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In episode 599, Rob Walling chats with Dominic “Dom” and Tracy Phillips of CodeSubmit. CodeSubmit provides a library of real-world, take-home tasks in more than 60 coding languages. Some of their customers are Audi, Netflix, Carbon Health, 3M, and Apple.
Dom and Tracy were also a part of the spring 2020 batch of TinySeed. During that year, they managed to 25x their MRR. In this episode, we’re digging into how they did that, what led to their bootstrapped hockey stick growth moment, what it is like working on a company with your spouse, and much more.
Topics we cover:
[2:20] How Dom and Tracy came up with the idea for CodeSubmit
[6:59] The approach they used to build their product MVP on nights and weekends
[11:16] Running a startup with your spouse
[13:42] The catalyst that led to their hockey stick growth moment
[17:06] When they knew they had product market fit
[21:46] The number of different marketing channels they tried before they decided to double down on content marketing and SEO
[26:19] The biggest mistakes that hiring managers and recruiters make when vetting new developers via take-home challenges
[29:40] Thoughts on building a lifestyle business
Links from the Show:
- CodeSubmit
- Dominic Phillips @domrdy I Twitter
- Tracy Phillips @tracy_s9z I Twitter
- ScrapingBee
If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you.
Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher
Rob: Welcome to the first ASMR episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. If you don’t know what ASMR is, look it up on YouTube. My kids troll me with it all the time, so I wanted to do that so I can show it to them later. I hope you’re having a great week. Today, I had an awesome conversation with the co-founders of CodeSubmit.
CodeSubmit is a SaaS with built-in take-home coding challenges that allow you to identify great candidates using real tasks, not brain teasers. The married co-founders, Dominic and Tracy, were part of our TinySeed batch two years ago. I think it was 2020, I can’t even keep it straight anymore, but they made amazing progress during that year. In fact, they 25X’d their MRR during our batch year.
Today, we dig into how they did that, that moment when they hit what I’m dubbing the bootstrapper hockey stick, working at a company as a couple, finding the right marketing channel that allowed them to do this, and of course the recurring segment how did you know when you had a product-market fit? Without further ado, let’s dive into our conversation.
Tracy and Dom, welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us.
Tracy: Thanks for having us, Rob. We’re really excited.
Dominic: Thanks for having us.
Rob: It’s great to have you on the show. You are the founders of CodeSubmit. It’s codesubmit.io. Your H1 is to make better hiring decisions with take-home coding challenges. Identify great candidates using real tasks, not brain teasers.
I like to give listeners an idea of the stage you are at. Some folks give out MRR, some give team size, and some give […]. Anything you’re willing to share with our listeners to give them an idea of your stage?
Tracy: Sure. CodeSubmit is a team of about eight. I and Dom are full-time folks, but we have quite a few contractors that work for us, some for a very long time, so I’d say we’re about eight people.
Dominic: And we’re profitable and growing.
Tracy: Yeah, that’s true too.
Rob: Yes, you are growing. I have access to your MRR because you’re a TinySeed company. You had a bootstrap or hockey stick moment. It was about a year ago and I want to go into that a little later. For now, I want to find out what the obvious question is, why build a platform like CodeSubmit? Was it a problem you’re experiencing or something else?
Dominic: Initially we built CodeSubmit to scratch our own itch. I was a hiring manager at an early-stage tech company in Munich and Tracy was a tech recruiter and then, later on, joined a more product-focused role. I needed a way of sending take-home challenges to my candidates in my interview process and I just couldn’t find a platform that offered the exact type of product I needed. I sat down one weekend and built the very first version together with Tracy with her input from her recruiting process at her company.
Tracy: Should I talk a little bit about that a little bit? As a tech recruiter, that was what I was doing when Dom and I started CodeSubmit. We had a process that we were using to vet candidates. It was a pretty early company still, we had about 40 employees, and they just raised their Series A, so it’s time to hire that for those tech roles.
We were using a process, which I think is very similar to a lot of small startups in Europe, very similar to what Dom’s process was at his company, where we would have a take-home challenge, maybe a step two or three, and in the interview process you’d have that screening call with the recruiter. Then you’d maybe have another call with one of the hiring managers on the tech team and they’d ask you if you’d be interested and willing to complete a take-home challenge.
How we were doing that back then was we would create a Google Doc with a prompt and we’d send that to them maybe with some supporting files via email. Then, of course, the tech recruiters are the ones liaising between the candidate and the hiring team. They would come back with technical questions and we would not be prepared to answer them as the recruiters most of the time. We’d have to go back to the hiring manager, ask them, and it was a lot of back and forth. It would take a long time and it was not very convenient for the candidates to submit their assignments in the end.
I think I expressed that issue with Dom and he said hey, we’re experiencing that at our company too. Dom and I had worked on some small, fun projects before together, but we thought it could be a cool opportunity to try something bigger, see if we can build something for ourselves, and that’s kind of how we got started.
Rob: When I first heard the idea—I spoke with you in an interview—it resonated with me because we did the same thing at Drip. We hired maybe 20-something engineers while I was there, and it was a very similar process. We did both take-home and also pair programming. We would sometimes do that and I see that. I actually hadn’t remembered but you have both of those built into the product.
The issue I always had with the take-home stuff is Derek and I would sit down and it’s like well, what tasks do we want to give this person and then we try to think up a challenge. Usually, we’d almost put something real out of the codebase like a real problem, but then we’d simplify it, and then we’d send it to him. We would reuse that a few times and then we’d have to come up with another one and then Derek would review it. It was cumbersome.
Someone would submit a Ruby file, I don’t remember, check it into a GitHub repo and then they come through it, and blah-blah-blah. That’s what I was thinking about trying to code in a browser anyway. As a non-developer these days, I was thinking back to all the presets and all the customizations that I have in my own IDE, and even getting someone else’s laptop and trying to code on their laptop, I think could be challenging.
The other interesting thing or the big piece that I’ve always been intrigued by is you have a kajillion coding challenges built into it. As a hiring manager, I don’t have to come up with them. They’re already designed and you have 20 languages or something?
Tracy: More. Today we support over, I think, 65 or more different languages and frameworks with our library.
Dominic: This is also definitely one thing where we are very different from our competitors. Our competitors focus a lot on the language and algorithmic side of things. Nowadays, most of the development is done with frameworks and libraries, and you very rarely will build something completely from scratch. Our coding challenges are focused.
