On Monday, I gave a short attendee talk at MicroConf Growth on how to conduct user interviews and usability sessions. It was only twelve minutes, though, so I had to focus it on the key point: Getting useful user feedback is all about how you act. To find your user’s pain points (and in turn opportunities for your business), you need to make them feel comfortable being open and vulnerable with you. This means you
March 25, 2019
Conference Talk: MicroConf Growth 2019
Gave a 12 minute talk on customer interviews at MicroConf 2019. Notes Slides
January 21, 2019
Bootstrapping a Business: 5 Years In
Retrospective on 5 years of Geocodio at IndieHackers in January 2019. Read the original post on IndieHackers On January 21, 2014, Geocodio was officially launched into the world. By some miracle of luck, we landed on the front page of Hacker News for almost the whole day. In the pre-Product Hunt era, this was about as good as a launch could possibly go. The traffic surge quickly faded and not everyone had
November 12, 2018
Interview: Conquering the Glass Ceiling with Dr. Cortney Baker
In this episode of Conquering the Glass Ceiling, I sat down with Co-Founder of Geocodio, Michele Hansen. Michele and her husband created a software-as-a-service company that provides geocoding services. Michele has started many businesses and products over the years with friends and her husband. Her family has helped her throughout her entrepreneurial journey and start her current business. She has learned to figure out what customers really want and how to
August 21, 2018
Forbes: The Shocking Cost Of Daycare Propelled This Mom To Start A Business
When Michele Hansen and her husband started planning for the birth of their daughter, they quickly realized that to afford daycare at $24,000 per year, they were going to need an additional income stream. “Day care is more expensive than state college tuition in a majority of states, including the District of Columbia, where we lived,” said Hansen. “People are expected to come up with this chunk of money out
July 20, 2018
Getting Started with User Interviews in 3 Steps
It’s frustrating to look at your metrics and wonder why you have high dropoff, low conversion, or low engagement. Ultimately, there’s only so much digging you can do in Google Analytics or a spreadsheet before you need to try something different. Google Analytics will tell you that people are doing things. But it will never tell you why. It will never tell you their motivations, their frustrations, and what they’re trying to do.
May 21, 2018
Interview: Startup Pregnant
When Michele Hansen and her husband started planning for the birth of their daughter, they quickly realized that the high cost of daycare—a whopping $24K per year—was going to require an additional income stream. So, they created an app called Open Nearby as a side project. In the course of building that business, Michele and her husband uncovered a need in the market for geocoding software that translates addresses into
February 22, 2018
Interview: Lean the F*ck Out: Mastering Google Search And SEO To Increase Sales Online
In this episode, we talk with Michele Hansen about the business she co-founded with her husband, Geocodio. They launched the business as a side hustle together just after they got pregnant with their first born, now Michele works full time on the business. We talk with her about what it took to make that change and how she has been able to grow the business using a lean startup model,
December 2, 2017
5 Things I’ve Learned After Going Full Time on My Side Project
This past summer, my husband/co-founder and I had the opportunity to speak at Laracon 2017 on Launching & Scaling a Side Project. In the talk, we talked about what we’ve learned launching (…and scaling!) Geocodio, which we started as a side project in January 2014. It’s been quite the journey, and we wanted to share what we’ve learned with others to fuel their own entrepreneurial efforts. We made sure to mention that
October 13, 2017
Congratulate Your Users
Note: I wrote this just before leaving The Motley Fool. I had so much fun working on product there and I’m still incredibly proud of the work we did together. Something I’ve become excited about in the past year is increasing users’ self-esteem, especially in situations where they wouldn’t normally expect it. From retail to investing, it’s a small but high-impact way to increase user satisfaction and delight. Even things