Brian Casel: [00:00:00] Hey, it's Open Threads. I'm Brian Casel. It's my podcast. Welcome to it. Back on the show today is Joe Howard. He is the founder of Driftly. app. Before that, he ran and built a business called WP Buffs. In this conversation, we're not talking too much about work. We're talking about life, something I really wanted to get more into here on the Open Threads podcast.

In my previous conversation with Joe, he mentioned sort of offhand that he took about a year hiatus in between running and stepping away from WP Buffs before he got into Driftly. And just the word hiatus made my ears perk up because I can't even relate to what it must be like to take a hiatus. I wanted to ask him all about that.

But the other thing that I noticed is Joe is a dad, just like I am. He's got a young kid and a growing family. And so, you know, we spent a good time. Just chatting about what [00:01:00] it's like to be fathers in this life and career as an entrepreneur. You know, it's a fun mix, especially talking about traveling. And you know, both of us have been really into traveling with our kids, with our families.

I think it's interesting that we've both sort of had like travel kind of built into the identity of our families. So we talked a bit about that as well. Yeah, a lot of good stuff here. but for now, let's dad out with uh, Joe Howard. Here you go.

Hey Joe, good to have you back on the show here.

Joe Howard: Good to be back. Thanks for having me again. The first one was a good one. You thought it would be a good idea to bring me back for a little extra.

Brian Casel: Yes. I like to record these, batch them up and then get them into the queue here. But. You mentioned something at the beginning of our last conversation that I really want to dig into here.

You said that you took like a hiatus for like a year or two in between your previous business WP Buffs and before starting this new one, Driftly. I mean, I [00:02:00] always hear about other founders taking these hiatus. Like taking a long hiatus and it seems like so much fun and relaxing and rejuvenating. But then I'm thinking like, I could never do that.

I'm always working. And when we do a ton of vacations, we travel all the time. I've got kids and everything love to spend that time, but I'm still working on stuff. How do you do it? And what did you do?

Joe Howard: Yeah, it was probably like six to nine months of a hiatus of what I would think about it of. So I think that.

I always had in my mind that, I mean, the reason I like got into startups was like, I wanted control over my own time. Really? I never liked this idea of, okay, you have this job, you like work eight hours a day. Don't hold eight hours. Even if you like what you're doing, it's like controlled by someone else.

Someone is like, do these things during this job. And then you have your like two hours of commute. And it's like, you don't get to choose like someone saying like you have to be in this car. And then what, you have like three hours at night to like do dinner and maybe like two hours before your kid goes to sleep or something.

I always wanted more control over what I [00:03:00] was doing in terms of the time I have. I just want like control over like 24 hours a day, like that sounds amazing. And I think that WB Buffs eventually got to this point, like it was pretty successful company. It still is a pretty successful company. It actually more successful now with Nick having taken over in the last six months than it was with me as CEO.

But it got to that point where my strength is more in the early stages of startup and not as much as like, yeah, it was starting to feel like it was weighing on me a little bit and taking up time that I wanted back. And so I decided to take this time off because I. Wanted to get back to that full control over my time.

I'm not going to lie. It was actually scary. Actually, I think pretty similar to you. Like a lot of what you're saying resonates a lot with me. Cause a lot of my mindset was like, should I be working right now? Like, should I be doing something like what impact am I having right now? Should I be being more productive with my time?

And it was weird a little bit to honestly, like [00:04:00] force myself to enjoy that and be in that.

Brian Casel: There are times when I get burnt out and that's when we take a vacation and we do those several times a year. And I also do like founder retreats with other founder friends. And those are just as fun and energizing the issue that I have a lot.

I don't know if you relate to this is like, I enjoy working too much. I have too much fun working, especially designing and building software. There's obviously aspects of building a business that a grind, but I'm always hacking on something. I gotta be creating something and I'm into music and stuff too, but that's more of a hobby and I don't have the energy to like fully produce.

Music like I used to when I was younger. So I need these creative outlets. And for me, that's actually building software, which happens to be my work and my business. Do you ever run into that where it's like, I gotta be making something.

Joe Howard: Yeah. And what you're saying, I totally feel that because that was most of my journey with WP buffs.

I think I got to the point where I was just, I fell a little bit out of love with the role I was in and a little bit out of love with the WordPress community that I joined. [00:05:00] Eight, nine years ago. And it was just something different than it is today. And that's not at all meant to say the WordPress community isn't awesome.

