Business Perspectives at Balkan Ruby

Speaker 1 0:00

hello friends, welcome to the special edition of friendly show. Today we are all in the belgians. We are in sofia, bulgaria, on the belgium ruby conference, and today I have two speakers. Listen, come on. I got adrian, who just gave a talk, and I put irina from evil martians evil martians hello, hey, hey guys, yeah, excited to be with you, as as always.

Speaker 3 0:35

So welcome, so okay, so we're a balkan ruby, we uh, which is the? The slogan is back in, back in business, because the balkan ruby conference is back in business and the whole theme is about business. So we have a lot of different, a lot of people that are having businesses with ruby and with the development, telling, sharing their stories. Right, uh, you shared, you opened a conference and shared about how you can do it with consulting and you can. You know, we spun off any cable and you're doing business there with, like an open core business. I spoke about my business with Avvo. What do you think about the other talks as well, like how, what do you think about, like, the different approaches that all of us kind of have?

Speaker 2 1:16

Yeah, I really like the idea of conferences specializing on something not just Ruby, right. We now have, for example, balcon will be specializing on um the business side of things. We also also had rail sas well, right, which was also sort of more about business and like sas, products built with rails. But this, this one is, but we don't have that this year, first of all, and then, like, I like, I like the idea that we can be here talk about consulting or products. So many people do this. Yeah, yourself is uh, consulting right, and, and eddie, so yourself, you are an educator and consultant, right uh, yes, so uh, I've got to the super real youtube channel.

Speaker 2 1:58

I've previously created a few courses on udemy and on gumroad, and I do consulting for clients yeah, so, and and this somebody recently told me that there's something entrepreneurial about rubyists, that rubyists in general are. Yeah, this is cool.

Speaker 1 2:15

I like sharing, I like sharing and yeah well, maybe because it's easier to create a startup and we'll be in the rails that in some java stuff yeah, that's true, that's true.

Speaker 3 2:27

Yeah, and I quite like um, I quite like the uh. The talk about like monetizing open source, which was like super, like distilled, like every type of open source, you know kind of uh monetization that you can think of. Is we started from uh, you know tips like uh, about like tips and how you can, you know, sponsor a project all the way to like enterprise, kind of like companies that do it and um, yeah, it was.

Speaker 2 2:58

That was quite cool that that, yeah, I agree that was a great talk and what was? I think the takeaway from Bozidar's standpoint, the way I understood him for himself is like he was trying to say, look, I'm not really commercializing this project but kind of I will, you know, create my own limits right to the level of my involvement, and to try to gonna stay sane makes sense because Rubik's is so popular. The fact that that it cannot, it cannot gonna survive in donations at all, like donations are not cutting it at all for Robocop, something as popular as Robocop that's, that's crazy. But I mean, we've, we've known that before.

Speaker 3 3:53

But it's refreshing to kind of hear yeah, hear those stories again and another thing, like from your talk about the, the fact that you should be like a node for, like an engine for like helping your customers meet other customers and, you know, introducing people. I think this is what's happening here right now. Like you know, people are asking me like oh, how hard it was, like what did you do then, what did you do now? Because I did this and I did that, and I think this is such a nice cross-pollination of like ideas and like experience, right that, yeah, you don't get like any yeah, actually I wrote down my uh three like summary bullet points from your talk so they will uh create opportunities to customers and people around you.

Speaker 1 4:38

Uh, number one priority be useful. Number two priority make a deal and make your customers be irrational towards you yeah, yeah, that's they.

Speaker 2 4:48

Yeah, that pretty much summarizes it. But yeah, the idea was that you kind of, uh, you want to have this really good foundation of your business by being able to build relationships around you, like with your clients and for beyond, because so many people they they finish the deal or they can assign the contract to finish the contract and then there's no continuation because they're not building a relationship with the customers. And also, like, if you think about relationship with the customers and also if you think about, um, adrian, you remember how we first met.

Speaker 3 5:24

Do you remember our first call? Yes, I was in Vilnius quite long. When was that? Uh, it was last year, I think.

Speaker 2 5:28

No, it's not the last year, adrian. Our first, our very first zoom call. You don't remember. I remember it. Okay, you forgot, you were pitching Alva to me, to evil Martians not, not, I was that you look about.

Speaker 2 5:43

I wasn't very new, sudden meetup, yeah yeah, it was 2001, I didn't know, okay, I think years ago. Seriously, I remember I remember thinking you know what I thought back then? I thought, first of all, of course, I didn't know that much about you and your business, um, and but second of all, I thought you are not charging enough, that I thought you say that your product is gonna save days, maybe weeks of work, maybe months. Right, um, because if you dedicate, you know, dedicate work on building the same functionality, yeah, it's gonna take repetitive yeah, a lot, um, but then you're only charging.

