ScreamingBox Technology & Business Rundown

SCREAMINGBOX TECHNOLOGY AND BUSINESS RUNDOWN PODCAST #4
Brunch website feedback app - Guest: Razvan Statescu

Dave Erickson 00:32
Welcome everyone to the ScreamingBox technology and business rundown podcast. We're here today with Razvan from Brunch, which is a website feedback product and app. We look forward to having a deep discussion with him, about his history, how the product was developed, where he's going to be taking it, and how it will help you in doing your business. So Razvan, welcome to our podcast. Maybe you can give us a light background of your development background, how you became a developer, your experience and how you started Brunch.

Razvan Statescu 01:16
Hello, everyone. Thank you first for having me and thank you, Dave, for the kind words. So about me; I was interested in computers and later on programming since I was in high school. I started programming on my own using YouTube and other similar sites. In the past five years, I've been freelancing as a web developer. In a few words, that's my background.

Dave Erickson 01:58
What type of web development did you enjoy doing the most? What were you focusing on?

Razvan Statescu 02:05
When I started freelancing, I was mostly doing PHP. In the past two years, I've been doing both back end and front end. For back end I'm using Node JS mainly and front end using Angular, but I've had projects with two Vue JS. I've studied Angular.

Botond Seres 02:44
Sorry. I'm not too familiar with it, but I've heard of it. I hear it's a kind of TypeScript based language. Do you enjoy working with TypeScript, because we rarely get developers who use it. Most people just go for vanilla JS and that's it. So, if you could tell us more about that experience, that would be great.

Razvan Statescu 03:18
I've seen a lot of projects where, like they are using Typescript, but really they are using vanilla JavaScript. I mean, they are not really using the extra features that Typescript brings. I think it's good, especially a work in progress where there are more people involved. It brings like an extra layer, It's more strict. In some cases, especially where more people are involved that's good, because it gets everyone on the same page, and it's easier to maintain and not make stupid mistakes.

Botond Seres 04:10
Oh, that's nice. So it brings nice structure, a foundation to a favorite scripting language.

Dave Erickson 04:22
Well, Razvan when you started thinking about products, was that as a result of doing development work, and then seeing that there were gaps or needs, from what you were doing, or was it based more on the clients that you had were asking you for solutions and you came up with product ideas based on that. How did freelance development inspire you?

Razvan Statescu 05:03
I've had small personal projects that I tried promoting on different groups but they were all small and they dropped off within a few weeks or a month. With Brunch, the difference was that I didn't start to dip below. I had a co-founder and I think it is very important, like to have at least another person when you're starting something because you motivate each other and you push each other. It makes it more fun and I think the worst thing that can happen when you start something is abandoning it, to lose interest. It's the same everywhere, even if you start a YouTube channel or an Instagram, it will be you, your family and your friends and you only keep it up for a year. I think it's the same with a new product. If you start from the bottom with no community and no previous product, maybe you have other resources, but if it's your first, I think it's very important to have at least another person to do it with.

Dave Erickson 06:42
How did you choose your co-founder? Was he another developer that you work with or is he somebody who is very focused on business development, and not really a developer?

Razvan Statescu 06:55
Andre, my co-founder, has a digital marketing agency in Bucharest. I had worked with him in the past on different projects. So I knew him and we were working together for the past year very well together. We are very good friends; he is the kind of person that I can go out and have a beer with. We started this because, as I said, he has a digital agency and we could share resources. First, we needed a designer and a marketing person and he provided other things we needed and I provided the coding.

Dave Erickson 08:10
Okay. So he handles the business operations and you handle the product coding.

Razvan Statescu 08:15
It's the same right now. He's dealing with the operations and I'm dealing with the development of the platform.

Dave Erickson 08:27
All right, well, maybe we can get into a little bit about how Brunch started, and what your product development process is.

