Slow & Steady: Recent Episodes

Brian Rhea, Benedikt Deicke, and Benedicte Raae

Join us as we share what it's like to build and launch a bootstrapped startup while working for yourself full-time. Benedikt is working on Userlist with two other co-founders, Brian is running solo, and Benedicte is establishing herself as a Gatsby expert while spinning up POW! on the side.

Benedikt comes back from summer vacation. Benedicte grapples with Gatsby and Jamstack “dying”.

End of summer, end of Gatsby?
Jamstack is Dead…Or Is It?

Coming back from his three-week vacation, Benedikt is feeling relaxed and recharged. On his first few days back, he was able to work on the proper solution for their issue with large broadcasts.

With the recent changes at Netlify, the dev community is wondering if Gatsby and Jamstack are indeed dead. Benedicte's recent challenges with support has given her a new product idea: a no-code authentication for no-coders. She also shares another project idea that could let people create a “mixtape” of podcast episodes.

Benedikt and Benedicte also talk about the tasks we offload to our smartphones, how to get into the flow zone, and more.

Benedicte talks to Geoff about the marketing experiments they’re doing this fall.

Outseta
Follow Geoff on Twitter
Watch the productive morning routine video
Tailwind fake businesses

Now that the business is a bit more stable, Geoff’s putting his focus back on marketing. He shares the three marketing experiments they’ll be doing later this year: “cleaning out the gutters”, working with creators, and building their content factory.

Benedicte and Geoff also talk about SEO, content products, and more.

Benedicte and Benedikt take on the challenge of #SummerofUITweaks for their products.

Let us know if you’re joining the #SummerofUITweaks on this thread

Currently enjoying the last weeks of the European summer, Benedicte is loving the “chilling but still getting work done” vibe. Aside from implementing UI tweaks, they’ve also been working on the WeWeb and Supabase integrations at Outseta.

Meanwhile, Benedikt and the Userlist team encountered a bug that caused a broadcast to be sent twice to its recipients. They’ve also updated their frontend dependencies, got a new UI component for their new data structure, and more.

Benedikt talks to Andrew Atkinson about different types of database constraints and his upcoming book.

Read the tweet that triggered this interview
Learn more about High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails
Check out Andrew’s blog
Follow Andrew on Twitter

Andrew Atkinson is a staff software engineer at Fountain who is very passionate about Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL (just like Benedikt!). He’s so passionate about them that he’s actually writing a book called “High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails” that’s coming out very soon.

Benedikt and Andrew also talk about dealing with constraints and ActiveRecord, Rails validations, and more.

Benedicte thinks about the best way to update docs. Benedikt gets excited about their product development.

Get a sneak peek of Benedicte’s second floor

Benedicte thinks about the best way to update Outseta docs without creating a big bang project. She’s also working on a pitch for version 2.0 of Prune Your Follows.

While Michael and Jane were away, Benedikt handled customer support, giving him a new appreciation on that aspect of the business. On the product development front, the team is making great progress — phase one of the trigger refactoring is finished, they shipped an improved Webhook integration, and their visual automation builder prototype is working nicely.

Benedicte and Benedikt also talk about archiving, note-taking apps, and more.

Benedikt shares a major life update. Benedicte gets things wrapped up before vacation.

Things were slow for Benedikt last week in preparation for his big day. Despite the slower pace of things, the Userlist team accomplished a few things: they worked on their message rendering refactoring, and made progress on their trigger unification.

Feeling a bit frazzled, Benedicte wraps things up before they go on their summer vacation. She also enjoyed her time at the recent React Norway and felt very powerful (and old) when she helped someone out at her bank job.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about pull requests vs. merge requests, going down rabbit holes, and more.

Benedikt and Benedicte have finally met in person in Athens.

Benedikt had a great time at the recent Rails SaaS conference where he was able to meet up with his Userlist co-founder Jane, and Benedicte. Now back in Germany and fully recovered, he’s catching up with his work at Userlist.

The past few weeks have been filled with travels for Benedicte: painting their cabin in Sweden, meeting up with the Outseta founders in Athens, and going on the Slow Business Adventure gathering the west coast.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about the weather in Northern Europe, documentation, AI, and more.

Benedicte and Benedikt return to the daily grind after enjoying the conference season.

Here’s why we had to push back the recording time of this week’s episode
Getting Things Done – a book by David Allen
Listen to Benedikt’s conversation with Brian Casel about shipping speed
Prune Your Follows

After not being able to attend for the past years, Benedikt enjoyed himself at MicroConf Europe: nice weather, meeting their customer support advocate in person, and all the social events between the talks. Now back to work after his week-long birthday leave, Benedikt’s trying to figure out how to be smarter with his to-do list.

Benedicte’s back to the daily grind after her short conference season in November. Aside from working on the readme files for their Cloudinary plugins, they’re also doing more work on Prune Your Follows as they prepare for their upcoming Product Hunt launch this December.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Ivar Østhus of Unleash chats with Benedict about feature flagging, how they enable collaboration in teams, how they turned their side gig into a full time business, and more.

Unleash
Follow Unleash on Twitter
Follow Ivar on Twitter and LinkedIn

What started as a side gig in a basement in Norway, Ivar and his brother turned their SaaS into a full time business in early 2021. Their tool allows teams to build features together, ship new features in small increments, and enables transparency within teams and stakeholders.

Ivar and Benedicte talk about his journey to commercial exploration, how they talked to over a hundred customers, how they protect their users’ data privacy, and more.

Benedicte enjoys a fun week at Jamstack Conf. Benedikt wraps things up at work before next week’s MicroConf Europe.

Despite feeling tired after Jamstack Conf, Benedicte enjoyed a great week in San Francisco that was filled with partying and talking. She also had a nice chat with an encryption backend that might lead to a deal for POW! that’s similar to Prune your Follows.

After finishing the final touches on the message composer, the Userlist team is now rolling it out for everyone. Benedikt’s also wrapping up the work on the message topics feature before heading out to MicroConf Europe next week.

After running into a problem with her domain, Benedicte and Benedikt talk about how to protect your email address and domain.

Prune Your Follows
BDTP S6E1: Email Deliverability with Lauren Meyer
Read more about SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
Postmark’s DMARC Reports Tool

Despite experiencing a “fail week” with technology, Benedicte celebrates a few wins with her projects such as getting Prune Your Follows ready for beta along with this week’s Xata launch and slowly converting her site to Tailwind.

Benedikt and the Userlist team managed to build and ship their most requested Message Topics feature in a span of a week. And after weeks of frustration with his internet connection, things are looking promising as Benedikt decides to switch providers.

Geoff Roberts of Outseta chats with Benedikt and Benedicte about Outseta, their uncommon operating and compensation model, and more.

Outseta
Justin Welsh
SDR Nation
Follow Geoff on Twitter

While there are a lot of best in class tools out there, more often than not, early stage businesses only need basic functionalities to get things done.

Coming from the same experience, Geoff and Dimitris used it to build Outseta, an all-in-one tech stack (that includes payments, authentications, CRM, and email) for SaaS and membership style businesses. Their tool helps founders focus more of their time on building the product instead of spending time integrating several different tools before launching their business.

Geoff, Benedicte, and Benedikt talk about how they attracted both the technical and non-technical audience, how he juggles work and dad duties, and more!

Benedicte lands the deal for Prune Your Follows. Benedikt deals with the slow speed of moving their rendered emails.

Should Benedicte get the black or steel refrigerator?
Backblaze
Xata
Geoff Roberts of Outseta

Benedicte successfully lands the deal to rebuild Prune Your Follows with Xata, NextAuth, and Gatsby. With everything she has to get done before flying out to San Francisco, she’s looking forward to doing a good crunch time to fight the insecurities away.

Benedikt is feeling a bit frustrated with the slow speed of moving rendered emails from their database to Amazon S3. And with the major chunk of work out of the way, Benedikt and Leo were able to do a lot of cleanup on their message composer code.

Benedikt focuses on solving other issues on Userlist. Benedicte makes the most out of her vacation in Germany.

Conference Buddy
Geoff Roberts of Outseta

With the message composer now deployed to production, Benedikt and the Userlist team can now focus on adding more niceties and fixing other issues on the platform.

Despite being unable to meet up with Benedikt last week, Benedicte had a nice and productive vacation in Germany. She was able to catch up with Mirjam Aulbach of Conference Buddy for brunch and send her proposal on the Sample App + Content Combo. As for Cloudinary related things, Ola’s doing a great job on the readme by bringing joy into it with emojis.

Benedicte pitches her latest side project to a database startup. Benedikt gets an interesting question from his mentee.

Read Benedikt and Jesse’s back and forth about shipping updates
Prune Your Follows
Campfire Labs – a content company
Traction – a book by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
First Ruby Friend
Senior Engineer Mindset – a book by Swizec Teller

Benedikt and the Userlist team are putting the finishing touches on their message composer, which will be deployed to projection very soon. He also met with his First Ruby Friend mentee this week and got an interesting question: how do you become a senior developer?

Benedicte just pitched her latest side project, Prune Your Follows, to a database startup and will be having a meeting with them later this week. This new opportunity has gotten her excited about the prospect of turning future side projects as viable lines of business.

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

Benedicte and Benedikt share tips on how to make the most out of conferences and more.

Retweet Colby Fayock’s testimonial about Gatsby
Retweet Brian Lovin’s testimonial about Userlist
Priya Parker’s “The Art of Gathering”

Benedicte is filled with happy hormones this week because of dancing, more work from Cloudinary, and a wonderful testimonial from a customer on Twitter. She’s working on her preparations for upcoming conference talks and has also received a call for proposals for another one next year.

