 All right now we can start All right, so I am here with Riley Chase of well you know him faint more famously probably from a hostify But you we're actually gonna talk about a couple of other projects too that you started so hostifies your most successful thing you started, right? Yeah, definitely. Okay, so you got hostify ghostify I like there's a there's a naming scheme that you kind of use a few different of them, which is kind of fun But well actually so we have a little bit of background. I've already in our video and I've tested used And we've recommended quite a few times your product. That's kind of my first interaction I should start with you know I dig in this the product someone makes and things like that but then what also is interesting is how much you share So I'm gonna start by doing a screen share here switch over to this desktop and I the you're a man off my own heart here you share it all much in the way I do let's let's talk about this so Your hardcore year you start with losing a job and ended up building Softwares a service company. So that's that's interesting. Let's go ahead and tell me a little bit about that Yeah, so it was kind of inspired by this guy in the Ukraine Andre that he invented the idea of hardcore year, but the reason I like the idea of hardcore year is Just sharing your story of like going full-time on a business and committing full-time to it And I think there's a like it's a most of business owners. They're successful. I've talked to you They all went through this period where the first year in business. They made less money And then they struggled Before you know the business started to take off and eventually they made as much money as they made before and then they started making more money But you know, there's kind of this dip and that's what hardcore years about It's going through that struggle, you know, that's in I've been in business now 17 years But I still fondly remember going from, you know, a great income at a really good job to Starting my business 17 years ago and going I don't make any money now and for me. I didn't have startup investors This is 2003 and I wasn't starting a software as a service company because no one knew what that was It existed but it wasn't like a SaaS was not a common term and I was doing IT services But you do you go through this dip of wow, I was doing Tech work and making good money too. I'm broke and now I'm leveraging all my assets and things like that to try to Keep it afloat until you kind of get over that I think my big learning experience was I thought having skill meant I would have work turns out those are a hundred percent different things The marketing to get there and I think you probably learned some of the same So you started working on this as a coding project, right? because you were learning how to code and while getting Learning how to write the software around the hostify system Yeah, I think an important part of it is that I didn't start hardcore a year by quitting my job And then trying to figure out what I was gonna do next it was like I already had this thing Hostify that I had been working on for six months. I had gotten it to almost a hundred customers It was only like twenty four hundred dollars a month revenue and only like half of that was like profit I actually take home after expenses So it was just like not like enough money to survive on really for me But it was just barely there where it was like if I do some freelancing or like if I you know I know what I need to do to find more customers and I put more time into this I know I can grow it so and you know, I had a few years of experience trying to build an IT service business before that So I knew that you know I wasn't gonna just quit my job and then try to figure it out because it takes a it takes a long time to get traction Yeah, that's Getting the traction is really one of the key parts of this too. That's I think the It took so long before even I built my own little you know Especially specifically found IT service as you build that whole recurring revenue from customers or just customers calling you back and things like that and This is that question everyone asked it's kind of it was somewhat maybe not fortunate But you did like you said you got fired from your job disagreement with the employer Which allowed you the opportunity to end up being full-time at this and I think that's everyone's question when they start a business is do I quit my job or start my business and I the challenge in that is I've heard a couple different arguments. I've seen like all the inspirational quotes I think one of the things that happens is when you don't have a plan B and like for me I don't have a family that had money when I decided to start my business There wasn't like another option. It wasn't like, you know as I'm already established I already moved out and I owned a house and I had a family there wasn't like what do I do next? So you put your whole heart into it because it becomes well I can't just go. Well, I don't have to work on today because my day job pays my bills I think that's probably what kicked you into overdrive right then, right? Yeah, I think I think It would be a lot different if I was still working at my full-time job I don't you know, I think it would definitely be a lot different and I do feel lucky that I was fired at the time It was just shocking and it was scary and it was believable But you know, I think leading up to this I had in my mind a lot of time I had in my mind that you know I'm making six figures at my day job and when host five makes more than that then I'll switch to doing that full-time but that's really I learned is you know, that's really the wrong mindset because It's just I don't know if it would ever get to there if if you have that mindset where you're waiting for it to be bigger And not putting your all your time into it like you said Yeah, and I've actually watched numerous friends kind of coming go in that because there are people who are in tech space They started a hobby project one of them one of my friends was building some gaming service But his job was more important. He has a really good paying job He had great benefits and he just there's no real kick to leave there because they