Speaker 2 6:27

We were charging something like a few hundreds or something.

Speaker 3 6:30

Yeah, yeah, it was like doesn't, doesn't kind of make sense, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 6:34

Yeah, I got that feedback and you can learn the lesson from charging a good price. From Andrew Culver yes, like a bullet train. Five years ago it was already charging, I assume, a thousand and a half. Yeah, so like I'm giving you value, yeah, and the price shows that I, that you, will get value.

Speaker 2 6:55

Yeah, yes, it's true, right that this.

Speaker 3 6:57

They claim this sort of true, they claim this and I got this feedback before that it has to pass to be some correlation between like the value and the price it does. Like people don't believe, like it's too much. It like what you say me that much I'm in charge of this little.

Speaker 2 7:12

What's the catch here is that, yeah, and we learned that lesson and we you know, yeah, yeah, but also what budget are said about commercialization, that people gets a lot of sort of heat outlash yeah for releasing commercial versions. Is it your experience?

Speaker 3 7:32

yes, like I, I uh, there's this, whatever. There's this community where it's very big, with with rails I won't name it and when I started out I didn't know anyone. So my thought was I'm gonna go to the big community and I said they're like hey, I have this thing which is like you know, I don't know it's. It has a free version, it has paid version, and immediately like, oh my god, this is promotion, get out of here.

Speaker 3 7:56

Put it in like they have a special promotion channel, like sounds like yeah, and somebody like really like told me things like oh, but how do others do it for free and why do you charge? You're stealing from us and whatever. And like andrew culver yeah, top one, because they mentioned him and he popped up and said like hey, it's okay if you charge, like we couldn't make it for free if we didn't charge all this time.

Speaker 2 8:17

So, yeah, it's like I think we need a little bit of education around this thing that hey, it's okay to to charge something for somebody I agree I think there's almost like a stigma in some communities, including maybe rails community I hope it's actually sidekick is doing a lot to for for the community community in normalizing the idea that the product is a commercial product but it kind of solves so many problems for you. I think the way I think about this is like open source has two sides. One side is freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of doing what you want, right and sort of so this free, when you're doing something like open source without expectations, for free, for fun, out of passion, this is great. But also people around you shouldn't should kind of not expect you to fix older problems, to kind of stop being free. You know, yeah, you do something like bajidar says, says I will fix the issue if it concerns me, if I, if I'm if I want the same, the same thing, yeah, yeah, if I want.

Speaker 3 9:31

If I need to right, yeah, but then I'm not.

Speaker 2 9:33

There's no obligation, yeah, there's no obligation to to do work for other people but then there is a sort of commercial dual licensing, commercial open source and it's different. It's where we build things for other people, right?

Speaker 1 9:48

we kind of follow their lead but I think you should be also uh right with the messaging.

Speaker 2 9:53

You shouldn't be like, uh, read this like pulling the plug that's, that's the, that's actually, that's the worst, right, when you sort of I don't know, I don't want to say bad things, but let's say, change your mind in in the middle of yeah, so, we all like.

Speaker 3 10:12

Redis is super hot right now when they think about them changing everything hashing hashing yeah, but it kind of like you kind of see, like how others you know, like amazon and other services, they kind of like stealing it or something you know they, they try to, um, you know, create services based on that. And so basically now it means that I were whatever red is that I cannot make money out of my project. So, uh, you know there, there should be some protection there.

Speaker 1 10:38

I mean, what if, tomorrow, uh, amazon, uh, opens a new service, amazon avo, yes, and it lets people build the apps based on our exactly, exactly, but that's our house.

Speaker 2 10:49

Uh, extended features in our pro exactly, yeah as a like any cable, any cables. Also, we with any people, we're trying to keep everything that is kind of for a single node usage in an open source version.

Speaker 3 11:06

Yeah, and then if when you have a cluster, this means you are a bigger organization and this is a pro version, this kind of you're definitely building for something bigger, for a team or for a customer or somebody with that need that has, you know, money, so it's okay to monetize.

Speaker 2 11:21

So you, you've reached that threshold and it's it's kind of huge, as it actually has to be pretty huge for you to need a cluster of any cables yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 11:32

So it makes sense.

Open Source Attribution and Transparency

Speaker 2 11:35

Yeah for a bunch of stuff that's cool yeah but something I was also thinking is I actually wrote a tweet about it that that you know that open source doesn't need your donations yeah yeah, what it meant is they're never enough. I mean, of course, it's a good thing to have donations. The problem is when people hope that the nations will be, around right for them.

Speaker 2 11:58

It never happens and it's um, so what? I think what, what? And marco commented, shanghai commented, like there was some discussion and um, they said, and they said and what I proposed is that I want companies to to, I want to know who's using the open source. I want the companies to be open and return to kind of say, yeah, by default, we will disclose that we're using the products and some of the funds are just going to go there.

