The Business of Laravel

Matt Stauffer:
All right, welcome back to the Business of Laravel podcast where I talk to business leaders who working in and with Laravel. And today my guest is, so I got to get the different names. We've got Alison Gianotto, also known as Snipe, who is the lead developer and founder of Snipe IT. We last were on a podcast seven years ago, which made us feel very old when we looked at that in Laravel podcast. We'll link that in the show notes, so make sure you take a look. But Alison, would you introduce yourself and tell us who are you and what is your business?

Alison Gianotto:
I've been developing in PHP for about 30 years as an OG on the PHP channel before it moved to free node. yeah, old. I don't remember.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, wow. Before free node, where was it before free note?

Alison Gianotto:
I don't remember. That's how long ago it was.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. That's more OG than me, yeah.

Alison Gianotto:
Yeah. Like before it turned into the PHP C community before Erasmus left, like all of that stuff. I'm very, very old. and so I founded a company called Grokability around the product of Snipe IT, which is a free open source IT asset management system, which basically allows IT departments to figure out which laptop is where, assigned to whom, what needs repair, so on and so forth. Same for software licenses and things like that. Although we do have people using us in very, very unusual ways. The most interesting way was, well, there were two. One was tracking oil rigs. And then another one was tracking human body parts.

Matt Stauffer:
Really?

Alison Gianotto:
I didn't ask too many questions about that one. I'm assuming it was some sort of donor program. I'm hoping, hoping. Yeah, hopefully. So it's like, it's really kind of geared towards IT, but that said, you know, it's basically just a way to assign things and figure out where stuff is.

Matt Stauffer:
Tracking stuff.

Wow. I know that some of our conversations around how the business works will rely on a better understanding of kind of like what it does. So if you don't mind, I want to kind of dive just a tiny bit further into like what Snipe IT is. So if I were my, my brothers are both in tech. One of them is a programmer. One of them does a lot of IT and at times he's worked being the IT guy for, know, probably a 20 person company.

Alison Gianotto:
Sure.

Matt Stauffer:
where nobody is doing tech. When I think of IT, I think of the people who help us programmers and they're setting up firewalls or whatever. But I think that IT is more commonly like the only technical people at a non-technical place and they're managing printers and stuff. So if I were that person, I would install, would it be like a locally hosted installer? Are you guys doing cloud-based installations? And what would my process be?

Alison Gianotto:
Yeah, well, you could run it yourself for sure. You'd want it to be probably network connected in some way on your either local network or on your own cloud solution.

Just because you're going to want to be able to, you're outside of the building or outside of your network, you're probably most likely going to want to be able to address stuff from somewhere else. We also do offer cloud hosting, and enterprise support. If you're doing some really funky integrations, API integrations, you know, like we try and help on the help desk, but like, if you're doing something really crazy, then you know, you're going to have to upgrade your support package there. So.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, and that was one of the places I was gonna go to. So I get started, I download the free software, I get set it up on a Digital Ocean box or whatever, and I assume that I'm manually typing things in, but you talked about integrations and you talked about support, and I wanna kinda cover both of those baselines.

So first of all, integrations, am I getting like a little QR code generator and scanner? Is that the type of thing y'all are doing, or is it mainly just kind of like snapping a picture with my phone and typing, this is in closet seven? Like what does this management actually look like?

Alison Gianotto:
There are quite a few different ways that you can use us. We do have barcode and QR code support. We also allow you to import a lot of times, where I started before, when I was first writing the software, we were using Google Docs that's really common in really small companies. And that's actually why I started to build Snap IT. I had never planned on this actually going anywhere. I certainly did not plan on this being my job for 13 more years.

Matt Stauffer:
Uh huh. Yeah.

Alison Gianotto:
But so we were using Google Docs and because we had a couple of contracted IT people who wouldn't keep things updated and so on and so forth, I was just getting tired of it. The company was moving locations. And so when you are moving locations and you're hiring movers, you need to know what you have so that you know when you get there that everything came with. And we realized that there were tens of thousands, if not more, of dollars worth of equipment that we just couldn't find. Like they just walked off. Maybe we fired somebody before I got there and they just kept their

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Alison Gianotto:
laptop or whatever it was. And so was like, okay, this is a, this is actually kind of a process that we should really adhere to. that process of getting on board with that, that they transition into using a system, whatever the system might be is a real giant pain. Basically like you have to talk to finance and say, okay, I need all the invoices for any technical, like any laptops, desktops, you know, monitors, keyboards, all of that stuff. And so you're just going through piles and piles of sometimes hand printed or printed out.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Alison Gianotto:
paper on actual tree, dead tree paper.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh my gosh.

Alison Gianotto:
And then you have to do the audit of, okay, so according to this, you should have serial number blah. And you have to email everybody to actually get them to report in on what they have. And that process is wildly unpleasant and there kind of isn't really a good way around it. There isn't, you need to know what people actually have versus what we think they have. But once that's all settled and you can do imports. So like via Google docs, if you're keeping that in the spreadsheet, you can import by a CSV.

Matt Stauffer:
Got it.

Alison Gianotto:
And so that saves a lot of typing. We find that a lot of times people who are using Google Docs because the data isn't 100% accurate...

