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Slow & Steady
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Slow & Steady

Author: Benedikt Deicke, Benedicte Raae, and Brian Rhea

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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, and Benedicte is establishing herself as a Gatsby expert and developer advocate for hire.
198 Episodes
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The Userlist team is seeing some progress with their sales process. Benedicte has some ideas of how to refine her live streaming service.Things are moving forward sales-wise for Benedikt and the Userlist team, sending a few custom-priced enterprise quotes in the past few weeks. Benedikt also shares his takeaway from his recent chat with Monica Lent.With her new Go Live with Queen Raae service, Benedicte is thinking about how to help those dev founders who are a bit hesitant about going live. And while it’s unfortunate that she didn’t get the caravan, Benedicte refocused her energy on improving their property and possibly the Volkswagen bus that’s sitting in Sweden.Benedikt and Benedicte talk about the importance of following up, greenfield projects, and more.
Benedicte is feeling playful with her latest service and project ideas. Benedikt makes it through a stressful week.Should Benedicte and Ola get the Caravan? Let them know in this thread.Mastering live streaming as a content creation flywheel for a couple of months now, Benedicte is now finalizing the details of her latest service for fellow dev founders. She’s also trying to convince Ola to get a Caravan to renovate as her office/studio.Benedikt is feeling a bit scattered after having a stressful week: he had to do a few demo calls in between everything, and had a bit of a rough time with one of their largest customers renewing its annual subscription.
Benedikt and the Userlist team celebrate a significant financial milestone. Benedicte leans into the human aspects of content creation.Join Benedicte’s biweekly live streams on YouTubeCheck out MixPod’s revamped web designDespite experiencing a few hiccups with their bank account and Stripe, the Userlist team celebrates a financial milestone as they’ve hit break even. As a bonus surprise, Userlist was able to sell a domain for a significant amount of money.After powering through the birthday bonanzas in January, Benedicte spent 24 hours at the spa and is now feeling re-energized and ready. And with all of the streams and content creation she’s been doing for the past few months, she’s now opening herself to those who need a livestream host, a mystery dev, or video creator.
We have Brian back on the show this week and tells us what he’s been up to.JobLens — Brian’s productThe Age of Spiritual Machines — a book by Ray KurzweilSpiritual Machines — an album by Our Lady PeaceEpisode 131: Brian is back in town, literallyEpisode 120: We Have a Contest Winner!Follow Brian on LinkedInMore than a year since he was last on, Brian tells us about his time at GitLab, JobLens, his consulting work, and his board games.Benedikt, Benedicte, and Brian also talk about tech layoffs, AI, why you shouldn’t monetize your hobbies, and more.
Benedicte talks about the fun during the holiday season. Benedikt shares his 2024 goals.YearCompass — reflect on the year and plan the next oneDocs for DevelopersDespite feeling a bit all over the place, Benedicte and her family had a lot of fun during the holidays. With their newly renovated house, they were able to host about 30 people for the festivities. Benedicte also plans to work on her YearCompass in February after the birthday bonanzas this month.Benedikt looks back at 2023 and it was a generally good year for him, reaching significant milestones in his personal and work life. He and the Userlist team are planning to step up their sales game this 2024. 
Benedikt and the Userlist team launch their visual workflows feature. Benedicte shares why she now enjoys collaborations.   Support Userlist’s visual workflows on Product Hunt Queen Raae’s viral Ikea clip Buy Back Your Time — a book by Dan Martell After two and a half months of sprinting, Benedikt and the Userlist team finally launched their visual workflows. They also dusted off their website which included adding new copy, screenshots, pages, structure, and a new testimonial scroller section, among others. He’s guessing that this might have also helped get them new and better quality trials this month.Despite the bank gig being over, this short stint made Benedicte realize that she loves collaborating with teams after all. With this minor setback, she might have to get the dev rel service business up and running sooner than she planned. And now that she’s collaborating with other contractors on her other projects, it looks like everything’s falling into place for her “build in public” narrative.Benedikt and Benedicte talk about why you should let features drip out over time, Framer, and more.
Benedikt remains in crunch mode. Benedicte and her pirate family are back to streaming. Still working on their visual workflow builder, Benedikt and the Userlist team are still in crunch mode. The velocity has been crazy as they were shipping stuff super fast like adding new node types in just a couple of hours.Benedicte, together with her pirate family and AK, just finished their first stream on charting the course for MixPod. And as part of their marketing strategy, they’ll be releasing clips from the streams on various channels. She also has an upcoming mini-project which she calls SemanticAdvent, where she’ll select 24 Semantic HTML tags in 24 days.Benedikt and Benedicte talk about gamification (Polar Habits was mentioned), Lillian’s first marching band concert, how to get customer feedback, and more.
Scary Bell Peppers