Benedikt and the Userlist team also received praise on Twitter from a customer with a large following. The team’s also focused on finishing the editor integration work this month. And after skipping the MicroConf for the past two years, Benedikt will be attending this year’s MicroConf Europe along with their customer advocate, Katarina.

Benedicte and Benedikt share their go-to conference tips so you can build new relationships during the event and more.

Coming back from a two-week break here at the podcast, Benedikt and Benedicte talk about the progress they’re making and a few existential questions about shipping updates.

Jamstack Conf 2022
Modern FrontEnds Live!
Prune Your Follows

With the summer over, everyone’s in “back to work” mode and the pace is picking up.

Benedikt is revitalized after his three-week vacation. The Userlist team is making great progress with the message editor. On the frontend, they’re currently polishing the UI and fixing small annoyances with the copy-paste function to make it easier for users. On the backend side of things, Benedikt is working on setting up the validation process for the new document schema and is tackling issues related to their original renderer.

Benedicte is gearing up for her upcoming Gatsby talks this November to hit three birds with one stone: two conferences and a video course. Work-wise, she’s still figuring out the right mix of Gatsby products and services. And while it didn’t win the Hackathon, she’s refactored Prune Your Follows to use NextAuth.

Benedikt and Benedicte also discuss a few existential questions about shipping updates like: how long should stuff take? What is good enough? How do you balance quality and speed?

Benedicte chats with Feather.so founder Bhanu Teja P to talk about his Notion to blog platform and the importance of marketing your product.

Feather.so
Follow Bhanu on Twitter
Vercel charged Bhanu ~$1.8k for hosting MDX.One

After quitting his job as a software engineer, Bhanu started blogging. He enjoyed creating content but the process was time consuming: after writing on Notion, he still had to convert it to Markdown, and then transfer it to the blogging platform.

He then thought about developing a tool that would make things easier for Notion users.

A rebrand of a previous product, Feather.so is a blogging platform that enables Notion users to write and publish their content without having to go through the tedious conversion and copy-pasting process.

Bhanu and Benedicte talk about his other Notion-based tools, why marketing your product is as important as building it, and more!

Benedikt and Benedicte are both celebrating very productive weeks as they see all their efforts come together in their respective projects.

Jamstack Conf 2022
Bhanu Teja P of Feather.so

Benedikt and the team had a pretty successful week in terms of stuff shipped: they finished the frontend query builder improvements, implemented an Amplitude cohort sync integration, and added a server-side rendering for their new message “document schema”. They also plan to work on a bug in their old editor that’s causing problems with their users’ inline image data.

Benedicte’s also on a roll: they had a great meeting with Cloudinary last week, talking to Newline for producing courses, and is currently getting ready for her talks at Modern FrontEnds Live! and at Jamstack Conf 2022. She’s also working on a fun side project to clean up her Twitter following.

Benedicte and Benedikt talk about the updates from the week and why it's in fact good idea to write down your passwords.

The ONE Thing by Gery Keller
Episode with Pierre from ScrapingBee
1Password's password recovery process for teams and families
Password managers don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than not having one

In the last week, Benedikt finally got some work done on the user interface of Userlist's condition builder. This was only possible by ignoring a lot of other things. However, he feels like the effort will pay off in the future by getting the fundamentals right.

Benedicte's focus is on cultivating good habits by keeping up the yoga schedule, being more mindful about preparing food, and enjoying time outside in the sun. She's also preparing to launch the Queen Rae live streams again, starting August 25th, and is looking for guests that have interesting Gatsby projects.

A recent support issue on POW! triggers a discussion about best practices around password management and how some of the advice we all learned in the past might not be the best anymore.

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results

With the summer almost over, Benedicte is excited to get back on the grind. Benedikt deals with the heat wave and the load of small things at work.

Modern FrontEnds Live!
The tweet that got Benedicte the invitation to do an interview with Will Sentance
The Culture Map by Erin Meyer

Both Benedicte and Benedikt have felt the unusual temperatures brought by the heat wave.

Aside from his struggles with the current weather in Germany, Benedikt is feeling a bit unfocused because of the load of small things that need his attention at work. He’s also looking into other hosting solutions for Userlist for future reference. Benedikt and Leo are at 90% with the WYSIWYG editor but progress seems kind of slow lately.

Coming home from their long summer vacation, Benedicte is still enjoying the remaining downtime left before school starts but is also excited to get work done soon. She’s back on the 30-day yoga challenge, has a couple of conference talks lined up, and is working on their streamlined offer for ongoing maintenance and support for Gatsby plugins. And in an unexpected turn of events, she got an invite to do an interview with Codesmith’s Will Sentance.

UX designer Nathan Powell joins Benedicte and Benedikt to talk about his latest projects, some practical UX tips, and the struggles with onboarding.

Nathan’s first SaaS product, Nusii
Laura Dunn
Nathan’s UX course for developers, Develop Your UX
Nathan’s latest SaaS project, Feature Flux
Check out Nathan’s website
Follow Nathan on Twitter
Subscribe to Nathan’s YouTube channel

Nathan Powell, formerly of Nusii, created the business proposal software back in 2013 as a solution to his own pain points as a freelance UX designer. But in 2019, he decided to move on from it and sold everything to his co-founder.

Nathan is now making a comeback in the SaaS game with a new UX course, an upcoming book, and Feature Flux. With his new SaaS project, he hopes to make collaboration and revisions easier for UX designers and development teams.

Nathan, Benedicte, and Benedikt talk about the biggest UX mistakes SaaS companies are making, their struggles with onboarding and more!

Benedicte is enjoying the slow summer rhythm. Benedikt and the team are feeling good about the new pricing.

Modern FrontEnds Live!
Nathan Powell of Feature Flux

Benedicte is enjoying the summer with her family but to her surprise, there was way less recreational coding than she expected (which is a good thing). Despite the slow summer rhythm, Benedicte was still able to get meaningful work done: Cloudinary beta is now ready for testing, her workshop got accepted to the upcoming Modern FrontEnds Live! in London this November, and is in preliminary talks with a potential collaborator for POW!.

Benedikt is still figuring out how to work with the complexity of the Stripe integration while Leo is making great progress with the editor. The Userlist team is feeling good about the new pricing and is thinking about adding a new plan very soon.

Benedikt fights against spam sign-ups. Benedicte contemplates the next steps for POW! in light of the recent overturn in the U.S.

Benedicte’s app, POW!
Benedicte’s talk at React Norway

Both feeling under the weather lately, things have been a little crazy for both Benedikt and Benedicte.

Benedikt’s plan to work on the Stripe integration got derailed because of relentless spam sign-ups on Userlist. The team has put in a Slack integration to detect spammers early. Benedikt is thinking of adding another layer of protection with a scoring mechanism that can filter out potential spammers based on their email domain. On the plus side, Leo is making great progress with the WYSIWYG editor.

Benedicte ended last week with a happy bubble at React Norway. Ironically, someone told her that the recent overturn in the U.S. happened while she was talking on stage about reproductive rights and privacy. The recent happening has got Benedicte thinking about the next steps for POW!.

Michael Christofides of pgMustard chats with Benedikt and Benedicte about pgMustard, PostgreSQL, and doing marketing for SaaS.

pgMustard
PostgreSQL
Talk Python to Me Episode #366
Follow Michael on Twitter

While a relatively older database system, many companies still use PostgreSQL for its reliability and flexibility. However, many users find it difficult to figure out the problem when their database slows down.

Seeing this as a great pain point for their customers, Michael pitched an idea for a tool at his old workplace but unfortunately got rejected. He held on to this tool idea and launched pgMustard in April 2019.

pgMustard helps speed up slow database queries for PostgreSQL. But unlike other tools in the space, pgMustard pinpoints users to the source of the problem and even gives suggestions on how to move forward with it.

Michael, Benedicte, and Benedikt talk about gardening, Supabase, working at Userlist, SEO, and more!

Benedikt finally launches the new pricing. Benedicte talks about their ideas for the next season of the stream.

Michael from pgMustard

Benedicte had another "boring week" job-wise: regular work, emails, and the stream. On the marketing sales front, she started to follow some of the bigger plugins on GitHub to see what issues will arise. And with the final stream of the season this week, Benedicte shares that they are already thinking of new ideas to try out for the next season.

Benedikt just launched the new pricing for Userlist and is a bit anxious about how it will turn out. The team also made great progress on their WYSIWYG editor. While building a good user experience is always a fun and exciting challenge for Benedikt, he shares that he needs to focus on backend work more.

Benedicte is feeling calm after an ordinary week. She is getting ready for summer and, beyond the routine activities, she has figured out solutions for the Cloudinary plugins. Now that the "fun" part is over, she will implement the solutions over the next two weeks. Oslo has been warm and Benedicte is taking full advantage. Her talk is approaching in late June and she is prepared to be... unprepared and stressed.

Benedikt has enjoyed good weather as well and planned some local sightseeing recently. The new pricing at Userlist is close, but it is tricky. The team is having difficulty getting the proration the way they want it. After diving into the Stripe Apps, Benedikt is also finding that effort more complex than expected. To kick off yet another, large, infrastructure-like project, Benedikt and Leo meet and start researching on a new WYSIWYG editor.

Benedicte and Ola win the Gatsby gig! Benedikt spies a new opportunity.

Cloudinary
Structured Content
Gather's Escape The Island
Introducing Stripe Apps

Benedicte and Ola hear back on their proposal — they'll be working with Cloudinary on their existing plugins! Benedicte is already digging through the code to tackle any bugs before summer starts. Speaking of Gatsby, she takes a moment to rant about community-based support. POW! picks up a few new customers despite Benedicte not focusing on that in the short term and Structure Content came to Oslo.