If they're not dealing with too many assets, like we have some folks, like colleges and things like that, and K through 12s will have 10,000, 20,000 Chromebooks and things like that.

Matt Stauffer:
Wow.

Alison Gianotto:
So yeah, you're not gonna email each one of those kids' parents. That's less good. But if it's a small enough amount, then sometimes we find that people will actually go in and just kind of start fresh.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yup.

Alison Gianotto:
That way they can just start over and like, okay, we can say that these people do have these things. Now we have a clean slate and everything is exactly where we know it to be. And now we just use that moving forward. So everybody's process is a little bit different and it really depends on how big your organization is.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. Yeah. Okay. And I was going to ask about monetization, but I actually want to go back to that kind of origin story. So you were, you know, working at a company that had this need, you start scratching the edge by building a thing on the side. What was that process like and what were your intentions there? Were you're just kind of like, I'm going to build something for me? Or did you think about it being like multi-tenant SaaS from day one or not SaaS, but you know, multi-tenant kind of multi, were you imagining other people using it from day one I guess is the question.

Alison Gianotto:
So, well, I I've worked in open source for so long that I just naturally made it open source to start with, but I didn't think anyone was going to care about it. I really was like, we've got people who upgrade from us to this day from version four, which was like eight years ago, something like that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, jeez.

Alison Gianotto:
And so, you know, I built it kind of with other people in mind, but also building it for myself first. Mistakes were made in some of those processes and some of them haunt me to this day and I have them I have a list of those that I need to I need to correct but fortunately...

Matt Stauffer:
Oh no. Yup.

Alison Gianotto:
you know now that people have been using it for a really long time moving that kind of data around becomes a lot less trivial You know if I just fixed it in the beginning Yeah, but you know, we weren't...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. At the beginning, yep. Hindsight's 20-20. Yeah.

Alison Gianotto: 0
really using it for licenses that much and so because of that you can see the the kind of pain points in licenses. You know, also the model of licenses has changed in 13 years. A lot of people are doing cloud licenses and all kinds of other stuff. And, know, it's on the list. I promise it's on the list. We're going to get to it. I promise.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, so you were building that for yourself. It was an open source project as we want to do as open source creators. You say, well, somebody else will spin it up and use it exactly the same way I do. That's fine. Maybe even you add like, you know, two or three different ways to do a couple of things. But I assume at some point you hit a critical masses of usage where you said, you know, a I may need to kind of re-architect this and B I may need to actually think about making money for this in order for it to kind of like really support what I'm doing. What was that kind of transition like?

Alison Gianotto:
So I built Free Alpha on my Christmas break. I was working at an ad agency.

I don't remember if I was the CTO at that point, but basically the technical person, which meant that like, you know, we had a crew of developers, but when someone's printer broke, they also talked to me and I was involved in the off-boarding process and all of that. And so I was using my experience of basically being the IT person for a really long time as I was trying to solve these problems.

So I'm really bad at taking vacation, like really, really bad.

Matt Stauffer:
Ahh same.

Alison Gianotto:
And I'd saved it all up and they didn't roll over. So I basically took like three weeks of vacation off because I was going to lose them. And I just started just started coding and I was like, Hey, I've heard about this Laravel thing, you know, how is it different than cake or any of other frameworks and blah, blah, blah. And so was like, all right, fine. You know, and so I just started coding it out and, uh, you know, then a couple of people started opening issues and I was like, okay, I mean, sure. That seems like a pretty reasonable request. And then five people became 10 became a lot more. I ended up leaving that job, um, and co-founding a startup.

And so they had a really short runway. My husband thankfully was able to kind of sustain us during that time because the runway ran out really, really quickly. And so was effectively working for them unpaid.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Oof.

Alison Gianotto:
But you know, it was a project we believed in and so it was fine. And then the momentum on Snip IT kept growing and growing and growing. And finally I had to leave the founding job because I was like, I'm... I'm actually like, I'm too busy over on this other thing. And my husband at one point had said, you should really charge for this. I was like, who's going to pay for this? It's free. And he nagged me and he nagged me and he nagged me until I put a PayPal button up on our WordPress product site. And like two days later we had a sign up. Shit. Shit. Okay. So actually I hadn't left the, the co-founder gig at that point.

But then we actually started to gain traction as an actual company. And then I was actually making a livable amount of money. So I had to leave the company that I'd been a co-founder of. And it was Slim Pickens for sure. I couldn't live by myself in an apartment and sustain a family on what I was making. But it was real and it kept going up. And so I was like, oh crap, I guess I to start a company now because that's going to make my taxes really

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Alison Gianotto:
difficult if I just keep doing this. So yeah yeah you know you can blame my husband.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I mean, great. Good man. Did you at that initial point was the PayPal button just donate to support? Was it if you don't if you you you pay for this, you're to get enterprise level support. pay for hosting. OK, OK. So I was just going to ask. Yeah.

