and everything's nice.
Alex: Okay. Yeah. That's fair. I think the book, the JavaScript book I liked the most is a JavaScript ally, Jay. Bye. Reginald Brit if the way I think and it's it just teaches JavaScript from first principles from it explains how JavaScript is like secretly a functional language. And that I found that like super useful yeah. A lot of fun to read. So yeah, if you're teaching yourself again anyway thank you.
Rasul: And regarding Django. So if say we have users who visit the website, they saw all the cool stuff people built with Django and they want to start learning. Do you have any advice for those people?
Alex: Yeah, I think the tutorial is really good actually. I think The hardest thing, honestly, it's like learning what you don't need to know. Because there's, so there's so much stuff, both in Django and Python and Django rest framework or whatever else in libraries you want to use that like that's like a lot of it is Not only do you not need to know it, but like a lot of it is like stuff that you really don't want to use, frankly. And I, in as in, or you don't have a good sense of what that is. So it was just easy to get sucked into wasting a lot of time on time, stuff like that. So the example I like is when I was learning Python, I just had no concept of what to learn or not learn. So I remember spending like several days, like reading the documentation on like frozen sets was just having been doing this for 10 years now, like I've never wanted to use it for us and said it's like complete wasted time. Other than knowing that there is. It's like, how is that supposed to know that it's like the same thing where there's so many different string formatting methods and Python now. And like a lot of them you really just don't want to use. As a beginner, like it's easy. Get caught up in like spending multiple weeks, like learning stuff, like learning string formatting stuff that you should need to be using it in the first place. Yeah. I don't have a good solution other than maybe getting a job and it like, other people for advice. Yeah,
Rasul: maybe that's actually a good idea, cause you mentioned that as a beginner learning, you don't, supposedly you don't know many people who know it very well, so you don't know what to learn. So maybe having a resource, so you know what you should learn, what you should focus on. What's the most important thing. Alex: And with Python and Django, there's like really good meetups also where people are super helpful and like most major cities. I th I think it's something a little bit easier than most other technical stacks. So that's one of the real advantages. Actually, I left by phone, my
Rasul: parents, or you can do, I started it because I was econ and math. And then. Doing it for data analysis, because I thought that's what it was made for. And then, later on web development. Jangled cool. So then I'm seeing, you can make apps for Mac with Python. It's just crazy. It's so versatile
Alex: people say it's like the second best language for everything, which I think is the first is like whatever specific language for your use case, so like for web development and data science or whatever, different or game development. But I, but for me, like wanting to startups, like that's the reason I chose it, essentially, because it's as a startup, you don't really know what you're going to build or how you're going to make money. And with Python. No matter what the answer is, like you can do it with Python, whereas like a lot of other languages, like you don't necessarily have that flexibility or the third party libraries or, whatever. Yeah, for me, that was like why I went that direction.
Rasul: That totally makes sense. So you mentioned for forward everyone's yeah. Let's talk about it a little more. So right now, is it your full-time project you're fully dedicated to it?
Alex: Yeah, it has been for the last couple of years. Yes. Very
Rasul: interesting. So you don't have a full-time job, as a developer or anything. Alex: Not right now. So I, I had for a little while before that I'd been alternating between doing consulting and just working on this essentially. But then I've been, I started going in, I really wanted to keep doing that, but then I got pushed more towards working on this full time, just because A couple of years ago, like Google announced a new security policies for anything using like the Gmail API and like a lot of their other API APIs actually that misses it basically necessitated either paying like tens of thousands of dollars a year for a security assessment or else rewriting rewriting a lot of the software to use different API systems. So it's just it economically, it just wasn't gonna work to be paying like, tens of thousands of dollars a year for something that was like, a hobby project. So I just had to make a decision decided to go forward, essentially.
Rasul: Okay. When you started it it was, I think I mentioned it was 14, roughly, right?
Alex: So I think my co-founder and I started working part time and the weekends and 2000. Oh no, it w it was 2014, fall of 2014. And then we we went full time briefly in July, 2015, and then. Launched second theory. It wasn't even filed I call it like an MVP, but like in restrict, it was not really viable, I think in okay. Spring of 2016, because
Rasul: I was just going to ask how long it took you to get to an MVP, if you will. So you have two versions and the PR a non real MVP and a real MVP.