We try to simulate the work that the candidate will face at the job as closely as possible, and this includes frameworks. The majority of our coding challenges actually are framework-based. You will find JavaScript and React. You will find Python, Django, Ruby on Rails, and all these language and framework combinations in our library.
Rob: Got it. Cool. Listeners now have a pretty good idea of how the product itself works. The two of you saw this problem essentially at your day jobs and said we want to go build this.
You’re bootstrappers, most bootstrappers go nights and weekends and they do it until they can raise a small amount of funding, have a spouse who can support them, can have some money in the bank, or whatever. What was that like for you?
Tracy: When we started, I was actually doing this tech recruiting job and was also finishing my master’s. Dom was working full time as well. As I mentioned, we were kind of thinking we try something as kind of a fun project initially to scratch our own itch and see if there was any interest before we would go all in.
We actually ended up working on it for nights and weekends for quite a long time and it was every night and every weekend once we started building. Do you want to say something about the MVP because that’s also interesting?
Dominic: We had an MVP or a very early version of the product probably after two or three weeks. The core functionality was for sure there, but it was very ugly. It didn’t have a lot of features that you would expect. There was no login, there was no account creation.You’d have to set up everything by hand. There was no billing or anything like that. It was really just the core of the product how do I get this coding challenge to the candidate with the least amount of friction and how can I then afterward assess this coding challenge.
This part we had actually done after a very, very short amount of time and with this initial version, we went out and went to our own companies where we were working full-time and pitched it to them, pitched it to companies in our own network, and this is how we got our first four or five customers onboarded onto this crappy product that barely worked.
Then we just burnt the midnight oil for the first 6–12 months. Every night after work, every weekend, every public holiday we would sit there and make the product better and serve our customers better, and very, very slowly we got customers onboarded.
Rob: That’s the grind that I like to call out on this show that I think some podcasts or some YouTube channels kind of gloss over, the easiness of bootstrapping, the easiness of starting a business. I did the same thing. I worked nights and weekends for three and a half years on different projects. I was a consultant so I would taper back my hours and stuff, but it’s a lot of work and I do get questions sometimes.
Listeners write in and say this is hard, or it’s too hard, or I can’t find time to do this, or I don’t have the money to do this. I always say hard work solves all that. Unfortunately, I didn’t sleep as much as I would have liked for a couple of years on and off doing this. It sounds like you all did the same thing for a year plus.
Tracy: Frankly, there’s no glory in it. Your friends aren’t saying what an awesome endeavor you’re undertaking, cool that you spend every waking moment, that we haven’t seen you for three months, you can’t make it to our dinner parties. Everyone’s wondering why you’re doing this. It’s funny to look back now and everyone is very positive and says congratulations. It’s great to hear that you were able to quit your job and do this full-time. But back in those days, it was crazy. You do have to get through all of that. It’s hard to say it’s as easy as disingenuous. I don’t think there’s anything easy about it.
Dominic: For sure it’s not easy. On the other hand, we don’t have children yet and no real other responsibilities besides our jobs. We’ve earned this lucky position that we both had well-paying tech jobs that allowed us to go home and spend this time in the evenings to code and all our own things. We were lucky in this regard as well.
Tracy: Yeah and lucky that we did it together because I think it’s harder to continue to burn the midnight oil if you have a spouse who is not doing the same and is wondering how long it’s going to take before they start seeing some of the benefits of this time.
Rob: That’s right because if friends don’t believe in your idea or friends are upset that you’re not going to a dinner party, it’s one thing. Those relationships heal and they’re still your friends now. But if your spouse doesn’t believe it, and you get six months down the line, it creates issues. I’ve talked about that a lot on this show for sure, as well as over on Zen Founder, a podcast that I do with my wife.
That kind of begs the question if you’re married and you started a company together? What is that like? I can imagine that you’re having some challenges and that you’re working all day together and then you’re hanging out at dinner. Are you talking about work? Does work bleed into everything? I think I know the answer, but it hasn’t been net positive for you? Do you think about being married or would be easier if you weren’t in a relationship starting this company together?
Dominic: This is actually one of the questions that people ask us the most, is how can you work with your spouse? How can you be so successful working with your spouse and not be on others’ throats all the time? For us, it has been such a positive experience and for us, the benefits really greatly outweigh the disadvantages.
The biggest advantage for us is that a company is a roller coaster. There are times when everything’s great and there are times when it’s not so great. In those times when it’s hard and difficult, we have each other’s back, and we can support and motivate each other. When it’s great, then, of course, we celebrate together. It has been such an amazing journey for us.
Tracy: I agree. I think it’s not for every relationship. But for us, it’s been amazing. The other thing, of course, that’s a huge advantage is it’s almost like being a solo founder in the sense that the company is owned by the family. Dom and I are 50-50 founders and it helps us to align our family goals well when we both have the company goals in mind.
Everything feels very aligned on the same trajectory. I think it helps us plan for the future as well since we work together rather than two separate families trying to kind of more or less align. I think that’s a huge advantage if you can do it, if your relationship works that way. For us, it’s only been a benefit but I think we are a little bit unique that way.
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You’re building this product nights and weekends, you’re grinding it out, you apply to TinySeed, and you get into the batch. You were pretty early at the time, but the TinySeed money allows you to go full-time in May of 2020 in the midst of COVID. It just occurred to me, as I’m saying this date and you were making good progress. You were growing a little bit each month.
As you got into early 2021, something really clicked and I referenced it earlier, but it was this bootstrapper hockey stick moment right around February. What changed between the prior 20 months of working on the product, half of that which was full- time because you had the TinySeed money. But something really changed and your revenue just started ticking up quite quickly.
Dominic: I think the biggest thing that changed for us that was sort of this catalyst of this hockey stick moment was we realized that the acquisition channel that started to work very well for us was SEO and we started to take SEO very seriously and started to double down and invest a lot of time into content marketing into our SEO rankings. We were lucky that we had Kevin and Pierre on our TinySeed calls—Scraping Bee—and that helped a lot.
We started to realize that this channel actually works well for us. We sort of doubled down on it, reduced the money we spend on our acquisition channel—time and money we spend on our acquisition channels—and really focused on SEO. Since then we have consistently had 10%–15% growth month over month and slowly and steadily climbing to our next big revenue goal.
