Omer (00:10.080)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talk to John Daniel Trask or JD, the co founder and CEO of Raygun, a SaaS product that helps developers to monitor the health and quality of their web and mobile applications.
JD And Jeremy were working as software developers for an IT services company in New Zealand.
They both cared deeply about the quality of their software and hated having unhappy customers.
So they were always looking for better ways to track and fix errors quickly.
In 2007, they both put in $10,000 each to start a business and launched their first product that notified developers when their software crashed so they could quickly fix the issue.
But the business grew very slowly and they both had to keep doing consulting work on the side to be able to pay the bills.
Fast forward to today.
Their business is doing several million dollars a year in annual recurring revenue.
They're cash flow positive and have customers in over 100 countries.
But it's taken them 12 years to get to this point and it hasn't been an easy journey.
In this interview, we talk about how they've grown the business, some of the challenges they've faced along the way, and how they've been able to innovate by ignoring competitors.
So I hope you enjoy it.
J.D.
welcome to the show.
John-Daniel Trask (01:53.240)
Awesome.
Thank you very much for having me.
Omer (01:55.960)
So let's start by finding out about a quote that inspires or motivates you or gets you out of bed to work on your business.
John-Daniel Trask (02:03.720)
Yeah, I was thinking about this and it probably sounds like a negative quote, but I'm a big fan of a quote from Bill Gates where he says, success is a menace.
It can fool smart people into thinking they can't lose.
And I really like that quote because we all have good days and we all have bad days.
And often I find that it's when things are going well that you can not necessarily notice where the fires are at that point.
And so it's a way.
I've never liked the whole stay paranoid mentality, but just being mindful that just because things are going well doesn't mean you should become complacent and think that you can't still lose.
Omer (02:39.070)
Yeah, I haven't heard that one before.
That's a good one.
And I agree with you.
I'm not a big subscriber in terms of the paranoid thing, but just being More aware.
And I think a lot of the times, I don't know.
For me, it's like when things are going well, I'm always like, okay, things are probably not going to be as great at some point.
So what do I need?
What is this telling me?
What do I need to prepare?
What do I need to be thinking about?
John-Daniel Trask (02:59.290)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Well, the one I sometimes wonder about is when you think everything is going really, really well, it's usually, you know, we talk about fires, you know, it's usually because you haven't noticed the room is actually filling with smoke and there is an issue somewhere, you know, there's something that needs some attention.
Yeah.
Omer (03:17.270)
Okay.
So for people who aren't familiar with Raygun, can you tell us what does the product do, who's it for, and what's the problem that you're helping to solve?
John-Daniel Trask (03:31.110)
Yeah, sure.
So Raygun originally launched as a software crash reporting solution.
So we would sell it into software teams who wanted to automatically get reporting on things that were going wrong in their software, depending on sends that data to our service.
It's a fully hosted SaaS solution that we have and it does all sorts of funky things like fingerprinting on errors so that it can say, hey, this looks like this error.
So we won't just give you a list.
We can actually say, there might have been 100,000 errors, but these are the 25 root causes that you need to go and deal with and really just help teams improve things.
One of the interesting things when we launched that product was that a lot of people think they don't have many issues with their software.
We have never had a customer who has come along, plugged it in and wondered if it worked because no data was flowing.
It's more that they plug it in and go, oh my gosh, I cannot believe how buggy our software is.
So that was the original Raygun.
And then over time, we sort of grew to the point where we added what's called a real user monitoring product.
So understanding the performance that your end users are experiencing.
So is our site or app or mobile device, is it actually working quickly for our end users?
And then late last year, we added a full application performance monitoring product, which tracks what the code's doing on the server side.
So maybe the application is slow because of database calls or really bad coding, for example, we can help pinpoint exactly where those issues lie.
And so we actually sell that as a suite these days.
So understanding where things blow up, is the customer experiencing the software as you intended?
It and if not, what are the actual issues I need to go and fix to make it blazingly fast and glorious for my end users?
And so today it is typically still sold into tech teams, small and large.
One of our customers, for example, with our real user monitoring product was tracking the user experience of more than 85 million concurrent users on their piece of software.
Kind of narrows it down.
We're not allowed to say who they are, but they're quite big and then right down to startups that use the software.
So yeah, if you're building software and go and try out Raygun and see how it might help.
Omer (05:38.450)
Now you don't talk specifically about revenue numbers, but you're okay with telling the audience that Ray Gun is a multimillion dollar business today.
John-Daniel Trask (05:49.420)
Yeah, so Raygun has, I think I mentioned just beforehand about 50 staff these days.
We're a cash flow positive company.
We've raised about 1.7 million US in aggregate, but we haven't raised money in many years.
And so you can kind of piece together there.
Yeah, the business is doing reasonably well.
It's not though a heavily venture back that you know, manufacture the growth and it could all be, you know, looking great but actually fundamentally an unsound business.
We're not like that.
Omer (06:19.480)
Yeah.
And before we start recording, you mentioned that you have customers in over 100 markets worldwide.
John-Daniel Trask (06:25.880)
Yep.
Omer (06:26.360)
And the business is based in, in Wellington, New Zealand.
And you know, I'm, I'm not aware of many successful SaaS businesses of this scale that have come out of New Zealand.