like him He liked his day job So he kept kind of like putting it off and putting like two weeks at a time We just not even log in and touch stuff. He go out the server went down But you know, I got enough money that I'm not gonna deal with it It the whole thing crashed because some guy hacked me and I'm gonna deal with it later And then he eventually his whole gaming as a service business that he was hosting service for a male Because he it is he just was very honest for drinking after the bar one. He's like, yeah, he goes I just don't care enough, you know, but what it suddenly is your income like this is do or not But that you wrap that passion right up in it at that point like you said not having a plan B I never applied to a job a job listing since I lost my job still haven't applied to a job Don't have any plans to now but early on of course when you're making a thousand dollars a month And then next month you're making like, you know a little bit more money a little bit more money It's like, you know, you know, maybe I should get a job and you know to hold me over But no I always was like no I'm going full-time on this for one year and at the end of that one year That's why the hardcore year thing at the end of the year if this was you know Still not making that much money I'm gonna go get a other job and it'll go back to being a side project, but you know It did work out luckily, so I'm still doing it So let's dig let's dive in a little bit of technical you have learned probably more About the MongoDB and the way Unify uses it than anyone else. I know We've talked a couple times messaging back and forth and you know, you're looking at it differently then Me a user of Unify and I'm more into the network engineering But someone else my friend Phil when we were looking at the way Unify gets stood up because he has some of him He's he's a DevOps guy He started digging into he goes Why I think you might want to be like this and looking at the tuning and then you you probably go Kind of the same things like you're like, oh man, you because do it at the scale How many you have I'm gonna assume right now you're over 40,000 devices overall attached We're over 45,000 ubiquity devices connected to you over 850 servers that I'm managing with one other person Yeah, yeah, so you you've had to do a lot of tuning For some of your singular servers with larger installs How was that reverse engineering without a roadmap for ubiquity? That's because i'm sure their engineers don't just hand over documentation to you, right? No, so um, so yeah Like you said, it's reverse engineering. It's uh, it's not easy It's um, basically, you know every program that I've written to automate something in Unify It came from opening up chrome clicking buttons the way you're supposed to use the uh, you know Inside the dashboard you click a button you watch what network request was made And then you figure out that api request and um, you know ubiquity doesn't provide any documentation on these things Same thing with mongo db. I looked up. Um, how to use mongo db. What are all the commands for mongo db? How do you tune it? How do you um, scale it and um, you know, this is how I learned about these things was Reverse engineering just figuring out going through the database. Oh, here's where they stored that record Let's fix that or change that or if we change this setting in unify it changes this thing in the database So what if I just change the database directly that way? I don't have to have an admin account to go to unify So it's a lot. It's a lot of time a lot of time of just looking at it Yeah, and that's that's the uh, little the hacking aspect and to me, um The hacking mindset and the business mindsets are the same because you're basically not accepting the rules That were handed to you that you just set it up this way. Um, the same with business If you're an employee, you just accept the rules. These are my tasks This is what i'm assigned to do when you are doing a startup and you have a new idea You're bending the rules around to me. They're one and the same My hacking background on my business background people like, well, you know how to hack stuff and you do business I'm like, they're not any different. It's just it's just taking rules Seeing how they may apply to me and seeing how they don't or seeing how I want to use them in a new way um And that's the the unify thing is a cool one because I think you have this right Collision of right place right time. We're watching unify over the last couple years really take off as a product Even some of the large sales places that we do I mean we've so we've done some of these installs where we've done single site installs of over 300 devices and uh It's it's been crazy for us because we do the infrastructure to lay out in the design And these some of these companies when you talk about having 300 of them If you switch to any other company that has licensing fees, that's a lot of licensing fees And as uh, a ceo of one company told me he goes I'm getting a hundred dollar license feed to death. He goes it sounds it goes it all sounds inexpensive He goes until you look at my monthly bill of $28,000 a month in fees Across all the products we have he goes at some point um And that's what I think unify really took off and at the same time Unify although they let you give you the controller for free They're one of the only companies that doesn't seem to have a clear like they did offer But as your blog pointed out not that long ago. They kind of killed off all their own hosting options for it. Yeah um Yeah, I did write a blog post about that and I think it's really coming straight down from the ceo Robert para and if you read his blog He blogs about being anti cloud and you know, it's kind of the disruptive model that his business is built on Not having licensing giving the software ready for free But um, you know the drawback of that is you know, when you're an msp Or when you're a company with more than a few locations Having a controller at every location keeping an updated community secured is just not an option And so, um, he's definitely taking the approach that he wants to sell you that one more hardware thing to go with your unify set for every site but um, I think