Razvan Statescu 08:37
Brunch started around one year ago. We used similar products in the past to develop websites, but we didn't like them very much. We wished we could combine all of them and have the best features from each of them. So we started our own product. We wanted to make the process of getting feedback on a live website easier, because right now you need to send emails and send print screen on Slack and there's a lot of back and forth communication to finally understand what the problem is. This takes a lot of time, creates frustration, and it's not good. With Brunch you can quickly find out what they want to change. You can load a website to the app and you can change the color or the size of the text. The app creates a thread where you can add multiple comments, files, and print screens. You can assign those to different team members and you can use it like both internally with your team and with the client if you want to get feedback from them on the work you're doing. That's of the way it started, from our past experiences with similar products that we used.

Botond Seres 10:47
That all sounds really interesting. So what was your initial minimum viable product? What did you launch it with? What features did you find most important? You said that there are other tools which are similar that had many great features, but you had to combine them. How did you decide what were the most important of all of these features or what was easiest to develop?

Razvan Statescu 11:18
Honestly, when we started, it was our first big project. If I look back to one year ago, we started with the main feature of loading websites and being able to add feedback on the live website by clicking on an element, and then we started building around that. First we had to figure out how to differentiate ourselves from other apps. For example, on a competitor app, you had to insert a JavaScript snippet into the website, that's easy for me but not for other people, especially copywriters that use the app. they have like zero knowledge of this. They give feedback on a client's website so they would have to ask the client to add a snippet. The adoption probably would have been very hard in these kinds of cases. So for example, on Branch you don't need to add any snippet on a website, you can basically load any website.

Botond Seres 12:49
Oh, that's nice. If you don't mind I have a bit more of a technical question. I am working on unit testing at the moment and one thing that comes up constantly, is identifying an element. So you mentioned that for feedback, you can click on any element, and you can attach a screenshot. How do you identify which element is being clicked on?

Razvan Statescu 13:22
So for Willow the website's into an iframe and iframes are the worst. You can't see anything from JavaScript, what's inside the library, or the elements. We can see basically nothing. So we proxy the website and we inject JavaScript there. That way, when we load a website into an iframe, we use that JavaScript to communicate back and forth between what's in the iframe, and the Angular app. You can communicate with a website that's in an iframe by using events. Like you said, you can send an event from inside the iframe, from the child to the parent and from the parent to the child. We use those events to communicate certain actions. For example, when you click an element, the website inside the iframe knows that you clicked that element because it's on the website but the Angular app, that's like the parent of the iframe, doesn't know that. So we use that script inside the iframe to tell the Angular app what you clicked on; that's how we did it.

Botond Seres 14:56
Alright, so if I understand correctly, you actually inject code into the clients web apps as well.

Razvan Statescu 15:03
When you load it inside the iframe, we don't load the actual website. We proxy it.

Botond Seres 15:20
I never would have guessed that even if my life depended on it.

Razvan Statescu 15:24
I think this is the feature where we iterated the most, because it's the most important feature, it's the core feature. If the website doesn't load, we don't have an app.

Dave Erickson 15:35
Razvan, what was the most challenging aspect or part of the development work that you ran into? That part of the product development was the most challenging for you and why?

Razvan Statescu 16:10
From what perspective? I mean, technically, what we have found the most hard technically?

Dave Erickson 16:17
It could be technical or it could be the development process. You, as the head of product development, what was probably the most challenging aspect of developing this product?

Razvan Statescu 16:35
From a technical point of view it would be loading the website into the app, and making sure everything is loading correctly, because every website is different; you can build on Shopify, WordPress, custom websites, or using even different libraries, bootstrap or tailwind. We had to make sure that every website was loaded correctly. That was by far the most challenging, technical thing we had to work on and we are still working on that and improving it, because it's the core of Brunch. On the not technical side of view, I think setting priorities. We are not a big development team. So, it's not very hard to manage managers, but at the same time, we don't have a lot of work power, because we are only two guys. So I think prioritizing what we need to do next to me, it's very hard.

Dave Erickson 18:16
All right. When you guys were developing the product, you had to put something out, but you got to a point where you needed funding, is that correct? You bootstrapped it from the beginning yourself, but then you needed to actually go out to get funding. Once you had kind of an MVP, to start marketing and selling it? How did you guys go about that process of getting investment or preparing the product to show to investors?