Alex: Yeah. So initially launched something. Yeah. So it was like a round it, I want to say a year and a quarter of full-time work for each of us. Yeah, that's about right. And then but like the initial thing just didn't really work at all. Like we. We did a show hacker news post, but in loss a product time, but it really didn't even promote it beyond that because it didn't really work. So it's there's not much point getting users if every time they tried to do the one thing they're supposed to do, it just like breaks. And also there there were like a lot of other issues. Like it didn't work on mobile at all when we launched. And it was just like, so it. It kinda there, there were just like a couple of years of, we'd talked to potential users and be like, why aren't you using this? And they tell us things like like I don't have a computer. I only use the internet from my phone and just morning on my phone oh, that seems a legitimate reason. Actually. Maybe we should like work on that. Why aren't you using this? And they're like You can only share email publicly, but what if I want to see what it looks like before I share it with all my friends? And we're like, oh that also seems legitimate. And there was like and then it's If I publish it I'm not sure if the publicly, I want lots of people to read it. And you guys don't have the users. There were like, oh what if we, made it so that you can embed email within Reddit posts, medium posts. So that way, like you could, leverage all of their traffic without us needing, millions of user. And so it was just like very iterative where
Rasul: that's perfect. Cause you were talking to your clients and then. Acting upon their recommendations. And it took you out when you said till 2016 to get something working Alex: well. So the thing we lost since 2016 and wasn't working here, we should just like public to get something working like actually with good engagement, like only in the last. In the last six months we've started, we were actually getting good engagement now I think we've it's still not like a like super successful business by any means, but it's gone from like the trough of sorrow to like the wiggles of false hope stage if you're familiar with Y Combinator model. Yeah. But yeah. And that's That's interesting because like now, like in like you had always been doing it like a little bit of prospecting, but it was like, we'd send out like a few hundred emails, like asking people if they wanted to use the product or, whatever we were saying in, we were like getting a bunch of feedback, but like not a lot of people who wanted to use it or else people who wanted to use it, but like even people who wanted to use it. They found themselves unable to actually use it for various reasons. Which kind of necessitated us just going back to the well, working on the product essentially, but also made a few shifts over the years with our initial customer base and stuff like that. So in the startup world, there's two different schools of thought that are like diametrically opposed. One is you should always be like selling all the time. And if you're not like, it's if you're not like selling every day, like you're not a real business, it's just like a fan of your project then like the other school of thought is that like engagement's the most important thing. And until you have like good engagement and retention, then there's no point in doing growth because it's just you're just. Pouring water into a sip, essentially. So like we definitely very heavily into the focusing on getting a good engagement or which we've finally seems to be working. Yeah, now we're going back to in the other actually didn't actually. Doing selling, which is in, it's actually going better now, which is a lot more fun. Okay. Yeah. It's just it's a lot more fun when people like, are excited about the finger building.
Rasul: Yeah. So I met, I mentioned, oh, sorry. I noticed that first of all, the hacking news, the second hacking news show was an accidental one, I believe. Someone else posted.
Alex: Yeah. I It was an accident. It wasn't asking posted. Yeah, so I don't know who it was. I think it was someone I met at a meetup and I'm not, I'm actually not sure. Or I think someone I've gotten to meet I've told one of their friends, or I don't know what the other was. But yeah,
Rasul: we've got a lot of traction. There was a lot of comments, a lot of controversial. Some people were okay. That's pretty usual,
Alex: yeah, that, that was like the best thing today is the first time we did a show acronym. It just got like completely ignored pretty much. And then the second time, like people were actually angry enough oh, we're like, we're making progress. It's actually funny. Cause it's always had that reaction. Like it So when we started working on it, it was like before the Sony email hacks, it was before the Hillary Clinton email things, it was before, like all this, like all of these scandals. It was also before like tech lash, where people just lost faith and Facebook and Google, all these better companies, Amazon. So yeah it's been Weird in that environment, but even from the very beginning, like it's, it was like very polarizing like this is like before we even had the product, when it was still, when we were just going to meet up to talking to people. But still, so I guess in like 2015, where I just remember they were, there were like a couple of people. We're like, yeah, we're taking this site where anyone can take like an email conversation and publish it on the internet. And some people were like, wow, that's an amazing idea. And other people literally just got super angry and one person just started crying. It was like really weird, but yeah, I don't know.