it's Not understanding what the msp or what the the enterprise needs and um, and that's centralized management. So Yeah, and for us, you know, we are my background is dev ops. I have other staff here that is as well So we don't mind hosting in ourselves But then other msp's we talked to and this is what one of the reasons hostify was so interesting to me Was there's people who contact us. We one off will manage their servers for them But obviously that gets tedious and I'm like, look if you want this done right hostify and you know, I vetted your product and said Okay, this is the way to do it because you either are internally a dev ops team or you don't have one and some msp's Even if they're bigger they may not have someone who understands how to manage a linux server How to tune a mongo dv server and we're doing it only for ourselves So make no mistake for anyone listen to this time. Will you manage it for me? No, I'm going to point you over to hostify Because honestly, it's not our thing we like managing for ourselves and things like that But some msp's just don't have that there especially because they're usually really windows heavy Um, yeah, because we actually use linux here and windows. Um, so we don't mind doing it But um, I think that's just like it's a perfect service and it kind of surprised me Is it feels like it was a gap that unify just said well, we're not going to do this But of course famously microsoft's known for that they they've lead they leave gaps in their product offering and just kind of say All right third parties go ahead. This is the gap. We left in a market We host email, but we don't have a wonderful spam filter So we're going to let third parties do better spam filtering in us even though we host your email So, um, unify did the same thing they decided not to make the hosting available and automated as you can make it So, uh, you filled that gap really well now Go ahead. Tell me real quick. Is there um, Is there any issues? I I don't know if there's something legal we can't say on here But as unify have been upset with you about this in any way that directly. Oh, yeah, um, so it's interesting Our relationship has changed over time. Um, I've never really talked with them directly very much But you know, uh, how it started off was october 2018. This was just a few months after I had started hostify Um, I received a cease and desist letter from their legal team and they said, um It was a lot of mumbo jumbo and I was like At first, you know, they made it sound like I can't continue doing hostify because it's violating their whatever And so I wrote the back said, you know, what does this actually mean? And so they said we don't want you to use the ubiquity logo in your screenshots on your website So I kind of figured out that they were trying to scare me off from doing it But really the only legal thing they had on me was I can't use their logo or something on my website So I removed their logo and then ever since then I'd never heard from them They've said I wrote the back said I removed your logo is everything fine now. They said, yeah, it's fine And then um, it was a few months ago I received a letter from robert para and he sent me the unified dream machine when it came out and thanked me for You know, my great service with hostifying everything confusing for me, but um, it was also confusing that he sent me the udm which can't connect to hostify and I I never did take it out of the box. It's in the box right there. I won't take it until I'm remotely adopted. I have no use for it. My customers are returning them. So Yeah, it was confusing. He didn't send me a udm pro. So I'm sure that my lack of review on the udm is Uh, you know Weren't me any future products that will be sent to me But I do love his I promote all his stuff, you know, I'm doing teaching everybody about his products and everything I love the new gen 2 switch. I just bought myself one. So And we're a huge fan of the products. I mean, uh, they they have Probably one of the interesting, you know, the unify software to find networking One of the things that to me is a game changer about unify is probably more their software and lesser hardware Obviously the two are directly related to each other. Um, and like we just reviewed the gen 2 pro switch And I really like it But where they're not as much of a game changer is in their pricing is good On their switches, but not killer But their software on the other hand for I don't think I can Because you know me long time into network engineering I will say the easiest platform I've ever set up VLANs in my life on and Being teaching people how to do it is the unify platform hands down They just have a better way of handling it and they have the nicest interface of any network equipment I have ever touched and you know, my old days of sysco or any type of command line routers I did I was just used to you did it from the command line If there was ever you why you didn't use it because it was not it was well Well, it was not designed by the good guys. It was always uh some half ass Really Yeah, I mean when sysco came out from the old asa systems and they had that I think it was like this the earliest ones were this weird java launcher for a UI. You're like, I'm just going to the command line This is literally Or uh when they had the those uc 500s that they had a gooey thing for that too Yeah, they're it's just like the fire. It's always been bad and here comes unified Go to the command line because the gooey is so bad on sysco stuff like whether it's a sdm or the That old uc 500 thing. I can't remember what it was called. Yeah, and they use that weird java launcher thing Or something like that. So and you had to create objects for everything. I'm like, this is this is hard. I just want So this is where unify really stepped up the game. Um In this is where they've also had their own missteps. They took that same UI and threw it on other things And it makes it unclear as to where their product path is going because the only place this little bit falls short is of course As you know, the usg firewalls, which everyone asked me about and it's just like Can you add some features you have this beautiful interface, but a lack of features Yeah, that's one of those things