Tracy: I would also say, Rob, you mentioned COVID. CodeSubmit is one of the types of companies that are a digital tool for interviews, asynchronous interviews. We offer a couple of different interview types. There are tons of companies that suddenly found themselves in need of an alternative to in-person interviewing with COVID and making that very difficult.
We did benefit a bit from this whole shift into more digital or remote-friendly interview practices. I think our focus on SEO has kind of lined up well with that transition taking place and folks starting to kind of look at these keywords that maybe there wasn’t as much traffic going towards before COVID. Suddenly, we were well-positioned to capitalize on that traffic.
It definitely helped us, some companies were not so lucky, of course, when COVID came. We did see, like everybody, that little dip right after when everyone’s trying to pull back some of their expenses. In the long run, I think we’ve definitely benefited from people switching to a more remote-friendly or asynchronous interview style.
Rob: And you have customers like the US Air Force, Apple, Netflix, and Audi. These logos are crazy, really impressive. That actually leads us right into a recurring Startups for the Rest of Us segment called, when did you know you had a product-market fit?
Dominic: As I mentioned, I think once you start to see a consistent growth of 10%, 15%, sometimes 20% month over month that was the moment when we realized okay, we have what is called product-market fit. Also as you mentioned, these big corporations, multibillion-dollar corporations using our product, even if it’s only teams in a larger corporation, but still getting through this due diligence process at the Air Force, for example, that sort of gave us confidence that the product is in a state where we have this product-market fit.
Tracy: Yeah I can pursue customers and logos like that. Earlier, I’m sure, Dom already mentioned our ugly MVP, which would never have worked for some of our existing customers. The product definitely reached maturity at some point where we were getting customers consistently, that month over month growth was consistent, and we could consistently get through that due diligence or that procurement process with some of the larger customers definitely.
Dominic: These are customers that we did not reach out to. We’re terrible at cold outreach sales really, really bad. We had hiring managers from these companies sign up for our platform and try the tool. Typically when this happens, you have a little slack notification. We see that new people sign up.
When we see a Netflix or an Apple person sign up, then we reach out to them immediately like hey, we’re the founders. If there’s anything we can do to help you get started on the platform let us know. In 99% of the time, people reply and they’re happy that they have someone on the other side helping them get started on the platform. This is how we build a relationship with a very large company being only the two of us and a small team.
Rob: Yeah, and there are different playbooks for growing SaaS. I think the SaaStr Jason Lemkin playbook is outbound sales, it’s building big sales teams, and that’s it. That’s the note that he used to build several companies to great success. Does it work? It does.
It also depends on the space. The inbound playbook is really interesting as well. I think it’s harder to pull off. I think you sometimes have less control of it because you’re not just grinding and doing this outbound thing and you’re relying on content to rank and you’re relying on people to find it. Most of the businesses I’ve ever built, actually all of them, were built on inbound. That was my suite of tools.
We did some outbound with Drip, where there was a third party who did it for us as a productized service, and it broke even at best for us. There are also a lot of spaces where both are great. If you can get both inbound and outbound working that’s an amazing engine.
I do want listeners of the show to know that it’s not just one note that does these things. Maybe if you want to become a unicorn SaaS, it’s all outbound and blah-blah-blah. If you want to build an amazing $1 million, $5 million, $10 million SaaS company, you can do that with either inbound or outbound. You can do it with affiliate marketing.
There are all these options you have when you don’t need to get so big. I need to be a billion dollars in five years, it’s like well, I guess you kind of have one playbook, probably. We have amazing options as bootstrappers, or mostly bootstrap companies, who don’t need that, just that ravenous growth.
Dominic: For sure. I think that sounds so cliche, but it’s one of our superpowers that we are so small because there are a couple of advantages that we have here over big VC-funded companies. For example, we can put our pricing very transparently on the website. People, companies, and hiring managers can sign up for our service without having to talk to a sales rep. A lot of people don’t want to do that. They just want to sign up and try the software that’s possible with us.
Another thing is that we can give a lot of attention to our clients. I have one funny story. I saw the head of engineering of Techstars signing up for our service and I was online at that moment. I reached out to him with this little intercom bubble, saying hey, Techstars. I heard about you guys. Cool that you signed up. Is there anything I can do to help? He’s like yeah, sure, let’s jump on a call, jumped on a call with him, and they have been customers ever since. These are things that don’t scale, but they work really well in this inbound capacity.
Rob: Again, both work, but there’s magic in inbound because people are already warmed and primed and then they’re not on the defensive because they’re actually interested and they want their questions answered. I’m curious, you’ve obviously landed on this amazing channel and it’s growing for you. You tried a bunch of stuff before that. Can you remember how many different marketing approaches or channels you were trying to work through before you landed on content?
Tracy: We have done paid ads, we’ve tried going into forums and looking for communities that maybe could leads at some point. We actually did, at some point, even straight-up try to do the whole cold outbound strategy. I think that’s what I imagined. I’m a first-time founder, Dom was not, but for me, that’s kind of what I imagined being, I wouldn’t say naive or just not aware of all the different ways you can acquire customers in SaaS. I thought it was a sales process. It’s also how the companies that I worked for in tech found their customers, it was always outbound.
I think we had quite a few outbound sales strategies. We even early talks to a couple of folks to see if who came from that background sales guy who maybe wanted to also work nights and weekends with us and tried that that for quite a while, I’d say the first six months even, because that’s also how we got our first customers—by reaching out to our network. Those folks weren’t cold, they were warm. We could establish a relationship with them very easily. We already knew they had a problem that we were trying to solve. It was a different situation.
Dominic: We disliked the outbound sales process so much that we had to sort of create appointments in our calendar every Friday in the evening at 7:00 PM, we have a call […]. That’s from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM. We would do cold outreach to people. We would call out or shoot people on LinkedIn that are hiring managers at some companies and it just didn’t work for us. Also, it wasn’t fun. It didn’t work for us, it was very demotivating.
Tracy: Also time-consuming. We called it sales happy hour to give it an exciting vibe, but it was not fun. I think the TinySeed mastermind also really solidified. I did content very early. Content marketing was something we looked at very early. I like to write, I have a Medium blog. I got lucky with one of those articles I wrote about taking home. It’s still very performant.
I think it’s still a great article, but it wasn’t tied to our domain in any way. We got some views from it and those people are actually clicking on the link to come over and see it. We actually saw that folks were signing up from that, which was wild because with outbound sales weren’t doing anything for us. I think we were already looking at the content.
