Heroku, We're Gonna Miss You

Joe's Ruby Native launch video is stuck in Remotion hell

Claude + Remotion produced something mediocre after many rounds. Colleen's verdict: commit to becoming a video creator, or pay a pro. Joe admits he has a mental block around spending business money, even though he sells consulting for a living.

Joe migrated 7 apps to Hatchbox over the weekend

Off Heroku, Render, and Fly onto a single $25 Hetzner box + $10 Hatchbox to save ~$1,500-2,000/year. Postgres → SQLite, Solid Queue, nightly S3 backups. Heroku's still the gold standard, Fly's dashboard is unusable, and every "Heroku but better" startup ends up being Hatchbox. The dream of building their own PaaS is officially dead (again).

Colleen got her first cold-ish inbound for AI consulting

But the asks are vague: "I feel like I should use AI." Clients treat it like a magic lead-gen machine. Her fix: send tiered proposals ($5k / $20k / $50k) so the client picks their own budget and scope creep gets a natural guardrail.

Breaking into non-tech industries (insurance, mortgage brokers)

Huge opportunity, but enterprise procurement kills independent pitches. Joe floats: pitch a 6-month W2 embed to learn the institutional knowledge and build the system from the inside. Case study gold.

LinkedIn 30-day challenge

Colleen posted 7 days straight, impressions up 400%. LinkedIn's feedback cycle is weird and slow (posts resurface for two weeks), but it's clearly shaping social proof on discovery calls. X has plateaued, Substack feels like "X with a smaller audience." Joe commits to daily LinkedIn starting April 3.

Chapters

• 00:00 Challenges of Video Creation
• 07:58 Migration to Hatchbox and PaaS Limitations
• 36:15 Social Media Engagement Strategies