It has a lot of great aspects. I still love to this day. I still love open source software. I'm still a big proponent that the more open source software there is online, the probably the better the web would be in general, but the, it was just time for me to make a change, I think. And SAS was always there in the back of my mind to try out doing something in this world.

I think I wanted like that shift of community. I want to talk about what I did, but I also wanted just to quickly mention. The idea of like taking six months off was always really appealing to me because last generations, they worked for 30 or 40 years and they took a retirement at the end. People have heard this before.

Like, that's just not, I'm not into that. I want to enjoy it right now. I want to enjoy part of that retirement right now. Like, why would I wait unless I really enjoyed working what I was doing? I'm like you, I would probably keep working if I was really enjoying it. And now I've refound that in Driftly, right?

So now I'm on this path again. I'm like, here we go. Forgot to shower today. I must really be liking what I'm working on. So I totally get that. Day to [00:06:00] day people ask me this all the time, because I like listening to these stars for the rest of us all the time. And so most people don't want to like hang out and just sit on a beach after they're done with a semi successful venture.

I'm at the beach right now. I've been at the beach for six months, so I do enjoy the beach. I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with that, but I filled up my day, did a lot of reading. I did a lot of listening to podcasts. I did a lot of cooking. I spent a lot of time, not just with my family, but like working on my.

Role in my family. So planning weekend trips for my son, like things to do on the weekends. It sounds like a little thing, but when you're working for 10 hours a day, you drive an hour home, you're tired. You wake up on a Saturday, you're like, what are we doing today? I wanna show him fun stuff. Some of that stuff that you want to do that's exciting or new or fun or whatever you want to do.

Like it doesn't just come into Always. Yeah, always it actually plan what you're gonna do. It does take a little bit of practice work. That's right. So I spending some more of my time on that. I read the whole [00:07:00] expanse novella. So like, I don't know if you're into sci fi, but there's like nine books and like seven mini stories.

And I read all those.

Brian Casel: Yeah. Someday when I take a hiatus, I'm going to go deep on sci fi.

Joe Howard: There you go. And I learned to cook a little bit more. Which was nice. I still do the weightlifting and I don't totally dislike the idea of like eating for fuel. I like the idea of like powering my body to be able to do certain athletic things, but it was also nice to be able to like dive a little bit more into that world, which before it was like.

I would do okay. I'd like put something in the slow cooker or put something in the pressure cooker or batch cook. And it was like, fine, but I think I'm looking, doing a little bit more recipe stuff, nothing fancy that takes all day, but I'll look up some recipes and have Sterling send me things and go to the grocery store or grow to the market and find fresh ingredients and try to make something that is a little bit more.

And it's something new that I haven't done as much in the past few years as I was just like. I was ordering lunch. I was like doing the meal delivery, like, I want to work. I'm working on WP buffs. Who knows what the future entails.

Brian Casel: Now that [00:08:00] you're working again on Driftly and taking this time off, what's new in your working routine now, like in terms of your lifestyle or time investment or schedule or anything like that?

Joe Howard: Everything's different this second time around. Yeah. Are you generally working less? Yeah, I'm working a lot less, Jacob and I had never met before we started this. So I could talk about co founder meet and actually starting the company thing. But one big thing that we talked a lot about was like how we wanted this company to run and we both wanted to run company.

Neither of us are super interested in like hiring a big team to do a lot of stuff. Like we want to stay small. And I was very much about that because I did the big team before, and it was great. Not to say it wasn't successful. It was successful. The team's happy. The business does well, but I lost my way a little bit.

I want to be the maker. I want to be involved in the day to day. And I want to grow something that scales without necessarily having to hire 50 people to run the day to day. So we had that in terms of wanting to stay a little smaller and Jacob has a full time job. So he works a few hours a day [00:09:00] on this.

And I work a few hours a day on this. It's actually been like a really easy transition of my day to day. Take Morrison to daycare. I go to the gym. I come home and eat. I work for a few hours. I'll watch some soccer in the afternoon. I go take Morrison to swimming and I come home like that's my day. We're both pretty part time on this.

Neither of us feels like we have pressure that we have to work and get VC funding and go to the moon or anything like that. We've made that agreement before we even started that like, Hey. If this takes a year to get 10, 000 MRR, that's cool. If it takes two years, that's also cool. Let's take our time and enjoy the process.

