Austin Vance
Appearances
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
And any optimization post the bottleneck will continue to be starved more and more for resources because the bottleneck is constraining what can be fed to it. And so when we started to expand our services, we'd say like, OK, if we can get a deployment process and infrastructure to a place where it is stable, it is scalable and it is automated, but it's not like perfect.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
What's the next bottleneck that this company faces? Is it that their code is not well tested? So they're putting out too many bugs. So releasing every day, but the quality is low. So we need to introduce automated testing and continuous integration. And oh, is a part of the problem that the features they're releasing are not what the customers are asking for.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
So they need a design team to be out kind of banging on the world and understanding how people are engaging with their products. And so each one of those bottlenecks, we kind of move back and forth between them.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
based on where our customers saw pain rather than focusing, continuing to optimize deployment flow that is already well optimized for the quality or throughput of code that's being produced.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
Services is different than product. And so there's always this kind of give and take because the scaling factor for a services company, assuming you can't charge more per hour because the market won't bear it, is more bodies. And so at a product company, you're looking to scale ARR in a different way. In the way we engage, there's 40-ish hours a week per person.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
You're not going to do 90 to get more revenue because they have lives and jobs and they should be real people. So we scale based on people. But that doesn't mean we don't want to hire all incredible people. We think a lot about like the employee experience and we iterate on it and it's not that we haven't made mistakes or, but we hire for people.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
And I said earlier, we look for unintimidating and unintimidated people. Most of our interview process is focused around how people communicate about highly technical things.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
What we want is someone who has the patience and the empathy and the, I don't know, the emotional intelligence to deeply communicate about something that is highly, highly technical in a way that doesn't make someone feel stupid. And if they are capable of that, often they are an incredible developer or technologist because they so deeply understand the technology that they're working on.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
To do that early on, I reached into my network. You know, I would call people that I had worked with in the past. I'd say like, oh, I learned so much from you. Do you want to come and work at Focus? We'd love to have you here. Or people would reach out to me that had worked for or with me in the past and say, you know, I'm really excited you started your own thing.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
You know, what are you trying to do? And we would bring them on board. That shared experience that we had, we skipped the storming portion of a new team because we had all worked together in the past and went right into forming and norming. That was super important.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
From the network, reaching out, talking about the experience, talking about how we really want to be a craft-oriented consulting firm that puts high value in not just the billable hours, but in the technology and the technical expertise that our team has really brought people on.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
I think I overscaled. I think the biggest mistake I made as a CEO is we were super flooded with work at one point and we were doing great work on all of our customers. But what we lost track of was creating this like shared deep tribal belonging for the team and consulting.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
Consulting is weird, especially remote consulting is different because you might spend most of your time with a totally different company than the company you work for. And so there's always this question about how does the services firm create enough value to their employee that they don't just leave the firm and go to the customer.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
We can always put into contracts you're not allowed to poach and stuff like that. But if I have employees who want to go to our customers, it means that I'm not creating enough value for them to want to be in my firm versus at a company that hired us. Scaling is about creating a shared experience. The power of consulting is the breadth of work that we approach.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
We at any point have 5 to 10 customers and over the course of years have dozens and dozens of shared experience, where at a product company, you might not get that.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
If you are a developer looking to accelerate your experience and the services firm is doing well, scale comes from sharing that like communal breadth of knowledge with new developers or new people joining the team, not necessarily new developer, but new people joining the team.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
So they almost like drink from a fire hose and get, you know, three years of experience in one because of the breadth that they're approached with. Consistent culture, consistent approaches. You know, I could talk about tooling we use and we're big fans of no private channels in Slack.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
You know, the Slack is our office and, you know, we we try to keep everything kind of in the open as much as possible. That kind of stuff has really helped as well. And then, of course, to scale the culture across a remote environment. setting and to scale the business, to scale the number of people without reducing the quality, we of course do IRLs.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
So we bring our whole team together to do everything from workshops to breaking bread and cheersing each other over a beer or coffee or something.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
The most proud moments I've had at Focus are the IRLs. It's pretty incredible to walk into a room full of, at one point it was 10 and then it was 20 and then it was 30 and then it was 40 and then it was more like...