and um, you know every day I talked to my msp customers And um, I just send a year video a lot actually on firewall comparisons for 20 20 or 2019 or whatever pf sense untangle washguard sofos whatever You want to use but don't don't use the usg unless you're just throwing it at someone's house and you're not going to use IPS ids or vpn and you just need routing and switching in the hcp and vlands. It's fine for that But yeah, and that's and that's what you've run into as well. And I just made a 2020 version of that video for that exact reason to highlight that yes And features still haven't come to these you still can't assign a block of ip's to a wan address on a usg I mean that's a really really basic Function that it seems like you should be able to sign, but here we are 2020 doesn't work Yeah, there's little things like that that are big things Yeah, they're little things, but they're really big things. So Definitely definitely some challenges, but um Yeah, anyways, that's enough about the unify. We'll talk Lastly about a couple other projects. How are you are you still pursuing? Well, I know you're doing the unms and uh, that's the other side for those not familiar with the unify ubiquity product line Their other product line being the edge series. So you got the unms going that's going well Yeah, it's going well. So um a few thousand dollars a month. Uh, we have about uh, 80 customers that use unms So our business is really primarily unify with almost 800 unify servers about 80 UNMS servers So it's a small part of our business and really what it is is uh, it's a whole different audience It's mainly wireless internet service provider operator businesses Um that are using unms and then we have a few overflow where like an msp has a lot of you know Nano station local point to point connections out there and they want to manage those But now I'm pushing our msp customers to use the unified building to building bridge instead So they can have everything in the unified dashboard because you know the msp's use those point to point connections But but yeah small part of our business We've been looking at some of those uh unified bridges for the same reason I love it to be in one dashboard because right now it's not We don't really have to we we don't have any unms Set up because we're not as worried about monitoring because one thing I will say about them Man those edge the site to sites. They just work. They that's another um, yeah, they just work You just put them in but um, you know, one nice part is it does the config backups from the devices So you get that in case the device dies you can swap out the config you have Monitoring and you can also push firmware updates to your devices. So that's the one convenience of is being able to push the firmware updates so Maybe we'll have to look at that because the unms Is that using mango db on the background too? I've never So unms is an amazing stable product. You can it has let's encrypt built into it You can do really inside the web interface. You just click the update button instead of having to the command line And um, yeah, it's it's built on docker and postgres database I'm sure you can put million records in there and it's not going to collapse unlike mango db You have enough clients connecting on your network It once it gets to around a million records the thing falls apart and you got to clear the database of all the records And it just can't no matter how much hardware I throw at it. No matter how much tuning I do It has limitations software limitations for how many records it can sort and everything Yeah, I was really surprised they went with mango because of that mango is just my my dev out translate scene is built on mango is like why right because I think the reason why is because it's built for a cloud key gen one is Or I don't know. I guess they had to unify before that But it seems like it you know, it's a it's a choice for an embedded Device something simple for an embedded device to run on a simple processor, you know Yeah, I think it just wasn't thought for scalability. It's a thought for simplicity but not for scalability That's probably the simple answer Yeah, I wish they would rewrite it like unimes the unimes is you know newer and it has better better stuff for sure It seems a lot more stable in postgres much more much more flexible much more stable Um now you hired someone this year. Is it this year or late last year? It was last year August to september is when he started full-time. Okay from you. Is that going well? Oh, it's amazing. He's such a great guy. Um safuan. Maybe he I'm sure he's listening to this. Um Yeah, he uh, he's been doing really good He pretty much handles 90 of the day-to-day support side of the business And so now I've been concentrating on just building relationships with people I'm doing Demos and talking with our customers learning more about their businesses and telling people about hostify and spending more time on that Then it's doing the support side so it's been it's a real key step whenever you're growing the business and Uh, it's one of the videos I've done before as well as that's it's such a common question Well, how'd you hire your first person and I always tell people you don't really think of it that way You think about it when you've compartmentalized enough processes that you can assign them to someone Because if you just hire someone on day one, they're like, hey boss, now what you're like crap I actually have to tell them what to do, but you should have processes to hand them So that's what he's the you seem pretty process oriented I think that lends to when you're programming you already have this compartmentalized this compartmentalized And he's like, oh here's here. I'm handing you off this part when they call answer it They're going to have problems with the product. These are the general problems Here's the task list managed by exemption to forward it up to me. Uh, once you can put that around someone That's when you hire someone. That's the that's kind of the key to it sometimes But it really frees up your time to grow the business hiring my first person Um, it was the most difficult thing I've probably ever done like as far as the business definitely the most difficult