Benedikt celebrates as Userlist passes a $15k MRR milestone following a few preceding months of slower growth. The new pricing feature is coming along nicely and he's looking forward to the rollout. Benedikt is also excited about Stripe releasing their new Stripe Apps, a new way to build Stripe integrations. There aren't many companies in the new app marketplace, so it presents an exciting opportunity for Userlist. He would have to learn some React though...

Pierre de Wulf chats with Benedikt and Benedicte about ScrapingBee, PricingBot, growing with a small team, and leveraging communities.

Scrapingbee.com
Microsoft Clarity
Nathan Barry on compensation at ConvertKit
TinySeed
Follow Pierre on Twitter
The ScrapingBee Blog

It wasn't the best of times, but it wasn't the worst of times. Pierre, co-founder of ScrapingBee, was excited to come record and get some relief from debugging an infrastructure issue. Debugging can be challenging work but it comes with the territory of owning a SaaS — customers don't want to do this, so they will pay for it!

ScrapingBee is growing quite nicely thanks in part to a solid product with a good fit and a tightknit team. After first working on PricingBot, a price-monitoring service for e-commerce, Pierre and his co-founder pivoted as their runway was dwindling. They created a web scraping API very quickly with ScrapingBee, secured a spot in TinySeed during the pandemic, and passed the $1M ARR threshold with a fully remote team last year.

Pierre, Benedicte, and Benedikt discuss the impact of community involvement, support, acquisition, SEO, and more!

We're back! Benedicte waits to hear back on a Gatsby proposal. Benedikt returns from vacation.

Norway's Constitution Day

Benedicte sent out a proposal for more project-based Gatsby work and is anxious to hear back. She made progress on her article for Smashing Magazine as well and is looking forward to feedback on the draft. She is finding it difficult to narrow down exactly what level of expertise the audience will have and knows that meeting her audience at their technical level will be critical when writing her book. Reluctantly, Benedicte places POW! on the back burner, at least for a few months. Leaning into the Gatsby work feels more important. Norway just celebrated Constitution Day, so Oslo was a party! Endless ice cream included.

Benedikt took a vacation last week. While the computer came with him, he didn't do anything more than a few notification checks — no fires to put out! Userlist finally, officially launched the new signup flow and they haven't seen any errors in the rollout. They are also getting closer to launching the new pricing plan as well, something that will likely be wrapped up by the end of the quarter. Benedikt might have some bandwidth to work on the Stripe integration, but it's unclear how much work remains there. Finally, Userlist grows again as the new community advocate just came aboard!

Benedicte is anxious about an inbound lead for new Gatsby work. Benedikt is almost done with the new signup flow implementation.

Userlist — Now Hiring: Community Advocate
Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick
Web Scraping with Pierre of ScrapingBee
ScrapingBee — a web scraping tool
React Norway

Benedicte has an inbound lead for some potential Gatsby work. It's exciting, but she's anxious to see what comes of it. She talks about Rob Fitzpatrick's book, Write Useful Books, and the difference in the effort needed to produce different types of content — short books, livestreams, produced video, etc. In other updates, Pierre, founder of Scraping Bee, will join Queen Raae on stream this week and Benedicte will speak at React Norway this summer!

Benedikt is (almost!) done with the new signup flow and he reflects on the complexity and work estimation. He's satisfied with the implementation but still hopes to learn how to better recognize and estimate these larger efforts in the future. Benedikt's planned Friday administration work got pushed in favor of some recreational coding — creating a password strength indicator for Userlist. Although he feels a little guilty, it was a fun break. Speaking of fun... Benedikt is taking a week off!

Finally, Userlist is hiring a part-time Community Advocate. Check out the job description in the show notes above.

Benedikt closes in on a major feature implementation. Benedicte gets some feedback on 1:1 calls and POW!

Rails Autoscale
DataCater
Using DataCater to connect your app to Userlist
Smashing Magazine Person of the Week
POW! Reddit thread
Gatsby Webinar on Plugins (2019)
Unified.js

Benedikt and the Userlist team are getting pretty close to finishing the new signup flow. Or they were... Benedicte points out a potential edge case. Either way, they've made progress and benefitted from treating the effort as a major feature instead of trying to cut corners. Benedikt celebrated a relaxing Easter recently as well — largely offline thanks to the maturing team and product. He cleared his inbox and recorded a video for Userlist with a friend who runs DataCater. If you have any suggestions for Heroku alternatives, send Benedikt a DM. He's finding it harder to stay a big fan amidst recent outages.

Benedicte is feeling appreciated, and for a good reason! She was named Smashing Magazine's "Person of the Week" and has received lots of love. No coding on POW! to report back this week, but plans are coming together and she received some feedback around product preferences on a Reddit thread. In addition to POW! feedback, she also got some on her Gatsby calls. The "emergency" branding might not resonate with everyone, but she finds the calls rewarding. Benedicte plans to do more selling and outreach for Queen Raae services. Surprise! Things don't sell themselves. As a reward for completing other work, she has been working with markdown, trees, and other fun tools.

Anna Maste is the founder of Subscribe Sense, a business she started after exiting Boondockers Welcome.

Subscribe Sense — Anna's new business
Boondockers Welcome
Music video fun
Follow Anna on Twitter
Smart Subscriber — Shai Schechter's email tool
RightMessage — Brennan Dunn's & Shai Schechter's email tool
Deploy Empathy — a book by Michele Hansen

Benedikt and Benedicte host Anna Maste, founder of Subscribe Sense. Subscribe Sense is an email tool created to ensure subscribers to your mailing lists are confirming their subscriptions with a double opt-in. Before exiting her previous business Boondockers Welcome, Anna realized that she had leads who had not confirmed their signup to her lists. Subscribe Sense aims to increase confirmation rates.

Benedikt and Anna talk about some of the opportunities and dangers when working with email providers. Userlist has had to ask similar questions about handling emails and user behavior. The three discuss how Anna's previous exit played out, what her expectations are for Subscribe Sense post-exit, how she delineates development and marketing work, and how education and software stacks play a role in getting to an MVP.

Not to mention, Anna can make a killer parody music video!

Benedikt is working on a new signup flow for Userlist. Benedicte has fun at MicroConf.

Adam McCrea of Rails Autoscale
Andrew Culver of Bullet Train
Dr. Sherry Walling
Michael Christofides of pgMustard
Llama Life has raised a pre-seed funding round!

Benedicte returns from MicroConf ending several weeks of travel. Physically, she's tired. Mentally, she's energized! She made the most of quick stops in New York City, met some listeners at the conferences, and embraces something very scary... improv. The Gatsby emails keep going out and she gets feedback on POW! from the women at MicroConf. Benedikt poses the question: "How important is the encryption in POW!'s value proposition?"

Benedikt and Leo work together on a new signup flow for Userlist that Jane designed. This work touched some of the oldest code in the codebase so it felt good to give it an update. Changing the Stripe implementation to modernize it was a win as well. Not sponsored! Userlist hired a new Customer Success Engineer — Michael from pgMustard. He's off to the races and even answered an inquiry with the knowledge he had from listening to this podcast.

To wrap up, recent Slow & Steady guests are getting funded. Coincidence? Come on the show and find out!

Benedikt and Benedicte chat with Steve Ruiz about tldraw, art, and slicing pizzas 11 ways.

Steve's website
Steve's artwork
perfect-arrows
perfect-freehand
globs.design
Cuttle
Follow Steve on Twitter

Steve Ruiz combines art, design, and tech. In his career, he transitioned from an artist to a designer that coded, and then to working with algorithms and tinkering with design-related tools. Many of these projects throughout the years shared an open source theme and tldraw, his current focus, is no different.

Steve tells Benedicte and Benedikt the story of tldraw — taking it from a side project, to going full time, to recently acquiring funding. While the "tiny little drawing" app has taken off relatively quickly, it becomes clear as he recalls previous projects that Steve's success is enabled by all his past work and experimentation on similar ideas.

The trio discusses a ton of other interesting topics: building a team, creating with constraints, open source software, and more.

Benedikt's productive week included migrating to Google Workspace. Benedicte heads to MicroConf in Minneapolis.

Steve is coming soon!
tldraw — Steve's app
Gatsby ImageCDN stream
MicroConf Growth

Benedicte is feeling frustrated. While Steve will still be coming on in a future episode, she yearns for more time and energy to do all of the things! Knowing that progress will go slow and steady instead, planning out focus projects should help. On the less frustrating side, the Gatsby version of the POW! marketing site will be complete soon. For those headed to MicroConf that want to meet up, reach out to Benedicte on Twitter.

The CSV import feature that Benedikt has been working on is getting very close and he feels optimistic. On the backend application, he updated to the latest versions of Ruby and Rails. And Userlist published their Heap integration and it is working smoothly. This was an integration they have worked on for a while and it will provide some promotional opportunities. Finally, though it wasn't the easiest, Userlist is making the switch to Google Workspace. While Benedikt is thankful that the Google apps will work more nicely together, the process isn't the most "fun".

Benedicte returns to the show from Athens. Benedikt tackles some complexity in a new feature.

The War of Art — a book by Steven Pressfield
Seth Godin on "the resistance"
pgMustard — review Postgres query plans
MicroConf Growth

After checking in with Brian last episode, Benedicte is back on the show. Her travel isn't slowing down just yet — after she returns from Athens it will be off to America for MicroConf Growth. She's excited to talk to others in the space about growing the POW! team. So far, the decision still feels good. One of her goals is to define an "engine" for POW! similar to the one she has established for Queen Raae. It should help kickstart some increased productivity.