Scary Bell Peppers

2023-11-0232:31

Benedicte and Benedikt share updates on Userlist's upcoming visual workflow builder as well as Benedicte's new project, MixPod. Benedicte's Halloween DinnerAmazing CSS DemosBenedikt talks about the progress on Userlist's new feature, and how setting deadlines increases stress, but helps prioritizing what's important. Benedicte shares recent challenges in Outseta's customer support, where people get confused by new client/server patterns in Next.js. Afterwards, she outlines the plan for the new streaming series for building MixPod which starts in a few days. 
A major luddite

A major luddite

2023-10-1940:12

Benedicte and Benedikt talk about their updates from the past three weeks, washing machines, winter preparations, and more.Sign the new letter to the U.S. Congress regarding Section 174Buy Back Your Time — a book by Dan MartellFour Thousand Weeks — a book by Oliver BurkemanDespite crashing into her vacation, Benedicte was still able to chill with friends while surrounded by nature. Things are going nicely at Outseta: they got shout outs at Webflow conferences and are seeing some accounts going from zero to making a lot of money in a short span of time. Benedicte also talks about the preparations they’re doing for their next public build.Since the last episode, the Userlist team has now finished migrating their sending infrastructure and have recently added bounce and spam complaint tracking. On the non-work front, Benedikt had an awesome time in Lisbon, enjoying both MicroConf Europe and the sightseeing with his wife.
Benedicte and Benedikt talk about the old hobbies they’ve picked up and other updates from the week.Here’s Michael and Benedikt on day 1 of their drum challengePOW!, Prune Your Follows — Queen Raae’s app projectsMicroConf EuropeThings are going great for Benedikt and the Userlist team: they’re currently migrating to their new email service provider, and they’re making good progress with their visual workflow builder. He also shares that he and Michael Koper are taking on a 30-day drum challenge. Despite feeling a sore from riding camp and ballet lessons, Benedicte is now ready to work on her app projects this fall. Aside from POW! and Prune Your Follows, they’ll also be working on their new app idea called MixPod. For her work with Outseta, Benedicte shares that they’re almost done with the Framer integration and are currently working on their brand center.
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.OutsetaFollow Geoff on TwitterWatch the productive morning routine videoTailwind fake businessesNow 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.
Summer of UI Tweaks

Summer of UI Tweaks

2023-08-1138:24

Benedicte and Benedikt take on the challenge of #SummerofUITweaks for their products.Let us know if you’re joining the #SummerofUITweaks on this threadCurrently 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 interviewLearn more about High Performance PostgreSQL for RailsCheck out Andrew’s blogFollow Andrew on TwitterAndrew 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 floorBenedicte 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. 
Major life update!

Major life update!

2023-06-2932:08

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.
Busy Bees 🐝

Busy Bees 🐝

2023-05-2528:20

Benedikt prepares for his upcoming Rails SaaS Conference talk. Benedicte visits her old university town. Rails SaaS Conference Four Thousand Weeks — a book by Oliver Burkeman Recording from Trondheim this week, Benedicte is back in town to serve as an external reviewer of the university’s IT Master Program. Her exploration of the university town felt like she was transported back to the early 2000s during her uni days.With the upcoming Rails SaaS Conference, Benedikt is currently focused on preparing for his talk. They were also able to fix some memory issues at Userlist last week by introducing a request limit.Benedikt and Benedicte talk about their upcoming meet up in Athens, why you should let things take time, and more.
Benedicte thinks about how to move forward with Prune Your Follows. Benedikt starts working on their conversion goals feature. Prune Your Follows @levelsio’s tweet that gave Prune Your Follows more following The new Twitter API has changed the rules of the game, which makes Benedicte think about options on how to move forward with Prune Your Follows. Despite this, she’s been enjoying life beyond work: signing up for window restoration classes, a sauna membership, and doing renovations.With the reporting feature wrapped up and shipped, Benedikt and the Userlist team are now working on their conversion goals feature. And while he ran into some complications with their trigger implementation last week, he was able to simplify the process and even ran an experiment with the Ruby gem, Scientist.
Benedikt ponders on adding a now page for Userlist. Benedicte gets excited about an upcoming upgrade to their property.Check out Lillian’s mmm.pageAfter getting feedback from churned users, Benedikt thinks about having a changelog or now page so that users could check for Userlist product developments. They’ve also just shipped their latest feature and is now available for all users.Benedicte is excited about a few things in the past week: they just got a great offer for a staircase and she’s taking on her first devrel project for Outseta. She also guided Lillian in creating her first website using mmm.page.
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