Rasul: Okay. And and your product hunt was pretty successful as well. I guess there was no. Protocol seems to be a little nicer in that sense. So there was no sodas, no crazy, arguments going on. But what I wanted to ask is any learnings you can share for me from both of those lunches? Anything that comes to mind?
Alex: Very little, honestly. I think, obviously, like it's a lot of fun to be on like hacker news and product hunt. But at the same time for 99% of businesses, like those aren't like your customers. I guess that's true. Yeah. So if you can get, if you can get them like beta testing in like finding bugs or something like that's a great. For most people make, they'd be pretty lucky to get that. There are exceptions, like there are like, obviously Dropbox, it's like the canonical example of a company, like show H and indeed they became like a $10 billion thing. But most companies aren't like that. They're just Hey, first of all, I. These days, it's very hard to even get your, like your show agent featured on the front page of hacker news. And even if you do, it's it's more of a vanity thing and not like a marketing.
Rasul: Yeah, I agree. Yeah. So let's talk some numbers if you are comfortable with, so how many users does email or would everyone has right now?
Alex: A few hundred and it's like very small it's okay. He was so there were, I'm trying to think of how to phrase this. There were, there, there were like a few hundred people who signed up with the first iteration of the technology. And then within the last couple of years, I read off the tech And the new technology finally got it approved by Google less than a year ago, like in the last six to nine months, that's good. And yeah. And then since then I was basically spend about six months doing like special projects with it. So like I was doing Like a lot of stuff using our software to a benefit to Andrew Yang campaign for precedent. Which was super useful, just like dogfooding our own product and like finding a lot of a, like some bugs, but more just like features where it's oh, tag to actually use this for something real. Yeah. Needs like X, Y, and Z. W we had been documenting that the product, like for our own needs for awhile, but to actually be working with the campaign and like a few other larger users like that, and to be doing things that they were asking for service, like a lot of Like useful or means, like I used to improve the product. I'm going to say, oh yes. So then the partly because of the product improvements, but also partly randomly, like the engagement started getting validated there's people who have actually been using it, like not every day, but every week, like multiple times a week. And then at the same time, there was, again, some email threads that were posted about coronavirus recently that got like tens of thousands of page views and were linked to from like Asian times, financial times, like the front page of Yahoo news like really Helped us out. And people were like super excited and they were like, dozens, if not hundreds of tweets about it. So validating that people actually like the experience of reading the threads and then like a reasonable percentage of people who are reading the threads were actually signing up and making accounts. So not all of these people were actually using the product most were not, but still like that kind of. I guess separately, almost like the people using it for business use internally, it was validated people. Their leadership aspect was validated. Like the engagement are pretty forums validated. So all of the pieces of the life cycle have been like separately validated at this point. This is so that's how I've been making. Transitioned to actually focus on selling it. Sorry. Yeah.
Rasul: I can only see it going up, as you mentioned, people share cars because it has an innate kind of sharing quality. So you should, the point is that you share and when you share other people read it. And so they're more likely to share as well. And you can spread hopefully though that's how it's going to go. The first time you publish the project on built the Django. I obviously checked about I didn't go into detail. I didn't I just looked at it from far and just, okay. That's pretty cool. I'm just starting to wonder how you did it. And then second time around maybe a couple of weeks later, I decided to look at it again. And then I went to, I missed the tutorial. The first time I saw it. And then the second time with the video explaining, and then some more detailed explanations, it was very well done. The instructions were very good. And then they're talking about the use cases very well, so that I can, immediately think, okay, what can I use it for and how it can be used? So that's done very well. And if you don't mind me asking did you hire someone to do that? Or you also tried to do it yourself?
Alex: No, I did it myself. It, my, my wife helped a lot. There she's a film and video teacher it's her voice in the current version of the tutorials. So yeah. And she I basically, I wrote the scripts and I did the screencast, but then she edited it, edit it and did the voiceovers and It was, it did all the timing to make sure that the voice lined up with images and stuff. So that's how they were created. A lot of them actually need to be redone now. But I really hated it.