John-Daniel Trask (06:41.790)
Well, that's probably more of a you thing than an us thing.
So to give you an idea, there's a.
In New Zealand I mentioned the population about 4 1/2 million people.
Here in Wellington there's a 10 year old company called Xero Xero, they're an $11 billion SaaS company.
Started here.
Omer (06:57.630)
Yeah, I know, Xero is the one that I had thought of.
John-Daniel Trask (06:59.990)
Yeah, yeah.
There's a bunch of other SaaS companies.
So in Auckland, New Zealand is a company called pushpay.
They're about a billion dollar payments company that's been built here.
They did that a few years.
There's vend.
They're quite a significant point of sale SaaS company.
So new Zealand, despite its small size, actually has a very modern tech scene.
So for example at my house I have gigabit Internet, there's a national fiber program here.
We actually have lots of universities, heavy focus towards tech.
I think software is now either our third or fourth largest export sector for the entire Country.
I put that partly down to the fact that we're on these couple of rocks down at the bottom of the South Pacific that are freezing cold and there's nothing else to do other sit inside of code.
But yeah, it is what it is.
I think we do pretty well for where we're at.
Omer (07:51.190)
Yeah, yeah.
I mean I have a number of members in my SaaS club plus community who are founders from New Zealand.
John-Daniel Trask (08:00.150)
So they sound good looking.
Omer (08:05.190)
Yeah.
And so I've definitely been aware that there's a lot going on there on the tech scene.
But it's also great, especially some of the other companies you mentioned that I hadn't come across before.
That's really good to see that those sorts of companies growing and having that level of success.
And I think it's always a good reminder, hey, you don't necessarily need to be in Silicon Valley to build this kind of business.
John-Daniel Trask (08:24.530)
Yeah, I kind of think it comes down to the style of business.
You know, if we'd set out and said, you know, what we want to do is go and raise as much money as we can and just go absolutely crazy.
Certainly it's probably difficult to beat the Valley vibe on that.
But our, you know, my business partner and I's a whole intention has always been to build a business of significance.
We sit down and we of, you know, try to make decisions.
I mean a good example would be when we expanded outside of New Zealand into the United States.
And even here in New Zealand the people would say, oh, so you're going to San Francisco?
I go no.
And they're like, why not?
And I'd say why would we?
And it was by turning the question around that people start to realize that, well they don't.
They've never actually critically thought about why.
They're just so used to this is the answer that they've never, never dug any deeper.
And I find that that's actually a massive limiting factor to a lot of folks building companies is that they kind of, they don't actually sit down and critically think about things.
They just go, we do this because this is what you do not.
We do this because here's the reasons why it makes sound business sense for us.
And so I like to think that we spend a fair bit of time actually going, well, what is actually the best decision we could make for the business and have those conversations a bunch more.
Omer (09:39.640)
So you and your co founder Jeremy, founded the business back around 2007.
Tell me about like how did you guys come up with the idea for this business?
John-Daniel Trask (09:48.830)
Yeah.
So in 2007, by way of background, we started out, I was 23, Jeremy's a bit older than me, and we set out, we put in $10,000 each.
We had a third co founder at the time, but we bought him out within about the first year just because it wasn't really the right thing for him at the time.
And we did not start out with what Raygun's products are today.
We bootstrapped the business.
We did build developer tools.
We could see that there were deficiencies in that area.
We both came from a software development background, but what we did that was a bit different was that in the bootstrapping side.
So when we were going out just to, you know, make some money by doing work for third parties is we actually took discounted rates and we would take equity positions in the companies that we were doing work for.
Obviously not everybody wants to do this, but it worked out for us.
We ended up building about four or five different companies with folks we were not the operational leads in those businesses and effectively, I think all of them today, yes, they've all been sold.
And so we had some varying sizes of liquidity events for our own company through that.
And then in 2012, we decided that SaaS.
And as you talked about with Xero, we sort of looked at their model with the software as a service stuff and went, you know what, that looks pretty sexy to us.
And so we thought, what could we be doing that was in SaaS that was also going to help development teams?
And so one of the things when Jeremy and I used to work together, we worked for a company called Intgen here in Wellington, was that we were reasonably well known for writing reasonably good quality code.
And one of the reasons was, is that we would actually instrument our software to automatically report the software errors via email to ourselves.
Keeping in mind, this was around 2004, so we were already using like cruise control.net and running build servers and continuous delivery models and things like that.
So we were probably a little bit ahead of the broader development market at the time.
And then in 2012, when we were looking around for the SaaS idea, we were like, you know what?
We should build an entire product around that notion of understanding the faults in our software, build workflow tools, make it smarter than what we could have done with just our inboxes.
And it turns out that a lot of developers actually really liked that system.
And like I say, some of them are now really, really massive companies using, using that capability through to little startups.
We did put a lot of stuff in there that we couldn't do.
And it was just an inbox based tool, but like filter out bot based stuff.
Or maybe you want to permanently ignore a certain type of error that doesn't make any sense for you to track.
So for example, you often have that with front end JavaScript errors where say a web browser extension is actually the cause of the error.
And it's like, well, you can't fix that, so you don't want that polluting your sort of list of errors that you need to deal with.
