Slow & Steady

Geoff Roberts of Outseta chats with Benedikt and Benedicte about Outseta, their uncommon operating and compensation model, and more.OutsetaJustin WelshSDR NationFollow Geoff on TwitterWhile there are a lot of best in class tools out there, more often than not, early stage businesses only need basic functionalities to get things done.Coming from the same experience, Geoff and Dimitris used it to build Outseta, an all-in-one tech stack (that includes payments, authentications, CRM, and email) for SaaS and membership style businesses. Their tool helps founders focus more of their time on building the product instead of spending time integrating several different tools before launching their business.Geoff, Benedicte, and Benedikt talk about how they attracted both the technical and non-technical audience, how he juggles work and dad duties, and more!

Benedicte lands the deal for Prune Your Follows. Benedikt deals with the slow speed of moving their rendered emails. Should Benedicte get the black or steel refrigerator?BackblazeXataGeoff Roberts of OutsetaBenedicte successfully lands the deal to rebuild Prune Your Follows with Xata, NextAuth, and Gatsby. With everything she has to get done before flying out to San Francisco, she’s looking forward to doing a good crunch time to fight the insecurities away. Benedikt is feeling a bit frustrated with the slow speed of moving rendered emails from their database to Amazon S3. And with the major chunk of work out of the way, Benedikt and Leo were able to do a lot of cleanup on their message composer code.

Benedikt focuses on solving other issues on Userlist. Benedicte makes the most out of her vacation in Germany.Conference BuddyGeoff Roberts of OutsetaWith the message composer now deployed to production, Benedikt and the Userlist team can now focus on adding more niceties and fixing other issues on the platform. Despite being unable to meet up with Benedikt last week, Benedicte had a nice and productive vacation in Germany. She was able to catch up with Mirjam Aulbach of Conference Buddy for brunch and send her proposal on the Sample App + Content Combo. As for Cloudinary related things, Ola’s doing a great job on the readme by bringing joy into it with emojis. 

Benedicte pitches her latest side project to a database startup. Benedikt gets an interesting question from his mentee.Read Benedikt and Jesse’s back and forth about shipping updatesPrune Your FollowsCampfire Labs – a content companyTraction – a book by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin MaresFirst Ruby FriendSenior Engineer Mindset – a book by Swizec TellerBenedikt and the Userlist team are putting the finishing touches on their message composer, which will be deployed to projection very soon. He also met with his First Ruby Friend mentee this week and got an interesting question: how do you become a senior developer?Benedicte just pitched her latest side project, Prune Your Follows, to a database startup and will be having a meeting with them later this week. This new opportunity has gotten her excited about the prospect of turning future side projects as viable lines of business.

Benedicte and Benedikt share tips on how to make the most out of conferences and more.Retweet Colby Fayock’s testimonial about Gatsby Retweet Brian Lovin’s testimonial about UserlistPriya Parker’s “The Art of Gathering”Benedicte is filled with happy hormones this week because of dancing, more work from Cloudinary, and a wonderful testimonial from a customer on Twitter. She’s working on her preparations for upcoming conference talks and has also received a call for proposals for another one next year.Benedikt and the Userlist team also received praise on Twitter from a customer with a large following. The team’s also focused on finishing the editor integration work this month. And after skipping the MicroConf for the past two years, Benedikt will be attending this year’s MicroConf Europe along with their customer advocate, Katarina. Benedicte and Benedikt share their go-to conference tips so you can build new relationships during the event and more.

Coming back from a two-week break here at the podcast, Benedikt and Benedicte talk about the progress they’re making and a few existential questions about shipping updates.Jamstack Conf 2022Modern FrontEnds Live!Prune Your FollowsWith the summer over, everyone’s in “back to work” mode and the pace is picking up.Benedikt is revitalized after his three-week vacation. The Userlist team is making great progress with the message editor. On the frontend, they’re currently polishing the UI and fixing small annoyances with the copy-paste function to make it easier for users. On the backend side of things, Benedikt is working on setting up the validation process for the new document schema and is tackling issues related to their original renderer.Benedicte is gearing up for her upcoming Gatsby talks this November to hit three birds with one stone: two conferences and a video course. Work-wise, she’s still figuring out the right mix of Gatsby products and services. And while it didn’t win the Hackathon, she’s refactored Prune Your Follows to use NextAuth.Benedikt and Benedicte also discuss a few existential questions about shipping updates like: how long should stuff take? What is good enough? How do you balance quality and speed?

Benedicte chats with Feather.so founder Bhanu Teja P to talk about his Notion to blog platform and the importance of marketing your product.Feather.soFollow Bhanu on TwitterVercel charged Bhanu ~$1.8k for hosting MDX.OneAfter quitting his job as a software engineer, Bhanu started blogging. He enjoyed creating content but the process was time consuming: after writing on Notion, he still had to convert it to Markdown, and then transfer it to the blogging platform.He then thought about developing a tool that would make things easier for Notion users.A rebrand of a previous product, Feather.so is a blogging platform that enables Notion users to write and publish their content without having to go through the tedious conversion and copy-pasting process. Bhanu and Benedicte talk about his other Notion-based tools, why marketing your product is as important as building it, and more!

Benedikt and Benedicte are both celebrating very productive weeks as they see all their efforts come together in their respective projects.Jamstack Conf 2022Bhanu Teja P of Feather.soThe Artist’s WayBenedikt and the team had a pretty successful week in terms of stuff shipped: they finished the frontend query builder improvements, implemented an Amplitude cohort sync integration, and added a server-side rendering for their new message “document schema”. They also plan to work on a bug in their old editor that’s causing problems with their users’ inline image data.Benedicte’s also on a roll: they had a great meeting with Cloudinary last week, talking to Newline for producing courses, and is currently getting ready for her talks at Modern FrontEnds Live! and at Jamstack Conf 2022. She’s also working on a fun side project to clean up her Twitter following.

Benedicte and Benedikt talk about the updates from the week and why it's in fact good idea to write down your passwords.The ONE Thing by Gery KellerEpisode with Pierre from ScrapingBee1Password's password recovery process for teams and familiesPassword managers don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than not having oneIn the last week, Benedikt finally got some work done on the user interface of Userlist's condition builder. This was only possible by ignoring a lot of other things. However, he feels like the effort will pay off in the future by getting the fundamentals right.Benedicte's focus is on cultivating good habits by keeping up the yoga schedule, being more mindful about preparing food, and enjoying time outside in the sun. She's also preparing to launch the Queen Rae live streams again, starting August 25th, and is looking for guests that have interesting Gatsby projects.A recent support issue on POW! triggers a discussion about best practices around password management and how some of the advice we all learned in the past might not be the best anymore. 

With the summer almost over, Benedicte is excited to get back on the grind. Benedikt deals with the heat wave and the load of small things at work.Modern FrontEnds Live!The tweet that got Benedicte the invitation to do an interview with Will SentanceThe Culture Map by Erin MeyerBoth Benedicte and Benedikt have felt the unusual temperatures brought by the heat wave.Aside from his struggles with the current weather in Germany, Benedikt is feeling a bit unfocused because of the load of small things that need his attention at work. He’s also looking into other hosting solutions for Userlist for future reference. Benedikt and Leo are at 90% with the WYSIWYG editor but progress seems kind of slow lately.Coming home from their long summer vacation, Benedicte is still enjoying the remaining downtime left before school starts but is also excited to get work done soon. She’s back on the 30-day yoga challenge, has a couple of conference talks lined up, and is working on their streamlined offer for ongoing maintenance and support for Gatsby plugins. And in an unexpected turn of events, she got an invite to do an interview with Codesmith’s Will Sentance.