Alison Gianotto:
No, it pay for hosting. No, it was just pay for hosting. Yep. And I had a shared server that I was already paying for for other projects. So like it wasn't actually costing me any money. It was just costing me time. But deploying hundreds and hundreds of Laravel installations is pretty time consuming. And then making sure when new releases were tagged that they all got updated as well. It just became a lot. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
So we have a lot of clients who want to build a tool like that where it's a single install per person. Actually, that's not true. We have a lot of clients who have already done that. Then they come to us and they say, we've got 200 different installs and we've customized each one. And we need to find a kind of more stable system because everybody's on a different version. So when you were getting custom requests to modify things from very beginning, were you ever tempted to say, I'm going to have an actual different version of this app for each person?

Or is it like a hard line of like everybody's got to have the same code base because otherwise I can't maintain it. Yeah.

Alison Gianotto:
No, it's a hard line. No, it's a hard line and we're AGPL, so I would have to release it anyway, like under my own license. I couldn't do that. So.

Matt Stauffer:
Got it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't hear people reference their own license very often. I you are a true open source nerd. You're like, what I gotta do. I'm beholden to it. So.

Alison Gianotto:
I am absolutely a bad nerd. Yep. Yep. And frankly, I mean, it's too much aggravation anyway, because there's, I got 13 years of context stuck in my head. And if we vary from that for one special unique snowflake case or several of those, there's no way that we would be able to sustainably handle that. But also what I, what I generally try and do if it's possible, if the request is, if I feel like it would work for the community at large, or at least could be ignored by the community at large and won't add too much technical debt or cyclomatic complexity, I'll usually try and add that as an option. Like, okay, you, the one person who actually wants a PDF logo on their printout, sure. Okay, I'll add a PDF logo upload. And so I'll build it in so that we don't have to have these, you know, ridiculous varying versions of things. Also, if you want to customize like the way stuff looks you know, we put IDs on nav items and lots of things that we know people want to hide. That way don't have to have a billion checkboxes of, you know, what, what do you want? You know, the CSS trick usually works, but like actually removing some of those things would actually affect the database schema itself. And so, and I generally, I feel like for when you add a settings checkbox, it should always hurt. It's like when you denormalize a database, it should hurt. You should really be making sure that this is the only way that you can pull that off. Well, like one of the challenges that we have, because each of our customers does have their own individual install. If you're self-hosted, you can twiddle things in the .env file. If you're hosted, you don't get access to that. And so we've had to build in a whole bunch of like really clever things. We never want the hosted product to be worse than the free product or more limited than the

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, for sure.

Alison Gianotto:
the free product. So kind of balancing that out, making sure that like, Hey, we're never going to make the hosted product. We're never going to kneecap the free product and give you more of something on the hosted product, but we're also not going to do the opposite of that and make our own hosted product worse. So it's a tight rope that we have to walk when you're, when you're basically your own biggest competitor, you have to really stay on the, stay on the straight and narrow and try and come up with some really creative solutions on how to solve some of these problems.

Matt Stauffer:
The parallels between what you're doing and folks building open source frameworks and stuff like that is pretty incredible. Because I mean, the same questions I'm having for you of how do you add complexity and features without making it so complex that a newcomer doesn't have an easy time? It's the same thing that a package author and a library author has to deal with. But you're dealing that in both an open source software and a... It's crazy how much overlap that it is, but also how much complexity is added because it's a business for you.

Do you have any like ux developers on staff? it just kind of you and your your desire to keep it? Okay. Yeah

Alison Gianotto:
You're looking at her. I mean, anybody, anybody, anybody.

Matt Stauffer:
Are there days where you wish you had a...

Alison Gianotto:
For sure. mean, we're a small company. We're 11 people. like, there are days I'm doing 13 jobs at any given moment. The UX side is actually one of the things that I enjoy the most though. And some of my poor developers have submitted PRs and I look God-free I love you, but seriously. So he would post up these PRs with screenshots and I'm like, you really thought I was going to let that go? That box is five pixels off.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, great.

Alison Gianotto:
And I would actually draw a line on his screenshot and just be like, you know, I'm not going to take that. Why? I know. So yeah, I actually really enjoy that because I think one of the things I don't actually enjoy writing code that much. I enjoy solving problems and I enjoy building products. And I think I love the UX side of it so much because small changes in UX can really just supercharge people's workflows. And...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Okay.

Alison Gianotto:
It is something that, you know, and certainly there's tons of room for improvement in my own product. I know that I've got a list of those as well. I've got a lot of lists, but, um...

Matt Stauffer:
Yep, of course.

Alison Gianotto:
you know, for me, when you can release a feature and immediately on GitHub, somebody says, thank you so much. You've just saved hours. Like that's fantastic. You know, I really enjoy that. So.

Matt Stauffer:
You're like, yes.

Yeah. that's a great feeling. so, I mean, one of the questions I always ask is in what ways Laravel involved in your business and you already kind of told us that story, but I am curious, when you were first building it, was it vanilla PHP and what was that transition like? Y

Alison Gianotto:
Nope, started with Laravel.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh from day one? I don't know why for some reason I thought you had made a move to Laravel at some point. So, okay.