Benedikt had a busy week working on a CSV upload feature. This feature should alleviate some of the customer support work where users have been sending in lots of sheets for import. The data structures differ, the instructions can be unclear — allowing customers to upload and manipulate their data before import should help out. Benedikt also spent some time refactoring which kicked off an interesting discussion about deciding when to refactor.

If you know of ways to speed up Benedikt's testing, shoot us a message!

After taking a three month break from the podcast, Brian joins Benedikt for an update episode. After ending their year on the road adventure after seven months, Brian and his family are back in their hometown in Colorado. In a couple of weeks they'll finally be able to move back into their house.

Brian's board game project is in the pipeline with the potential publisher. However, things move a lot slower than Brian and his friend were hoping for. Nonetheless, everyone in the industry confirms that this isn't unusual in the early stages. To keep their creative juices flowing, they both started working on a new, competitive, deck building game.

While he's sad that his dream of building a software business as a solo founder didn't work out, Brian's very happy about his job at GitLab. The work is still fun and fulfilling, even though the number of meetings on his calendar increased. Overall, he's a lot more relaxed so the move back into full time employment was the right decision for him.

Benedikt has been fixing a problem with Userlist's data processing pipeline in the past week. A very specific set of conditions caused problems for a customer and it took quite some head scratching to figure things out. Ultimately, he's happy that he's now got a team in place so development work doesn't fully stop when unexpected things like this disrupt the week's plan.

Benedicte's app, POW!, turns two years old on International Women's Day. Benedikt enjoys the ability to pair program again.

Benedicte's app, POW!
Done for you Demo on queen.raae.codes

Benedicte has worked on POW! for two years and she brings some exciting news this week — the team will be expanding! After being more of a back burner project last year, POW! is going to have a bigger focus in 2022 with another developer joining the team. There are some outstanding legal things to figure out, and Benedikt offers some advice when growing the "tiny muffin", but a bigger team will help tackle the complexity of the app. Additionally, Benedicte has finished the Done-for-you Integration Demo sales page.

Though it is a bit tricky to test at this point, Benedikt is feeling good about the progress on Userlist's new authorization layer. The two discuss some of the complexity in working through that, but Benedikt thinks he's close to a rollout of an early version. Leo, the new developer at Userlist, continues to contribute and refactored lots of code last week. Benedikt has enjoyed the ability to pair again, particularly when the two of them arrive at a solution that is better than what they could have arrived at alone, individually.

Finally, Brian will be returning to the show next week to chat with Benedikt. Unfortunately, Benedicte won't make it as she's headed to London. For those that will be in London on Wednesday, March 16, send her a DM on Twitter to attend her in-person meetup!

Benedicte enjoys a serene winter wonderland. Benedikt adds an unexpected integration.

Userlist's Better Done Than Perfect podcast
UI Breakfast Podcast. Episode 233: Demystifying Product Funnels with Rachel Obstler (of Heap)

Benedicte and Benedikt are feeling calm.

Benedicte has been staying in the woods outside of Oslo on vacation. Her cell phone and Twitter use are down, and she has been relaxing — skiing and spending family time. Before vacation, she was doing some refactoring on POW! to make it easier to add features in the future. Looking ahead, Benedicte will be traveling to London to visit her dad and to meet up with friends from the interwebs! After that, on to Athens.

Benedikt details a win for Userlist — finalizing a new privacy policy and terms of service for GDPR compliance. It was expensive, not so fun, and they may need more updates again soon. Keeping with the recent integration theme, he worked on an unexpected one for Heap, a powerful analytics tool. After many years he also started building an authorization solution to allow for enabling access based on pricing tiers or user roles in the future.

Marie joins Benedicte and Benedikt to discuss building Llama Life, a productivity app centered around focus and fun, in public.

Follow Marie on Twitter
Llama Life — work through your to-do list with focus and fun
First version of Llama Life
www.fidgetpage.com — a small project that drives Llama Life traffic

Llama Life is a web-based productivity tool that Marie built to help you work through a to-do list, not just build one. While she isn't new to startups, she is new to coding. Self-taught and working as a solo founder until recently, Marie reminds herself that indie hacking on Llama Life is a dream job that combines design, marketing, and her newfound capabilities in software development.

Moving quickly as both the designer and developer, Marie continued to build Llama Life after finding early encouragement on Twitter. The product started simple and grew to include authentication, a database, and payments. While the productivity application space is crowded, she built Llama Life out of her own needs. When diagnosed with ADHD, Marie became obsessed with solving for focus and attention and needed a tool that allowed for setting quick timers and one that was also fun.

Listen in to learn the story behind the fun branding, how Marie leverages her marketing strengths, and what's ahead for Llama Life!

Benedikt asks some tough comparison questions. Benedicte leans on the "engine" and has some fun.

Hacker News, Date Comparison
Zach Holman: The Kobayashi Maru of Comparing Dates with Times
Benedikt's date and time comparison tweet
Slow & Steady, on YouTube!
Done-for-you Demo Draft
You're basically a house plant...

Have you weighed in on Benedikt's data comparison conundrum yet? He stirred up quite the team conversation at Userlist, and on Twitter, too. There were some hot takes and lengthy discussions, but he was thankful to have a team to run some difficult date-handling questions by. He was also thankful to get back some deep focus time this week to tackle the challenge. He uploaded the catalog of Slow & Steady episodes to YouTube — now one more place you can listen!

Benedicte relied on the Gatsby engine while she had some fun last week. Covid restrictions were lifted in Norway over the weekend. She got drinks with several friends and visited briefly with her sister in person after years apart. On stream last week, viewers seemed to enjoy a more freeform troubleshooting session and she finished a draft of her done-for-you demo. While POW! didn't qualify for TinySeed this year, Benedicte has a friend interested in helping with the marketing and customers interviews.

And Brian? He's settled in Boulder and is doing well!

Benedicte shares some positive feedback. Benedikt moves forward with a suite of integrations.

Queen Raae, testimonial tweet
An embarrassed Queen Raae on stream
Userlist Integrations page

Benedicte is feeling flattered, is receiving praise online, and saving this kind of feedback for the future in a "brag folder". She recommends starting one of these for brightening up a gloomy day or for reminding you of your achievements when it comes time for performance reviews. In addition to working on some new sales pages, Benedicte has applied to TinySeed with POW!. She doesn't meet the recommended MRR threshold but discusses the motivations behind applying anyway.

Benedikt hasn't had the strictest focus given recent customer support issues and new hire ramp-up time, but he has made lots of progress with the Userlist integrations despite this. Some companies make this work easier for developers than others — Stripe is one of the good ones (add this to the list of non-sponsored Stripe shoutout episodes). In another milestone, Userlist has moved all email marketing to... Userlist! This was made possible with the feature update from last year and they finally made the jump over.

Time flies for Benedikt at Userlist. Benedicte will save you from your Gatsby emergency.

TinySeed: an accelerator for SaaS bootstrappers
How to Start a Podcast in 2022 – Beginners Podcasting Guide with @mijustin
Emergency Gatsby Call Sales Page
Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats with @wesbos and @stolinski
Llama Life - calm, focused productivity
Bannerbear — generate marketing visuals

Benedikt has a frustrating day but shares a big milestone — after 50 months, his shares in Userlist have fully vested. He details how the business agreement between the Userlist co-founders worked and why it was smart to have it in place early on. Benedikt also shares a "royal screwup" story from the past week. After deleting an entire account he was able to restore everything after only several hours of work. In fact, despite the undesirable set of events, the success of the recovery effort is a "win".

Benedicte launches her "Emergency Gatsby Call" sales page for those stuck on a reef — a one-on-one call to the rescue! She plans to make a page for giving talks as well. Some people think she works for Gatsby. These pages will help reinforce that she can help do Gatsby work for them. The upcoming streams include some plug-in making and code reviews.

The two talk integrations, dunning emails, and they tease a future guest!

Benedikt and Benedicte chat with Lesley about her product Newsletter Glue.

Lesley's website
Follow Lesley on Twitter
Newsletter Glue — Lesley's product
WordPress Gutenberg
Benedicte's Tree Top Hut getaway
POW!

Lesley Sim, co-founder of Newsletter Glue and fan of unique top-level domains, discusses product pivots, finding co-founders and freelancers, bootstrapping, WordPress, and more.

Newsletter Glue is a plug-in that allows you to build and publish newsletters with the power of WordPress. The current offering is the result of a zoom-in pivot where Lesley solved one of her own problems. She works on the product remotely with her technical co-founder, Ahmed, and they've seen traction since the pivot.

The three wrap up with weekly updates. Benedicte gets a new customer for POW!, Benedikt shares a meaningful win, and Lesley is riding a productive wave.

The third Monday of January may be a downer, but not for Benedikt and Benedicte!

Blue Monday
The Great Gatsby with Queen Raae - REACT 168
Benedikt: Tree data structure thread
Smashing Magazine

Benedikt is bathing in artificial light, exercising, and staying focused thanks to the new frontend developer, Leo, at Userlist. These factors, combined with a good year and small raise, have him beating the usual winter blues. Last week they helped a customer through a spam attack and he completed more integration work. Benedikt has enjoyed talking through the code with another developer.

Benedicte, feeling confused about progress last week, is nonetheless keeping the engine alive. Schools are closing and childcare has been tricky but she had glimpses of "supermom". She completed her first non-hourly contract, started a draft for her Smashing Magazine article, kept up with yoga, and will even sneak in a short treehouse cabin trip this week. Like Benedikt, she has also enjoyed discussing code at a higher level with Ola as he comes up to speed.

Benedicte celebrates her birthday and Benedikt dives into backend work.