So layering on those tools really help people better understand the health of this software.
Omer (12:42.080)
Okay, so you've got this opportunity in front of you here.
We're always interested in like, okay, how does someone take an idea or a first version of a product and find customers and start to grow that business and get traction?
So what was it for you guys and how did you get started?
John-Daniel Trask (13:02.880)
Yeah, so we did quite a lot of content marketing back in the day.
And this was before content marketing was even really talked about.
And I get people sometimes, oh my goodness.
How did you see around that corner that content marketing was going to be big?
And it was like, well, because we were basically broke and writing blog posts was cheap.
So I would write blog posts about stuff and we would tell people about what we were doing.
And slowly that sort of built up.
Today, even with the blog on the Raygun site, I think we generate more than 200,000 visitors a month to that.
So we've continued to sort of build that snowball up over time around the brand.
But back then it was just a case of putting those things together.
It was absolutely slow going.
One of the things that I think was really important very early on was that before there were great tools like say chart mogul or base metrics, most people were just kind of going and reading say VC blog posts that would say, here's an Excel file on SAS metrics that we care about.
And so I actually built a little SaaS metric site into our admin tool and that was where we could kind of see the power of compounding growth.
And then we knew that we had something with legs.
And then at that point kind of going, well, okay, well, our biggest impediment to growth now is probably just awareness.
Don't get me wrong.
The product was certainly far from perfect, but the charts were going up and to the right like we all like to see.
So how do we make that go faster?
So we had the content marketing we did.
We bought in a young lady to start helping with AdWords.
And we did that because I would dabble with AdWords and it would look great for like a week or two, and then it would all fall to bits and have terrible roi.
And so we bought this lady in to sort of say, okay, well, you're going to own the AdWords account.
And I think we only gave her a budget of like $2,000 a month.
I think her salary was higher than the budget she even had to manage.
But she did help eke out some early growth there as well, which was useful.
But the big sort of break for us sort of came when Scott Hanselman, who you may know from his Hanselman it's podcast, and he's prominent within the developer community, specifically the Microsoft developer community.
And he ended up using Raygun on a little side project, and he wrote a blog post and, you know, kind of gave a.
An insight into the power of content and building your own brand.
You know, Scott's a big one for saying you should write frequently and you should write on your own domain, not on somebody else's platform.
And he has built himself a massive platform there.
And so when he wrote this blog post and he commented on how he used Ray Gun to understand the errors, that sort of shot things into the stratosphere for.
At least at that time, relatively speaking, it was massive for us, and we're huge fans of Scott's already, but he didn't actually know it was our product.
He actually didn't know the Ray Gun name belonged to us at that point.
So that helped a lot.
And so over time, and even part of the.
I know that recording this podcast came from an introduction from a mutual friend, but I found speaking on podcasts, doing small events in various communities, being part of user groups, really grassroots stuff has worked quite well for us.
We are now at a size that we are having to say, you know what?
We've got to start looking at some things that scale a little bit better.
There's that.
I think it was Paul Graham maybe, who said, you know, start out by doing things that don't scale.
That could be reaching out to individual podcast authors.
It could be, you know, reaching out to people to get them to try the software.
But in the early days that that stuff does work.
There's that saying, you know, you can't rely on silver bullets.
What you need is many lead bullets.
And we were certainly in the growth mode of many lead bullets.
Nothing by itself looked like it was a phenomenal win, but they do compound.
Omer (16:41.360)
Yeah, okay, so you were doing the content marketing or in Those days, I guess we just called it blogging, right?
Yeah.
And tell me a little bit about that.
How much thought was going into that in terms of thinking about your target audience and the type of content they wanted and having some sort of content plan?
Or was this like, every week?
Let's figure out something that we can write about.
John-Daniel Trask (17:10.150)
It was more the latter.
I wish we seemed that sophisticated.
We're very sophisticated now around SEO and various things like that and what are the topics.
But back then, it was more a case of going, maybe there was something that was annoying in our own software development process that week, and it would be like, well, surely other people have this problem, so we'll write about that.
I also think it's important to write a little bit about your own journey, because I think a lot of folks feel like if they talk about what they're doing, they'll somehow give away the secret sauce.
Or, you know, other people will.
Will try and copy it.
And it's like, well, first thing is people will try and copy you regardless.
That's.
That's not just because you're talking about what you're doing, but a lot of people, you know, they want to be part of a movement.
They want to be connected to something that they care about.
Well, telling the story of how you're going about things absolutely helps get people engaged in what you're trying to achieve and helps build that brand up early on.
So we would talk about some of the stuff we did.
We talked about early laptop specs that we would be providing to the team.
We would talk about, I think if you actually go back far enough, we even have a blog post that talks about the.
This esoteric brand of fridge freezer that came out of China that seems to only be sold in New Zealand, that used to just destroy any Coke can if you ever change the temperature dial.
It was the most bizarre sort of things you could write about.
But it was kind of like, okay, these weirdos seem like my tribe.
You know, maybe I'll check out what they're doing.
Omer (18:38.760)
Right.
I was going to say that's almost like exactly the type of content you want if you're thinking about developers.
Right.
In terms of, hey, I'm just like you.
I'm real.