Razvan Statescu 18:56
Let me give a little context to that. First of all, when we started, one year ago, we didn't really talk much about how we were going to get an investment. That was difficult, because as we built it and tried to bootstrap it, we kind of lost interest in it, because we had very small wins and, of course, not much time to invest in it and things were moving very slow. So that was kind of a mood killer. We had a few months at the end of last year, where we stopped working on it. In the beginning of this year, we talked and we said, "okay, we made the app, we can't let it die", so we started working on it again. We talked with the hype, who invested in the app and he joined as a partner, because he's also helping us with growth strategy and is directly involved in Brunch. He has a company, modex; I've done some jobs in the past from them. So we already knew each other. So we started talking about promoting Brunch and what we do and how he can help with building it. So we decided we would build this together. So basically, how we got to the investment was through networking.

Dave Erickson 21:31
You didn't go to an accelerator or an incubator or anything like that, or by participating in a lot of VC kind of pitching or Angel pitching, you did it basically through a relationship networking, correct?

Razvan Statescu 21:49
I think if we didn't do that, it would probably have died by now. Now, we've joined some programs, and we are preparing for another investment round. But yeah, back then it was through the network we had.

Dave Erickson 22:20
Okay. What was the primary focus or reason why you wanted investment? What are you using the investment for? Primarily?

Razvan Statescu 22:34
So most of the money is going to payroll, because we are now six people; some of us are full time and some of us are part time.We are searching for a QA person and we'll probably need to hire another programmer soon. Other than that, a lot of money is going into partnerships, campaigns, marketing and on different servicing of servers.

Dave Erickson 23:33
Yeah, because there is an infrastructure that you need to maintain. What kind of infrastructure are you using to handle this?

Razvan Statescu 23:45
Right now we are using Digital Ocean because most of the infrastructure is there, databases and servers.

Dave Erickson 23:58
A lot of entrepreneurs have a vision of where they want the product to go, but one of the biggest mistakes a lot of them make is they don't plan for success. So, what would happen if somehow this caught on, and you start expanding in your marketing works, and you get 100 times the number of clients you have, are you prepared for that kind of scalability? Or is that a challenge you still have to face?

Razvan Statescu 24:35
You mean from a business perspective, or from a technical perspective?

Dave Erickson 24:42
Well both.

Razvan Statescu 24:43
From a business perspective, this is not really my area but we will need to update our processes because Yeah, like, right now we only have six people, but if we are going to be 50 people, or 100 people, we need to change the way things work internally, and update our processes. From a technical point of view, we are constantly progressing by improving the app, and developing new features. That's part of the process, because investing more money in infrastructure, that's necessary, but we also have to have the app prepared for that kind of traffic and that amount of users.

Botond Seres 26:00
So on a personal level, are you ready to give up coding once or when your company gets to 100 people? Are you prepared to step out of the shoes of a programmer and step into the shoes of a full time manager?

Razvan Statescu 26:17
I don't know, maybe I'll code from time to time. Right now it's hard to have time for coding because we are trying to hire a tester. We are in two programs, not really accelerators, but programs where you meet with some mentors and talk about different areas of business. So yeah, there are like a lot of other tasks outside of programming. So it's hard, but I am trying to make time to also do some coding. I think in the future, it will be very hard, but I hope I also have time for that.

Botond Seres 27:12
It sounds like you're excited to expand your horizons.

Razvan Statescu 27:18
Yeah I don't want to lose focus, because if you don't code for half a year, you are out of the loop.

Botond Seres 27:31
Oh, that's very true. I did stop coding for one year and so it's been hell to start again. Everything changes.

Razvan Statescu 27:39
Yeah, who knows what frameworks we are going to use in one year?

Dave Erickson 27:46
It sounds like your passion is coding. You really seem to enjoy it.

