Building Jam

What’s happening this week at Jam? We’re shipping design updates, making decisions about a new product launching soon & discovering that intuition is a form of data.This week, Jam’s Lead Designer joins the podcast to discuss:(00:18) Sharing some design iterations to Jam's Slack app(05:06) Dogfooding at Jam(09:10) Irtefa’s very niche idea for new Jam swag: “Only 1 Network Error”(09:58) Future changes we’re making to Jam notifications(12:17) Using intuition as a form of data(17:34) Getting a new product in beta ready for GA: from Irtefa-led onboarding to self-serve(21:56) Thinking about the “why” in Jam’s onboarding(26:49) Team challenges of the weekSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

What’s it like building Jam this week? We’re hiring a second designer and realizing it’s one of the hardest positions to fill.This week we discuss:(00:15) Why hiring a designer is harder than an engineer(6:57) How we look for designers at Jam(09:15) How our designers’ personalities have shaped the product(16:15) Working with sr. designers (tip: they don’t need your Canva file)(21:41) Talking to new audiences about your product(28:44) Google docs is Totino’s Pizza rolls & Notion is a calzone(30:30) Answering “What’s your favorite product?” in a PM interview(33:30) Reacting to a mind-blowing website (https://amie.so/)(34:48) What bell-bottom jeans say about your startupSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

What are the best marketing tactics for growing startups? We don’t really know yet, but we’re having a lot of fun figuring it out. This week, Ian and Ivanha talk about taking Jam marketing from 0 to 1.(00:36) The owl video experiment & "Content-Market Fit"(05:34) Getting comfortable with a blank canvas(08:49) Deciding the tone and messaging of feature launches(11:47) Sizzle reels & Building Things™(16:16) Challenges of the weekSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

Getting builders together has become a core part of what we do at Jam- with events for our community now happening 3-4 times a month. The truth is it hasn’t always been clear we should do this, especially as a remote team with users all over the world (150+ countries 🤯). This week, we share the story behind our approach to events and building community as a startup.(1:14) Why did we start hosting events at Jam?(4:45) Our first in-person user meetup(7:42) The nerves behind hosting our first event(10:07) How to predict your event’s attendance rate(12:55) Our biggest challenge with hosting events today(15:10) The story behind our first AI demo night(16:45) How we find demos for Jam events(18:24) How to host your first event(22:00) Doing community marketing without a community forum(23:00) Why building Slack/Discord communities is difficult for saas products(24:45) Hot take- Don’t oversell your product to your community(27:55) What is the Jam community right now?(29:10) Spicy topic- Measuring event ROI(35:46) Our challenges this week

What happens when you spend months looking for the perfect candidate… And then the engineering team grows by 50% all at once? This week, the Head of Engineering at Jam talks about the challenges of scaling and hiring in our startup:(00:26) Why hiring takes so long— 5 months iterating the process!(09:30) What’s going to break: the stuff we know, and what we don’t(11:01) Changing the format of decision-making now that there’s more people (and opinions)(18:30) The different factors that go into choosing the right candidate(20:36) What happens when the team goes from 15 people to 20(22:40) Does anyone know the perfect designer:engineer ratio?(26:57) More team challenges: unexpected hires and financial planning, balancing strategy with execution, and showing up for the team with a meeting-packed calendar. 

We’re trying something new: hitting record on an unfiltered conversation about what it’s actually like to build Jam each week. This week we discuss:(00:29) This week’s offsite and building in person(04:32) Bringing up difficult or confrontational topics with the team(07:18) Choosing what to focus on when there’s a lot going on(08:02) Finding the right format for team retros(10:11) Breaking the news that a beta product needs more iteration(11:51) Trusting your gut vs. data(12:29) Excitement and uncertainty about an upcoming launch(14:15) How to make hard-boiled eggs in Bogotá