Rasul: No, I can imagine. I can imagine it's not. Quick and easy. It's not like a coding where you're going to change something and then you can see the results straight away. It's a long project so I can insult them.
Alex: They were incredibly painful to me. Like I, even though each one's two or three minutes, like they, it took a long time essentially. Yeah, it's like probably 10 hours per minute of video. Something that, to write the script. And so just from
Rasul: your side, plus whatever your wife did though, with the editing and then, oh, wow.
Alex: Cause you need to recording again and again. And it's and there would be things like, I'd actually accidentally like. The tabs would be like in a different place between kites or like the bookmark bar would be like open or closed or it would be in like the incognito window. So the Brasher would be like a different color or so I, there kept being these continuity issues and then all sorts of stuff, vocals and yeah, it was just
Rasul: such a pain that's painful. That sounds very painful. I hope the second time around it goes easier. And then
Alex: yeah. Yeah. Some of them are still fine, but yeah. There's a couple of things that have changed.
Rasul: If you don't mind me asking what's so do you have a revenue going in from the customers using or it's currently totally free and what's your plan on a kind of
Alex: business model? There's like a small amount of revenue, not enough to live off like a few hundred dollars a month, basically. But it's Yeah, it's, the business model is basically, and this is what it's always been even before we built it like that. It's completely free to share stuff publicly, but to share stuff privately within your company, it costs a few dollars per user per month. In our case, we're charging $16 per user per month. So yeah, that's the model. Essentially the theory is that sharing stuff publicly gets us users and makes us rank higher in Google and all of that. So hopefully in the long term, we'll get more easiest to decide who will then make distance accounts. So yeah it's basically the exact. Business model was good hub. Which really was an inspiration. I think when we were talking about it back in 20 14, 20 15, we were talking about should this be paid or should this be ad prototyping supported? My thought was really like it takes 10 years to build a business, and at least, and in 10 years it's like self-driving cars really put like a third of Americans out of work and who's going to have money to buy stuff. That's like being advertised. So I don't, that's not really maybe that won't come to fruition or whatever, but that wasn't really like a business model that I wanted myself, like chain too. So that's cool. We've never run it as an, a site and have really Wishes design from the ground up not to require like advertising to be profitable.
Rasul: So let's switch maybe for a couple of minutes to talk about pretty forward. So how does it relate to everyone and then what's the different, what are the differences?
Alex: Yeah, so the so the idea of For everyone. Was that like stuff when you share it publicly or within your company, it's kinda meant to live forever essentially. And just be visible either to the general public or else the people within your company. There's a lot of stuff that you don't necessarily want to live forever or that doesn't need to. Want to share something with one or two coworkers, but not have a need share it with your entire company. So pretty far to build for that use case. So it's completely free. It's in like the idea is emails are parsed like the same way, so they're super easy to read. They can still be embedded, whatever. But but yeah, they don't live forever. Like you can make them expire and you can share them with like just one person or whatever. And the idea also is that for what everyone had this URI complicated funnel where you need to make an account and the need to connect your email address and all this other stuff. So by the time you actually can even share your first email, you've had to do five or 10. Things before that where it's pretty forward and has zero funnel. Like you don't need to make an account. Like you literally just saw the ad on, you opened the ad on and then you hit share in that. It's basically one click. So yeah, we, it was also just an experiment to see what what our engagement would be like follow up those barriers to using it would be removed yeah. And it's, even though it only has, I think as of right now, there's only like 176 people within cell. Partly I've been working at other stuff since it was launched a few months ago. And just partly I just haven't figured out how to get more people installed it to install it, but the people who haven't installed are actually like using it. A lot of them are using it like quite a lot. So I've been like super happy with that. It's just, it's a question of how to get more people to install it, which is I think it's solvable, but it's yeah, exactly. I just, I have not solved it yet. Okay.
Rasul: Yeah. No, whatever. It's a skill, I'm sure you'll get better. And with a business background, especially have you ever thought of selling either over the projects or,
Alex: Yeah. I've thought about it and it's just it's pretty hard to sell something until like you have actual users. It doesn't even if the technology is like pretty good and pretty stable at this point like the reality is like people don't buy things from the technology and they buy that for the user base. Realistically until you have like over a hundred thousand active users, it's just like a non-starter to sell something essentially. So yeah, maybe you actually, who knows? I just working on it there. So I we just the thing that's kept me going even through like years of like very limited usage. So yeah hopefully it just turns into a real business. That I can run myself, which is, it actually seems to be on its way to doing fortunately. Yeah.