Alison Gianotto:
Nope, no, because also, you know, since at the old company, the ad agency, had a dev team of I think 10 or 15 and you know, different requirements, different projects that we were working on had different requirements and things like that. So I needed to really make sure that I was up on whatever the kind of the new hotness was in PHP. You know, we were mostly a PHP shop with a few exceptions. And so I figured on my vacation, I wanted to learn this framework anyway, and I had an actual problem that I wanted to solve. So, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Got it, okay.

Yeah. Okay. Very cool. Um, so I know that you have a team of 11. I don't actually know your full hiring story, but as you have been bringing team members onto support, have you brought fully baked Laravel developers in or have you brought people outside the Laravel world in and then taught them Laravel?

Alison Gianotto:
Both so one actually used to work for Tighten. And so Yeah, he was I think the only fully baked Laravel dev. No, actually knowing Spencer. Spencer was also a fully baked Laravel dev, but everybody else Were like we got one guy out of Code Camp. He was just a friend of ours and he couldn't get a job and I was like I was watching him as he was learning and he was starting to ask
better and better questions. so finally I look at Brady and I'm like, should we, we could take him on as a junior. And, yep. And we took him and he's still with us and he's great. So yeah, it's, it's a bit of a mix, you know, obviously if someone knows Laravel, that's great. That's easier, but, it's not.

Matt Stauffer:
That's awesome.

Yeah. And that was going to be my question is having kind of gone through the experiences you have, would you ever choose to hire somebody who doesn't know Laravel or you're like, every time it was so much work, like I just want to take fully bake people in.

Alison Gianotto:
That's not really the quality that I look for. I look for people who are asking smart questions who are able to learn and able to adapt. I mean the Laravel that we have today is not the Laravel that I started with. And you can certainly see echoes of that legacy code in the current code base. And there's a...

Matt Stauffer:
That's the truth.

Alison Gianotto:
There's like a level of absolutism that I just kind of won't tolerate. If it's like only Laravel or only PHP or only this, or only this type of database. I don't want, I don't want to hear any of that. If you're a junior, I'm really kind of looking for, are you finding creative ways to solve problems? And also, do you know where the foot guns are? Do you have a good sense of what could be a foot gun? Like, do you know what a thousand and one queries is? How do you know? How do you check? You know, and, and like,

Matt Stauffer:
Love it.

Alison Gianotto:
watching people grow from that kind of very beginner standpoint into, know, actually I found this query that wasn't optimized as a PR and I'm like, nice, nice work. You know, that's, that's really fun. You know, obviously we, we, because we are small, we don't, my rule was we always hire juniors and unfortunately, because we just don't have that much time, I think we're not great at hiring juniors because we can't always give the mentorship that, that we'd like, but fortunately the rest of the dev team.

Matt Stauffer:
Love that.

Alison Gianotto:
Everybody comes together when anybody's got a question or a problem and there's no question that's stupid or anything like that. The team that we've built is pretty great and everybody helps each other.

Matt Stauffer:
I love that and you keep answering my next question, but I'm gonna take it further. My next question is gonna be what does it look like for you as a person with 13 hats? Who has a small team to also be raising people up? You know, like a lot of people have the ideal of bringing on juniors and apprentices and helping being a part of the thing. But the pipeline, but most people end up in their reality saying, well, I really just need fully formed people and that's a nice idea one day, but I really need fully formed people now.

It's something I've struggled with the more my responsibilities have been at Tighten, you know used to be 50 % of leadership team now I'm 100 % of leadership team, you know at least the ownership team and it's a lot harder to spend that time than I used to Is that something where you guys have kind of a more structured on boarding or is it very much just sort of like a will? Yeah. Yep.

Alison Gianotto:
No, it's trial by fire. It's trial by fire, unfortunately. When I brought my help desk person on, which is the first employee that I had, I'm just like, kind of watch what I do on the help desk, then do that. Like that's, because I was so overwhelmed, I didn't have time. And I can't take credit for us being good at or not good at whatever, you know, handling juniors. It is the team that kind of rises together. I do not have the time and I hate myself for it. I really wish that I could.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yep. Same.

Alison Gianotto:
I could participate more any of the higher level questions. Certainly product questions come to me. And if it's something that I just know off the back of like off the back of my hand, I mixing metaphors all over the place. But if it's something that I immediately know and can answer to, then certainly I'll jump in. But we also have office hours or we do Grok when we have something scheduled, we do Grok talks because the my company is called grok ability. It has nothing to do with Elon. So we have Grok talks.

Matt Stauffer:
Elon stole it from a stranger from a strange land and we know he doesn't understand any of that,

Alison Gianotto:
Stranger in a strange land. Yeah. Yeah, I he doesn't understand anything. Anyway, putting that aside. Just completely derailed me now. Yeah, so yeah, I mean, usually we have something scheduled or we try to have something scheduled if there's a cool piece of technology, even if it's completely unrelated to anything that we're working on. It's like, hey, I was messing around with GraphQL or Neo4j, like whatever, just cool stuff that people are working on.

You know, it takes time obviously to put those types of talks together. And so we don't always have them, but we always have the office hours when those talks would be. And so all the devs will jump into a huddle or a schmortle or whatever, whatever technology chat technology they're using nowadays. Y

Matt Stauffer:
Right, exactly.