Latest stream with Mirjam
The Great Gatsby with Queen Raae - REACT 168

While Benedicte enjoys a birthday tradition, the momentum from last week has slowed down. Not to fear — the Gatsby "engine" is proving a valuable way to keep things moving along. Routine, systems, and daily email writing were all "winners" for the week. A podcast appearance on React Round Up went well, too.

Benedikt adjusts to working with Userlist's newest addition, Leo. Despite delegating tasks, Benedikt realized he is still spending time thinking about the delegated work. Otherwise, the onboarding is off to an excellent start and it has allowed Benedikt a chance to focus on the backend work. Exercise returns as a focus as well.

Admire anyone that is working "slow and steady" on their business? Let us know and perhaps we'll have them on as a guest!

Welcome to the new year! Benedicte and Benedikt report on their year-end breaks and share a few goals for the coming year.

YearCompass — reflect on the year and plan the next one

Benedicte enjoyed a great Christmas holiday and New Year's celebration. Between a trip to the mountains, sledding on toboggans, and watching the fireworks over Oslo, she felt invigorated to get started in 2022. Her encryption and privacy talk went well and she already has a podcast appearance and streams lined up to kick off the year.

Benedikt's holidays were not quite as relaxing, but he still enjoyed some of the family time and took a trip to the Black Forest. One big win was onboarding Userlist's new frontend developer. Benedikt says he's a great fit, is learning the code, and it felt good that things were getting done while he was away. They also hired a new customer success manager from their previous short-list, who already jumped in and helped with a recent AWS outage.

For 2021 review and 2022 goal setting Benedicte and Benedikt used the YearCompass framework. Benedicte's theme is "slow and steady". She has goals to avoid "shiny object" temptations and to keep progressing the things that are working for Queen Raae. She still has to decide on what that means for POW! — will it be the year that POW! becomes all that it can be? Benedikt isn't big on trackable or concrete goals either, though he wants Userlist to become profitable. Not profitable for just the sake of it, but to break even for longer-term financial stability.

In his last episode before taking a break, Brian gets some great news about his game, Backpack. Benedicte recovers from a few sick days. Benedikt shares some hiring lessons from Userlist.

Let's help Mirjam settle on a Data Model #ConferenceBuddy v2.0 with Benedikt Deicke
Podcast: The Business of Authority
BoardGameGeek — online resource and community for board games
MegaMaker — a community for bootstrappers
ProseMirror — tool for building rich-text editors
Sanity.io Portable Text

Brian is leaving on a high note. His game won FIRST PLACE in the board game design contest! His submission started as an accountability exercise and ended with real feedback, a cash prize, the option to publish, and credibility for future pitches. For JTBD.app, the future is still undecided. For now, Brian is having some conversations in the MegaMaker community and is staying open.

Benedicte is recovering from a few sick days during a busy time. Thankfully, she had built up some buffer and won't miss her encryption talk this week. She has kept up with yoga despite the missed time and is celebrating non-hourly work. It's a great fit for how she wants to work and the flexibility is a benefit when working while feeling less than 100%. Benedikt will come on this week's livestream to help with data modeling decisions for ConferenceBuddy.

While Jane was on vacation at Userlist, Benedikt focused on customer support and hiring. They have some promising frontend developer candidates moving through the later stages in the process despite a setback with the customer success manager role they previously hired for. Separately, Benedikt starts to regret a decision they made to use Markdown as the source of truth for messaging content and shares how he is thinking about moving forward.

The gang is all here! In addition to updates, they discuss the "sawdust" metaphor — packaging the byproducts of your primary service and putting them to good use. Brian announces he will be taking a break from the show.

Blogging For Devs Community
Go Rails — learn Ruby on Rails
Benedicte's new plugin
Yoga accountability Twitter thread
Conference Buddy — an app by Mirjam Aulbach
Now Hiring: Frontend Developer (Ember.js) at Userlist

While he feels conflicted, Brian plans to take a three-month break from the show. He's tired of the march to grow his MRR and doesn't feel like he has meaningful updates. He is enjoying his role at GitLab and wants to spend his free time away from building a SaaS — namely on projects like board games. Last week will be his final episode before the break.

Benedicte has updates on several fronts — a new plugin, a yoga accountability partner, and her first non-hourly gig! She plans to have Benedikt on an upcoming stream to talk databases after the next authentication stream. She also needs to unfollow some Twitter accounts to follow some new ones... without making 5000 clicks.

Benedikt's time has been spent almost entirely in hiring for the frontend development position at Userlist. They had to say "no" to the previous round of candidates and it isn't easy. In between hiring, he has snuck in some small features and bug requests. The good news in causing stupid bugs? They are easy fixes. Usually.

Not sponsored, but Benedikt and Benedicte rave about Stripe a little. The Userlist team grew by one while Benedikt was on vacation. Benedicte gets a small POW! win.

Conference Buddy — an app by Mirjam Aulbach
Stream: Use a plugin to accept Stripe donations of any amount
Stripe — making payments easy, NOT sponsored :)
Smashing Magazine — for web designers and developers

Benedikt took last week off but didn't unplug 100%. He moved hiring forward on the frontend developer role. The pipeline is filling up and he expects to wrap up soon. While he was out, and completing some projects around the house, the customer success role was filled.

Benedicte fills Benedikt in on her newest streaming plans — ones that will cover authentication and privacy in the context of Mirjam's app, Conference Buddy. She celebrates a small win for POW! as a user inquires about yearly pricing. After they shower Stripe with praise, Benedicte gives Benedikt an update on holiday baking!

Brian is back! He returns from the Grand Canyon trip and reflects on his time spent while disconnected. Benedicte gives a progress update on her Gatsby work and her plans for streaming in the coming months.

Queen Raae GitHub: gatsby-plugin-let-it-snow
Conference Buddy — an app by Mirjam Aulbach
Stream: Use a plugin to accept Stripe donations of any amount
semantic-release: Benedicte's "tech crush"

Benedicte catches up with Brian after he returns from his trip to the Grand Canyon. She is feeling focused, hitting a good rhythm, and is cranking out code! She has a lot of excitement around the NPM package semantic-release this week and is headed in the right direction for her Gatsby-authority business. She shares her latest YouTube livestream plans as she wraps up season two of Gatsby Deep Dives with Queen Raae and the Nattermob Pirates.

Without cell service or internet connectivity, Brian had time to reflect while having a blast backpacking the Grand Canyon. The headline? He might be ready for a break from bootstrapping. Certainly not a "forever" break, but perhaps some time for hobbies to be just that — hobbies. To be continued...

Benedikt and Benedicte pair up for another week without Brian. Benedikt continues to interview at Userlist which offers learning opportunities. Benedicte shares both a change in plans for the end of this year and a broad goal for 2022.

Queen Raae GitHub: gatsby-plugin-let-it-snow
"Let it Snow" in action
Now Hiring: Frontend Developer (Ember.js) at Userlist
Rewardful: affiliate & referral setup for SaaS companies using Stripe

Benedicte is feeling creative after working on a short, fun Gatsby plugin, "Let it Snow". On the topic of plugins, there has been a change in plans. After canceling the launch of the pay-what-you-want bootcamp last week, she plans to rework the bootcamp offerings in favor of creating Gatsby plugins. The new strategy is to offer these plugins and have additional paid, asynchronous coursework available for those who want to customize or dive deeper.

Benedikt moves ahead with hiring at Userlist for the frontend developer position. Questions still remain about the process and he ponders the best way to structure a paid test project. After preparing the test project for interviews, he spent time on a rejuvenating task — improving the integration architecture. The Rewardful integration is scheduled to launch today!

Finally, in a shared win of mutual accountability, Benedicte continues yoga and Benedikt continues walking.

With Brian away, Benedikt and Benedicte discuss the nuances of why hiring can be difficult. Benedikt shares how the search for open roles at Userlist is going. Benedicte is scheduling the remaining Gatsby bootcamps and is open to experimenting with offerings and formats in the future. The two discuss valuable aspects of different educational content formats. Finally, winter is coming and Benedikt is not particularly excited about it.

Now Hiring: Customer Success Manager at Userlist
Now Hiring: Frontend Developer (Ember.js) at Userlist
Develop and deploy a pay-what-you-want feature with Stripe
BREATH - A 30 Day Yoga Journey

Benedikt gives an update on hiring efforts at Userlist. The number of applications for the frontend developer position is well below the number of applications for the customer success position. Benedikt weighs waiting to hire someone who is an excellent fit versus hiring someone more quickly. Benedicte agrees that either way, it's important to find a personality that is willing to jump into the fold at a startup. If you are interested in this role, please apply or forward it to someone that might be.

Benedicte has scheduled the second of three Gatsby mini bootcamps and is finalizing the schedule for the third. As discussed previously, there is room for experimentation. Specificity in the content is important for making the learning relevant but a few questions remain. Are takeaway coding examples the valuable piece? How about asynchronous content delivery? Besides Gatsby, she hopes to sneak in some coding on POW! soon.

Winter is coming and Benedikt isn't thrilled. The two discuss some strategies for coping with less sunlight at higher latitudes — Vitamin D, sun lamps, and exercise. After a few days away from yoga, Benedicte is starting a new 30-day journey herself.

Brian starts his role at GitLab and continues to make progress on outsourcing development with JTBD.app. Benedikt recaps the email marketing feature launch and shares open roles at Userlist. Benedicte prepares for the Gatsby mini bootcamp kickoff, discusses pricing strategy, and wonders, "Don’t we all want a successful SaaS?"

JTBD.app
Now Hiring: Customer Success Manager at Userlist
Userlist's Marketing Email feature
Benedicte's Gatsby Bootcamp
Jonathan Stark
Benedicte's POW!