Rasul: And I guess I have a couple more questions before we start to wrap up regarding gender. I don't know if you've seen this or you have a feeling about it, but I saw this kind of argument quite a lot. And people have different opinions on this. Function-based use class-based used. What do you prefer? What you think things better.
Alex: So classmates use, I think it's better through w with the caveat that like, just because I think so I think classmates use is better because it's easier to read. And essentially like you've got, your, your get your post, your put they're all split up. It's like very easy to see where one starts and one ends and so forth work class ACU kind of tends to go wrong is when people start. Making their classes like inherit all of these properties from like parent classes. And then as soon as that happens with all of the readability advantages, like it go away. But in my personal philosophy is like use class-based views. But don't have them inherit from like other stuff. That said if you're a beginner, I think it's fine to use like functional stuff. Like for a lot of people, it's just easier to understand it. And it's if you start with functional to use, it's you're easy to rewrite them later. It's not, it's yeah. Okay.
Rasul: I started with class easier for you, so never understood. I still have trouble since attending function based use. Because there are use cases where you need those and it's just like a little bit on those. Okay. And interesting for your project. Do you self-host or you use any like type of stuff? Alex: I'm on AWS and elastic and stock. Yeah, it took a while to learn how to use it. But it's been pretty good. It's been relatively inexpensive. And I think learning AWS is like a good life skill to have. So I'm not upset at all that I went in that room. Yeah. It's not like
Rasul: those frozen sets, right?
Alex: Yeah, no, exactly. Right where it's like I've used Hiroki well but yeah. BF for this, I think AWS specifically. Sure. Yeah. I
Rasul: am currently. I tried Hiroko once I can just couldn't get it. So I failed this, sitting it up, went with digital ocean. Drop that. And so it's just basically the Linux. You have to do all the setup, but they have some good instructions and yeah, I agree with you that, those skills feel like, that good they're very relatable and that you can use them in other places. Do you have any other things you would like to talk about or you would like me to ask you?
Alex: No question. I know. No. My my hope would be that if you check back in six months or a year, like the business will actually be making a substantial amount of money or at least it will. Yeah. So I think, right now we've got like a handful of other than like the special projects I mentioned there's we've got like a lot of, five and 10% of companies, but now we're starting to. Get interested in 50 to 200 person companies. We'll see how that goes. But
Rasul: Alex, I would love to do another one. Hopefully it's going to be sooner than six months and you'll be able to know, or the share them the amazing growth because cause forward, everyone is. I don't want to say old project because it has some sort of negative connotation to it but you've been working on it for a while. I hope yeah it's the point where I seen all the growth exponent exponential growth is at the point where it's very feasible. Alex: Yeah. Yeah. For bootstrap projects. It's actually the norm for things to take a while. So it's even though it feels like insane, but yeah.
Rasul: Okay are there any other notes you'd like to give the, future Jungo makers anything in particular to help them get started or, pushing through?
Alex: No. So I mentioned to you I'm still working on like a blog post event, Janu architecture. Hopefully it will be published within the next few months it's hard because I'm trying to mix business advice with Snippets essentially. And it's which I think is like super important personally, but it's it's also pretty difficult just from like a writing perspective, because there's not a lot of examples of that being done to Yeah. Cause it's there's still like a lot of times business people in COVID people are like different, but I think it's like important that like people code from like the perspective, like doing things that make sense from for the business. I guess so. Yeah, I'm trying to push that and experiment with that. It's like a writing style. It's a,
Rasul: it's hard sometimes I agree. But it's very important. It's just a good thing to do. It adds clarity to yourself, when you go through it, you understand it more, but also, it's very helpful for the people. So thank you. I am personally very looking forward to reading that post and seeing what's your perspective on some of the gender stuff. Cool. So thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much for being patient and answering all the questions. Any questions?
Alex: Thank you. Yeah, thank you Russell. I appreciate it. All right. Take care.