Hiring Taylor Otwell to build HelpSpot & Laravel at the same time | Ian Landsman, HelpSpot Founder

In our very first episode, Matt had the pleasure of speaking with Ian Landsman, affectionately known as the 'Godfather of Laravel,' where they discussed his long history with Laravel and his business journey. Ian shared insights into his primary venture, UserScape, and its flagship product, HelpSpot, a help desk application he started 20 years ago. They also talked about taking a bet on Taylor and Laravel early on, bootstrapped startups, and more!
Matt Stauffer Twitter - / stauffermatt
Ian Landsman Twitter - / ianlandsman
Tighten Website - tighten.com/
HelpSpot - www.helpspot.com/
UserScape - userscape.com/
LaraJobs - larajobs.com/
The SaaS Playbook - saasplaybook.com/
The Startups For the Rest of Us Podcast (Rob Walling) - www.startupsfortherestofus.com/
Gail Goodman's Talk - businessofsoftware.org/talk/h...
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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten. tighten.com/

[@Masmikh]

This wast 🔥
I'll be there for all episodes 💪

love it!

[@cb73]

Great stuff. I have a slight disagreement that it’s wise for companies to support open source developers. Maybe in some cases and in particular it’s worked very well for Taylor and Laravel, but as a system rather than on a per case basis is not the right way to think about it. The reason is based on something you said that will be the clue. You said people say they don’t have time and you sort of casually threw in there “because of hobbies” as if that were some casual trivial reason. It’s not trivial. How a person chooses to use every moment of their time whether on raising a family or spending it on hobbies (or ranting in the TH-cam comments) is a reflection of their values. Anyone who says “I really value this open source thing I’m working on but I don’t have the time” is lying. Paying them to work on something they have shown isn’t highly valued is wasting time and money. It worked for Taylor because we know that if it weren’t for Ian (and he said this) he was absolutely driven to do it with it without Ian’s help. If you’re going to support developers in that way, do it not because they can’t do it without your help but because they are doing it with or without your help and it would be great to be a contributor on a journey they are already on.