And I think, you know, yeah, absolutely.
This is not some big corporate thing.
John-Daniel Trask (18:50.850)
We try and do a lot of quirky stuff.
I mean, I know that this will come out later, but today we actually have a squad of some of our team who are running a whole campaign on our Twitter account, which is raygunio twitter.com raygunio and they filmed a little bit of me and they're going around town basically handing out coffee and donuts to various dev teams in the city and telling the whole story about that.
Because it's just quirky and different.
Right.
Nobody really likes those, really boilerplate PR comms, you know, they're boring as hell.
So how do you be a bit different and cut through and be a bit unique?
So I encourage that, actually, that.
That's one area as well we found in recent times.
LinkedIn is, I know, specifically for our audience, which is typically developers.
You know, they typically frown upon LinkedIn.
That's the site where it's like, well, I just get recruiters attacking me.
And it's like, actually, LinkedIn is a freaking monster platform, man.
Like, you can get a lot of.
A lot of engagement on there.
I have a Twitter account, much to the annoyance of both my wife and some of the people in our management team, for some of the problems that can occur there.
But that's also been a great platform for us because, again, our audience hangs out there.
A good example where marketing and growth didn't work for us is actually Facebook.
Now, you can't count the number of companies that have flourished through Facebook, but my goodness, the technical audience, they absolutely do not want to be marketed to on Facebook.
That's where if they use Facebook, that's for family and friends, they don't want to know about work stuff on Facebook.
And so we've never seen any real economic return from.
From being on Facebook.
Omer (20:23.360)
That's interesting.
I'm curious, how did you go about engaging your target audience or developers on LinkedIn?
Because that wouldn't be the first place that I would think of as being a great opportunity to reach developers.
John-Daniel Trask (20:35.760)
Yeah, so.
So for us, it's more once you start going up to their managers, so the people that are slightly above necessarily writing all the code.
And of course, then once they are aware of what Raygun is, then if they hear or see the team playing around with this thing, they can already kind of connect the dots.
Because one of the challenges with developers is oftentimes that they won't actually go and ask to spend money on anything.
Getting them to usually leave their desk or take their headphones off is actually a pretty big ask.
And even in our own company, when I'm walking the floor, if I hear somebody saying something like that, oh, yeah, I was looking at this tool, but it's like $29.
I'm like, you know how much I'M paying you.
You clearly do.
Like, here's the credit card.
Just get the damn tool.
Like, it's not worth you spending, you know, the next few hours wondering, pondering, should I, shouldn't I?
Do I want to go and ask for this?
It's like, just take them their money.
And so being able to be on LinkedIn gets into that next.
That next level up in those organizations and builds that brand awareness with those folks.
Omer (21:36.270)
Okay, great.
So you were using content marketing, a little bit of social media.
Got a lucky break with Scott Hanselman and him kind of picking up and featuring what you guys were doing.
Was there anything else that you did in those early days to help drive growth?
John-Daniel Trask (21:55.950)
It was speaking at user groups.
You'd be surprised how many people go to user groups that can sometimes be from fairly substantially sized organizations as well.
That was a big takeaway.
So we might come in and just talk about how we built our data ingestion pipeline.
It wasn't a sales pitch at all.
It was just, here's how we might handle.
Like today, Raygun handles about half a billion API calls every hour through the platform, and that's quite a lot of data.
And people are generally quite curious about how you might handle some of that stuff.
And so we would go and do user groups as well.
That would actually take quite a lot of time to do.
And obviously you can't hit the entire world all at once, but they were very effective.
It's interesting because a lot of large companies, there's often a lot of folks that might be, in our case anyway, development managers, executives, whatever, that they actually want to work with smaller companies because they know that they're going to get better engagement.
They're not going to get weasel words and bullshit thrown at them just because it's another big company.
They want a company that's going to be able to be more agile and flexible with them and be able to eng well.
And early on, when we closed our first few large enterprise accounts, I think our very first one literally came from a person who heard myself and I think maybe Jeremy talking on a podcast and was like, well, we have this problem and, you know, it didn't count against us that we were a small company down in the bottom of the South Pacific and we ended up building a really great relationship with both the company and the people there.
Omer (23:28.620)
So this is really interesting because you talked about, hey, there's no.
What was that saying?
There's no silver bullet, but you need a lot of lead bullets.
John-Daniel Trask (23:37.560)
Yeah, no silver bullets.
A lot of Lead bullets.
Yep.
Omer (23:40.520)
And it sounds like that's exactly what you were doing.
Just churning out a lot of content, writing about anything that you were interested in that you thought other people were interested in.
Doing some stuff on social media, speaking at user groups, podcasts.
But these weren't like big things.
They seem like, okay, there's a lot of legwork to do.
You don't reach a huge audience, you're reaching kind of small pockets of people.
And then so I guess the next obvious thing would be how can we scale this, how can we start doing more scalable things?
But I know one thing people might look at is like, hey, there's a whole bunch of these massive conferences that happen which can get us to reach thousands of developers at a time.
But you tried those and they didn't work so well.
John-Daniel Trask (24:31.970)
Yeah, no, they haven't worked wonderfully well for us.
It's almost like the bigger the conference, the worse performing they'd be on an ROI basis.