Alison Gianotto:
eah, like whatever. and unfortunately with the time zone difference, it can make it a little tougher for us to join. Most of the devs are in, East coast, not East coast, West coast. We've got...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Alison Gianotto:
one in East Coast, we've got one in Texas, and our COO is in Hawaii. So basically the furthest time difference from where Brady and I are is 11 hours. And most of the devs are eight hours away. And so they're just getting up as we're like, okay, time to turn in. It also means that our day ends, our meeting days end at sometimes 10 or 11 p.m. our time. You know, because like, we're not gonna make devs wake up at four o'clock in the morning for meetings. So like, you we chose to move. It's our job to kind of handle the difference.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, you've talked a lot on your various social medias and also on a specific website that you have about your journey of moving to Portugal and kind of moving your family there. I wish we could have an entire episode just about that. But I am curious to kind of hear what's it like managing. Because what I'm used to doing is I'm running a remote team that is probably 60 % in the US. And so when we have folks outside of the US, it's sort of like, yeah, OK, you know, it's a thing. We make it work. But like, you are outside of the US.

Running a, I presume, still US-based company with primarily US-based staff members, are there any unique challenges that kind of come outside of the time zone, which is obviously a big thing? What are any other aspects of that that make that particularly difficult?

Alison Gianotto:
I mean, we had to engage with an EOR in order to get paid as Portuguese residents. And every single EOR employer of record, I think in the United States, it would be a POE, like Paychex, ya know, that type of company. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, gusto, all them, yeah.

Alison Gianotto:
And so we had to find, we're using Rippling. We are not huge fans of Rippling, but they were the ones that said that they could handle Portugal. And so we signed up with them. Just that it's a buttload of extra paperwork. And rippling is pretty expensive for what they do. But we kind of don't really have any choice. There's like legal requirements that we have to fulfill. So, you know, I would say that's probably the hardest part. The time zones are really brutal. I'm not going to lie about it. Even us as kind of night owls, it's just brutal. You know, basically running out the door hoping that you can find someplace that will serve you food at 11 o'clock at night in the middle of winter in Lisbon. You know, because we've got those tiny little European refrigerators, so it's not like you can keep a lot of food in the refrigerator anyway. So, you know, just a lot of those types of logistical complications. But the time zones are brutal, and I would never lie to anybody about that. Like, it is difficult, for sure.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, we had a one of the guys at Tighten, Keith he's Italian, know background and so he's lived in Italy with his entire family a couple times for a full year and one of the times he worked at Tighten during that and he would I'm trying to remember exactly what he'd do I think he would wake up and spend his whole morning with his family and then they would have lunch together and I think he'd check in and basically disappear for the afternoon have dinner with his family and then disappear for the evening.

Do you all kind of end up working that or do you like what's your what's your day to day schedule like?

Alison Gianotto:
So it depends if it's a running day or not. If it's a running day then we get up a bit earlier because right now it's super duper hot in in Lisbon and if we blow that window then it's just too hot for us to run. It's like in the upper 80s, low 90s most of day.

Matt Stauffer:
You're not getting outside. Yeah. Yeah.

Alison Gianotto:
So you know we kind of get up, otherwise we kind of get up whenever because we do go to bed pretty late. We get up usually around like 9, 9:30 something like that. Brady likes to play his stupid games and his like iPad games and stuff just to kind of gear himself up. Got to walk the dogs, got to do all that stuff. I usually jump on the help desk first because one of the advantages that we do have with this crazy time zone stuff is we accidentally have follow the sun coverage. You know, with us here in Portugal, Victoria in Hawaii and then Osei in California, like we basically get full coverage. And so I try and take advantage of that.

Matt Stauffer:
Hmm interesting and then Hawaii. Yeah.

Alison Gianotto:
It's punishing being eight time zones away. We may as well get the good things out of it that we can. And so I usually try and jump on that and that way their day starts a little less chaotic. And so we all just kind of cover each other's time zones and backs and stuff like that. And then usually we'll take a meeting depending obviously. We'll usually try and take a longer break in the, like around lunchtime. It's never actually lunchtime. It's usually closer to like 3 p.m. because we're idiots and we forgot to eat breakfast.

And now we're starving and nauseous. So we have to run out and then, you know, we'll take a long lunch and then get back in time for the evening meetings. It's a long day for sure, but we also have a four day work week. So you know, it's like, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. Yeah. Okay. That changes things for sure. Is that a long time Grokability thing or is that a Portuguese introduction or? Okay, got it.

Alison Gianotto:
Oh yeah. No, we've had that for a long time. What we realized, what I realized honestly, it was like no work was getting done on Fridays anyway. Like nobody was getting anything done. And our customers for the most part are kind of mailing in on Fridays as well. So it's like, let's just make this official. Like Friday's off, it's fine. And we don't do the like cram 40 hours into four days thing. Like it's 32 hour work week. And certainly we have flex time anyway. So like if you had to do something, we're just not rigid about it at the end of the day. Like we have unlimited PTO as well. So like our QA person is like, you know, I had to take the kid to school. So I'll make up the work on Friday. I'm like, I do that if you want. I mean, we're just do it next week. It's okay.

