Hello Code: Recent Episodes
Hello Code
A look behind the scenes at Melbourne startup Hello Code. Founders Josh Sharp and Belle Beth Cooper discuss the ins and outs of building products, talking to customers, and navigating early startup life.
We talk about the "Quality Assurance", or QA, process that Belle goes through when releasing new updates to Exist for iOS. Gets a bit technical but we try to keep it accessible.
It's been a while! In this episode we talk about the recent web update, and what's changed for Belle now she's been full-time on Hello Code stuff for nine months.
We cover some recent happenings, like the results of the survey, Belle joining full-time, and our Apple In-App Purchase woes.
Belle talks about the data we're now importing from Apple Health and how she's going with adding sleep to the list. Josh talks about how our upcoming custom tracking feature will work.
In this episode we talk about the recent press mentions we received and how that boosted signups and income. We reflect on how hard it is to get press and how long it takes to build up brand awareness.
We talk about what's been happening with our new (beta) product Changemap, Larder, and Exist. We express sadness for the current state of affairs and our continuining failure to make enough money for Belle to quit freelancing, and ponder the future of Exist.
We recap the results of our recent Exist user survey and talk about what to do with what we've learned, and choosing what to work on.
In this episode we talk about finding a niche for Larder, being somewhat unwilling to commit to it yet, and when to start marketing things you don't do yet.
We kick off a new set of episodes about our latest product, Larder, by talking about what it is, where the idea came from, and how it fits into our business.
We talk about receiving feedback on Exist from users, why it's both frustrating and rewarding, and how to give others good feedback.
In this episode Belle shares the issues and setbacks she's come across in building a HealthKit integration for Exist.
We've been on hiatus for a few months, so we bring you up to speed on Belle's new day job at Ghost, and what's been happening with Exist and Littlelogs (plus future plans).
We discuss what it's like to live and work together in the same house, how to have our own space and work/life balance, and get lots done on our startup. In our startup house. This is the final episode of our first season.
A large part of Belle's job is content marketing. We talk about what that is, how we do it, and what we get out of it. This is a bumper edition with lots of detail on how Belle works and how to make it work for YOU (if you are a startuppy person making a product too).
We talk about our recently launched Android and iOS apps, the process behind making them, and why they differ from each other and the web app.
We talk about our Hello Code work situation including the ongoing need for client work, having to watch our expenses, and how we make it all work without going crazy or broke.
When you get more press, you get more visibility, and that means becoming a target of more unsolicited contact — both from helpful people, and people who just want to sell you stuff. We talk about our experiences and the reasons behind saying no.
We talk about why Exist has always been a paid-only product, how that's affected growth, and the tradeoffs to be made when picking a price in general. Pricing is hard.
We talk about applying to incubators and accelerators and our experiences pitching VCs. All without success.
We talk about hitting our first anniversary of launching Exist and what that means for our early backers recurring (or not), Exist for Teams, the results of our recent user survey, and our new priorities for Exist post-survey.
We're going to try to keep this a regular thing. The podcast returns for episode three and details the rise of young Belle from coding apprentice to coding master.
We had a good response from our first podcast, and so decided to give it another shot. This one is about "the grind" of working hard and not seeing any progress. We talk about Exist and Littlelogs.
On a whim, we decided to record a podcast about a topic we were discussing today, the concept of putting something "in the Hello Code bucket". I hope you enjoy it! This is an experiment, so please let us know if you'd like to hear more about our startup journey.