And what we ended up doing is a lot of the large conferences that we go to, don't get me wrong, we do get some return on them, but they're just not as good a return, especially for the amount of, I guess, non financial input, the amount of time you have to put into these things.
But we found them really good for connecting with a lot of those larger customers that work pretty well.
Smaller events, a little bit more intimate, a little bit more engaging, they work a lot better for us.
So we still do them.
I mean, we just did Microsoft Ignite in Orlando.
I think there was 30,000 people at that.
We'll be at re invent in a few weeks time.
I think that's about 35, 40,000 people as well.
But we're going to those because we want to connect with our customers, maybe even some prospects.
And hopefully we will generate enough prospects that they become customers with time.
But yeah, on the whole, go to an event that's more like 50 to 100 people and it's like shooting fish in a barrel by comparison.
I think one thing we should touch on though that we haven't really yet is the importance of actually having a product that doesn't suck.
Omer (25:46.730)
Small detail.
John-Daniel Trask (25:47.690)
Again, the compound nature.
Right.
If you're doing all this work to try and get these customers on, they better stick around, they better find value in what you're doing.
And you know, we talked beforehand where you commented about, you know, people maybe leaving your product only because they stopped doing a podcast at all.
What we see is a lot of our churn comes from you know, we were a startup and we're shutting down.
It's very rare that we would get churn for any other reason because folks just kind of go, oh, yeah, well, you know, why wouldn't I want to know if my software is crapping all over my customers?
And so one of the interesting things that's a bit unique to our business was that we could use Raygun to track Raygun.
And so we would see our customers have a fault, we could fix the fault, deploy it, sometimes contact that customer, even if they've never even told us about the issue that they experienced, and just blow their socks off and be like, I don't experience this anywhere else.
They don't get Microsoft Word saying it needs to close.
Do you want to send this to Microsoft and go, okay, and get an email back from Satya saying, hey, really sorry about that.
There'll be a new update next Tuesday that fixes that issue.
But if they did, like, holy shit.
You'd be like, this is the most amazing software company in the world.
And so we leveraged that as well around the product.
And of course, that also showed some of our customers what the value of the product is that they're using, because they'd be like, wait, so we could do this too?
And it's like, yeah, you can.
And I've always found it very interesting in the space we're in, where we're trying to sell to, to tech teams is.
And in particular, thinking about it from a startup point of view, how successful would Ray Kroc have been if every fifth burger from McDonald's had rancid meat in it?
And yet in the software world, people one usually don't even know how much rancid meat they're shipping, but if they do, they kind of go, oh, yeah, it's only a few thousand a week.
That's not too.
It's like, well, hang on a minute.
You're trying to do everything you can to build a reputation of having a great product.
You shouldn't have something that is alienating your customers.
Right.
And so in a way, even though we sort of talk about how we're selling this product that helps technical teams, it also massively lowers people's cost to acquire and their ability to retain customers because it helps them have products that aren't giving them food poisoning.
Keep the analogy alive.
Omer (28:11.290)
Yeah, I think that's a great point because it's easy to misinterpret the sort of advice about build a minimum viable product and ship it quickly.
Or I think it might have been Paul Graham as well.
Who said that?
Was it Paul Graham?
Anyway, if you're not embarrassed about your product, you've waited too long to ship it or something.
But I think those lessons there were really about, hey, you know, don't get into analysis paralysis.
Get something in front of the customers, get feedback, iterate.
But I think all of it should be qualified with, make sure your product doesn't suck.
Right.
I think it's more about, rather than trying to build a product with 20 features and all of them are mediocre and some of them are.
Half of them are buggy.
Focus on one feature that just works really, really well and get that out there.
John-Daniel Trask (29:05.950)
Yeah.
I think what leads a little bit to that analysis paralysis that you talk about as well is I realize I'm dropping quotes left, right, and center.
I don't know who said this one, but my wife says it all the time, is don't compare your insides to other people's outsides.
As in within your business, you do know where all the faults are.
You know where all the problems are, all the things you wish you could do, all of it, that stuff.
And then you look at everybody else and all you're actually seeing is their marketing message, which is, everything is great, and you're going, oh, man, I've really got to step it up.
Right?
Like, because they're awesome.
And it's like, no, they're just as shitty inside as everybody else.
We're all struggling against the tide here to do something great.
But then I think it's really easy for folks to sit there and go, well, I have to wait until internally I'm the same as what their external message looks like.
And it's like, you'll never get there.
It's just you only asymptotically approach perfection.
No one ever gets there.
Omer (30:04.770)
But anyway, that's a great quote.
I'd never heard that before.
Gonna have to look up who it is.
But don't compare your insides to other people's outsides.
And.
Yeah, I mean, we do that all the time.
Right?
And exactly.
If what you're really comparing to is the marketing message you see, then it's very easy to feel, like, really crappy about what you're doing.
I think that's why it's also.
It's good to have an awareness of what's happening in the market and who's out there and the kind of things they're doing.
But if you spend too much time kind of getting fixated on how great your competitors seem, to be compared to what you're doing, that's not going to do you a lot of good.