We hired one of our contractors who still is working with us to this day around that time to kind of help us with our blog. Then we joined TinySeed and met Pierre and Kevin who were also having a lot of success with SEO and content. We’re in the mastermind with them and I think they were learning a lot and we were learning a lot. We very quickly realized that this channel was something we should pursue and then we started seeing the results from that. I think that’s kind of how we ended up going full all-in on SEO.
Rob: I called it out earlier, but Pierre and Kevin are the founders of ScrapingBee and so folks can follow them on Twitter. They’re actually transparent with their revenue. They’re north of a million ARR now and they grew really fast also on this front of content in SEO.
I don’t want listeners to take away that content works and cold outreach doesn’t. That’s not the point. The point is to find what works in your space. You’re going to need to experiment based on your product, based on your customers, based on your space, and you’re going to find one or more that works eventually, hopefully, assuming you can find product-market fit.
That’s really the takeaway here because there are companies that I have invested in and advised or just are in the MicroConf Community that cold outreach is amazing for them. It’s the main driver and there are some that cold outreach and content both work and that’s amazing because now you have two channels that work and you have diversification. Then there are folks like you where content and SEO are really the main drivers of growth.
Dominic: We still do some paid marketing and I refuse to give up on the paid marketing. I think it’s still ridiculous that you can pay $5 and appear on the top result in Google over all your competitors that have tens of millions in revenue and funding. We do get some customers from this. It’s just that the majority of our customers come from SEO.
Rob: As we move towards wrapping up, I want to ask you, as folks who’ve seen thousands, if not tens of thousands of take-home assignments be sent out and completed. I love to get the idea from founders who do have this broad swath of knowledge in a specific domain. Are there any big mistakes that you see customers making or either side that are really best practices or big mistakes that you see folks making?
Dominic: One big mistake that we see is that some companies are trying to use take-home challenges as a filter for their candidates. The problem is that, typically, take-home challenges take a longer time to complete, and if you send a candidate to challenge very early on in the process where they’re not really invested in your company yet, they might not be willing to put in the time to complete the challenge for you. There are different ways of assessment that, in our opinion, work better in the early stage of the interview process. That’s one big mistake.
Another big mistake is that we see some challenges that take way too long to complete. For us, we see that a good ballpark is between two and four hours. That’s something that most candidates should be able to comfortably do, maybe on a weekend or in the evening. A big mistake is that we see some companies send out challenges that take weeks or a full week to complete. Given that a lot of candidates have a family life and full-time jobs, it’s just impossible for them to complete the challenge that takes such a long amount of time.
Tracy: You should also be ready to invest the time to review these submissions. If your hiring team is sending out a challenge that’s going to take seven days or even a whole weekend, you also have to consider how much longer a long challenge is going to take your hiring team to review it.
They should be prepared to review it and they should be prepared to invest the time to actually look at these submissions if you’re going to actually send one out. There’s a whole host of reasons to keep them short, but candidate friendliness and incentivizing that candidate to actually continue with your hiring processes is really important.
Dominic: One thing that you mentioned, Rob, when you used take-home challenges at your companies, that you would use something that’s sort of coming out of your codebase is very close to the actual job that the candidate will work on, that’s already a very, very good sign.
We see some companies that use challenges that are so far from the domain that this company is working in, a very, very algorithmic-heavy and things that the candidate will never ever work on. It doesn’t make sense to test the candidate for something that they will never work on anyway. Use something that is close to what the candidate will face at the job.
Rob: When I send them FizzBuzz, that’s not what I should be sending. That’s a deep cut there, a deep programming cut.
Dominic: Unless your company does a lot of modular operandi operations, then you shouldn’t do that.
Rob: Yeah, the trick questions that were popular back in the 80s, and 90s at Microsoft, and then the programming challenges of here’s an array of numbers reorder them in the fastest way. It’s like, I don’t write code. I’m building web apps. I actually was asked questions when I’m a web developer to do these hardcore algorithmic things. It’s like I can figure this out but how is this testing how am I going to be a good fit at your company? This is really just testing did I study computer science in college and have I seen this before?
Dominic: Or did you study Leetcode or any of these other coding challenge websites for six months prior to your interviews? It doesn’t make a lot of sense, in most cases.
Rob: Last question for you today, before we wrap up. I think you’ve used the term lifestyle business for your own company. Lifestyle businesses is a pejorative term in Silicon Valley. I think people take it that way of, oh, we can’t fund that because it’s a lifestyle business. That usually means that the founder’s not working very much or that they’re just trying to fund their lifestyle.
I built lifestyle businesses my whole life and then that’s what I wanted to do, was just not work a day job and essentially you need that business. Drip became more than that and it’s great and it was life changing for me.
I think these terms, bootstrapping, lifestyle business, I don’t know how important they are or whether they need to kind of just transition out of the lexicon because I’m just building an amazing, profitable, mostly bootstrapped business. Does it really matter? What are your thoughts? I’ve heard you talk about how life-changing your lifestyle businesses have been. What are your thoughts on it?
Tracy: For me, I’ve been working in companies that are VC-funded. I think a lot of founders, especially first-time founders, imagine their entrepreneurial journey as this meteoric rise. You start, you raise a ton of money, you grind and build this great culture and this great product, and then someday somewhere down the line you sell it for millions of dollars. It’s life-changing and you walk into the sunset. I think that with that mindset, you lose some of that benefit of taking the slower route.
CodeSubmit for Dom and I has been life changing. We never set out to raise millions of dollars. To this day, we still aren’t considering that path, who knows for the future. We knew this was something we wanted to build sustainably and since it is our family business in a lot of ways, it makes sense for us to pursue this not just for the company to grow and for the mission, which is very important to us. It’s great to see people get hired, I love that about it.
Also, it’s been life-changing for us as a family, to grow this company, to have the freedom to pursue our own business, to have the flexibility to travel when we want to, to make our own decisions as executives, to have some creative freedom and how we pursue and build this business.
Dominic: I think as you said, Rob, the term lifestyle business in the Silicon Valley startup community is almost like a derogatory term. It’s like this is a bad business. These founders don’t want to become a unicorn. It’s a bad business. In my opinion, it’s very important for us to build a profitable, sustainable business that can sustain and support our lifestyle.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t have very ambitious goals. We want to get to $10 million ARR over the next couple of years. This is for sure a very ambitious goal for us. We have monthly growth goals that we want to reach and keep. For us, it’s just important that this is a business that down the line can support us, support our employees, be a great place to work for us, and also for anyone that joins our company. I think there’s nothing wrong with that.