Matt Stauffer:
Or don't. Yeah. Yeah. That's very cool.

Alison Gianotto:
You know, like we're not curing cancer here. I really wish we were, but unfortunately we're not. And so like, nobody's going to die if that button hasn't been clicked 500 times.

Matt Stauffer:
I love that. I'm in the middle of working on a course about how to run a company, dev team like Tighten. And it's really fun talking about our values and what we care about. And I always remember how much you and I align on values. But one of the things that's very clear to me is that because you have a product company, there is not a direct tie between the dollar that is earned and the dollar that is spent on a developer. Because you're not renting out developer hours like an agency is.

I envy you that and I always like it's always a grass is greener on the other side kind of thing for me for I'm just like one day if I had a product I could kind of like be much more, you flexible. Are there any ways where you look back at your agency days and you're like, you know what that was better or you're like No product is really just the way to be?

Alison Gianotto:
There are definitely days.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, okay.

Alison Gianotto:
I mean, I remember being at the agency and being like, if I only had one product, because we would run these campaigns that would run for, you know, a month or two months or something like that. And so we'd have all this dev buildup time and then they'd be live for a month or two and then they're gone. And then nobody even thinks of them ever again. And I would always say, man, you know, if I could just work on one product, I could make it amazing. And 13 years later, I'm like, man, if I could look at anything else today other than this product, you know.

Matt Stauffer:
I'm tired of it, okay?

Alison Gianotto:
I know but the thing it's the worst part is though it's there's this there's this Harry Chapin song and I don't know if you know Harry Chapin at all most people don't it's okay. He actually kind of predates us a bit everybody would know him from the cats in the cradle song that makes everybody cry there's another song that he has called Mr. Tanner and it's about this guy who works in like a laundromat a dry cleaning store and he sings to himself at night as he's pressing the clothes. And his friends would hear him sing and they're like, oh my gosh, you're amazing. You you should try out, you know, there's an open audition at the theater. You should go and, you get a review. And so he saves up for this. His friends chip in and he stands on the stage and he sang and he gave it his all. And the critics were concise. It only took four lines, but no one could accuse them of being over kind. And so they basically tear him apart on that stage. And he's completely broken.

Just utterly broken. And so he goes back to his dry cleaning job and he would only then sing in the middle of the night where no one could hear him. And there's a line in that song that reminds me so much of myself. As he's performing on the stage, he's auditioning, there's a line that goes, he did not know how well he sang, he could only hear the flaws. And like, that's what I look at when I see this product.

It's what I look at, anything that I own, honestly, anything that I'm in charge of. I know people love it. And I just, every time, like, all I can see are the things that need fixing. And that's not a great quality for sure. I mean, you know, we take the wins when we can get them. But I think the reason why we are good and why we move so fast is because, it's gonna sound super cheesy, but like this kind of relentless pursuit of excellence type of thing is just like,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Alison Gianotto:
because I have such possession and care for this product, all I can see are all the things that are wrong with it.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. I mean, yeah.

Alison Gianotto:
And then every now and then someone on the help desk or someone on GitHub will say something super nice or someone in Discord will say something super nice. And I'm like, oh, okay. All right, maybe I should go a little easier on myself. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
All right, it's worth it. Yeah, I mean, sure, it is not an ideal personality trait for your own mental health and insanity. So like my wish is for you to be kinder to yourself for yourself. I also want to say that I know a lot of people who are like you that are creative and driven and productive and then also have that trait. And it's like one of these like,

Alison Gianotto:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Usually I know a lot of people who like do like the Myers-Briggs and all those kind of like personality traits. It's usually like the good almost always comes with a paired bad, you know, and that bad is it is bad and we want to work on it, but it's often like the mirror side of the thing that allows you to do what you're capable of doing. So I wonder is the alternative, the completely clueless creator who just thinks everything that does brilliant because we know those people and you don't want to be that person either. Right. So yeah.

Alison Gianotto:
Yeah. We've worked with those people.

Matt Stauffer:
Our industry is led by them. Got it. OK, so back to some of the actually intentionally structured things, because as you and I talked about ahead of time, we will just meander and it's going to be great. But I want to talk a little bit about what has helped you get to where you are today. Now, you didn't just start as some open source developer and just create a company out of scratch. You have been in leadership positions. You've kind of done leadership things and you have been in the industry for a while learning and experiencing things. As you think about what got you to the point where you went from working for other people to doing your own thing, do you have anything that you can point to where you're like, these are the experiences or these are the learnings that got me to the point where I was actually capable of doing it? And that could be something recent, like a job as a CTO, or it could be something from your childhood where you're like, this traumatic experience or this positive experience kind of led me to become this person who I am today.

Alison Gianotto:
Yeah. Honey, how long is this podcast? You want to talk about my childhood trauma?

Matt Stauffer:
Whatever you want to do, let's go for it.