John-Daniel Trask (30:47.900)
No, and we've seen that, but particularly within crash reporting, where we were one of the very early sort of pioneers in that space, don't get me wrong, in real user monitoring and apm, there are some absolutely behemoth companies out there and our approach was to actually, I'll come back to our approach because you might enjoy that.
But within crash reporting, one of the things that used to, I used to find mildly amusing was watching as competitors did clone off things that we'd done.
And some of them, I'd sit there and I'd be like, man, yeah, we did that thing.
And it turns out it doesn't move the needle.
It's needlessly complex and it's a huge problem.
And I can kind of tell you just copying it because you think it must be important because we did it.
But again, you're not seeing our insights, which is telling us that, no, the metrics on that were that we shouldn't have wasted our time on that piece.
And so that I always find quite telling.
The second thing I was going to talk about in terms of when we look at building, like when we built Rum and we built apm, is I effectively forbid the team from going and actually looking at any competing product, which can be a challenge because they kind of see like, well, how do other people do it?
And it's like, no, no, no, no, no.
We're going to go, how would we want this to work?
Let's start with how we want it to be.
Let's not get hung up.
Because what we're going to see if we go and look at the competitors, is an outcome that's based on all of the constraints of the time when they design the software, the capability of their teams.
You know, maybe they're so old that they were.
They had to be designed like computers had 10% of what they have now, all of these limiting factors and we're going to say, well, they.
We've built this thing and it's gonna look exactly the same.
Let's start from what would we want this thing to do?
What would be awesome for us as a company if we could get this product and we can design it.
And then what we do is usually about a month out from actually launching a product is when I'll okay a few team members to go and actually start doing some competitive benchmarks.
The times we've done this, we sit there and go, boy, we should have launched These products six months ago, we're so far differentiated.
I wouldn't say ahead because they're, you know, they're very early stage products.
They're often missing some things around the periphery at the very least.
But you kind of go, this is actually a great outcome, even though it can be quite different to what the market may have seen.
And that to me is how you can kind of drive actual genuine innovation in a product category rather than just going, I'm going into this, I'll see what the competitors are doing and try and do it 5% better.
Omer (33:15.570)
Yeah, it kind of becomes like this sort of incremental improvement versus innovating when you spend too much time looking at competitors.
John-Daniel Trask (33:24.760)
Absolutely, absolutely.
You don't want to be completely ignorant of what they're up to, but you don't want your product roadmap to just be what somebody else is doing.
Omer (33:33.720)
The other thing you told me about before we started recording was how you'd spend money advertising in developer magazines, which again, on the face of it, sounds like a perfect place to reach your target customers.
But that didn't work either.
No, tell us about that.
John-Daniel Trask (33:51.800)
Yeah, so we were kind of getting courted by a couple of the magazine publishers within the domain of developer tools.
And the thing was, is that they'd be like, sign up and it'll be, I think it was like 10 or 20 or $30,000 or $45,000 for a higher end one.
And they'd be like, we're going to give you a glossy page and each of these and we have these really huge distribution numbers and blah, blah, blah.
And we just found that firstly, they would always have a good answer on why you obviously can't easily track print media in terms of conversion tracking.
So they'd have some pretty slick answers on that.
But we would just sort of go and outlay some of this money and then go.
We literally didn't see a change in the trial number.
We don't need any slick salesperson from a magazine company telling us that, oh no, you need.
Because what they then do is they'll say, no, it's a slow burn.
What you need to do is basically take out two years worth of this sort of spend with us and you'll see it happen.
And of course, now all of these magazines are going bust because there was all bullshit.
Everybody kind of moved online and especially within our market was in the digital space.
They might see these things, they might register that something exists in a category, but it wasn't something that was close enough to A call to action.
Maybe if you were a massive company that was saying, hey, you know what, let's say we're intel and you're.
We need to extinguish, you know, $150 million worth of marketing budget every, every quarter or something.
Maybe it's worth throwing, you know, a few hundred K at something like that because maybe it works, maybe it doesn't.
But when we were early on, you know, 10 or 20k was hell.
That was an entire month's payroll.
You know, it was a pretty big bet and I was always really disappointed with the performance of those.
Omer (35:36.980)
Okay, so I wanted to ask you about kind of funding and when you talked about back in 2007, you and Jeremy put in like $10,000 each.
John-Daniel Trask (35:51.630)
Yeah, there was a third co founder, his name was Andrew.
So we had 30k in the company all up to get started.
And then of course, because we were bootstrapping, we did do some development work.
So we were actually very fortunate because Jeremy had a great relationship with Microsoft New Zealand.
I mentioned he was a Microsoft regional director, which is a tit bestowed on people who contribute, I believe, significantly to the technology community.
We actually ended up getting a quarter of a million dollar contract with Microsoft through his relationship there to build demowear on how people should be looking to build modern scalable web applications.
And then they would provide that out around the world.
And they were very, very kind to us in that.
They then held three events across New Zealand in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland.
And they were more than happy for us to basically be the key sort of feature and brand of that.
And so that really helped us launch out the gate.
And of course, one of the things I hear from folks is they go, well, you know, that's so lucky.
You got so lucky because that was really your seed money.
And the thing is, it's like I go, yeah, it was, it was fortunate.