Brian's first day at GitLab was as expected — he started setting up and filled out HR paperwork. Learning about the remote-first culture was fascinating, though. On JTBD.app, onboarding development help is getting more exciting. He expects progress on feature improvements soon.

Benedikt recaps the email marketing feature launch from last week at Userlist. He feels good about it but anticipates some time before seeing an impact beyond the initial marketing splash. Userlist is looking to hire a customer success manager and a front end web developer and Benedikt is finalizing the job post for the latter.

Benedicte is preparing for the Gatsby mini bootcamp that launches this weekend! Between planning other topics, iterating on pricing, and building a community, there's a lot of work to be done. Ideally, the up-front effort could make for a rewarding long-term project. POW! is something that Benedicte wants to maintain on the side because... "Don’t we all want a successful SaaS?"

Matt Wensing joins Benedicte, Brian, and Benedikt to talk about Userlist's new marketing email feature. Brian enjoys vacation and finds development help. Benedicte launches her first bootcamp.

Check out Userlist on Product Hunt
Matt on Twitter
Matt's company, Summit
Userlist's Marketing Email feature
Benedicte's Gatsby Bootcamp

Big news this week as Brian announces that he's taking a full-time job. Why now and what does it mean for JTBD.app?

Gatsby Func Jam
Benedicte’s Submission
Art of Product with Penelope Phippen of Stripe
Rob Walling's Stairstep Approach to Bootstrapping
How Not to Stairstep

Brian Casel joins Benedicte, Brian, and Benedikt to talk about ZipMessage, selling businesses, hiring contractors to collaborate with, and how becoming a developer makes you worse at marketing.

ZipMessage
Brian’s Productize & Scale course
Brian’s Website
AudienceOps
FounderGigs

Benedicte got nominated for The Jammies Awards. Brian is feeling a bit overwhelmed by too many things on his plate. Benedikt realized why they are procrastinating a bit on the new marketing feature.

Vote for Benedicte at The Jammies Awards
pgMustard
The Gatsby FuncJam Challenge
Tilde

Benedikt has an epiphany, Benedicte is back in POW!, and Brian is all over the place.

Peak Performance
Sprint Hard, Rest Hard

Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success

Brian decides to cut the year on the road short, Benedicte is now focusing on building a Gatsby training business, and Benedikt is cleaning up Userlist's front-end code base.

Live Pair Programming with Adam McCrea
Queen Raae Codes
Real Python

We're all three together again and Benedikt has a couple of exciting milestones to share about Userlist's financials! Brian is still getting early access interest for JTBD.app and Benedicte is anxious to get back to coding on POW.

While Brian is struggling with his internet connection, Benedicte is thinking about productized offerings for Gatsby, and Benedikt is back from vacation.

Userlist Website
Call Paul with Benedicte

While Benedikt is still on vacation, Benedicte wonders about the pros & cons of teaming up with a close friend, and Brian continues to roll out updates to JTBD.app.

Benedicte and Brian are back to talk about affiliates, guesting, and building an audience. Also! Backpack made it through the first stage of the boardgame design contest!

@raae's Norweigian Horseback Vacay

Benedikt is joined by Daniel Alm, founder of Timing, to talk about Daniel's recent learnings from his time tracking app for MacOS. They talk about coming up with new product features, marketing strategies and work-life-balance.

Timing
Daniel on Twitter
AudienceOps
Postaga

While Brian is exploring the streets of New York City, Benedicte and Benedikt talk about their weeks and how to take vacations as an entrepreneur.

Benedicte's workcation
Benedicte on Twitter
Benedikt on Twitter

Brian answers a listener question about Headlamp and shares some updates about Backpack. Benedikt deployed the new sign-up forms for the marketing feature and is thinking about hiring a developer. Benedicte talks about her recent launch of Gatsby Summer Functions and the learnings so far.

Headlamp
Securing Your Gatsby
Gatsby Summer Functions
Tabletopia
Backpack on Tabletopia

To celebrate the 100th episode of "Slow & Steady," we take some time to tell our backstories and reflect on the paths that brought us to where we are today.

Queen Raae on Twitter
Benedikt on Twitter
Brian on Twitter
POW!
Userlist
HireBrianRhea.com from the Wayback Machine
The whole HireBrianRhea story

Benedicte talks about the launch of her upcoming Gatsby Functions course. Benedikt is talking about the recent live streaming experiment. Brian is starting to enjoy the year on the road and is working on the JTBD app.

Gatsby Summer Functions
Slow & Steady wins the race
Sidekiq
jtbd.app

Brian manages to join for an entire episode and share some updates on the JTBD app. Benedikt deployed double opt-in and got a kitchen all in the same week! Unfortunately, Benedicte was unable to join this week, but we promise, one of these days we'll have all three co-hosts on for an entire episode :P

Brian is back (joining from Bar Harbor, Maine) and sharing his progress on the JTBD app as well as stories from the road. Benedicte is taking a quick break from her vacation to launch Gatsby Summer Functions. Benedikt is scared to deploy the double opt-in implementation and fighting with email rendering in Outlook.

Benedicte’s on-brand vacation
Gatsby Summer Functions (30% Discount Code: SLOWANDSTEADY)
VS Code
VS Code Remote Development
GitHub Codespaces

While Brian is having trouble with his internet connection Bar Harbor, Benedicte talks about her upcoming Gatsby Summer Functions course. Benedikt shares his recent progress on Zapier and Double Opt-In for Userlist.

Jonathan Stark
Gatsby Summer Functions
Userlist on Zapier

Benedicte Raae joins Brian and Benedikt to talk about their updates of the week. Brian is still getting used to the life on the road, Benedicte is working on a new side project, and Benedikt is still figuring out how to implement double opt-ins.

Gatsby Summer Functions with Queen Raae and the Nattermob Pirates
POW! — the privacy-first menstrual cycle journal
Zapier
Userlist on Zapier

Benedikt has some exciting updates and Brian joins from the road for the first time!

Brian is kicking off his year on the road, so Benedikt invited Benedicte Raae to talk about live streaming on YouTube. They chat about how to get started, what formats work, and the benefits of using live streams to "build in public".

Benedicte on Twitter
POW!
Benedicte on YouTube
Snuti
Streamyard
OBS
Elgato Wave 3
Elgato Keylight Air

Benedikt is almost done with moving to a new home while Brian is almost ready to leave for a year on the road.

Benedikt is out this week, so Brian chats with fellow Brian, Brian Casel, about exploring paths to productizing the JTBD consulting service I've been offering.

Brian Casel
ProcessKit
Example of the JTBD Analysis Software

Brian thinks through some possible paths toward productizing the JTBD traction he's seeing and Benedikt is chipping away at small tasks while the upcoming home move chips away at his energy.

Aurelius
TinySeed
EnjoyHQ
@happytrailsfamily
Golden Game Guild
Visa trial subscription requirements

Brian is preparing for a camper test run this weekend. Benedikt is drained from a weekend of moving boxes and furniture.

Tuple
Matt Swanson on Twitter

Benedikt is surrounded by boxes and in the market for a kitchen. Brian is preparing to enter Backpack into a board game contest.

Brian and Benedikt started to pack up their homes. In addition to that, Brian is fighting literal bugs and Benedikt is building a Zapier integration.

Zapier
Jupyter Notebook

Benedikt is feeling excited about the feedback on Userlist's proposed marketing email functionality, and Brian has officially held a version of "Backpack" in his real-life hands!

The Game Crafter
Company Accounts by Userlist on ProductHunt
Brian’s Tweet about Backpack

Benedikt talks about launching the companies feature of Userlist as well as some database performance break-throughs. Brian is very happy about how his consulting business is turning out this year and is dabbling with some new productized service ideas.

Userlist's new companies feature
Brian's website
Hammerstone

Benedikt got some bummer news about his lease and Brian might have a prototype of Backpack in his hands sooner than he thought.

Pgmustard
Binary tree indexes
GIN indexes
Gather Town
The Game Crafter

Brian and Benedikt catch up on their progress in the last week. Brian talks about his recent consulting project and play-testing Backpack. Benedikt just launched the new user and company profiles and is tackling some long standing performance issues.

Jane McGonigal TED
Jane on Knowledge Project
Jane on Ologies
Yarn Deduplicate
MicroConf Remote

Brian shares about the latest round of revisions for Backpack and a customer sends the first ever marketing email via Userlist.

Peter Suhm
Reform.app
OpenAPI
MicroConf Remote
Ruben Gamez
Gather.town
Backpack on BGG

John Nunemaker joins Brian and Benedikt to talk about his journey as a founder and the various product he's built, launched, sold, and reaqcuired over the years.

John on FounderQuest
Harmony
Gaug.es
Flipper Cloud
Speaker Deck
Box Out Sports
Fewer and Faster
John’s Website
John on Twitter

Benedikt is ripping out cords on Userlist profile pages and Brian has a couple of very large vehicles in his driveway.

Brian's Truck and Fifth Wheel
First Half of Brian's Trip
Hasbro commercial (German) (English)
SegMetrics

Brian talks about his new consulting gig and the first blind playtest of Backpack. Benedikt shares the progress on Userlist features and marketing.

Brian on Twitter
Benedikt on Twitter

Benedikt finally has a calm and focused week. Brian's spinning a lot of plates, but things are looking good.

LessAccounting
Backpack on BoardGameGeek

Brian and Benedikt are in good spirits this week. They talk about recent progress on Brian's board game, Benedikt's successful battle against performance issues, as well as how Bitcoin helps Brian with his year on the road.

Ably
Backpack on Board Game Geek
SaaS Summit

Benedikt has had a productive (yet tiring) couple of weeks and Brian released a "How to Play" video for Backpack!