Alison Gianotto:
I mean, I think kind of working from here backwards. I've worked at a lot of crummy companies and have been treated really badly. And I was too young in my career to realize that I was being treated badly. And I needed the job too desperately. And I didn't have the confidence to think I could get another job and all of this other stuff. I really tried to make sure that we are constantly making sure that we're creating the company that I would have wanted to work for when I was in my 20s. And so basically that is the trauma is like every other company that I've ever worked for has led to this and has led us to make crazy things like a vacation bonus. Our lawyer was like, a what? Because we were redoing the employee contracts. And I said, yeah, a vacation bonus. That's what we do. We have one. He's like, I literally don't even know what you mean by that.

I said, well, you get, you know, it's unlimited PTO, but basically if you take two weeks at a time, then you get a $5,000 bonus. And he's like, I, what, what?

Matt Stauffer:
Make no sense.

Alison Gianotto:
And I was like, yeah, because we want people to take their vacation. You know, it's very common in our industry that people who say you have unlimited vacation, they don't really mean that because they're going to make you feel bad when you take it. Or, you know, you might not get the promotion because you took vacation, blah, blah, blah. We don't want that. We want you to be able to upgrade your flight. We want you to be able to upgrade your hotel room or whatever it is. Take your kids on a, extend your stay, whatever it is. Like you get that money because we want you to actually relax and disconnect and have a good time. And you know, it's very cool to be in charge of a company because you get to make those rules. You just get to like sometimes make arbitrary stuff happen and people are like, what? Lawyer's like, I'm going to have to get back to you on that. I don't, I don't.

Matt Stauffer:
Not sure how to write that.

Alison Gianotto:
I've never heard of this before. Yeah, he's like, he's an employment lawyer and he still is like, I've never heard of anything like this. So I'm going to have to get back to you. We had to kind of work out how that was going to go in the contract. One thing that we don't do is we don't roll over vacation. I mean, how do you roll over unlimited PTO anyway? People just not show up to work forever. Like keep collecting a paycheck. But that is one of my favorite parts is getting to do those types of things.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny, we wrote a blog post, I don't know how long ago, 10 years ago maybe, called the Great Tighten Experiment about how we were creating Tighten to be what we had always wished we had had a chance to refer. And we literally said that same phrase, you we want to create a company we want to work for. it's amazing what, and again, I'm making this course about how I built Tighten. One of the core things of like almost all these first videos is just like,
if you just use empathy for the people, if you imagine that you were in that position, it answers 99 out of 100 of the complicated questions around, what benefits plan should we offer? And how should I handle this person's request to go to their kid's school right now or whatever? Almost all of them can be answered like, well, what would you want? And of course, if you're a psychopath or if you are someone who doesn't want to do any work, well, OK, you're going to have trouble with, maybe your answer's not right. But for the average person,

Alison Gianotto:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
You know what you would have wanted. You know what pain you experienced when you didn't get that thing. And you know, when you got asked to work on the weekends to fill out the TPS reports and all you wanted to do was just, you know, you know, take it easy because your boss had made a promise that you weren't a part of. Now you have to fulfill that. Like, it's just sort of like you, you can, you can figure this out.

Alison Gianotto:
Right. That never happens at an agency. I don't know what you're talking about, Matt. Other people writing checks that you have to figure out how to cash? Yeah. yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah, I'm the sales guy now. So I'm like, I've got to make sure I do not become that evil person who makes the promises for my team. Oh geez.

Alison Gianotto:
Yes, yes you do.

Matt Stauffer:
OK, so we were talking about kind of like what got you to the point of like being able to do what you were able to do right now. And you named, you know, those experiences of being treated the way you didn't want to be treated and then paired together with your empathy, with trying to kind of avoid other people being there. If someone was to try and go through the same journey you went through. Obviously, we don't want them to intentionally go through a harmful experience. Are there any things someone can reach for? They're like, you know what, if I'm at a point early in my career and one day I want to be Snipe, I want to be like her, is there something they can reach for as an option, whether it's type of experience to gather or a mindset to try and shift where it can help them start moving in that direction?

Alison Gianotto:
I think certainly volunteering is any opportunity to volunteer. You will end up working with people from all different walks of life, all different backgrounds, all different beliefs. And as long as you're all working towards the kind of common good of whatever it is that you're volunteering for, you have that one thing in common. So, you know, familiarity breeds empathy. And so the more familiar you are with more people and different kinds of people, the better you're going to be able to understand them and put yourself in their shoes.

And you know, there's a story I like to tell and I might've told it seven years ago when I was on this last time. The details are a little blurry now because it's such an old, I learned this lesson so long ago. I was in Colorado for this conference and Jane Goodall was presenting. And a lot of parallels often mistakenly get made between ane Goodall and Dian Fossey. Dian Fossey is the Gorillas in the Mist lady, and her entire staff hated her. We still don't know how she died. It's suspected that her own crew killed her because she was just not easy to work with.

Matt Stauffer:
Wow.