Brian Casel: We've got lives and that's just important. If not more, obviously more important.

Joe Howard: I'd also just add it easier. Jacob's a first time founder. So this is his first venture. It's definitely easier for me having pretty good financial security for my first business to not put any pressure on timing. That's the whole point is to be able to do what I want.

So maybe Jacob feels a little bit more. Push to be working on things, but we're both definitely on the same page that like, exactly, we want our work to fit around [00:10:00] our lives and not our lives to fit around our work.

Brian Casel: In the previous episode I had with Corey Haines recently, he is looking for a technical co founder.

I was talking about like how finding a co founder is so difficult, not just to find like the skillset match, but like the career. Stage match and being able to self fund. And it sounds like, especially both being in alignment on like the calm approach to building a business that really helps a lot. Yeah.

I wanted to ask you about, uh, I wanted to ask you about kids. I've got two girls over here. What do you got over there?

Joe Howard: 10 hour episode. Let's go.

Brian Casel: I know because actually before this, I was just checking out your Twitter to see what you're up to lately and something new. I just saw this paternal dot life. I don't know if you actually wanted to like promote this or not, but like,

Joe Howard: Sure.

I don't go on podcasts to promote things, but if someone hears something that they like and they want to go sign up, like it's just, it's not really a business. It's just a side project.

Brian Casel: Yeah. But that's what I want to hear about. I mean, tell me about your kids.

Joe Howard: So yeah, I've got one little one for the time being.

Morrison is two and a half. Now the twos are [00:11:00] wild stage, man. I'm sure that you either know or you remember, but yeah, he's like super. He's learning to swim. He's loving dinosaurs. Like dino ranch is his jam. If you're not a parent, you have no idea what I'm talking about. You know, there's like the 10 shows that are like pretty popular on.

Brian Casel: Yeah. It's like now we're talking to all the parents who are still tuned in. Everyone else left.

Joe Howard: Yes. Everyone else has gone, but yeah. Coming home. He's like dino ranch. Let's go. He's like, he's eating the world these days. He's. I don't know. Constant growth spurt, it feels like. His moms and his dad are both pretty tall, so he's a growing boy, but very active.

He's like at the talking stage. Everyone is gonna develop a different stage, right? Every kid. At two, he was starting to like chatter. And now he's pronouncing things correctly. Like full sentences.

Brian Casel: I remember there's a phase in the twos where they start to verbalize. There's a good like six months there where only the parents can understand what they're actually saying.

Joe Howard: Oh my God, it's so funny. Before I was a parent, I was like, that's such bullshit. You don't know what they're saying. Like, come on, it's just God I'm every like six months before [00:12:00] everyone else can. We're saying That's right. 'cause you hear it all the time. You hear these repeated words. That's funny. 'cause my wife and I were both, there are a couple things that he says.

We're like, what are you talking Like, what is that? I can't even remember what they're right now. He'd have to say it.

Brian Casel: You know we have, so my girls are six and eight. I don't know if you have this feature on, I don't know if you use an iPhone. On iPhone fairly recently, you can put a photos widget on your home screen.

It'll randomly pull photos from your library. Right. I literally think it's my favorite feature of the iPhone hands down. So they added this like widgets feature on iOS.

Joe Howard: Yeah. Is it like these widget things? Yeah. Yeah. So see that there's like a family thing there. Yeah.

Brian Casel: Yeah, so basically, on the first screen of my iPhone, every single day I have a random photo pulled from my history from the phone, and my wife has the same thing.

And it's just constantly resurfacing memories. And of course, 95 percent of my photos are of my kids, right?

Joe Howard: This is the adjustment that happens to the camera, or the photos, in someone. They go to 95 percent of the kids, and like, where are the photos of me? I have no photos of myself.

Brian Casel: Because I'm not a person who just Naturally goes through my old [00:13:00] photos.

It's like not something I do, but when the iPhone surfaces it to me every single day, it's a way for me to like, jump back a few years ago to see it is such a trip now to see my kids when they were two, now that they're six and eight or two or three years old. And we have videos of them back then and stuff.

And it's like. Oh my God, they sounded totally different. And it's starting to feel like, man, I don't know if I remember when they actually looked and sounded like that. Oh man.

Joe Howard: It's so weird. Do they like look familiar? Like I know they're the same person, but they've grown into bigger versions of their baby.