SaasSummit
pgMustard
Substance Lab
Video: How to Play Backpack
Backpack Rulebook on Google Docs
Backpack on Tabletopia

Adii Pienaar joins Brian and Benedikt to talk about his new book Life Profitability: The New Measure of Entrepreneurial Success. They talk about the concept of Life Profitability, how Work-Life-Balance doesn't really exist, and why it's important to challenge traditional ideas about entrepreneurship.

Life Profitability: The New Measure of Entrepreneurial Success
Ryan Holiday
Paulo Coelho - The Alchemist
Herman Hesse - Siddhartha
Andre Agassi - Open
Yung Pueblo – Inward
Adii Pienaar on Twitter

Siddhartha

Open: An Autobiography

The Alchemist - Gift Edition

Inward

Benedikt got some much-needed rest over the weekend watching some American Football and a sailing race that completely baffles Brian's understanding of how wind works. Brian is also getting very close to being able to share his board game ... stay tuned!

America’s Cup
PRADA Cup Race Weekend Wrap up
Incredible explanation of how a sailboat goes into the wind
Tabletopia
Nusii
TinySeed
MegaMaker

Brian and Benedikt are sharing a bit about their plans for 2021. Brian is preparing for their year on the road, Benedikt is sharing details about a new direction for Userlist.

Readable Postgres Explains
Postgres Explain Visualizer

Benedikt has some huge news from the break and Brian is still feeling much more relaxed after shifting his focus to a hobby project. We also dig into our "Year Compass" reflections and talk about 2020 and 2021.

Brian's board game in progress
Year Compass

Benedikt is slowing things down as the year comes to a close and Brian's story pivots to, "An honest peek into my life as I try to recover from burnout by designing a boardgame."

Benedikt on Twitter
Userlist
Tabletopia

Brian is happy to not have any updates to share while Benedikt is fighting with frontend dependencies and the big question of what to work on next.

Brian on Twitter
Benedikt on Twitter

Brian is making plans for a big reset in 2021 and Benedikt is feeling better about Userlist's November numbers!

Bootstrapped with Kids

Brian enjoys working on a team again and starts to realize solopreneurship might not be for him. Benedikt is cautiously celebrating a revenue milestone with Userlist, but also contemplating its future direction.

Arc
Userlist alternative pages
SaaS Podcast Awards

Benedikt is busy with lots of little things and trying to sort out when to make time for investing in bigger projects with long-term benefits. Brian's thankful for his many blessings and thinking about how to reset his approach to building a business in 2021.

Brian is back from a week away from everything in the Grand Canyon. Benedikt is trying to increase momentum by shipping smaller, less polished, increments.

Brian on Twitter
Benedikt on Twitter
Userlist's Laravel Package
Please consider nominating Slow & Steady for the SaaS Podcast Awards

Brian's got some new client work lining up to ease some anxiety and Benedikt's schedule continues to be a bit hectic.

Better Done Than Perfect Podcast
Userlist Happy Hour

Brian is working on (in)validating the idea for Brand Patrol and might be close to signing a consulting deal related to Headlamp. Benedikt is trying to stay focused and talks about upcoming pricing changes for Userlist.

Headlamp
Brand Patrol
Userlist

Benedikt had a stressful day when a code change accidentally sent 1000+ emails and Brian shares that he's feeling completely burned out.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
Rails Autoscale
Snapshooter.io
Forbes: 10 Signs You're Burning Out -- And What To Do About It

Benedikt is back from vacation and already swamped with work. Brian share's some details about the new thing he's working on.

BrandPatrol
Userlist's User Onboarding Guide
FullStack Radio
Statamic
Tailwind CSS
Jane's Tweet about the new podcast

Benedikt is out again this week, so Brian is joined by his good friend, startup partner, confidant, and sometimes co-conspirator, Richard Miller. They talk about Richard's current project, the origins of the idea, and the importance of laying in a hammock so people will think you're sleeping.

No, really. It's important.

@richardkmiller
Richard's personal site
Goldie May
Rich Hickey’s “Hammock-Driven Development”

Benedikt is out, so Brian talks with Justin Jackson of Transistor about Headlamp's market, the risks and benefits of going upstream, and how the heck to pronounce "portage."

Transistor
Justin on Twitter

Benedikt is trying to tie up a few things so his vacation can get started and Brian is settling into truly believing that "Slow & Steady" is the way to go.

Brian wants to get himself more margin by improving his consulting offering around remote work. Benedikt's deploy of a new feature didn't go quite as planned.

Brian on Twitter
Benedikt on Twitter
Headlamp
Userlist

There are some encouraging trends in Userlist's numbers as some efforts have begun to pay off, and Brian wonders if SEO tools are even worth using.

LogRage
Ahrefs Keyword Research Tutorial: From Start to Finish
Userlist's User Onboarding Guide

Brian considers changing the primary focus of Headlamp, while Benedikt wonders what's an opportunity and what's a distraction.

Lattice
MicroConf Remote
Brian on Twitter
Benedikt on Twitter
Userlist's User Onboarding Guide

Benedikt is out this week so Brian gives a solo update on his SEO efforts and recent customer discovery calls.

Brian talks about his plans to promote his guide for remote employee engagement and Benedikt navigates the fine line between adding new features and getting lost in refactoring stuff.

Mangools
The Manager's Guide to Engaging Remote Employees
MicroConf On Air: Using Organic Content As Your Flywheel, Christopher Gimmer

Benedikt and Jane celebrated the 1-year anniversary of Userlist last week and Benedikt has been busy! Userlist has also started advertising on Facebook and we discuss a few hesitations he has about that. Brian is trying to find an effective mix of direct sales, content marketing, and paid ads.

Startups for the Rest of Us – Making Cold Email Work
LeadFuze
Steli Efti on IndieHackers
Steli at MicroConf
Asia Matos

Brian and Benedikt ran into some recording troubles today, but luckily Colleen Schnettler and Michele Hansen agreed take over the feed with their recently launched Software Social podcast.

Software Social Podcast
Software Social on iTunes
Michele on Twitter
Colleen on Twitter

Benedikt launched the new Userlist website and is trying to play catch-up on some other tasks. Brian is back from the wilderness and is wandering around in the confusing terrain of SaaS pricing.

Photos from Brian's Backpacking Trip
Lunr
Nagele & DHH on Indie Hackers
Rob Walling on Indie Hackers
"Obviously Awesome" by April Dunford
April Dunford on Bright & Early

Brian got up super early today to get an episode in before his next camping trip. He also talks about his recent demo calls and next steps for Headlamp. Benedikt is working on the new Userlist website and close to shipping it later this week.

Stripe Documentation
Stripe Support
HelpScout
Statamic
Jekyll
Headlamp

Benedikt is rested up after some time off but still feeling a bit overwhelmed by his todo list. Meanwhile, Brian has what is probably his most exciting update yet!

Headlamp
Userlist

Benedikt talks with Arvid Kahl about his recently published book Zero To Sold and how having too much momentum after selling one's business can lead to unexpected opportunities.

Zero To Sold
Feedback Panda
The Zero to Sold Compendium
The Bootstrapped Founder
Arvid on Twitter
Arvid's Podcast

Benedikt is feeling burned out and Brian makes good on his promise to have a demo recorded for this episode!

Headlamp
Userlist

Benedikt shares some thoughts on a recent feature release as well as some thoughts on the future of Userlist's marketing plan. Brian's been steadily making progress on integrations and foundational work for Headlamp.

Userlist
Headlamp
DemandMaven
Stripe Atlas

Ed Freyfogle joins Benedikt to share more than 25 tips for running a SaaS business. Ed and Benedikt talk about tips for billing, marketing, product as well as general tips for smooth sailing in your business.

Ed on Twitter
Ed’s Website
Ed’s company OpenCage
Ed’s Geomob Podcast
Bootstrapped.fm
Baremetrics
Calendly
Quaderno

There isn't an episode of Slow & Steady this week. It didn't feel appropriate. Instead, Brian reads an essay from Barack Obama and a short snippet from presidential hopeful Joe Biden.

Barack Obama: How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change
Joe Biden: Joe Biden Philadelphia Speech Transcript on Protests for George Floyd

Brian and Benedikt discuss Userlist's failed in-app messages launch, new competition, and Brian's recent progress on Headlamp.

Felt
Headlamp
Userlist's In-App Messages on ProductHunt

Benedikt and Brian are both in the zone as Userlist launches In-App Messaging on ProductHunt and Brian is making progress on the MVP for Headlamp.

Userlist on ProductHunt
Headlamp
VirtualBox
Sauce Labs
Browserstack
Netlify
Netlify CMS
Middleman
Statamic

Brian got unstuck from paralysis analysis and is working on a new Headlamp MVP. Benedikt talks about being torn between shipping vs. rebuilding features that aren't perfect, yet.

Social Cuts
Headlamp

Benedikt shares the big news that Userlist is part of the TinySeed 2020 batch! Userlist also shipped in-app messaging and launched a new pricing tier. Brian shares that the Mozilla job offer will probably be rescinded as a result of COVID-19 and wonders about the best path forward.

TinySeed 2020 Announcement
Nusii
Userlist New Starter Plan

Brian talks about his new puppy and gives an update on the job search. Benedikt talks about performance optimization whack-a-mole and shares thoughts on pricing of Userlist.

Appsignal

Val Geisler joins Brian and Benedikt to talk about how to approach email marketing in the midst of a pandemic. Tune in if you're struggling to strike the right tone with your audience.

Fix My Churn
Val on Twitter

Brian and Benedikt talk about their weeks, including Brian's job interview progress and Userlist's new product development workflow based on Shape Up.

