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**Gerhard Lazu:** That's right. I remember that. That was painful. Well, I'm glad that you're in a much better place now... And with that in mind, I know that things can always improve. It's one of my favorite things about this specifically - it's easy to improve. And the whole industry keeps improving all the time. So... |
**Saul Cullen:** We're constantly looking for improvements. We're working with what I think a lot of people would consider as bleeding edge technology, and that means that some of the decisions that we make don't always pan out to be the best ones. It can take trying them out to actually realize that it isn't the best ... |
What we're always constantly struggling against though is how we use our time... So we can seek to change things like we are currently - we're doing a number of migrations of all the services, but what that means is we reduce the amount of business value that we ship. So there's this push and pull constraint that we're... |
To answer your question, I think an area for me that is so important is development; the development experience is something where we still need to make quite a few improvements. You mentioned your questions about how our data is set up, and whether we refresh our data and things in our staging environment... And you k... |
**Wycliffe Maina:** I think what Saul also is talking about is more of like environment portability, so being able to create a whole bucket for a PR and being able to tear it down once the PR is done. One of the biggest challenges we have mostly when we're working is - if we're working with the same service, we end up ... |
So we are looking to technologies or solutions to help us into that area, so that we are able to \[unintelligible 00:40:06.23\] a little bit more, as different teams work on different solutions for different areas. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[40:17\] I think that makes a lot of sense... Being able to experiment with data, being able to do things at maybe a larger scale, production scale... Like, how does this impact production without taking production down? That would be nice, especially if you have to do migrations or big changes... So... |
**Break**: \[40:49\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Is there any particular incident or war story that you would like to share? Something that you've learned from. It doesn't have to be tech-related - it can be business-related - but something that obviously impacted your users. Because at the end of the day, everything that we do, whether it's coding,... |
**Saul Cullen:** Yeah, I'm sort of having to think through this... And obviously, as a young team, we come across a lot of challenges on a daily basis. I think perhaps an area that's been particular challenging for us over the last year to 18 months has been payments, actually. When I originally joined to help out with... |
We certainly came across an earlier incident where our payment provider disables refunds for us, unbeknownst to us. And of course, in the early stages of a pandemic occurring there's all manner of changes to bookings going on, customers no longer able to travel... And that was something that had really a very significa... |
\[44:14\] So at the end of the day, experience for customers comes first from our perspective, so we jumped on this and tackled it in our own way, and patched the holes as best we could... But I think it was quite a realization for us that rolling with single providers for third-party services definitely -- it's an obv... |
We've talked a lot about it actually since that occurrence, and we've got a lot of ideas of how we can fix it, there's tools out there like -- some of your listeners might have heard of things like Spreedly, where you're able to hook in with multiple payment providers rather than running a single provider like Stripe, ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's a really good one, because it makes you realize how even in the tech industry, where it's all about code and shipping, you hit against business realities like payments. Real money has to flow somehow -- well, real... It's mostly virtual these days, but still, money has to travel somehow, and yo... |
**Alan Cooney:** We deal with local guides rather than agencies. They're very small companies. So to take a step back, the way it works for payments on our website is you make a payment, and it actually gets protected in usually a trust fund. That's where the complexity comes from. So you can't just go through Stripe a... |
So from this perspective, there was not really any risk as far as we were concerned, in that all this money can simply be returned if the trip can't go ahead. It just so happens that at the time our travel payments provider, and indeed several others as well, prevented all automatic refunds across their API for all cus... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** How did you solve it? |
**Alan Cooney:** Yeah, it was actually a business solution in the end. We managed to convince our provider that we were a special case, that we were very safe, and they re-enabled at that time automatic refunds for us. So it took a few weeks to solve, which was obviously very stressful and we were really concerned for ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I like where this is going... |
**Alan Cooney:** Yeah, it was really useful actually having this event system, because basically what happened was refunds were shown they succeeded and failed in various ways, and so we replayed our event stream, this time hooked up to a Lambda function which sent an email to the support team of our payments provider ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[48:04\] That's very clever. |
**Alan Cooney:** A bit of a complex solution, but you have to think outside the box with these, so... Much credit to the team for creating that. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That is really genius, because statements of facts - those things happened, and what you do about those things can change. And having the ability to replay and take a different course of action for thing that happened is so powerful. Wow. So tech solves this specific problem. Interesting. And it's obv... |
Okay... So we talked about this particular incident, this particular tricky situation. A company fighting for their customers - I wish that was the case more often. And I know that many companies do the right thing, but I also know companies that don't do the right thing, so this is admirable... And especially when the... |