Speaker 2 12:29

They're going to help the project yeah, and, and then they will reach out to the maintainers more often.

Speaker 1 12:36

This is what it would be, but like should they disclose that I'm using the gem device? Should they disclose that I'm using the other one? Should I like have an open gem file and like list of services that my app is using?

Speaker 2 12:49

Yeah, that'd be actually cool. I mean, of course I understand, you know, even in cable pro we have one company that I mean we have many companies that are not disclosing, that are using us, but one company specifically they said for security reasons they cannot disclose their stack. Of course I understand that for sure, but like by default most companies, they're not disclosing it because for this right, yeah, yeah and and you still, you're still disclosing your stack in job openings. Of course you say I'm looking for rails engineers, it's, it's kind of obvious that you've got experience in this and this, but you don't want to.

Speaker 3 13:25

Yeah right also there could be some tooling to anonymize somewhere. Like you know, you don't have to disclose that publicly, but you could say would you like, like github, like, would you like to let any cable know that you are using them? Because, okay, yes, of course, and that would be like a secret between you. You know, I guess, in usage also.

Speaker 1 13:45

Yeah, maybe that, but but I'd want this to be by default, you know, and actually I've seen that checkbox in a few services that like when you sign up for the paid version, you agree to have your company like listed in the list of users.

Speaker 2 14:00

Oh, it's true, yeah, I saw that that's nice.

Speaker 1 14:02

You can add it to your terms of service yeah, I'm actually thinking about this so you can make it like opt out, yeah yeah but but you know what, when you have so the paid users, for some reason they give you much.

Speaker 2 14:16

They are accustomed to the idea of uh telemetry, for example. Uh, you know, like analytics or something like sending you some usage data they're accustomed to and kind of getting your emails. They're accustomed to it. It's a little bit different.

Speaker 3 14:31

Yeah, it's, and then, open source in open source, your profits it's uh, it should be open free and you know you should be using. Using it however, I want it and that's it. Never give credit never, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 14:47

Which is this is, I think, right, it just, it can, I think, maybe even rebalancing the credit. I mean the idea that you at least say that you're using this product. Yeah, maybe even I'd prefer public, but okay, um, maybe even that alone could, you know, change the yeah, the balance it's a one-way kind of like a one-way street today like uh, when you listed truby gems, use other, I was like, wow, yeah, exactly so, yeah, it's prestigious.

Speaker 2 15:20

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I reached out to them, so everything was good but you don't know who else is using the open source version and maybe it's some cool, I remember maybe apple yeah, maybe I don't know I, I can't talk about I know.

Speaker 3 15:34

I know about big, big clients that okay, everybody knows that I can't talk about.

Speaker 1 15:38

I know that Apple has some services yeah yeah I. I met a guy in.

Speaker 3 15:43

Brazil. That was at Apple at the tropical RV, so they do. They do have some rubies and rails.

Speaker 2 15:48

I'm staying there, yeah yeah, in in our, at our um. So I met a recruiter, because recruiting people released for apple, so they do. She said they do like a logistics. They acquired a company that was doing logistics in there. When you can trade in, yes, yes, this is the service, yes, so the iphone, then there's some logistics after you almost interviewed for that job.

Speaker 2 16:13

Seriously, yeah, attribution that was yeah, attribution, and maybe then I think I know people don't like like I don't know what you think. I think consulting helps. What I'm trying to say is I sometimes see people who build a product and they never use it themselves.

Speaker 2 16:37

Yeah, you know, hopefully yeah and when you consult you know for the clients who are using the product. You see, like, like what we do with emotions a lot. We see how the product has been used, how it's being kind of misused, how's being miscontinued anyway and that information is so powerful, so valuable because you get to improve your product yeah, yeah and and then you run into problems yourself using your product.

Consulting for Product Success

Speaker 2 17:03

Yes, so you immediately promise. So I think consulting is it's not a bad thing, especially in I don't know. Imagine you are, uh, you have your products as a side project and you, you earn money with consulting. So better consult, you know, on something related to your product.

Speaker 3 17:19

Yeah, sort of that's a good, that's a good, that's a win-win yeah, that's what?

Speaker 2 17:24

yeah, I also think. I think it's great, because people can specialize in something yeah, yeah, that's right okay so you're gonna have to solve this.

Speaker 1 17:33

We solved the uh.

Speaker 2 17:35

So we solved the position. We solved the sustainability of open source. Now it's up to just like this just like this. It's what's next. Yeah, thanks for joining us for this mini episode and let's go see the next talk.

Speaker 1 17:49

Exactly, yeah, see you guys.

Speaker 3 17:52

Thanks okay, so that was fun.