But, you know, Jeremy had been investing time into the development community with Microsoft for years and years, giving away his evenings, writing things on his blog, you know, helping promote their.
I think too many people forget you get out what you put in.
And we were very fortunate that Jeremy had put in a lot of work into that community.
I'm not saying that Microsoft were beholden to doing something for us, no way.
But to steal that old Steve Jobs quote, it's very difficult to connect the dots looking forward.
It's very easy to connect them looking back.
And due to Jeremy's engagement in the community, that helped us phenomenally in that first year especially.
So we were able to reinstate our salaries, for example, after a few months, which was earlier than I thought we would be able to do.
Admittedly, not full salaries, but enough to pay the rent.
And that came out of the work that he had done previously in building great relationships and building a great reputation.
Omer (37:59.470)
Yeah.
And that's a great point.
John-Daniel Trask (38:00.630)
Right.
Omer (38:00.830)
In terms of you've got to always be thinking about where's the opportunity to give to help, even if there isn't sort of an immediate payback.
It's just.
I just think about it as, like, just put some good energy out there in the world.
Right.
Some of it will come back in surprising ways.
Right.
But it doesn't have to be so transactional.
John-Daniel Trask (38:21.480)
Yeah.
And I get really frustrated these days because I see so many people that sort of play that game of, like, the first question is, what is in it for me?
And it's just like, that is the wrong attitude.
Like, if you go into something with that, you're going to first put off a whole bunch of people, and then you're going to say, well, I was unlucky.
And it's like, no, you just had the wrong attitude.
And then you kind of get the people that go, well, that's.
And probably skating pretty dangerously close to topics I shouldn't talk about.
But then you get the folks that go, well, that's privilege.
Right.
Because Jeremy had the time to go out and do that, and it's like, no, I'm kind of a believer.
I certainly know privilege.
Anybody listening to this podcast has probably got a lot of privilege because we live in this time.
We're in a position to have the technology to listen to these things.
You're obviously thinking about SaaS businesses.
You could beat yourself up forever around privilege if you wanted to.
But the real way to think about it, I think, is about priorities.
If Jeremy, for example, had been wildly unwell and couldn't contribute into the community, well, that does suck.
But clearly his health would have to be the priority there.
Right.
But I see a lot of people who quite comfortably will go home and Netflix and chiller a hell of a lot and then cry out about why you were lucky.
And it's like, no, it was putting the priority on I go home and prep a damn talk.
You know, or, you know, you can't necessarily control luck, but you can certainly improve your odds based on your priorities.
And like I say, the caveat is that you can't always have that.
You know, I recently had our first child, my wife and I. Congratulations.
Thank you.
And it has certainly Shifted my priorities.
There are certain opportunities now that I can't take up, and I'm totally fine with that.
I knew that when, you know, when we're going down that road.
But people should be thinking in terms of the priorities and what they want out of life.
Omer (40:11.430)
And on that note and that nugget of wisdom, I think I agree with you.
Seriously.
I think that's really excellent advice.
And I talk to a lot of people who want to start a SaaS business, and they'll say, I really don't have the time.
And that's often true, especially if you're in a situation where you don't have all of the free time to yourself.
You have a demanding job, maybe you have a family, you have kids, you have a lot going on.
But it doesn't have to be sort of an overnight thing.
John-Daniel Trask (40:46.520)
Right.
Omer (40:46.760)
It's not a sprint here.
It could be.
You think of it in the long term and what could you be doing?
Even if it's like working on something for half an hour a day, but just doing it consistently, it's kind of like exercise, right?
John-Daniel Trask (40:58.760)
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And you certainly see people.
The thing that's interesting with priorities in my mind is they're down to the individual.
Right now, I would prioritize family.
I know some people who are terrible parents because they prioritize other things.
Now, that's partly their choice, and I may disagree with that.
But you do control what you think are your priorities.
And unfortunately, there are folks in situations where their priorities kind of get forced upon them.
Obviously, the people that are in poverty or have addiction issues and things like that that they need to resolve, but for the most part, people have a little bit more control over their priorities than that.
Yeah.
And then it's a case of what you think is important.
Omer (41:40.310)
Yeah, I agree.
Okay, let's wrap up.
Let's get onto the lightning round, and I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions.
Are you ready?
John-Daniel Trask (41:48.790)
I think I am.
Omer (41:50.310)
Are you ready to go?
Yes.
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
John-Daniel Trask (41:56.370)
It's probably just do it.
So, you know, just get stuck in.
The time to do something is now.
You'll never have a better time.
Omer (42:04.850)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
John-Daniel Trask (42:07.890)
I'm a huge fan of.
It's a massive book, by the way, so get the ebook version unless you want huge guns.
There's Snowball, the Story of Warren Buffett.
I think it's an excellent biography that covers how he built such a massive empire.
But actually demonstrated fantastic integrity.
And I think that, and that's an important lesson for anybody in business because everybody likes to think that anybody who's wildly successful must have done something a bit sketch.
And he actually seems like a pretty stand up guy.
Omer (42:36.740)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
John-Daniel Trask (42:40.900)
Balance.
So kind of coming a little bit back to the priorities, I think you could make a lot of money if you deprioritized everything else.
But kind of like the family point earlier, you don't necessarily want to totally deprioritize everything else in the interest of business.
