Hammerstone - Bootstrapping a Software Company: Recent Episodes
Aaron Francis & Colleen Schnettler
HelloQuery: https://helloquery.com
Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
HelloQuery: https://helloquery.com
Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
HelloQuery: https://helloquery.com
Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
Colleen and Aaron are back from a hiatus.
Refine: https://hammerstone.dev/
Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
Colleen and Aaron talk through use cases for Refine that may actually get people excited.
Refine: https://hammerstone.dev/refine/laravel/docs/main
Torchlight: https://torchlight.dev
Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
Aaron and Colleen are both back from vacation with a lot of updates to share.
Refine: https://hammerstone.dev/refine/laravel/docs/main
Torchlight: https://torchlight.dev
Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
Aaron got stranded in Dallas thanks to two cancelled AA flights. We're sending outreach emails and doing a bunch of ancillary product work.
Refine: https://hammerstone.dev/refine/laravel/docs/main
Torchlight: https://torchlight.dev
Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
We're starting to have calls with customers!
Refine: https://hammerstone.dev/refine/laravel/docs/main
Torchlight: https://torchlight.dev
Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
Things are starting to look up!
Refine: https://hammerstone.dev/refine/laravel/docs/main
Torchlight: https://torchlight.dev
Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
We sent the Nova email! And it didn't go quite as planned.
Refine: https://hammerstone.dev/refine/laravel/docs/main
Refine Nova: https://github.com/hammerstonedev/refine-nova
Torchlight: https://torchlight.dev
Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
Tech time is over, it's time to business.
Refine: https://hammerstone.dev/refine/laravel/docs/main
Refine Nova: https://github.com/hammerstonedev/refine-nova
Torchlight: https://torchlight.dev
Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
The Nova landing page (with a buy now button!) is live.
Refine: https://hammerstone.dev/refine/laravel/docs/main
Refine Nova: https://github.com/hammerstonedev/refine-nova
Torchlight: https://torchlight.dev
Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
Some big changes happening at Hammerstone.
- Refine: https://hammerstone.dev/refine/laravel/docs/main
- Refine Nova: https://github.com/hammerstonedev/refine-nova
- Torchlight: https://torchlight.dev
- Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
- Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
Aaron got a new job! We're trying to figure out how to balance client work and product work.
- Refine: https://hammerstone.dev/refine/laravel/docs/main
- Refine Nova: https://github.com/hammerstonedev/refine-nova
- Torchlight: https://torchlight.dev
- Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
- Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
- Sean: https://twitter.com/sfioritto
- Tuple: https://tuple.app
We talk about the future of Rails and how it differs from Laravel. Aaron has been experimenting with Cloudflare, Edge Workers, and Fly.io.
- Refine: https://hammerstone.dev/refine/laravel/docs/main
- Refine Nova: https://github.com/hammerstonedev/refine-nova
- Torchlight: https://torchlight.dev
- Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
- Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
- Sean: https://twitter.com/sfioritto
Laracon is over, Colleen is speaking at a conference in March. We got paid!
- Refine: https://hammerstone.dev/refine/laravel/docs/main
- Refine Nova: https://github.com/hammerstonedev/refine-nova
- Torchlight: https://torchlight.dev
- Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
- Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
- Sean: https://twitter.com/sfioritto
In a long bonus episode, Matt Swanson (https://twitter.com/_swanson) joins Aaron to talk about Twitter.
- Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
- Matt: https://twitter.com/_swanson
- Boring Rails: https://boringrails.com/
- ShowCode: https://showcode.app
Aaron is practicing for Laracon, a lot.
- Laracon: https://laracon.net/
- Refine: https://hammerstone.dev/refine/laravel/docs/main
- Refine Nova: https://github.com/hammerstonedev/refine-nova
- Torchlight: https://torchlight.dev
- Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
- Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
- Sean: https://twitter.com/sfioritto
Our first Nova user has it installed and is trying it out. Aaron is prepping for Laracon and running out of steam.
- Refine: https://hammerstone.dev/refine/laravel/docs/main
- Refine Nova: https://github.com/hammerstonedev/refine-nova
- Torchlight: https://torchlight.dev
- Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
- Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
- Sean: https://twitter.com/sfioritto
We're wrangling multiple frontends all at once, trying to onboard Nova users, and Aaron did some fun MySQL stuff.
Matt Wensing (https://twitter.com/mattwensing) joins Aaron to talk about sacrificing time early on in hopes of having more freedom later.
Aaron and Colleen talk about the trough of despair and also numeric range optimizations, of course.
Back from Thanksgiving, we talk about finding an amazing React contractor, integrating the Vue and Laravel libraries, and more.Â
We talk about our coffee habits, new computers, renderless components, databases, and confidence.
Lots of exciting updates from Founder's Summit, and Aaron reports back on the first Laravel client.
Sean went pheasant "hunting", Aaron gave a live coding presentation, Colleen is building out nested filters
Sean is feeling the weight of his many jobs, Aaron tries to say "stabilizers" as much as possible in one episode, and we talk about new Torchlight clients.
We're kind of all over the place today! Sleep, foreign keys, CommandBar, Calvin & Hobbes somehow, Vue, and so on.
Command Bar - "CommandBar gives your users onboarding nudges, quick actions [...] in one personalized [...] widget."
Greg Skerman (https://twitter.com/GregSkerman) is the OG Sidecar user, and he stops by to teach Aaron a thing or two.
- Greg's Twitter: https://twitter.com/GregSkerman
- Greg's company: https://www.iseekplant.com.au
- That one LinkedIn article Greg wrote: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/always-deploying-greg-skerman/
- Laravel Brisbane: https://www.meetup.com/bne-laravel-meetup/
- Sidecar: https://github.com/hammerstonedev/sidecar
- InertiaJS
Colleen is a week into working with the client. Sean can't sleep, Aaron is having surgery. We talk about Refine + Laravel launch date, and Hammerstone acquiring a product!
Aaron can barely move, Colleen is working with billions of records. Sean is on vacation! Lucky Sean.
Refine is getting more and more Rails-y, Aaron talks about Torchlight and the Hammerstone thesis, and we debate the merits of the "launch immediately" trope.
So many updates! Aaron has twins now, which is a lot of babies. Sean talks about his job changes. We talk about Sidecar, Torchlight, the Laravel ecosystem, and much more.
Sean pitches Aaron on using YNAB for our business. We're making good progress in Rails and people want the Laravel version already.
Sean and Aaron attempt a "Sales Safari" for Torchlight.dev. It gets a little painful because there aren't many results, and Aaron kind of feels like giving up.Â
Sean has had an extremely busy week with work, other work, and house stuff. Aaron has torchlight.dev up and running and ready to start selling.
Aaron has a bunch of mystery pain, Sean has a fix that's kind of "out there". Aaron runs into the owner of hammerstone.com in a Twitter thread. Launching torchlight.dev.
Colleen and Sean have the Rails integration working, and Aaron talks about Laravel admin panels as a potential marketing channel.
Aaron has moved into the shedquarters, Sean can't sleep. We talk Airdrop, Full Stack Panic, and Refine refinements.
Aaron gets pushed out of his house for a week thanks to the freak storm. Sean makes some great progress on Hotwire.