Razvan Statescu 27:50
Yeah, it started like that. When I started freelancing, I wasn't even finished with high school. The main reason I started freelancing back then is because as I said, I am from a small city in Romania. So there weren't any IT companies there, so I couldn't get a job there. So the only way I could start doing this was by freelancing. I thought, Okay, I have some skills, and maybe I can put them to work. So I tried different freelancing platforms and got some projects, opened a LinkedIn account and connected with people.

Dave Erickson 29:05
What's your vision with brunch? Where would you like to go with it? If you could say to yourself, okay, what would Brunch be like in, you know, five years what are you thinking? Do you have any ideas about that?

Razvan Statescu 29:27
Short term, our goal is to reach the 100 paying customers; we hope to do that in the next couple months. Long term, let's say in half a year. Our goal is to breach a monthly recurring revenue of around 15k. How we are planning to do that is we have started creating a community and creating some content. We are like talking about making some partnerships with and different integrations, with different platforms for referral programs and campaigns.

Botond Seres 30:38
If Dave and I wanted to do a startup, we wanted to do our own project, our own software as a service. Can you give us any broad tips to get us started?

Razvan Statescu 30:56
I think the first one is, pick a partner, maybe more than one partner. It depends. I've seen a lot of startups, or products, where they have three or four programmers and co-founders. But they all do the same thing, they all code. So you should try and pick your co-founders to cover more areas, not just coding. If you bootstrap it, and you don't have a lot of money to start and to start with an existing team, you will have to do everything. Another thing is, start small, don't build 100 features and spend one year building an app that you think is good. Start small and send it to users. You should build an app in your area of expertise. For example, I am a programmer, it would be bad for me to build a medical app if I have no idea what doctors do. I don't have any doctor connections so I wouldn't have anyone to ask to test my app and give me feedback and help me build the app. For us, it was good because we made an app in the area where we worked. So we had other people that had either agencies or were building websites that we could talk about it with and get feedback about what problems they have while testing the app.

Botond Seres 33:35
Feedback is very important to all of us in anything we do and apparently you think so too. So your app basically is used for giving feedback. Is there an option to give feedback on the app that gives feedback?

Razvan Statescu 33:57
We haven't used it like that yet, but yeah, maybe it's an idea to make a loop of loading the app into the app and so on.

Botond Seres 34:11
Like inception.

Dave Erickson 34:16
I think Brunch has some really interesting applications. Obviously, a development agency like ourselves could use it for the work that we do, or resell it to our clients. I would also love to hook you up with our head of QA and have a conversation because it's obviously part of a QA process. And one of the things that agencies have to do with their clients is that after a product is built and delivered, there's always the maintenance side of it, adjusting the code, updating it and that feedback is really critical, that and really making the app as clean and as accurate as possible. The feedback that brunch is able to generate, I assume it's obviously, big things like bugs or errors that the people find on the website. But does it also give feedback or allow the user to give feedback about things like, I would like orange instead of purple or your site's great, but it would be nice if the site had this or that? Does it give that kind of feedback or allow users to provide that kind of feedback? Or is the feedback very focused on just technical things?

Razvan Statescu 35:48
No, no, It's kind of not technical at all. It's more of what the user sees on the front end. For example, you can give feedback on background color you don't like or as I said, copywriters use it for providing feedback on landing pages and stuff like that. They can edit the text directly on the website so the client can see what the new text looks like and they can also chat based on it. Also, the designer can give feedback to a developer or the project manager and the client can give feedback to the agency. So yeah, you can interact with the live website elements, you can even change them and edit the text, the color, the font size, the background color etc. You can start a trade off of messages for different elements and parts of the website.

Dave Erickson 37:31
How do users of websites access the feedback function of brunch? How does that work?

Razvan Statescu 37:43
So yeah, so Brunch isn't intended for users, it's not the kind of app that you install on a website where users can report bugs to Brunch. You can use it like in two main scenarios. One, you can use it internally with your team, let's say between the design developers, and project manager. You load the website into Brunch, not Brunch into the website. After you load your website into Brunch your team can provide feedback and collaborate on it. Or you can use it with your client and can use it to chat back and forth.