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
people that all like are just so passionate about software and like that scale they like shared language that they care about what they're doing like we're doing lightning talks and people are talking about their hobbies and their families that's when i'm the most proud you know i can look at revenue numbers and the business but i think what what i'm proud of is that we've created something that like actually has real value and it has value not just to our customers but to our employees
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
One of our big goals, there's like this EOS thing, which is like create a big 10 year goal or five year goal. And like, how do you get there is make focused a resume badge of honor. So I want people to look at, you know, focused on your LinkedIn or on your resume and be like, Oh my gosh, these people, they, they were at focused. They definitely know how to code.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
They're definitely like, you know, incredible developers, employees. And I think, you know, there are a handful of companies in the world that everybody in our industry will recognize as that. And That's what I want out of this company. And as I see us getting closer and closer to that, I get very proud.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
One of our kind of marquee customers is a big restaurant group in Chicago. They were actually the first customer of Focused. Their name is Lettuce Entertain You. They own a handful of restaurants around Chicago.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
One of the mistakes we made is we had just started to build out our design services and we didn't really have them nailed down in a way that they had the polish and crispness and professionalism that they do now and that our technical services have. you know, lettuce called us and said, Hey, we need to add some more features to our application. And we're really excited about like doing a rebuild.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
Can you guys do it? And we said, sure. And of course I say, you know, when we're adding design, would you like us to do the design too, rather than using a kind of two different parties, one to do the tech and one to do the design. Yeah. Let us dove in immediately. They're like, oh my gosh, we're so excited. So we bring them to the office to do a kickoff on the project. And it was a disaster.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
I mean, we just like, we didn't really have the workshop planned out. We didn't have the logistics around even getting in, having parking, the remote and hybrid setup was just difficult. And it really like burned, I think a lot of trust, both with the employees, because it felt like I kind of set them up for failure and with Lettuce.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
Like the new blossoming design team was like, oh my gosh, we just got thrown into the lion's den and this was a disaster. And then Lettuce, you know, on the same side was like, oh my gosh, do these guys know what they're doing with design? Should we even use them? It was really heartbreaking because of all the trust we had with them
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
And things go wrong like products have bugs and this is a bug right like and we fix bugs and the way you fix bugs and services as you tuck your tail as a leadership team and you say to the customer like we realize we made a mistake you know let's figure out how to fix it and you work together on fixing it and.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
that comes you know in a handful of ways it can come with extra work it can come with like some sort of discount or monetary change or even just like across my heart hope to die you know it won't happen again but more importantly as a leadership team i think we really buckled down and said hey when we have a service it has to have the polish that like we would expect out of all of our other services so we we gave time back to our design team to go back and and retrospect on what could have gone better and so we re-engaged with lettuce in the design space
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
And they happily, you know, continue to use our design and we really love them. And but I think it was looking back at the kind of the rushed product. But what's the there's the guy who made Mario. He had this quote, like, no one remembers a late game, but everybody remembers a bad one. And I think what we did there was we released a bad game instead of letting it be right.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
And in retrospect, I would have rather had a late game.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
I've avoided talking about AI and I don't want to talk a lot about it, but I think the future is really different. I think when we think about how we write software, you know, my firm helps companies write better software, deploy better software, build better products. That's our goal.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
And one of the things that's changing is, like I said, the software development industry specifically had kind of stagnated around optimization, you know, through the release and kind of ubiquitous deployment of Agile. And the AI tooling and AI augmentation of developers, I think, is going to really change how people engage with the code that they write and the applications that they have.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
I'm not an expert in building a product or having a SaaS, so I don't know how AI is going to change the end products. But I do think it's going to change the way we craft software and build applications. I think it's going to lower the bar in a handful of places so more and more people can come in. it's going to raise the demand and value of creating highly scaled iterative development processes.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
And so what I see focused as and constantly leaning into is, you know, what does it mean to be an incredible technologist? And that's what our future is, is like, you know, whether we're 50 people or 500 or 5,000 people, everybody here is an incredible technologist and embracing, you know, the best tools for the job. And so if we're woodworkers, you know,
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
One of the mistakes we made is we had just started to build out our design services. We didn't really have them nailed down in a way that they had the polish and crispness and professionalism that they do now and that our technical services have. Lettuce called us and said, hey, we need to add some more features to our application, and we're really excited about doing a rebuild.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
you know, to turn our nose up at using power tools would not be a great service to our customer. And I think we will embrace, you know, how AI tooling comes into the developer flow and how it drives development similar to agile or test-driven development or something like that. And I hope the future focused sits on hundreds of people's resumes as a badge of honor. And it's recognized as that.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
I mean, I read a lot. I am in a handful of professional groups that I talk to people about. I'm close with my dad. I talk to him a lot about business. I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My grandfather was, my great-grandfather was. We talk a lot about business at home. And my co-founder and my wife, I talk to all of them and they influence me deeply. I think
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
I don't want to give advice, but the professional organizations are absolutely an incredible place to kind of have. And I don't mean trade organizations where you're kind of around your competitors and you're being kind of cooperation.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
I think these places where you bring in a handful of, of competitors, like entrepreneurs, organization, or YPO tend to be really incredible places to get feedback from different industries, different scales, and give you enough information to make strong decisions.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
It's such generic advice. I don't want to give that. My first one is like, I would just encourage them to release, but I would encourage them to focus. Like I named the company focused because when a software development team is the most effective or a product team is the most effective is when they're not scattered. They're focused on like, what do we do? What is the feature we need?
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
What is our one great thing that makes us stand out? You know, someone trying to build the next big thing, I think my real advice is there's a bunch of noise in this world. There's a bunch of SaaS tools. There's a bunch of promises. And like, if you can just focus on what is someone going to pay for, what do they actually want from you?
