Still Early

In this episode:Tailwind is joining Shopify, and Peter isn't going with themWhy he said no to pursuing Shopify (big company, no side projects, night calls from Europe)He's joining Phone.inc as product growth lead on October 1Why Niklas wanted a founder type in the role instead of someone with a finished playbookThe 2012 job Peter quit after four months, and the case for founders taking a job for a seasonPhone.inc shipped do not disturb and call transfer, and invites are open againTailwind is joining Shopify. Adam Wathan announced it last week, and Peter's last day at Tailwind Labs was the day before. He'd been there four years, never full time (a couple of days a week as a contractor), but it was his main stable thing the whole time. He originally joined to build a job board, which he'd completely forgotten until recently. His own startup was near the end of its runway, and Adam asked if he wanted to start a business inside Tailwind Labs part time. It later turned into running partnerships. He's known about the acquisition for a long time, which made Laravel Live Denmark a month ago pretty strange (the perfect place to talk to everyone about it, and he couldn't).Following the team to Shopify was something Peter could have pursued, and there were a ton of good reasons to do it. But he's never really wanted to work at a big company, and if he ever did, he wanted it to be a decision he made on purpose. He also had too many things going on the side that he wasn't ready to let go of, and he'd have been the only person in Europe on a North American team. Adam told him he didn't have to come, and that it would still be a good outcome for him if he went and did his own thing.Instead, Peter is joining Phone.inc as product growth lead on October 1. He was already an investor and helping out as a contractor. The role covers marketing and the part of product that overlaps with it (the founder-led growth videos, onboarding, changes in the app itself). Niklas thinks of it as founder in residence, and Peter says it looks a lot like his job when he was starting Reform. A friend had been asking him for months why he was only there one day a week, since he already sounded like he was running growth.Peter isn't very employable (the last time he didn't work for his own company was 2012), and his real worry was joining when he knows he'll want to do his own thing again someday. Niklas said that's exactly who he's looking for. An experienced growth hire usually brings the one playbook that worked somewhere else, and at this stage Phone.inc needs someone who can go find the one that works for them. Peter also tells the story of his first job as a junior Rails developer. He quit after four months, and his boss offered to fund his startup if he stayed. Niklas makes the case (from his blog post "Seasons in life") that founders can take a job for a few years without it being an identity crisis. He did it at Trustpilot after Firmafon and says it was the best thing he's done career-wise.On the Phone.inc side, invites were paused in early September until two core features shipped: do not disturb and call transfer. Both went live yesterday. At Firmafon, transferring a call meant remembering a star code, so people just didn't (some customers literally threw the phone across the office instead). Now there's a transfer button next to end call, a live list of colleagues and their status, and you can brief the person before handing over while the caller listens to hold music Mikkel made in a day of jamming (Niklas says it's the best he's ever heard). Invites are back on, with ten new companies in a day and a goal of 100 live companies in two weeks. Phone.inc is also hiring someone to lead direct sales.The podcast will follow Phone.inc even more closely from here, hopefully recorded in person at the office.Still Early is sponsored by Phone.inc: a business phone number, welcome greeting, call routing, and opening hours, all from an app on your personal phone.

In this episode:Peter went to Laravel Live Denmark, which grew out of a Copenhagen meetup he helped start in 2014Everyone there assumed he works full time at Phone.inc now (the daily videos are doing their job)The form builder idea he never shipped at Reform: a form, plus an AI-built backend to actually process the repliesNiklas said for months that Phone.inc wouldn't build call queuing, then built it in two daysClaude's voice mode works with MCP servers on mobile, which turns a drive to Copenhagen into real workPeter wants to turn Memo into a microblogging platform (both ChatGPT and Claude told him it's procrastination)Peter went to Laravel Live Denmark in Copenhagen, which is a bit of a full circle thing. He and Visti started the Laravel meetup there in 2014 (he tried in 2013 but nobody replied to his forum posts), and Kasper has since turned it into a non-profit and a 300 person conference. Aaron Francis, Taylor Otwell and DHH all showed up this year.A lot of people assumed Peter now works full time at Phone.inc. He doesn't, he's still pretty part-time, but there's something on the channels every weekday now so it feels like he's always around. The batch of Q&A shorts they recorded before summer is what makes that possible (Joseph is editing them). Four are out, around a thousand views each on YouTube and roughly the same on TikTok. Niklas got recognized from the videos by a stranger in a swimming hall changing room, while naked, which he took as a good sign.The form builder came up again. Nanoform is the product Peter is most excited about, but the version he actually wants is the one he never built at Reform. A form is a small piece of software, and the replies always need a process behind them. So the AI builds the backend too, picking from real building blocks (a kanban board, a table, separate pages, whatever fits) instead of generating it from scratch. Niklas wants lead scoring and agentic steps that fire when a card moves status. Peter's phrasing: vibe coded forms, without the slop. The name is still wrong.Niklas had been saying for months that Phone.inc wouldn't build call queuing, since it's a feature for full time support teams and that's not who they're for. Then he looked at the data from the first 40 companies and found people waiting in line anyway (50 calls a day is fine until they all land during lunch). So he built the simplest possible version in two days. Every call is queued now, even the ones answered instantly, and there isn't a single new setting or checkbox anywhere. Do not disturb is next and falls out of the same model: turn it off and a waiting call rings straight through. They're also pausing invites for a few weeks. Forty companies in, there are four foundational things to tighten up first, and none of them were a surprise. The first number porting went through too.Niklas discovered that Claude's voice mode on mobile has all the MCP servers from his desktop, so an hour and a half of driving became actual work: Linear tickets, debugging calls, pulling product feedback out of customer service conversations. Peter can't stand talking to it (a clever door, he says), but they agree it's a bit mad that Siri isn't this.TechBBQ has grown into more of an innovation fair than a startup event, and Niklas would rather have something the size of Laravel Live Denmark, invite only, founders and investors. The side events around it were still great.And Peter wants to turn Memo into a microblogging platform. Longer than a tweet, shorter than a blog post, RSS, no algorithm, somewhere to document building the form builder. Both ChatGPT and Claude told him it's an elaborate form of procrastination. Niklas told him to build it anyway.Still Early is sponsored by Phone.inc: a business phone number, welcome greeting, call routing, and opening hours, all from an app on your personal phone.

