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I'm Michele Hansen, author of Deploy Empathy and guest on this week's Indie Hackers Podcast. AMA!

Hi everyone!

I had the pleasure of talking to Courtland for this week's IH podcast.

I'm co-founder of Geocodio, a SaaS my husband and I started as a side project in 2014 and have been running full-time for 4 years now, co-host of Software Social, and most recently, the author of Deploy Empathy, a practical guide to interviewing customers. I wrote the book in public and it hit #1 on Product Hunt when it officially launched a few weeks ago.

From SaaS to podcasting to customer interviews to anything else... AMA!

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    Big fan of you book Michele!

    What are some of the insights you’ve gained for Geocodio by doing customer interviews (and deploying empathy)?

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      Love this question! A pivotal learning early on was how people use geocodes not just for displaying maps but as doorways to other pieces of information, like Census FIPS codes to connect to government datasets for further research. This concept of the coordinates being doorways to information was something we hadn’t experienced ourselves and hadn’t built for. People started telling us how they were getting coordinates to get these other pieces of data, and that helped us carve out our niche of offering data appends for a variety of purposes (Census, political districts, timezones, etc). By understanding their overall process and the other pieces of data they are connecting to, we save steps in their process, which eliminates time, money, and hassle. It also increases our ARPU :)

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    What challenges have you had running a SaaS from outside the US?

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      that's a good question! The biggest one has been scheduling and timezones. At first, we tried to keep things as before. I ended up doing 8/9/10pm calls most weeknights and customer support was going off at all hours of the day. As a result, we've stopped doing live chat support and each of us now have one designated day a week where we do calls with the US outside of our normal working hours (3pm Europe/9am Eastern works fine, but Pacific is a bit harder). Things are much calmer now!

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