Rob: Thanks so much for joining me today. People can find you at codesubmit.io.
Dominic: Thank you so much.
Tracy: Thanks, Rob. It’s been great.
Dominic: Thanks for having us.
Rob: That’s a wrap on this episode. I hope you enjoyed CodeSubmit’s story as much as I did. I appreciate you listening every week to the mix of episodes I have. There’s an interview here. There’s a solo episode there. There’s a news round up there. I look forward to bringing something back into your ears again next Tuesday morning.
CodeSubmit is a SaaS with built-in take-home coding challenges that allow you to identify great candidates using real tasks, not brain teasers. The married co-founders, Dominic and Tracy, were part of our TinySeed batch two years ago. I think it was 2020, I can’t even keep it straight anymore, but they made amazing progress during that year. In fact, they 25X’d their MRR during our batch year.
Today, we dig into how they did that, that moment when they hit what I’m dubbing the bootstrapper hockey stick, working at a company as a couple, finding the right marketing channel that allowed them to do this, and of course the recurring segment how did you know when you had a product-market fit? Without further ado, let’s dive into our conversation.
Tracy and Dom, welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us.
Tracy: Thanks for having us, Rob. We’re really excited.
Dominic: Thanks for having us.
Rob: It’s great to have you on the show. You are the founders of CodeSubmit. It’s codesubmit.io. Your H1 is to make better hiring decisions with take-home coding challenges. Identify great candidates using real tasks, not brain teasers.
I like to give listeners an idea of the stage you are at. Some folks give out MRR, some give team size, and some give […]. Anything you’re willing to share with our listeners to give them an idea of your stage?
Tracy: Sure. CodeSubmit is a team of about eight. I and Dom are full-time folks, but we have quite a few contractors that work for us, some for a very long time, so I’d say we’re about eight people.
Dominic: And we’re profitable and growing.
Tracy: Yeah, that’s true too.
Rob: Yes, you are growing. I have access to your MRR because you’re a TinySeed company. You had a bootstrap or hockey stick moment. It was about a year ago and I want to go into that a little later. For now, I want to find out what the obvious question is, why build a platform like CodeSubmit? Was it a problem you’re experiencing or something else?
Dominic: Initially we built CodeSubmit to scratch our own itch. I was a hiring manager at an early-stage tech company in Munich and Tracy was a tech recruiter and then, later on, joined a more product-focused role. I needed a way of sending take-home challenges to my candidates in my interview process and I just couldn’t find a platform that offered the exact type of product I needed. I sat down one weekend and built the very first version together with Tracy with her input from her recruiting process at her company.
Tracy: Should I talk a little bit about that a little bit? As a tech recruiter, that was what I was doing when Dom and I started CodeSubmit. We had a process that we were using to vet candidates. It was a pretty early company still, we had about 40 employees, and they just raised their Series A, so it’s time to hire that for those tech roles.
We were using a process, which I think is very similar to a lot of small startups in Europe, very similar to what Dom’s process was at his company, where we would have a take-home challenge, maybe a step two or three, and in the interview process you’d have that screening call with the recruiter. Then you’d maybe have another call with one of the hiring managers on the tech team and they’d ask you if you’d be interested and willing to complete a take-home challenge.
How we were doing that back then was we would create a Google Doc with a prompt and we’d send that to them maybe with some supporting files via email. Then, of course, the tech recruiters are the ones liaising between the candidate and the hiring team. They would come back with technical questions and we would not be prepared to answer them as the recruiters most of the time. We’d have to go back to the hiring manager, ask them, and it was a lot of back and forth. It would take a long time and it was not very convenient for the candidates to submit their assignments in the end.
I think I expressed that issue with Dom and he said hey, we’re experiencing that at our company too. Dom and I had worked on some small, fun projects before together, but we thought it could be a cool opportunity to try something bigger, see if we can build something for ourselves, and that’s kind of how we got started.
Rob: When I first heard the idea—I spoke with you in an interview—it resonated with me because we did the same thing at Drip. We hired maybe 20-something engineers while I was there, and it was a very similar process. We did both take-home and also pair programming. We would sometimes do that and I see that. I actually hadn’t remembered but you have both of those built into the product.
The issue I always had with the take-home stuff is Derek and I would sit down and it’s like well, what tasks do we want to give this person and then we try to think up a challenge. Usually, we’d almost put something real out of the codebase like a real problem, but then we’d simplify it, and then we’d send it to him. We would reuse that a few times and then we’d have to come up with another one and then Derek would review it. It was cumbersome.
Someone would submit a Ruby file, I don’t remember, check it into a GitHub repo and then they come through it, and blah-blah-blah. That’s what I was thinking about trying to code in a browser anyway. As a non-developer these days, I was thinking back to all the presets and all the customizations that I have in my own IDE, and even getting someone else’s laptop and trying to code on their laptop, I think could be challenging.
The other interesting thing or the big piece that I’ve always been intrigued by is you have a kajillion coding challenges built into it. As a hiring manager, I don’t have to come up with them. They’re already designed and you have 20 languages or something?
Tracy: More. Today we support over, I think, 65 or more different languages and frameworks with our library.
Dominic: This is also definitely one thing where we are very different from our competitors. Our competitors focus a lot on the language and algorithmic side of things. Nowadays, most of the development is done with frameworks and libraries, and you very rarely will build something completely from scratch. Our coding challenges are focused.
We try to simulate the work that the candidate will face at the job as closely as possible, and this includes frameworks. The majority of our coding challenges actually are framework-based. You will find JavaScript and React. You will find Python, Django, Ruby on Rails, and all these language and framework combinations in our library.
Rob: Got it. Cool. Listeners now have a pretty good idea of how the product itself works. The two of you saw this problem essentially at your day jobs and said we want to go build this.
You’re bootstrappers, most bootstrappers go nights and weekends and they do it until they can raise a small amount of funding, have a spouse who can support them, can have some money in the bank, or whatever. What was that like for you?
Tracy: When we started, I was actually doing this tech recruiting job and was also finishing my master’s. Dom was working full time as well. As I mentioned, we were kind of thinking we try something as kind of a fun project initially to scratch our own itch and see if there was any interest before we would go all in.