Dave Erickson 38:56
So really, branch is really a b2b kind of product is a tool. Is it really a tool that developers use for internal teams and use with their clients to get that feedback. It is not a tool that is b2c where consumers are giving feedback on a website. Is that correct?

Razvan Statescu 39:04
Yeah, yeah, it's not intended for the users of the website. But for like the person that made the websites or like the client,

Dave Erickson 39:29
okay. Oh, and so the type of clients you're really looking for are development agencies and product development companies who are building their own digital products internally. Is that correct?

Razvan Statescu 39:51
We are kind of targeting the experts inside those agencies for example, digital marketing experts, project managers and copywriters. But yeah, basically agencies that build websites.

Botond Seres 40:10
So when you're talking business to business Brunch, what should we be thinking about? So the regular process for us C# developers is, we have the Team Foundation Server and we have tasks there, we can insert images and stuff. So how would Brunch change our workflow given that we have the application running locally, all the time? So do we open Brunch in a separate window, then we can open the prototype, which is running on localhost? Is that something we can do?

Razvan Statescu 40:52
No, you have to have the website available on a public URL.

Botond Seres 40:58
So we have to deploy it somewhere and then we can use that deployed website inside Brunch.

Razvan Statescu 41:07
Yeah.

Botond Seres 41:09
So would you say it's more focused on testing teams, then development teams, or ticket creation?

Razvan Statescu 41:24
Our main targets are digital agencies, not tech companies. The developer isn't the person that we want the feedback from. The developer is probably the person that will look over the feedback and implement it.

Botond Seres 41:53
Looking through all that feedback must be extremely exhausting. So maybe you could do a different service, which is aggregating all of what's similar out using Brunch. Do you have any plans to do something similar? Have you maybe thought about it?

Razvan Statescu 42:18
We aren't really. Right now we aren't targeting big tech companies, but rather digital agencies that aren't giant corporations. So I don't think it's really necessary right now. I mean, we don't have 100 people working on the same project, but for bigger teams where a lot of people are involved, I think this would be like a very cool feature to have.

Botond Seres 42:59
When you say digital agencies, you mentioned copywriters before as one, could Brunch be used for example, a digital publication so could say the New York Times use it for copywriting or am I completely confused?

Razvan Statescu 43:22
Yeah, I mean for sure they have a lot of copywriters, they build a lot of landing pages and I'm sure they talk about what takes the haze on those lightning pages a lot. So, for example, our first paying customer was a copywriter and she came from one of our competitors. She's using it for providing feedback on context for client websites. It's useful because first of all, you can change the text on the live websites and can see what the text will look like and see it next to the features you have or other other things like that. You can also start the portrait there and like brainstorm and add pictures if you need them.

Dave Erickson 44:42
I did a lot of publishing work and writing and it's one thing to share a Word document with somebody and say, review it and let me know what you think. Then of course, the minute it gets published on a real website and has formatted pictures They come back and say, "oh, I missed this, I missed that, we should rewrite this section". So I can understand how this could be useful particularly for a marketing agency who's building lots of landing pages or an SEO agency, they need to do this. Obviously solo freelancers or freelance teams can use this, development agencies, we may even use it internally. So I can see the advantages to this. And obviously, as a developer, you found that there was a need for yourself, let alone others. That's usually how the best products are developed and started anyways, from a basic need from experience?

Dave Erickson 45:47
All right, well, Brunch sounds like a really exciting product. Razvan, thank you so much for your time, we look forward to seeing how Brunch develops and working with it ourselves. For this month, ScreamingBox technology and business rundown, we had a very good conversation and next month, we will bring another guest and talk more about technology and business. Thank you very much for taking this journey with us. Join us for our next exciting exploration of technology and business in the first week of every month. Please subscribe, like and follow us on whichever platform you're listening to or watching us on. We hope you enjoy this podcast. Please let us know any subjects, topics, or anything else you'd like us to discuss in the next podcast in the comment sections or in a Twitter dm. Till next month. Please stay happy and healthy.