FounderQuest

The gents look back with some hindsight on the debates around private equity, VC vs. bootstrapping Honeybadger, and how funding decisions may have affected recent layoffs at NPM and Travis CI. Our recent Twitter ad performance for FounderQuest is also discussed as well as Nintendo graphics and food trucks. Join us!

Full Transcript:
Josh: We did it. We forgot to send him headphones, Starr.

Starr: He said he had headphones. I asked him, Josh. I asked him.

Josh: We're trying to get Ben to part with his AirPods, and it's like pulling teeth, man.

Announcer: It's like Steve Jobs and The Dude had triplets and they built an app. This is FounderQuest.

Starr: Can you hear us?

Ben: Kinda.

Starr: Yeah? Well, the AirPods might give you a little bit of a delay. I could imagine that would be ... this KVM, the video part worked even though the keyboard and mouse didn't work, but I totally forgot that this monitor can't do 60 hertz over HDMI. Does that makes sense?

Josh: What was the refresh rate on the original, the NES games and stuff?

Starr: Oh, it's super good.

Josh: Right?

Starr: Because it's a CRT.

Josh: Yeah.

Starr: It's just whatever the refresh rate is for your TV. Right? That's baked into the NSTC. It's for standard, which by the way, is frickin' complicated. Video output onto old school NTSC ... for CRT stuff is incredibly complicated, and I tried to understand it, and I pretty much just failed.

Ben: Is his PAL any simpler?

Starr: I mean, I don't think so because you're, because it's all analog, right? You're controlling the signal that goes, this analog signal that goes out and directs this electron beam and ...

Ben: Yeah.

Starr: It's just not this world of pixels. So TV's don't, they have phosphors but they don't really have pixels. Like computers have. There's no pixel at 1010 so, but fortunately some, some people who are smarter than I have when I was doing my emulator, they all basically they had mapped out the different cycles of the PPU, which is the NES' GPU, basically. The different clock cycles of the GPU each correlate to a specific pixel on your screen. So I didn't have to actually, you know what? To do an emulator, you don't actually need to know the details of how TVs work and stuff and refresh rate and all that.

Josh: So the results for the my Twitter experiment yesterday got a little better over time. So it seems that Twitter's ad algorithm is a self, it's a self learning algorithm. So it starts out, you tell it kinda who the type of people you want it to target are, but then it optimizes itself over time as it actually starts to get clicks.

Starr: Really?

Josh: If someone clicks then it, I assume, it picks people that are more similar to them or that it thinks are more similar to them and yeah, so it started out when I had first run it for a few hours, I had a, it was, it spent 10 bucks and got 13 clicks and but that's really bad. It was 86 cents a click by the end ...

Starr: What's a click though? What's a click?

Josh: No. It was a link.

Starr: Okay, yeah.

Josh: Whatever they call it. a link promotion campaign.

Starr: Okay.

Josh: There was one link in the tweet and the call to action was, or the result was to click that link.

Starr: I thought you were talking about your pun.

Josh: Oh, no. No, that did terribly. That was a follower campaign. I think I learned a lot about follower campaigns too. I just was using the wrong campaign too.

Starr: Okay.

Josh: Also, people don't really probably care about puns in their advertised Twitter feed, but it was a fun afternoon and I stand by it. But yeah, by the end of this fall, by the end of the second experiment, which was more of a real experiment, I had brought the click down or the cost per click down to 46 cents. So we got about 113 click throughs to FounderQuest.

Starr: Oh, nice. Nice.

Josh: To the episode and yeah.

Starr: Very cool.

Josh: At least now we know and I don't know, I think I got the targeting pretty good, but I, it was my first try, so I'm sure we could optimize that a little bit. Maybe the content too. So if we want to buy clicks, we now know that they probably cost somewhere between 25 and 50 cents.

Starr: Awesome. I wonder how many of those people subscribed or downloaded something.

Josh: I don't know. I think that's one reason I wasn't quite convinced that it was the best idea to link to the, I linked to an actual episode page 'cause I wanted to talk about the episode is like the reason you want, you get interested.

Starr: Yeah.

Josh: But I think if I did this again, I want to try a dedicated landing page that's made for the campaign that has an actual, a real call to action like subscribe.

Ben: Yeah. Like an intro or something.

Josh: Right. Yeah. Not just the transcript, which is basically what we have.

Ben: Right.

Josh: Yeah, yeah.

Starr: You know what would be awesome is if we could somehow get people, if we could send Apple users to just subscribe in Apple Podcasts.

Josh: Yeah.

Starr: Or I guess people use different, Podcatcher, so it may not work.

Josh: Yeah, that's the problem.

Starr: Yeah.

Josh: Yeah. I did target only people on mobile though. I was smart enough to do that. 'Cause I think people, for a podcast...