We actually ended up working on it for nights and weekends for quite a long time and it was every night and every weekend once we started building. Do you want to say something about the MVP because that’s also interesting?
Dominic: We had an MVP or a very early version of the product probably after two or three weeks. The core functionality was for sure there, but it was very ugly. It didn’t have a lot of features that you would expect. There was no login, there was no account creation.You’d have to set up everything by hand. There was no billing or anything like that. It was really just the core of the product how do I get this coding challenge to the candidate with the least amount of friction and how can I then afterward assess this coding challenge.
This part we had actually done after a very, very short amount of time and with this initial version, we went out and went to our own companies where we were working full-time and pitched it to them, pitched it to companies in our own network, and this is how we got our first four or five customers onboarded onto this crappy product that barely worked.
Then we just burnt the midnight oil for the first 6–12 months. Every night after work, every weekend, every public holiday we would sit there and make the product better and serve our customers better, and very, very slowly we got customers onboarded.
Rob: That’s the grind that I like to call out on this show that I think some podcasts or some YouTube channels kind of gloss over, the easiness of bootstrapping, the easiness of starting a business. I did the same thing. I worked nights and weekends for three and a half years on different projects. I was a consultant so I would taper back my hours and stuff, but it’s a lot of work and I do get questions sometimes.
Listeners write in and say this is hard, or it’s too hard, or I can’t find time to do this, or I don’t have the money to do this. I always say hard work solves all that. Unfortunately, I didn’t sleep as much as I would have liked for a couple of years on and off doing this. It sounds like you all did the same thing for a year plus.
Tracy: Frankly, there’s no glory in it. Your friends aren’t saying what an awesome endeavor you’re undertaking, cool that you spend every waking moment, that we haven’t seen you for three months, you can’t make it to our dinner parties. Everyone’s wondering why you’re doing this. It’s funny to look back now and everyone is very positive and says congratulations. It’s great to hear that you were able to quit your job and do this full-time. But back in those days, it was crazy. You do have to get through all of that. It’s hard to say it’s as easy as disingenuous. I don’t think there’s anything easy about it.
Dominic: For sure it’s not easy. On the other hand, we don’t have children yet and no real other responsibilities besides our jobs. We’ve earned this lucky position that we both had well-paying tech jobs that allowed us to go home and spend this time in the evenings to code and all our own things. We were lucky in this regard as well.
Tracy: Yeah and lucky that we did it together because I think it’s harder to continue to burn the midnight oil if you have a spouse who is not doing the same and is wondering how long it’s going to take before they start seeing some of the benefits of this time.
Rob: That’s right because if friends don’t believe in your idea or friends are upset that you’re not going to a dinner party, it’s one thing. Those relationships heal and they’re still your friends now. But if your spouse doesn’t believe it, and you get six months down the line, it creates issues. I’ve talked about that a lot on this show for sure, as well as over on Zen Founder, a podcast that I do with my wife.
That kind of begs the question if you’re married and you started a company together? What is that like? I can imagine that you’re having some challenges and that you’re working all day together and then you’re hanging out at dinner. Are you talking about work? Does work bleed into everything? I think I know the answer, but it hasn’t been net positive for you? Do you think about being married or would be easier if you weren’t in a relationship starting this company together?
Dominic: This is actually one of the questions that people ask us the most, is how can you work with your spouse? How can you be so successful working with your spouse and not be on others’ throats all the time? For us, it has been such a positive experience and for us, the benefits really greatly outweigh the disadvantages.
The biggest advantage for us is that a company is a roller coaster. There are times when everything’s great and there are times when it’s not so great. In those times when it’s hard and difficult, we have each other’s back, and we can support and motivate each other. When it’s great, then, of course, we celebrate together. It has been such an amazing journey for us.
Tracy: I agree. I think it’s not for every relationship. But for us, it’s been amazing. The other thing, of course, that’s a huge advantage is it’s almost like being a solo founder in the sense that the company is owned by the family. Dom and I are 50-50 founders and it helps us to align our family goals well when we both have the company goals in mind.
Everything feels very aligned on the same trajectory. I think it helps us plan for the future as well since we work together rather than two separate families trying to kind of more or less align. I think that’s a huge advantage if you can do it, if your relationship works that way. For us, it’s only been a benefit but I think we are a little bit unique that way.
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You’re building this product nights and weekends, you’re grinding it out, you apply to TinySeed, and you get into the batch. You were pretty early at the time, but the TinySeed money allows you to go full-time in May of 2020 in the midst of COVID. It just occurred to me, as I’m saying this date and you were making good progress. You were growing a little bit each month.
As you got into early 2021, something really clicked and I referenced it earlier, but it was this bootstrapper hockey stick moment right around February. What changed between the prior 20 months of working on the product, half of that which was full- time because you had the TinySeed money. But something really changed and your revenue just started ticking up quite quickly.
Dominic: I think the biggest thing that changed for us that was sort of this catalyst of this hockey stick moment was we realized that the acquisition channel that started to work very well for us was SEO and we started to take SEO very seriously and started to double down and invest a lot of time into content marketing into our SEO rankings. We were lucky that we had Kevin and Pierre on our TinySeed calls—Scraping Bee—and that helped a lot.
We started to realize that this channel actually works well for us. We sort of doubled down on it, reduced the money we spend on our acquisition channel—time and money we spend on our acquisition channels—and really focused on SEO. Since then we have consistently had 10%–15% growth month over month and slowly and steadily climbing to our next big revenue goal.
Tracy: I would also say, Rob, you mentioned COVID. CodeSubmit is one of the types of companies that are a digital tool for interviews, asynchronous interviews. We offer a couple of different interview types. There are tons of companies that suddenly found themselves in need of an alternative to in-person interviewing with COVID and making that very difficult.
We did benefit a bit from this whole shift into more digital or remote-friendly interview practices. I think our focus on SEO has kind of lined up well with that transition taking place and folks starting to kind of look at these keywords that maybe there wasn’t as much traffic going towards before COVID. Suddenly, we were well-positioned to capitalize on that traffic.
It definitely helped us, some companies were not so lucky, of course, when COVID came. We did see, like everybody, that little dip right after when everyone’s trying to pull back some of their expenses. In the long run, I think we’ve definitely benefited from people switching to a more remote-friendly or asynchronous interview style.