In this episode:Why Still Early and the Phone.inc vlog are two different shows, and who each one is forPhone.inc has 15-20 companies live on their own infrastructure, and the inbound is getting hard to keep up withThe two kinds of partnership Niklas thinks are actually worth doing (and why most aren't)Niklas hired a head of engineering in about a dayPeter got orbpilled: three days on Amp, a form builder and a kanban board, none of it built on a laptopNanoform's entire interface is a prompt you paste into an agentPhone.inc has started letting people onto the platform, slowly, and it's all running on their own infrastructure now. 15-20 companies so far, a mix of people with a real need and friends of the house who are good at giving feedback. The whole team ran the signup flow and did a friction log, which produced 20-25 issues in Linear, and Niklas had Cursor agents fix the ones he agreed with (watching cards move across the board by themselves was apparently pretty great).The pull is different this time. Random people calling Niklas's private phone because they heard about it, 55 unanswered LinkedIn messages, an inbox he gave up on and archived. Lea pulled him aside to point out they never felt anything like this in all the Firmafon years.Partnerships too, which Niklas would normally tell founders to avoid (usually all motion, no customers, and Peter got burned this way with Branch). But two categories look real: vertical SaaS platforms where the customer data lives, so a call can come in with context attached, and incorporation platforms where you catch a company at day one and never get switched out.He also hired Marcel as head of engineering. They'd worked together at Trustpilot and Whimsical, the whole team met him the same day, signed eight minutes later. Thomas made the first Android call too, with the business logic shared in Swift and the apps still native.Then Peter, who has had a slightly unhinged week. He tried an OpenClaw-style setup, didn't click, and then Adam told him to try Amp's orbs. He's now completely orpilled. The point isn't the agent, it's not needing a dev environment at all: spin up an orb, get a URL, comment directly on the thing, review it later. He built a hosted version of Nanoform this way, where you never touch a form builder (you paste a prompt with a link to the agents file, the agent builds the form, you click claim). He also added JSON bodies and kanban boards to Memo, which agents can update by patching JSON. All of it from his phone, including one session from the corner of Max Burgers.They also get into where this breaks down: iOS builds, push notifications, FreeSWITCH. Niklas thinks Phone.inc will have to build those runners themselves.---Still Early is sponsored by Phone.inc: a business phone number, welcome greeting, call routing, and opening hours, all from an app on your personal phone.