So some form of balance, Life, health, family, all that good stuff.
Omer (43:00.640)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
John-Daniel Trask (43:04.800)
For me it is note taking.
So I literally just sit in most meetings or anything I go to, I will sit there and draw little arrows and I'll write like a heading and I'll loop off little arrows.
I almost never ever, ever go back and reread those notes.
I go through about a notebook a month.
But what I've found is that the ability to retain in my mind the things that were covered in those meetings skyrockets just from the fact that I write it down.
Omer (43:32.360)
I love that.
Are you familiar with a concept called Morning Pages?
John-Daniel Trask (43:36.280)
I've heard of it.
Obviously I didn't make any notes about it because I have not retained enough detail about it.
Omer (43:44.200)
I think it's.
Is it Julie Julia Cameron.
I think the Artist's Way was the book.
But the idea is you just basically write three pages every morning of anything.
And that's something I started a few months back.
And it's.
I think it's the same as you.
It doesn't really matter what you write and you never go back and read it really.
But it's the process that it helps you get clarity on certain things and go a level deeper than maybe how you were thinking about something before.
And so I think it's more the process that's the most helpful thing.
John-Daniel Trask (44:22.840)
Yeah.
Omer (44:23.240)
And it sounds like that's the same case with your note taking.
John-Daniel Trask (44:26.520)
Absolutely.
I saw a tweet by somebody the other day who said when I write stuff down, I remember it.
Which kind of defeats the point of needing to write it down.
Omer (44:36.040)
But anyway, what's the new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
John-Daniel Trask (44:41.480)
I have a concept in my head for building an omnidirectional treadmill that could use a very small amount of space and be used within the vehicle VR world.
I've been kind of noodling on it for a few years.
Omer (44:52.500)
Is that a serious idea?
John-Daniel Trask (44:53.860)
Serious idea, yeah.
Omer (44:55.220)
Wow.
John-Daniel Trask (44:57.220)
I'm a big fan of technology.
Omer (44:59.460)
Yeah.
You'll have to let me know how you do with that.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
John-Daniel Trask (45:06.420)
Well, I'll bring this up because I was getting mocked by my wife this morning.
I don't know if it's that interesting, but she judges me because I always eat food from the thing that I like the least, least of what I like the most.
And so whenever she cooks dinner, she sits there and gives me a whole, like, you know, occasionally filthy looks on whatever I choose to start with.
So there's a.
There's kind of a standoff every time I start eating a meal.
I also eat McDonald's cheeseburgers by peeling the bottom bun off and leaving a pad for my thumb so that it doesn't go into the meat, because I believe that it increases the meat to bun ratio to an appropriate level that tastes better.
Omer (45:40.720)
Oh, that's gotta be one of the best ones I've.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
John-Daniel Trask (45:51.990)
You know, these days, it's got to be my son.
I was a weird, weird guy.
And that I really wanted to have kids when I was young.
And then I just got so damn busy with work, there was a part of me that kind of wondered whether we would actually have children.
And then we went, you know, decided to commit to having a child.
And now I used to be one of those people that just rolled my eyes when I see, you know, young parents and be like, oh, God, here we go.
You know, these people are going to be like, my kid, my kid.
And I've kind of changed my tune.
I try not to talk about it a whole lot with other people because I know that's how it kind of comes across.
But one of the things I've found has been fantastic for dealing with stress.
Whenever I get really wound up about something, I can just think about my son and it'll immediately brighten the day.
And similarly, it's helped me also in work with focus, because I used to kind of have the time to pretty much boil the ocean on anything I wanted to think about.
And now I'm like, no, I have the time to deal with like, two or three things, and that's about it, because I've got to go and deal with him.
So it's probably a little bit of a cliche response, but that's my new passion, if you will.
He's only seven and a half months old, so, you know, maybe once he's a teenager, I'll change that answer.
Omer (47:05.330)
I love it.
Great.
Well, jd, thank you for joining me.
It's been a pleasure talking about the Raygun story and getting to know you better.
If people want to find out more about Raygun, they can go to raygun.com Correct.
We'll include a link to that in the show notes as well.
And if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
John-Daniel Trask (47:26.860)
Well, I am a big fan of Twitter, so on Twitter, my handle is traskjd T R A S K JD and if people are not on Twitter, they can email me@jdtrask aygun.com awesome.
Omer (47:40.290)
JD, it's been a pleasure.
John-Daniel Trask (47:41.450)
Yeah, no, it's been fantastic.
I really appreciate the time.
Thank you very much for having me on.
Omer (47:46.290)
Yeah.
And I wish you, Jeremy and the team all the best of success.
And one thing we didn't talk about was the fact that you've expanded to the US and you have a base now here, just down the road from me in sunny Seattle.
John-Daniel Trask (47:59.330)
Yep.
Omer (48:00.290)
So next time you're in town, you know, please do let me know.
John-Daniel Trask (48:04.780)
I will do.
I think it's about three weeks away.
Omer (48:07.660)
All right, there you go.
John-Daniel Trask (48:09.740)
I'll send you an email.
Omer (48:11.500)
Okay.
Cheers.
John-Daniel Trask (48:12.860)
All right.