Rob: And you have customers like the US Air Force, Apple, Netflix, and Audi. These logos are crazy, really impressive. That actually leads us right into a recurring Startups for the Rest of Us segment called, when did you know you had a product-market fit?
Dominic: As I mentioned, I think once you start to see a consistent growth of 10%, 15%, sometimes 20% month over month that was the moment when we realized okay, we have what is called product-market fit. Also as you mentioned, these big corporations, multibillion-dollar corporations using our product, even if it’s only teams in a larger corporation, but still getting through this due diligence process at the Air Force, for example, that sort of gave us confidence that the product is in a state where we have this product-market fit.
Tracy: Yeah I can pursue customers and logos like that. Earlier, I’m sure, Dom already mentioned our ugly MVP, which would never have worked for some of our existing customers. The product definitely reached maturity at some point where we were getting customers consistently, that month over month growth was consistent, and we could consistently get through that due diligence or that procurement process with some of the larger customers definitely.
Dominic: These are customers that we did not reach out to. We’re terrible at cold outreach sales really, really bad. We had hiring managers from these companies sign up for our platform and try the tool. Typically when this happens, you have a little slack notification. We see that new people sign up.
When we see a Netflix or an Apple person sign up, then we reach out to them immediately like hey, we’re the founders. If there’s anything we can do to help you get started on the platform let us know. In 99% of the time, people reply and they’re happy that they have someone on the other side helping them get started on the platform. This is how we build a relationship with a very large company being only the two of us and a small team.
Rob: Yeah, and there are different playbooks for growing SaaS. I think the SaaStr Jason Lemkin playbook is outbound sales, it’s building big sales teams, and that’s it. That’s the note that he used to build several companies to great success. Does it work? It does.
It also depends on the space. The inbound playbook is really interesting as well. I think it’s harder to pull off. I think you sometimes have less control of it because you’re not just grinding and doing this outbound thing and you’re relying on content to rank and you’re relying on people to find it. Most of the businesses I’ve ever built, actually all of them, were built on inbound. That was my suite of tools.
We did some outbound with Drip, where there was a third party who did it for us as a productized service, and it broke even at best for us. There are also a lot of spaces where both are great. If you can get both inbound and outbound working that’s an amazing engine.
I do want listeners of the show to know that it’s not just one note that does these things. Maybe if you want to become a unicorn SaaS, it’s all outbound and blah-blah-blah. If you want to build an amazing $1 million, $5 million, $10 million SaaS company, you can do that with either inbound or outbound. You can do it with affiliate marketing.
There are all these options you have when you don’t need to get so big. I need to be a billion dollars in five years, it’s like well, I guess you kind of have one playbook, probably. We have amazing options as bootstrappers, or mostly bootstrap companies, who don’t need that, just that ravenous growth.
Dominic: For sure. I think that sounds so cliche, but it’s one of our superpowers that we are so small because there are a couple of advantages that we have here over big VC-funded companies. For example, we can put our pricing very transparently on the website. People, companies, and hiring managers can sign up for our service without having to talk to a sales rep. A lot of people don’t want to do that. They just want to sign up and try the software that’s possible with us.
Another thing is that we can give a lot of attention to our clients. I have one funny story. I saw the head of engineering of Techstars signing up for our service and I was online at that moment. I reached out to him with this little intercom bubble, saying hey, Techstars. I heard about you guys. Cool that you signed up. Is there anything I can do to help? He’s like yeah, sure, let’s jump on a call, jumped on a call with him, and they have been customers ever since. These are things that don’t scale, but they work really well in this inbound capacity.
Rob: Again, both work, but there’s magic in inbound because people are already warmed and primed and then they’re not on the defensive because they’re actually interested and they want their questions answered. I’m curious, you’ve obviously landed on this amazing channel and it’s growing for you. You tried a bunch of stuff before that. Can you remember how many different marketing approaches or channels you were trying to work through before you landed on content?
Tracy: We have done paid ads, we’ve tried going into forums and looking for communities that maybe could leads at some point. We actually did, at some point, even straight-up try to do the whole cold outbound strategy. I think that’s what I imagined. I’m a first-time founder, Dom was not, but for me, that’s kind of what I imagined being, I wouldn’t say naive or just not aware of all the different ways you can acquire customers in SaaS. I thought it was a sales process. It’s also how the companies that I worked for in tech found their customers, it was always outbound.
I think we had quite a few outbound sales strategies. We even early talks to a couple of folks to see if who came from that background sales guy who maybe wanted to also work nights and weekends with us and tried that that for quite a while, I’d say the first six months even, because that’s also how we got our first customers—by reaching out to our network. Those folks weren’t cold, they were warm. We could establish a relationship with them very easily. We already knew they had a problem that we were trying to solve. It was a different situation.
Dominic: We disliked the outbound sales process so much that we had to sort of create appointments in our calendar every Friday in the evening at 7:00 PM, we have a call […]. That’s from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM. We would do cold outreach to people. We would call out or shoot people on LinkedIn that are hiring managers at some companies and it just didn’t work for us. Also, it wasn’t fun. It didn’t work for us, it was very demotivating.
Tracy: Also time-consuming. We called it sales happy hour to give it an exciting vibe, but it was not fun. I think the TinySeed mastermind also really solidified. I did content very early. Content marketing was something we looked at very early. I like to write, I have a Medium blog. I got lucky with one of those articles I wrote about taking home. It’s still very performant.
I think it’s still a great article, but it wasn’t tied to our domain in any way. We got some views from it and those people are actually clicking on the link to come over and see it. We actually saw that folks were signing up from that, which was wild because with outbound sales weren’t doing anything for us. I think we were already looking at the content.
We hired one of our contractors who still is working with us to this day around that time to kind of help us with our blog. Then we joined TinySeed and met Pierre and Kevin who were also having a lot of success with SEO and content. We’re in the mastermind with them and I think they were learning a lot and we were learning a lot. We very quickly realized that this channel was something we should pursue and then we started seeing the results from that. I think that’s kind of how we ended up going full all-in on SEO.
Rob: I called it out earlier, but Pierre and Kevin are the founders of ScrapingBee and so folks can follow them on Twitter. They’re actually transparent with their revenue. They’re north of a million ARR now and they grew really fast also on this front of content in SEO.