Brian Casel: It's not so distant and so many amazing memories, but it's like the evolution and the changes that you see when you get a few years out, it becomes so much more drastic.

Joe Howard: I feel like it's drastic now. I look at baby photos. I'm like, bro, how are you five pounds when you were born? Like you are 35 pounds of like boy now, like this is crazy.

So you guys have the one. Yeah. The one. So life journey as of plan for right now, we're moving back to DC in a couple of weeks. We've been traveling for the past couple of years and now ready to settle back. DC is home. My parents are there. [00:14:00] My sister's there. Cousin, her two kids. So that's where the family we want to be close to is.

So headed back there and yeah, that's what will be for the foreseeable future. If you check in and me in a year, a year and a half, the number of kids may have changed or still figuring that out, but that's a TBD. I hear that. Yeah.

Brian Casel: And you have just the two. Two and they're two years apart, which I really like some, my brother and I are two years apart and I'm two years older than him.

And I really liked that separation pretty close in age because. We could play sports together. We could have a lot of the same friends and stuff like that. That was really valuable.

Joe Howard: I find it so funny that your brother, two years apart. So your kids are two years apart because if our plan comes to fruition, it'll be about three or three and a half years. And I'm three years older than my sister. And Sterling is three years younger than her sister. I don't know, like how much you went for that to happen, but it seems like there's this like leaning towards like how we grew up.

And so we're like, of course, like I want my kids to grow up that way. It's so funny.

Brian Casel: For us, it was pretty intentional. I would say I knew we didn't want to [00:15:00] only have one. We briefly talked about three, but we're good with

Joe Howard: two. I think that conversation probably happens somewhat frequently. Yeah.

Brian Casel: But for me being pretty close to my brother two years apart, I mean, we were like the best man at each other's weddings, especially as we got older, like high school, college.

Being able to have like shared groups of friends and stuff. That was really valuable because I have no people who have siblings five, six, seven years apart. And it's like completely different lives.

Joe Howard: Totally different. Even like three and a half is slightly different. Like my sister and I did not have like shared groups of friends.

Like I was a senior when she was a freshman. And so it was like, this could have different lives. And I was in high school and she was in middle school. So it's just like the two years apart is definitely, you're at similar enough stage, I think, to be able to like live similar lives. And when you're farther apart, it's a little bit harder, which may have its pros as well, right?

Like maybe, I'm sure there were times growing up where you were like, I wish I had my own life. Like brother's always getting my business, you know, everything has its sides.

Brian Casel: [00:16:00] Yeah. How about traveling with the kiddo? Sounds like he must be. On board with all the traveling you guys have done,

Joe Howard: Whether he's on board or not.

Yeah. Yeah. It's been really great, actually. I think probably a lot of people are nervous to travel with a kid that young, especially today when he's not vaccinated yet and there's still risk of COVID. What we did was we traveled places and stayed for Long periods of time. So we weren't on like a flight every week.

We weren't going backpacking through Southeast Asia. You know, we were going to places with good healthcare, with good internet access and staying there for enough time to like get a home base there. So we could get a little help with childcare so that we could. Form our lives in the safest way as possible.

Obviously, like in Mexico, we were flying down to Mexico. So mask up distance in the airport, trying to go in family bathrooms where there weren't like a million toilets flushing. It's like these things that you can do to minimize your risk. And then once we got there, honestly, like living our lives as same, we did in DC and being as safe as possible.

We're not going to any big raves or concerts or [00:17:00] anything. So safe for there.

Brian Casel: Nice that you guys missed the schooling with COVID.

Joe Howard: Yeah, that was a big challenge in DC in the past, as it is in a lot of cities, but I think it's starting to figure itself out. Not as many cancellations these days. We're in Florida now, so no cancellations for anything.

But the age of traveling was really good. When he is one, he goes wherever you want. And even more than that. Nature versus nurture. Like who knows, maybe he was just born this way. But I think that having traveled a lot, having met a lot of new people, spend time with a lot of different kinds of people has grown up with Spanish and English, like grew up sleeping in different places often.

There's something to be said for consistency and that has its pluses, but he's a pretty resilient kid. He will go to a new place and he'll sleep in a new room and we just talk to him and explain it to him and he's fine. So

Brian Casel: Totally, man. I mean, we've traveled a ton with our kids. They've been to the Philippines with us.