Alison Gianotto:
Yeah, like, I don't think anybody ever figured out the final story of that. Whereas Jane Goodall, who, by the way, is still alive, knock on wood, you know, she, she... She had similar goals. She was studying chimpanzees and instead of shooting at the poachers and trying to kill them, she hired them because she realized that these poachers, they don't hate chimps. They just, they've got a family to feed. And so one of the things that she did was she hired the poachers to protect the chimpanzees. She also brought, she also brought kind of a version of Planned Parenthood to that region of Africa and she would get these letters from young women who didn't realize that they had to have 12 children and hope that five of them survived. They now had agency to actually plan how many children they wanted to have. And she'd get letters like, you know, I have two children and the second one just headed off to college. And so like just the ability to transform lives by shifting your perspective on things. That story always sticks with me. And somebody asked her about that when she was up on stage. You know, they're like, you know...

Matt Stauffer:
Wow.

Alison Gianotto:
you know, when people say that you're like Dian Fossey, what do you say to that? And she basically didn't answer, but her not answer was enough. She basically effectively said, well, one of us is still alive. And so, she coded it in that very gentle way that she has,

Matt Stauffer:
Sure.

Alison Gianotto:
But like what I parsed out of that is like, yeah, okay, you're right. One of you is still alive. And so I think not... We get so used to solving problems in the same way. And I think businesses are like that. It's like, you just do it this way because that's way it's always been done. Like, what if you don't though? What if you hired the poachers instead of killing them? You know, what if you shift the perspective and actually start to understand other people's points of view and try and be creative? You know?

Matt Stauffer:
Wow. I'm have to go try and find some things I've heard talking later, because I'm like, I need some time to process that and I can't do it on this podcast, but I'm gonna do it later. So thank you for bringing that story up.

Alison Gianotto:
Sure, sure.

Matt Stauffer:
So I know we are at the end of time, which bums me out, because as always, I want to talk forever, but I want to ask a few last questions. So first of all, are you hiring anytime in the near future? People are looking for work with you.

Alison Gianotto:
Not currently. Right now with all the tariff craziness, like we're seeing a lot of company shutdowns. We're still doing okay. We're still net positive every month. But I have to feel things out a little bit longer just to see. know, like I would love to, but we're kind of on a wait and see sort of situation to see exactly how bad everything gets. So not currently, but you know, if and when we do, I'll post about it on Blue Sky. I'll put it up on the website and stuff.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, totally. Okay. And I'll retweet it and everything. Okay, second thing is, is there anything that we didn't talk about today that you wish we had talked about?

Alison Gianotto:
I didn't get to tell any stories about when I worked with tigers, did I? That might be one for the next podcast.

Matt Stauffer:
No, and I think that last time I said, yeah, we said, okay, God, you're just gonna keep that, I'll get you on every podcast I've ever had so I can eventually get you to talk about that.

Alison Gianotto:
Exactly.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, and the last question I have for everybody then is if somebody handed you $100 million for your company today, what would you do tomorrow?

Alison Gianotto:
That's a good question.

I mean, I guess maybe put some level of effort into marketing because we don't do any marketing at all. Not at all.

Matt Stauffer:
So normally the question is if they handed you $100 million to buy your company away, not to invest, you'd say no.

Alison Gianotto:
to buy my company, no. no, no. Now everybody's got their number and I need a little bit more than that for all I've put in. But because also the thing is I, well, I would need to know, I would need to know that like I would have to set it up so that everybody who's been with us also gets a piece of that. And so, cause you know, that's the kind of person I am. I don't know, a hundred million. I don't know that I would do it. Maybe like 500 million maybe.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, I was gonna say if somebody showed up with a billion and you knew that that was enough to, you know, give a million or two every single person in your company and also kind of feel like all the work you've done. But basically the goal is to get a number where you feel like you were properly, you know, compensated for all the work you've been put in and you can walk away from it and say, you know what? I'm financially good. I don't need it anymore. What do you do when? Yeah.

Alison Gianotto:
I don't know that I could walk away. As I said, I'm not very good at being on vacation. Like I would just build something else. There's just,

Matt Stauffer:
That's what I figured you were going to say.

Alison Gianotto:
I can't do it. When I quit my job at the ad agency, I was like, you know what? I haven't had time off between jobs in forever. I'm gonna take a couple months. That lasted two weeks. That's the two weeks. And then I started working on Snipe IT more. And cause like I played video games for two weeks and I'm like, all right, well now I'm bored. What's next?

Matt Stauffer:
Yep. Yep.

Good. Yeah.

Alison Gianotto:
So I don't know that there is a number to actually get me out of this.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I love it. That's wonderful. That's the dream, right? Is to be somewhere where you're like, no money could get me out of here.

Alison Gianotto:
I mean, we're really fortunate in that we never took money, we never had to, because we were bootstrapped and so we don't owe anybody anything. If we ever did shut this down, would need, whoever was gonna buy us would need to have the most ridiculous contract of like, this still needs to be open source for another five years. And then you can do whatever you want with it. But the fact that we were bootstrapped definitely helps a lot in freeing us up to make whatever decisions we wanna make.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I love that. Because we have to wrap, I will do the wrapping, but I just want you to know how grateful I am that you came to spend some time. I know how busy you are. I know how busy you are, and I'm really grateful for you spending some time to hang out with us.

Alison Gianotto:
Anytime, I'll always make time for you.

Matt Stauffer:
Appreciate it. And for the rest of you, thank you all so much for hanging out with us and we'll see you next time.

Alison Gianotto:
Thank you.