In this episode:Peter's first vacation in years without a computer (and using ChatGPT as a battlefield guide from a bench)Where memo is at: Peter is still user number one, and the aha moment problem he hasn't crackedExecutable memos, and whether a reminder is really just agent orchestrationCould an AI run OG Kit? Where to start, and wanting a layer above the pull requestNiklas cut runway from eighteen months to thirteen so he can hire fasterRebuilding the Phone.inc website with Cursor and ui.sh, plus 25 integration landing pages built while he sleptBoth of them are back from vacation, so this one starts with camping. Niklas did Norway in a small van with two kids, two car seats, two bikes and a stroller (lovely, but next year will be less ambitious). Peter camped too and spent about half of it getting kids to sleep in a tent. He also left his computer at home for the first time in years, which went fine apart from the odd thought about what would happen to it if something happened to the house. The best moment was sitting on a bench looking across the water at one of the most famous battlefields in Danish history and getting ChatGPT to explain the whole thing from exactly where he was sitting (that hill over there is where the long range cannons were, that island is where the Danes retreated to).Peter's update is mostly memo. He's invited a bunch of people, most haven't really activated, and he's still using it a magnitude more than anyone else. He's made it automatic for himself with prompts and instructions, so Claude and ChatGPT just know everything lives in memo and they read, write and update memos on his behalf. The problem is that nobody else gets to the aha moment unless it's automatic for them too, where the agents fill up their memo in the background and one day it does something they didn't expect. He hasn't solved that yet, and he's not in a hurry, since he's learning a lot as user number one. The idea he's excited about is executable memos: a memo that runs at a certain point in the future. Start with reminders, and then notice that a reminder telling your Claude to do something in two weeks is just agent orchestration.That ties into OG Kit, which Peter isn't really working on but people still pay for and like (Phone.inc became a customer this week). The thought experiment is whether an AI could run it, roughly what Sahil is doing at Gumroad but at much lower stakes. He'd start with the maintenance he doesn't do (updates, bugs, the backup that failed the other day), while Niklas argues he should start with marketing since that's where he does nothing at all. What Peter really wants is a layer above the pull request: something that fixes a thing, notices the fix broke something else, and either fixes it or rolls it back without any of it becoming his problem. Which leads to the open question he's sitting with: what building blocks would memo need before you could build the OG Kit operating system on top of it?Niklas came back from holiday wanting to step harder on the pedal, cutting runway from eighteen months down to thirteen or fourteen and hiring faster (more product engineers, probably an engineering manager, and a marketing and growth lead before the public launch). He also made a roadmap, felt dirty about it, and then rebuilt the Phone.inc website with Cursor, ui.sh and Astro on Cloudflare Workers, feeding it 60 screenshots of sites he likes plus a monorepo with the app and the docs in it. Then he had an agent work for eight hours generating 25 integration landing pages (Shopify, QuickBooks and so on), and during a call with a potential integration partner he had one built, deployed and sent over as a link right after. He also did an AMA on the Danish startup subreddit that got 193 comments, 80,000 views and around 60 waitlist signups.---Still Early is sponsored by Phone.inc: a business phone number, welcome greeting, call routing, and opening hours, all from an app on your personal phone.

In this episode:Summer special: Peter and Niklas each brought five business books off the shelf (plus a pile of honorable mentions)Positioning, knowing when to quit, OKRs, marketing channels, and how to stop fooling yourself about your own ideaWhy Getting Real still holds up twenty years laterThe Mom Test and Deploy Empathy as a pair (and why they'll probably kill your idea)Radical Focus vs Measure What Matters: the startup version of OKRs and the enterprise oneA reading list for the summer, since Niklas is driving to NorwayNo updates this week (they already recorded once), so it's just books.Peter's five: April Dunford's Obviously Awesome (April was a mentor at TinySeed when Peter was in the accelerator, and his advice is to actually do the steps, not just read them), Seth Godin's The Dip (he re-reads it every time he's about to quit or sell something, to double check it's the right call), Poor Charlie's Almanack in the Stripe Press edition, John Doerr's Measure What Matters, and Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares (19 channels and the Bullseye framework, which Peter has read so many times he doesn't really need to open it anymore).Niklas's five: Build by Tony Fadell (his "get fired up" category, next to The Social Network and the Isaacson Jobs biography), Getting Real from 37signals (his startup bible, published in 2006, free on the website, and he's given away more than a hundred printed copies), The Mom Test, Inspired by Marty Cagan (his scaling bible, and the thinking behind getting engineers in front of customers at Trustpilot), and Radical Focus, which is basically the startup-sized version of OKRs.Both of them gravitate toward books that work like debugging tools. The Mom Test and Michele Hansen's Deploy Empathy pair up really well (one is short and hands you the questions, the other is dense and gives you the whole customer interview process). Peter's take: if you're reading The Mom Test and The Dip at the same time to solve the same problem, you probably should have read The Mom Test a lot earlier.Honorable mentions: Purple Cow, The War of Art, Scaling People, Derek Sivers' Anything You Want (Adam sent Peter four Sivers books in the mail when he started at Tailwind), The Entrepreneur's Guide to Keeping Your Sht Together* by Sherry and Rob Walling (Rob's TinySeed was the first investor in Peter's previous company), Business Model Generation, and Founder-Led Sales Explained, which Niklas is a third of the way through. On that last one, Peter also recommends Jen Abel's two episodes of Lenny's Podcast (in order). They've helped him a lot with the Tailwind CSS partner program, where he's the founding salesperson and pulls in Adam when a deal needs the founder in the room.---Still Early is sponsored by Phone.inc: a business phone number, welcome greeting, call routing, and opening hours, all from an app on your personal phone.