My wife has family in the Philippines. Whoa, far trip.

I've been there twice and once with kids. And when we went last time, they were like one in [00:18:00] three on like a 20 hour flight.

Joe Howard: That's brave.

Brian Casel: We did like a month out there, but we've also done like, so early on before my second was born, the first one was like, she was like a year and a half.

We were pregnant with the second one. We did the round the country, like living in Airbnbs for about seven months. And ever since then, I think that solidified travel as like a family identity thing for us. And ever since then, we're doing tons of trips throughout the year and we try to travel. And so you're right, I think ever since then, my kids get super excited about like going to a hotel or an Airbnb.

We want to go like Explore like a beat or an area or something. They're like, we just want to jump on the bed. So we're cool.

Joe Howard: I love travel. I've always been a big traveler. My wife's always been a big traveler. So it's matched our identity. And I love to hear that. It's feels like it's become part of your family identity.

Cause that's

Brian Casel: super psyched about it. Like even like long road trips, like they're all up for it.

Joe Howard: I think the travel I've been thinking about this a lot recently, because I think that my wife, she's like a [00:19:00] fifth or sixth generation Texan. So her family is. They're not just, we live in Texas, they're like Texas forever.

And she easily been part of all that, but she traveled a lot growing up and she found her own path in life. And that led her to like super liberal DC and like led her to me. And like, these are things that I think probably without travel may not have happened. And as someone who's loved travel for his whole life, I know that it helps me enormously to like.

Not only empathize with different kinds of people, but just like learn about like what the world is really like, not through like Fox news. So it's like, there's a lot of different kinds of people out there and a lot of different, not just people, but like places there's desert and there's mountain and there's beach and there's lake and there's all these different languages.

And like to show kids that early is to me, that's like one of the most valuable. Parts of education, math school, like history is cool, but like travel and like sociology and all this stuff, that's what I [00:20:00] think can really open eyes.

Brian Casel: I mean, just that they get to see so much more of the world at such a younger age than I was, we've taken on like a train trip through Europe and we've gone to the Philippines and all over the country with them.

And we're going to do another like long road trip this summer across the country. And I think it's a lot easier now to travel. Like the tools for traveling are so much easier. Right? Like we used to bring out like paper maps back in the day and now we've got iPhones and navigation and stuff like that.

And

Joe Howard: Airbnb to find a place. Yeah. So I've, we've loved travel. It's been great.

Brian Casel: Yeah. Cool, man. It was great to catch up with you. Let's do it again sometime. It's always cool to like connect with other dad founders who are doing this thing, like especially running like the lifestyle calm business thing. I think that's what a lot of us are in it for.

So.

Joe Howard: And if people are the end of this episode and like, you're a dad listening to this, maybe you're like a dad and, or like a remote worker or like a SaaS person, Brian or I, but we talked about this a little bit, but if you go to paternal. life, I set up this discord channel or discord server for dads, and [00:21:00] it's just like 10 of us in there right now.

It's just a fun thing. And I, you know, I set up the website a couple of days ago, so, but we get to. Hang out there and talk shit about our kids. No, I'm just kidding. We get to try to be better dads and husbands. And it's just, there's so many mom groups out there. Those are easy to find. And I always have questions and I'm not going to like post on Facebook.

I'm like, no thanks for me. But I like want a place to like talk to other dads, ask them about, Hey, how are you finding, how are you selecting preschool daycare for your kids? My kid's crying every morning. I posted that in there and got some really good feedback.

Brian Casel: I don't know what's in there. Maybe I'll try to get in there, but it's also cool to connect with other dads who are entrepreneurs and doing this work remotely lifestyle.

I have so many great friends that I've grown up with, but they're just in jobs, right? They're not really doing what we do. And it's a different lifestyle.

Joe Howard: I thought about making it for remote, like dads. But I wanted to invite all my dad friends in there and some of them are not.

Brian Casel: Yeah. And that's cool too.

Joe Howard: It's kind of a place for all my friends who are dads to hang out. There can be a little bit of a disconnect between [00:22:00] like when you're a parent and when you're not a parent in terms of like friendships.

Brian Casel: So that helps.

Joe Howard: Totally. It's like, well, are you a dad? Then you're a remote dad. Congratulations. Come on in.

Brian Casel: All right, Joe. Yeah, this was fun.

Joe Howard: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Brian. Appreciate it.

Brian Casel: All