Mozilla
Storybook
Shape Up
Notion
Vito

Benedikt shares some nice March updates for Userlist while Brian ponders what the changing environment means for his near-term plans.

HelpFounders.com

Tracy Osborn joins Brian and Benedikt to talk about common distractions founders face in their day-to-day, as well as during the ongoing pandemic. They talk about how to identify distractions, how to stay focused, and how to find a good balance.

Tracy on Twitter
Tracy’s Website
Tiny Seed
Craig Hewitt at MicroConf Europe 2019
SelfControl for Mac
MicroConf Connect
Tracy’s article on Hiring a Virtual Assistant

Benedikt is trying to get back in the swing of things and shares an experiment with live streaming. Brian is making the most of the simplified schedule and getting in a lot of games with the family.

Focusmate
Tracy Osborn
Benedikt’s Node.js Livestream
MicroConf Connect

Brian and Benedikt resort to telling jokes to give their listeners and themselves a break from the information overload induced by worrying events and bad news.

Another super short one this week as Brian provides an update on the job hunt and Benedikt brings us up to speed on Userlist's taxes and his progress on a JS snippet.

Versoly
Userlist Happy Hours
Gitlab
Elastic

In this short episode, Brian and Benedikt talk about Brian's ongoing hunt for a full-time job, as well as recent updates on Userlist.

Headlamp
Userlist
Userlist's In App Messages Demo

FemtoConf is, in fact, sold out and Benedikt is working on the finishing touches of in-app messaging. Brian shares the big news that he's going to start looking for full-time employment to build in a little more margin. Now we're _really_ going to need to rewrite that intro :)

FemtoConf 2020
MegaMaker
3 Common Misconceptions of Remote Work

Benedikt shares some updates about the tickets and the line-up of FemtoConf 2020. Brian is worried about sounding like a broken record and is considering to apply for a job.

FemtoConf 2020
Asia Matos
Tracy Osborn
Jonny Platt
Ed Freyfogle

Benedikt is happily integrating in-app messaging into Userlist and the sample application! Brian shares some struggles with getting the consulting pipeline fired back up and talks about his recent article, "The Joel Test for Remote Teams."

The Joel For Remote Teams
IndieHackers Podcast with Jane Portman

Brian talks about the end of his involvement in Feature Audit and its (hopefully) bright future. Benedikt shares a bit of the struggles that they experience as an international founder team dealing with traditional institutions.

The Joel Test for Remote Teams
Feature Audit
Mercury
Anytime Mailbox
MicroConf

Encouraging networking updates from Brian and a push to be more active on LinkedIn. Benedikt is getting into a good rhythm with working full-time on Userlist.

FemtoConf

Brian and Benedikt talk about a lot of things this week, including Brian's new resources page for remote workers, customer support, and about the pros and cons sharing revenue numbers and being transparent.

Remote Work Resources
Netlify
FemtoConf 2020
Patrick McKenzie’s Tweet
Laura Roeder on Bright & Early
Open Startups

This week, Brian explores some ways to create overlap between his consulting work and Headlamp, while Benedikt continues researching email providers and tries to build a Userlist npm package.

Headlamp
Referral Rock
Josh Ho on Twitter
Josh on Bright & Early
DHH in Boulder
Tailwind CSS
Userlist

Brian and Benedikt are back after taking a break over Christmas and New Year's. They talk about some of their answers to the questions in the Year Compass and provide quick updates on what's going on with Headlamp and Userlist.

Year Compass
Brian's Newsletter: Is This Fun?
Brian's podcast series on remote work: Bright & Early
Headlamp
Userlist

Benedikt shares some stress-related struggles and how he is hoping to address them in the future. Brian is reflecting on the year and rethinking Headlamp's scope.

The Year Compass
Jerry Colonna
Jerry on Without Fail

Brian and Benedikt discuss recent developments in their businesses which include spammers, pre-sales, podcasts about remote work, and metal bands from the '90s.

Sepultura
Stage CMS
Headlamp
21st Century Work Life Podcast
ShieldGEO
Tool - Die Eier von Satan

Benedikt has shipped In-App Messaging behind a feature flag and it wasn't as painful as he thought it would be! Brian is sluggishly getting back into the swing of things after an eventful Thanksgiving in the US.

YearCompass.com
Brian’s Website

Brian's "Remote work doesn't have to be lonely" project is picking up momentum and has a name and website. Meanwhile, Benedikt is happy about Userlist's performance in November but confused by JSON Web Tokens.

Brian’s post on the Forces of Progress
Benedikt's Twitter thread on JWT
Baremetrics
Profitwell
Chartmogul
Summit
Matt on Twitter
Project Headlamp
We work remotely
Brian’s feature on WWR
Baremetrics Experts

Brian is back from a week in the Grand Canyon and Benedikt has some exciting news about his time commitment to Userlist.

Founder Collaboration Agreement resources
- PandaDoc Founders’ Agreement Template
- How to Create the Perfect Cofounder Agreement with Your Business Partner
- Calculating Co-Founder Equity Split
- Startup founder vesting: Here’s what it is and why it’s your best friend
Jane on Startups for the Rest of Us
Tuple
Branch
TinySeed

Brian is on vacation this week, so Benedikt is joined by Peter Suhm of Branch. Peter and Benedikt talk about the history of Branch, how Peter got into building software products, as well as his experiences with Tiny Seed.

Branch
WPPusher
Out of Beta
Tiny Seed
Peter on Twitter
Benedikt on Twitter

Brian is inching toward being ready to start pitching his prototype to customers and Benedikt is feeling a bit uneasy about Userlist's trial conversions.

Slow & Steady on Twitter
Brian on Twitter
Benedikt on Twitter

Benedikt is excited about an expensive purchase while Brian is ironing out the last kinks in the onboarding flow of his new product.

Standard Code
Tiny Seed
Slow & Steady on Twitter
Brian on Twitter
Benedikt on Twitter

Benedikt gives an update on his time at MicroConf Europe and Brian thinks there's a similarity in bootstrappers' perception of markets and our inability to grasp the size of the universe 🌝👽

MicroConf Europe
TinySeed
MicroConf Europe
April Dunford - Obviously Awesome
Bright & Early
Gesture Drawing
Out of Beta

After giving a short update on their past week, Brian and Benedikt talk about Ryan Singer's book Shape Up.

Slack Workflows
TeamMood
Ryan Singer – Shape Up
Brian’s Interview with Ryan Singer
MicroConf Europe
MicroConf Growth & Starter

Benedikt is back from vacation and Brian is closing in on finalizing the functionality for his "Remote Work Doesn't Have to Be Lonely" prototype.

Userlist
Userlist Office Hours
Brian's thread on Remote Work

Brian is joined by special guest Derrick Reimer while Benedikt is on vacation. Brian & Derrick get meta and talk about the pros and cons of doing a "Built-in-Public" Podcast.

Derrick's site
StaticKit
I'm Walking Away From the Product I Spent a Year Building
Art of Product Podcast

Brian makes good progress on his new product and Benedikt is finally done with researching how to implement in-app messages for Userlist. Inspired by Brian Casel, we also wonder how to make the podcast more interesting to listen to.

Nusii
Brian Casel on Twitter
Bootstrapped Web Podcast
15Five
Derrick Reimer on Twitter
Art of Product Podcast

Benedikt is feeling overwhelmed by a big list of small tasks. Brian continues to look for insights to address the problem of isolation and loneliness that many remote workers face.

Brian’s Website
Benedikt’s Website
Brian on Twitter
Benedikt on Twitter
Slow & Steady on Twitter

Donut
Brian’s Website
Benedikt’s Website
Userlist.io Office Hours
Brian on Twitter
Benedikt on Twitter
Slow & Steady on Twitter

Big news from Brian about his plans for Feature Audit and Benedikt talks through his struggles with analysis paralysis.

SlowSteadyPod on Twitter
Brian's Tweet about Remote Work & Loneliness

Benedikt's experience at a Metallica concert leads us to reminisce about building band websites in the old (and not so old) days. We also talk about our successes and failures and what we've learned from them.

SlowSteadyPod on Twitter
Thinking in Bets
Stage CMS
Nightwish
What I’ve learned From My Jobs So Far – Brian Rhea
Mocavo Acquired by Find My Past
Josh Pigfords projects list
Justin Jackson’s talk at Laracon

Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

Brian's still exploring the formation of a Mastermind group and Benedikt upgraded Userlist to Rails 6 before going out sick for a few days. We also float the idea of meeting IRL at MicroConf in 2020.

Follow Benedikt on Twitter
Follow Brian on Twitter
Userlist.io
FeatureAudit.com

Benedikt's calendar exploded following Userlist's launch. Brian had an encouraging week after a code pairing session with a friend. We talk about the pros and cons of having a co-founder and chat through some possible alternatives in the near-term.

Three Hour Brand Sprint
Follow Benedikt on Twitter
Follow Brian on Twitter
Userlist.io
FeatureAudit.com

Benedikt celebrates the successful launch of Userlist and some stressful hiccups that happened in the days prior. Brian gets some advice on restructuring his business model.

Userlist on ProductHunt
Follow Benedikt on Twitter
Follow Brian on Twitter
Userlist.io
FeatureAudit.com

Benedikt and Userlist have an official launch date and a Code Freeze. Brian struggles to find time for Feature Audit between client proposals and family time.

Follow Benedikt on Twitter
Follow Brian on Twitter
Userlist.io
FeatureAudit.com

Brian and Benedikt talk about how the idea for the show came about and what they're hoping to share along the way.

Follow Benedikt on Twitter
Follow Brian on Twitter
Userlist.io
FeatureAudit.com