Episode Details

Julien Danjou is the founder of Mergify - a tool that helps merge code safer and faster. 

Summary (auto-generated):

• How do you split your time between work and marketing? 0:00
  • Julian splits 50% of his time between building the product and the other 50% doing marketing and bringing people to the product.
  • Julian talks about mergerfi.
• Where do you start with product development? 1:23
  • The goal is to solve a problem for an engineer. They co-founded Mirchi Fi with Mary and wrote their own tool.
  • The role of time is a lot of time.
  • The importance of doing demos and showing the product around to the team, and how that has changed over time.
  • How the product is simple and there are a lot of viable options around it, but it's hard to think about all the tiny details.
• How did they get started? 5:08
  • They both started with a full-time job and moved from a platform to get up. They felt naked without any of their tools. They wanted to build their own tools.
  • They found a first rate customer, pitch.com, and then found more startups willing to use a merge request tool.
  • One of the challenges of being a bootstrapped company is that they only have two hours per week to work on the tool.
  • It is easy to not get good at making decisions when you can do everything, but in air quotes, do everything.
• How long did it take to write the first dashboard? 10:07
  • Before people started using it internally, they did most of the grunt work of writing the first version. The first version was a mvp.
  • The first dashboard they wrote was like HTML and the bootstrap framework, which was pretty bad, but it was good enough.
  • The first version of the product is the only thing that is going to be out in front of users or customers.
  • The importance of being an entrepreneur-minded person.
  • When they found the first customers, they decided not to build a company right away, but to focus on building a few hours a week into bots.
  • The real trap.
• Marketing and getting the word out. 16:00
  • The root problem is that nobody knows about you because you are not doing marketing. You have to go with the event if you have a competitor or inspire something.
  • It is easy to build the things for a year or so, especially when you are a developer.
  • Not everything works, but what works well is open source projects. For example, amazon is using lodgify on their open source project.
  • One of their biggest customers was using one of the engineer's projects on github.com, and they talk to their manager about it.
• Marketing and marketing budget. 20:30
  • Marketing is a lot of different channels that they can use, and they have tried almost everything to see if it works, and if it doesn't work, they try to future-harm.
  • They try to provide value for free to open source users and projects and are happy to do that.
  • Adding value in open source is about saving time and giving time to most open source projects using a merge tool.
  • If a company is new to open source, they need a tool to help them with a workflow tool, marketing, etc.
• How did you find out about rescue?

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