part of the business was Trying to figure out what I'm doing and turn it into processes I actually wrote a whole blog post about how I create a process for every single thing that we do here and um, you know wrote it wrote guides on it and um, you know, and that's you know That's how I was able to hand it off, you know Every time a new ticket would come in I'd create a new process And then whenever something similar came in, you know, I'd refer to that process send him the article with that and you know I'd actually fill myself a zoom Doing it and then when something similar came, you know He would watch the video and then eventually that turned into written guides and then now it's like really really good processes that we have so You know, we I uh, I worked in the automotive space. So we were iso certified So we had we had like the really regimented forms and process for everything So for me it was kind of I took those same form processes and just brought process oriented stuff Making task lists and things like that versus some people come in it And I think that's why they struggle with the question so much And just it's a kind of a business problem in general if you're not thinking about process You're just kind of chaotically running the business and doing everything I like I try to hand things off But it's hard because I've never created a documented process to hand this someone else, you know This really the biggest success of any franchise business is it's just a collection to book of processes. Here's your mcdonald's It's this it's it's step one through 300 right through here That should be the goal of any business. Have you ever read the book? Uh emeth revisited that one really helps me a lot to Understand I'm I'm old enough to have read it first and I read Yeah, yeah, no, but the emeth revisited someone recommended to me when I was going through this and man it was it's a great book It's probably um, I would probably put it on I need to do a book list and I would probably be right at the top of them Uh book lists. There's that I I won't ramble off every one of them But there's um, there's a handful of good entrepreneur books. Um, yeah, that's probably another blog post I should do sometime. Well, yeah, definitely Yeah, that's uh, definitely there and then and I brought the employee things I knew you wrote a whole blog post because that's one thing I will say Anything I don't say in this interview you have dumped a lot more in a series of blog posts About well all kinds of different steps of this, you know hiring and things like that You've been very transparent which um is obviously greatly appreciated and like I said at the beginning It's just something I do as well being very transparent about how we do things and everything else The last little couple things I'll talk about is some of the other projects you had I Think I got the concept of ghostify. Are you still doing that one? No, so it was last june or so that you know, I kind of got uh carried away with all I started all these different I started uh, three different sass companies and I tried to start an msp community So and then that was you know, so I had hostify and then I had these like other things that were Not really making any money and they needed a lot of work to get off the ground And hostify at the same time was taking off or each month it was growing growing growing And so it became very obvious to me that I had to put all my time into hostify and I started doing that around last summer and um Definitely uh has been has been good. So I I still have customers using ghostify. I still have customers using captify not very many Um, and I still have a pretty good like 300 people in my msp story community on our slack channel But none of those things are things that I'm actively uh growing right now Yeah, so they're just kind of there. That's um, that's always hard to even for myself the Businesses I've started over the years. I've had I used to have a tv repair business in 2005 and six There's no money in tv repair. So anyone had heard that um, there's not a lot if I created by closing it There's no market for that anymore. Um, but you know, you put a lot of time and effort in something It's hard to kill off. It's like is even mentally you're like, but I spent so much time on it But you're like but nobody wants it or it's not as popular the idea wasn't as good And sometimes the best thing you can do though is accept it and go I'm gonna drop this section I'm gonna move on from this because I'm gonna do better if I focus on these other things over here Yeah, that's tough Yeah, that's and it's never easy. It's always anyone could put on the hindsight go well, you should have covered of that You know in 2007 time. I'm like, yeah, I can tell you that right now anyone can but when you're living it It's a whole lot harder But uh keeping the focus can be it's a challenge because you want to start doing all the things but You gotta it's that's not an easy balance. That's uh, especially you're young So you you're still gonna you bump up and you're how old are you right now? 27 Okay, so you're about the same age as me when I started I think it was 20 out of in 26 when I started my business and it was You make more mistakes as younger. I don't know. It's just how it works out but My my biggest regret of those I didn't start even younger so I could have made those mistakes even earlier and been further ahead But you know, yeah, such as like Well, I'll leave links to her to find all about you so obviously a lot of it starts at Riley Chase But we talked about hostify and we have the affiliate link for that. I'll leave down below So that's been kind of cool. It's a service we do recommend and all the other services we talked about I'll leave links to all those in the description, but it was great talk with you in person here We've talked a lot on you know online through a few different formats And we've definitely talked about all the previous things we talked about but uh, yeah I wanted I wanted to do this interview because I think a lot of people wanted to hear the story of How'd you come up with it and how's it work and things like that? So that's pretty cool I appreciate it. 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