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
You can start to get traction and then the rest follows because once you have customers, your customers tell you what they want next. And so get your customers in so that they can then tell you where to go rather than kind of having a lack of focus.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
Thank you very much for having me. This was really fun.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
Can you guys do it? And we said, sure. And of course, I say, and we're adding design. Would you like us to do the design too, rather than using two different parties? Lettuce dove in immediately. They're like, oh my gosh, we're so excited. So we bring them to the office to do a kickoff on the project, and it was a disaster. My name is Austin Vance. I am the CEO and co-owner of Focused.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
You need to really want it. It's not just about technology.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
I'm a software developer. It is who I am and what I love to do. Like last night, I kind of blacked out and went till three in the morning coding. I started Focus because I had been working at a large payments company and we had been hiring kind of support through consultants and services or a services company.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
We've been hiring support through services companies and there's kind of an adversarial relationship between a services company or boutique services firms and their customers. And I never, it never really made sense.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
Like, you know, when I hire a consultant, I want to hire them because they have all this experience and they're going to come in and they're going to help increase the quality of my team, increase the quality of my code base, bring skills in that I don't have. And what happens is those consultants come in and they kind of stay, they have this like land and expand model.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
And when I built Focus, I left this payments company because I was like, I think you could build a services company that's designed to deprecate itself. So we come in and we pair program and we write tests and we work with our customers to enable them to get new skills that they don't have.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
And eventually, like the win for us is rather than increasing our footprint at a customer from two developers to 10 developers. It's, you know, did we go from, you know, five developers down to zero developers and they feel like they can like steer on their own. The original service we offered was DevOps. We started in 2019.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
Right around that time was really like when cloud and paths and all those things were really popping off. Kubernetes was really starting to win the cloud wars and software engineering had a little bit of a hit a lull and kind of innovation on what like the right kind of software engineering is. Agile had become ubiquitous in some way, shape or form.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
You know, different companies were doing different amounts of it, but it was everywhere. And the agile methodologies and kind of the extreme methodologies of like automate everything and highly collaborative teams never made it into the cloud and or into the cloud spaces and the infrastructure spaces. And DevOps was really trying to do that.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
And so focus started there and then grew from DevOps focused agency into, you know, software engineering services and design services as well.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
The MVP of Focus was a group. I mean, it wasn't even a group. It was me, my co-founder, and one other. We wanted to be this super unintimidating team that was unintimidated by any problem. The features of our product, a service has to enter the world as a product. It has to have the same features. Otherwise, it kind of does everything poorly rather than one thing great.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
The features of our product were that we truly understood the migration path and the complexity of legacy infrastructure trying to get to the cloud. And so as you're taking legacy infrastructure, on-prem infrastructure, or even cloud infrastructure that maybe was a copy-paste of an on-prem design... We understood how to make that much more cloud native, and we would do that through automation.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
So things like using Amazon CDK or Terraform, we would test it. It would all be continuously deployed. GitOps was becoming super powerful. Kubernetes was super powerful. So it was these experts in legacy systems.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
that understood how to take these features or these these servers from legacy infrastructure style to kind of modern infrastructure style and at the same time we would pair program with our customers that you know devops are often not devops but infrastructure teams to show them these tools are not that intimidating you know you're very comfortable in bash and you're very comfortable in a shell but you know writing a little bit of terraform is also not that intimidating and it's the exact same thing you've been doing but much more maintainable much more shareable repeatable that kind of stuff
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
Prior to working at this payments firm, I worked for a really large consulting company. As we found customers, I had these customers coming in wanting DevOps support. We were doing a really good job, and they wanted other stuff. They wanted software development support, us to build an app, wanted product managers, wanted design. We lost focus, so we expanded really quickly.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
We added all these supplementary services, things that we weren't experts in but thought we could be, or they could be kind of tack-on services to what we were. For the MVP decision, I think the hardest thing, it was price. Because I'd worked in services before and I ran a large services branch before I understood what the market would bear in terms of pricing.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
I remember negotiating with one of our very first enterprise customers, a rental car company. They're ready to do a deal with us. They're telling me over and over again, you know, if you do this, you know, at a substantial discount, then we're going to give you way more work. And I think, you know, I really stood firm on like, I understand the value of our service.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
And I really think that you guys understand the value of our service and the quality of our delivery and the in this leave behind quality that we're going to give you that is different than any other body shop. And so we really held firm on price and I'm glad we did.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
It slowed down our growth pretty dramatically because the deals, one deals kind of disappear as people hear pricing or the sales process turns into much more of an educational process where we're teaching our customers why the enablement portion and the deprecation portion of our engagements is so valuable to them and why having eight developers that you pay $80 an hour is actually less effective
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
than having two that you pay $220 an hour or something like that.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
our customers told us was kind of the coolest thing. We had good customers and they were asking for additional services or additional expertise. As I built Focus, I relied really heavily on my network, both for customers and for staff.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
It was really important and actually really critical to how we grew that we had a group of people that had either worked together before or had deep trust in each other or had hired or worked with people at the company at previous jobs or something like that. I always wanted to be a full-service software consultancy. I didn't want to just be stuck in DevOps.
Code Story
S10 E21: Austin Vance, Focused.io
I'm a big believer in the fundamental law of constraints, where a manufacturing process, any optimization before or after the most tight bottleneck is superficial. And optimization before the bottleneck will just pile product or resources up at the bottleneck.