**Alan Cooney:** No, exactly, it's trust funds \[unintelligible 00:49:11.28\] usually. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Having those relationships coming into play, and you having to lean on those, and eventually the right thing happening weeks after the fact - there's a lot that goes in the background. And at that point, does it matter to ship code? Does it matter to add new features? Not really, right? Because the mo... |
Okay, so - still thinking about your customers, the Skyhook Adventure customers, which feature that you've shipped in the last six months made you most proud, most happy? And you can go around, maybe you have different favorite features... Wycliffe, how about we start with you? Do you have a specific favorite feature? ... |
**Wycliffe Maina:** I'd probably say hosts sign-up. I sort of consider that my baby. I worked on it for a long time, I made a lot of mistakes in the process, and learned a lot over the last few months. \[unintelligible 00:50:14.12\] an increase in host sign-ups. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** How did it work before this feature was developed? How did hosts get signed up? |
**Wycliffe Maina:** The whole process is that we are moving over to a new service. We sort of \[unintelligible 00:50:38.11\] each of us took an individual task. I focus on the host, I think Alan was working on the booking service... Essentially, the idea was to improve reliability so that the process of signing up was ... |
**Alan Cooney:** I think it's important to emphasize that previously the hosts filled in PDFs and a spreadsheet... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Wow. |
**Alan Cooney:** You know, these are very MVP things, so it's not just -- when we say "migration", okay, there was some migration involved, but actually it was changing an MVP into a brilliant experience for the hosts. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That sounds right. |
**Alan Cooney:** And we've seen a fivefold improvement in the number of hosts signing up, so that's something to be proud of. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** For sure, for sure. It just goes to show, there's many areas like that that you can always improve. Knowing which one to focus on, which is the most important one - that's where the business comes into play... And they say "You know what - this is what we need, because the company will be able to do t... |
\[52:11\] So that is a very nice business working well with tech, and working well with maybe marketing, who knows... I don't know -- I mean, even though you're four people, all of you wear different hats, I know that, and you're all hands-on. That's one of my favorite things about startups - everybody gets to do every... |
So how about you, Alan? Which is your favorite feature? |
**Alan Cooney:** Yeah, this is kind of a strange one, but cancellations. It's a bit different with the Covid pandemic, but they want to cancel or change dates or do something like that... And previously, they had to reach out to us, we'd get back to them within 24 hours, maybe they had some questions about availability... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's amazing. So let me guess - is there a cancelation service now? |
**Alan Cooney:** It's actually in the booking service. That one is quite big, I have to confess. The backend code is pretty simple. It's just a really nice user experience, and I know Damien from the team - who's not here today - who works in operations, that also produced massive decrease in the number of support tick... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** What about you, Saul? |
**Saul Cullen:** There are a lot of new features that have been going our recently that are really exciting, I think, from both the hosts side and the customer side of the Skyhook marketplace... I think one that's been asked for many times by our customers, and internally, is the ability to discover new trips. As our n... |
What we implemented recently, as we touched upon earlier, was utilizing an Algolia third-party site search tool to provide that functionality for us. Ordinarily, something in the past may have taken weeks or months to implement, was done within 7-8 days, fully integrated, with lots of capability behind it. I was certai... |
Also, we're starting to see areas where we need to make improvements to that from those metrics, where we can add features and functionality and where we can remove them. |
It sort of takes me onto a slightly tangential point actually about third-party tooling. It's something that we in the last few months have started to use more of. As developers, we often think "Hey, I could build that." We've got this great thing called serverless that will take a week to build a solution to whatever ... |
So what we started to do, given that we're a very small team at the moment, is to look for third-party tooling to give us rapid solutions that we can then -- you know, either they provide a long-term solution for us and they're really fully-featured and they do what we need without creating too many single points of fa... |
\[56:15\] So that's an area where we're turning to these third-party tools to prove some of these ideas and concepts really quickly, and reduce those feedback loops that we talked about earlier. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Any tools that you would like to mention, Saul? |
**Saul Cullen:** Certainly Algolia on the search is a great tool. I think they're probably a market leader at the moment, and that's been really positive; our experience was good. Third-party email services - you know, it's very easy to start linking services into AWS SES (Simple Email Service), and things like that...... |
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