I don’t want listeners to take away that content works and cold outreach doesn’t. That’s not the point. The point is to find what works in your space. You’re going to need to experiment based on your product, based on your customers, based on your space, and you’re going to find one or more that works eventually, hopefully, assuming you can find product-market fit.
That’s really the takeaway here because there are companies that I have invested in and advised or just are in the MicroConf Community that cold outreach is amazing for them. It’s the main driver and there are some that cold outreach and content both work and that’s amazing because now you have two channels that work and you have diversification. Then there are folks like you where content and SEO are really the main drivers of growth.
Dominic: We still do some paid marketing and I refuse to give up on the paid marketing. I think it’s still ridiculous that you can pay $5 and appear on the top result in Google over all your competitors that have tens of millions in revenue and funding. We do get some customers from this. It’s just that the majority of our customers come from SEO.
Rob: As we move towards wrapping up, I want to ask you, as folks who’ve seen thousands, if not tens of thousands of take-home assignments be sent out and completed. I love to get the idea from founders who do have this broad swath of knowledge in a specific domain. Are there any big mistakes that you see customers making or either side that are really best practices or big mistakes that you see folks making?
Dominic: One big mistake that we see is that some companies are trying to use take-home challenges as a filter for their candidates. The problem is that, typically, take-home challenges take a longer time to complete, and if you send a candidate to challenge very early on in the process where they’re not really invested in your company yet, they might not be willing to put in the time to complete the challenge for you. There are different ways of assessment that, in our opinion, work better in the early stage of the interview process. That’s one big mistake.
Another big mistake is that we see some challenges that take way too long to complete. For us, we see that a good ballpark is between two and four hours. That’s something that most candidates should be able to comfortably do, maybe on a weekend or in the evening. A big mistake is that we see some companies send out challenges that take weeks or a full week to complete. Given that a lot of candidates have a family life and full-time jobs, it’s just impossible for them to complete the challenge that takes such a long amount of time.
Tracy: You should also be ready to invest the time to review these submissions. If your hiring team is sending out a challenge that’s going to take seven days or even a whole weekend, you also have to consider how much longer a long challenge is going to take your hiring team to review it.
They should be prepared to review it and they should be prepared to invest the time to actually look at these submissions if you’re going to actually send one out. There’s a whole host of reasons to keep them short, but candidate friendliness and incentivizing that candidate to actually continue with your hiring processes is really important.
Dominic: One thing that you mentioned, Rob, when you used take-home challenges at your companies, that you would use something that’s sort of coming out of your codebase is very close to the actual job that the candidate will work on, that’s already a very, very good sign.
We see some companies that use challenges that are so far from the domain that this company is working in, a very, very algorithmic-heavy and things that the candidate will never ever work on. It doesn’t make sense to test the candidate for something that they will never work on anyway. Use something that is close to what the candidate will face at the job.
Rob: When I send them FizzBuzz, that’s not what I should be sending. That’s a deep cut there, a deep programming cut.
Dominic: Unless your company does a lot of modular operandi operations, then you shouldn’t do that.
Rob: Yeah, the trick questions that were popular back in the 80s, and 90s at Microsoft, and then the programming challenges of here’s an array of numbers reorder them in the fastest way. It’s like, I don’t write code. I’m building web apps. I actually was asked questions when I’m a web developer to do these hardcore algorithmic things. It’s like I can figure this out but how is this testing how am I going to be a good fit at your company? This is really just testing did I study computer science in college and have I seen this before?
Dominic: Or did you study Leetcode or any of these other coding challenge websites for six months prior to your interviews? It doesn’t make a lot of sense, in most cases.
Rob: Last question for you today, before we wrap up. I think you’ve used the term lifestyle business for your own company. Lifestyle businesses is a pejorative term in Silicon Valley. I think people take it that way of, oh, we can’t fund that because it’s a lifestyle business. That usually means that the founder’s not working very much or that they’re just trying to fund their lifestyle.
I built lifestyle businesses my whole life and then that’s what I wanted to do, was just not work a day job and essentially you need that business. Drip became more than that and it’s great and it was life changing for me.
I think these terms, bootstrapping, lifestyle business, I don’t know how important they are or whether they need to kind of just transition out of the lexicon because I’m just building an amazing, profitable, mostly bootstrapped business. Does it really matter? What are your thoughts? I’ve heard you talk about how life-changing your lifestyle businesses have been. What are your thoughts on it?
Tracy: For me, I’ve been working in companies that are VC-funded. I think a lot of founders, especially first-time founders, imagine their entrepreneurial journey as this meteoric rise. You start, you raise a ton of money, you grind and build this great culture and this great product, and then someday somewhere down the line you sell it for millions of dollars. It’s life-changing and you walk into the sunset. I think that with that mindset, you lose some of that benefit of taking the slower route.
CodeSubmit for Dom and I has been life changing. We never set out to raise millions of dollars. To this day, we still aren’t considering that path, who knows for the future. We knew this was something we wanted to build sustainably and since it is our family business in a lot of ways, it makes sense for us to pursue this not just for the company to grow and for the mission, which is very important to us. It’s great to see people get hired, I love that about it.
Also, it’s been life-changing for us as a family, to grow this company, to have the freedom to pursue our own business, to have the flexibility to travel when we want to, to make our own decisions as executives, to have some creative freedom and how we pursue and build this business.
Dominic: I think as you said, Rob, the term lifestyle business in the Silicon Valley startup community is almost like a derogatory term. It’s like this is a bad business. These founders don’t want to become a unicorn. It’s a bad business. In my opinion, it’s very important for us to build a profitable, sustainable business that can sustain and support our lifestyle.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t have very ambitious goals. We want to get to $10 million ARR over the next couple of years. This is for sure a very ambitious goal for us. We have monthly growth goals that we want to reach and keep. For us, it’s just important that this is a business that down the line can support us, support our employees, be a great place to work for us, and also for anyone that joins our company. I think there’s nothing wrong with that.
Rob: Thanks so much for joining me today. People can find you at codesubmit.io.
Dominic: Thank you so much.
Tracy: Thanks, Rob. It’s been great.
Dominic: Thanks for having us.
Rob: That’s a wrap on this episode. I hope you enjoyed CodeSubmit’s story as much as I did. I appreciate you listening every week to the mix of episodes I have. There’s an interview here. There’s a solo episode there. There’s a news round up there. I look forward to bringing something back into your ears again next Tuesday morning.
