Flight Review: Recent Episodes
Brandon Bayer, Mina Abadir
Flight Review is a podcast chronicling the journey of two entrepreneurs building an ambitious devtools startup. Hosted by Brandon Bayer and Mina Abadir, the founders of Flightcontrol. They chat about entrepreneurship, product design, SaaS, marketing, and building devtool products.
We talk about Brandon’s travels, our new hire, and our company retreat in Italy next week. We also discuss our slow velocity and how we plan to increase shipping momentum.
We chat about how RenderATL is such a stellar conference, give an update on hiring and the technical interview process we designed.
- twitter.com/Swizec
We talk about the incredible response to our new job posting and the process that went into. Also we go behind the scenes of our hiring process and how we are evaluating candidates.
- flightcontrol.notion.site/Backend-Typescript-Engineer-at-Small-DevTools-Startup-12e52471539a4ab9878514e04c415da6
We talk about managing schedules and productivity tools. Then we talk about what we're learning about making a really great hiring process.
- meetsidekick.com
- mightyapp.com
- cron.com
- Video on technical interviews: youtube.com/watch
Brandon officially stops coding, now that Blake has taken over all his coding responsibilities. We talk about our completely broken hiring process and how we are fixing it by starting from first principles. And then we rave about how Superhuman has changed our email lives (we never thought we'd be that person).
- Book: amazon.com/What-You-Do-Who-Are/dp/0062871331
- superhuman.com
- growthbook.io
We discuss our sponsorship of React Miami, the outcomes from that, and how we are evaluating ROI. After some other product and company updates, we talk about switching our Webflow website to Makeswift. And the tradeoffs of code vs nocode marketing sites.
- sound.xyz
- webflow.com
- makeswift.com
- awesomic.io
Being a founder is an extreme exercise in focus, prioritization, and discipline. This week we're feeling this more than ever, with so many things to do. We give updates on hiring, Blitz Toolkit, Flightcontrol product updates including preview environments, and comment on the Redwood 1.0 release.
This is the final week of this YC batch, so we reflect on the past three the months, our fast paced fundraising process in the last two weeks, and where we go from here.
- We're hiring a Senior AWS DevOps Engineer
Week 10 of YC and life is off the charts! We talk about being human, being fully yourself in important meetings, and how we are cultivating a super healthy cofounder relationship in the midst of chaos.
- https://usenoor.com
Brandon and Mina give an update from week 9 of 12 of this Y Combinator batch. The phase were it starts to feel like the wheels are coming off the bus 🤪 And also discuss YC in general. They also talk about their first in-person company gathering and how important shared in-person context is.
This is a secret episode recorded on November 5, 2021 where Brandon and Mina share the exciting and brutal backstory on how they tried and failed to raise VC money, eventually got into Y Combinator, and then quickly raised a total of $1 million.
This week we dig into how we are managing our work-life balance and mental health while building an ambitious startup. We share our mental framework for processing it all, the guidelines we put in place for ourselves, and some tactics we're using.
We discuss Flightcontrol progress update, how personal perceptions can vary widely between video calls and in person, and then dig into pricing. We talk through our entire pricing journey, the things we tried, and how we eventually ended up at our current pricing.
- Pricing your SaaS product
- Van Westendorp Pricing Model
- https://www.vantage.sh/
It's week 3 after launch, and we now have paying customers! We talk about our current rention numbers and how we're working toward a public launch soon. (Also sorry for the delayed publishing! Totally forgot to upload and publish in the heat of startup life 😂)
It's been an awesome second week since onboarding our first customer. We manually onboarded 20 more and then opened up self signup. We discuss how we're managing it all, and what's coming next.
We have liftoff!!! This was a wild and awesome week onboarding our first users and getting our first taste of product market fit signals. We recall our week day by day, sharing what it feels like to onboard your first users. We also talk about finding the delicate MVP recipe and about how we are figuring out our initial pricing.
- Van Westendorp Pricing Model
After our weekly Flightcontrol progress update, we dig into our new weekly development cycle process and choosing our KPIs and short term goal.
- Development Cycle Planning: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4e-product-development-cycle-fundamentals
- http://segment.io/
- https://june.so/
- https://avo.app/
- https://www.amplitude.com/
We finally shipped Flightcontrol to production! And we dissect the last 3 months to figure out why it took so much longer to build than we anticipated. And talk about what we are doing going forward.
We discuss the new RFC to pivot Blitz.js to a framework agnostic toolkit. And we talk about how that plays into Flightcontrol.
- Straight No Chaser
- Blitz Pivot RFC: https://github.com/blitz-js/blitz/discussions/3075
- tRPC
We're continuing to make good progress, but that last 10% just gets you every time!
- Sebastian joins Vercel
- Adam Elmore, our technical advisor
One week later and v1 still isn't shipped. This has been stressing Mina out and Brandon tries to keep Mina from burning out. We also talk about how PlanetScale pulls the rug out from under DB migrations and how to use it with Prisma.
- Prisma/PlanetScale issue: https://github.com/prisma/prisma/issues/7292
- Github action helpers for PlanetScale: https://github.com/jonico/pscale-cli-helper-scripts
It's crunch week as we are scrambling to finish the last 10% needed to start onboarding some users! We talk through our mental and technical progress.
(Sorry for Mina's audio quality! Correct mic input wasn't selected)
- zod
Brandon and Mina meet in person for the first time! They talk about what that experience was like. Then they go into a lot of technical discussion about the design and implementation of Flightcontrol, including DB selection, schema design, and how Flightcontrol will let you manage projects, environments, and services.
- Temporal Meetup Recording
Brandon and Mina discuss the progress toward the MVP launch by end of November, learning how to have one-on-ones, and Brandon getting an executive coach.
Brandon and Mina talk about Blitz passing 10k Github stars, Vercel hiring Rich Harris, Connect.tech conference, and latest progress on Flightcontrol.
- Rich Harris' announcement tweet
- 7 Powers book
- Cue language
Mina and Brandon give progress updates and then talk about how they are thinking about company building, what their goals and values are etc. And then they discuss whether to hire another engineer or not.
Brandon talks about what it was like to attend Founder Summit in Mexico City. And we talk about all the hot new Next.js 12 features and how they will affect and integrate into Blitz.
- My twitter thread on Founder Summit (with pictures!)
- Founder Summit
- Calm Company Fund and SureSwift Capital, Inc. (organizers of Founder Summit)
- Next.js 12 announcement: https://nextjs.org/blog/next-12
- Next.js Conf recordings: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBnKlKpPeagnJYpc5geAHU40ld5hk8i82
- Vercel Edge functions: https://vercel.com/features/edge-functions
- Details on output file tracing: https://nextjs.org/docs/advanced-features/output-file-tracing
We talk about how Blitz forked Next.js earlier this year and Brandon's current status on finishing that migration and progress towards Blitz 1.0. And then we talk about Temporal and how it's making Mina's backend development so much nicer. Lastly, we discuss the relationship between Flightcontrol and Blitz.
- Blitz.js RFC - Time to maintain a fork of Next.js?
- Temporal
- Brandon on Twitter
- Mina on Twitter
This episode gives a full overview of who Brandon and Mina are, how they met, how they started Flightcontrol, and where they are in the building process.
- Brandon on Twitter
- Mina on Twitter
- Flightcontrol
- Blitz.js
- Art of Product Podcast
- Temporal
- Aleksandra Sikora, our first employee