Benedikt is working on a new signup flow for Userlist. Benedicte has fun at MicroConf.Adam McCrea of Rails AutoscaleAndrew Culver of Bullet TrainDr. Sherry WallingMichael Christofides of pgMustardLlama Life has raised a pre-seed funding round!Benedicte returns from MicroConf ending several weeks of travel. Physically, she's tired. Mentally, she's energized! She made the most of quick stops in New York City, met some listeners at the conferences, and embraces something very scary... improv. The Gatsby emails keep going out and she gets feedback on POW! from the women at MicroConf. Benedikt poses the question: "How important is the encryption in POW!'s value proposition?"Benedikt and Leo work together on a new signup flow for Userlist that Jane designed. This work touched some of the oldest code in the codebase so it felt good to give it an update. Changing the Stripe implementation to modernize it was a win as well. Not sponsored! Userlist hired a new Customer Success Engineer — Michael from pgMustard. He's off to the races and even answered an inquiry with the knowledge he had from listening to this podcast.To wrap up, recent Slow & Steady guests are getting funded. Coincidence? Come on the show and find out!

Benedikt and Benedicte chat with Steve Ruiz about tldraw, art, and slicing pizzas 11 ways.Steve's websiteSteve's artworkperfect-arrowsperfect-freehandglobs.designCuttleFollow Steve on TwitterSteve Ruiz combines art, design, and tech. In his career, he transitioned from an artist to a designer that coded, and then to working with algorithms and tinkering with design-related tools. Many of these projects throughout the years shared an open source theme and tldraw, his current focus, is no different.Steve tells Benedicte and Benedikt the story of tldraw — taking it from a side project, to going full time, to recently acquiring funding. While the "tiny little drawing" app has taken off relatively quickly, it becomes clear as he recalls previous projects that Steve's success is enabled by all his past work and experimentation on similar ideas.The trio discusses a ton of other interesting topics: building a team, creating with constraints, open source software, and more.

Benedikt's productive week included migrating to Google Workspace. Benedicte heads to MicroConf in Minneapolis.Steve is coming soon!tldraw — Steve's appGatsby ImageCDN streamMicroConf GrowthBenedicte is feeling frustrated. While Steve will still be coming on in a future episode, she yearns for more time and energy to do all of the things! Knowing that progress will go slow and steady instead, planning out focus projects should help. On the less frustrating side, the Gatsby version of the POW! marketing site will be complete soon. For those headed to MicroConf that want to meet up, reach out to Benedicte on Twitter.The CSV import feature that Benedikt has been working on is getting very close and he feels optimistic. On the backend application, he updated to the latest versions of Ruby and Rails. And Userlist published their Heap integration and it is working smoothly. This was an integration they have worked on for a while and it will provide some promotional opportunities. Finally, though it wasn't the easiest, Userlist is making the switch to Google Workspace. While Benedikt is thankful that the Google apps will work more nicely together, the process isn't the most "fun".

Benedicte returns to the show from Athens. Benedikt tackles some complexity in a new feature.The War of Art — a book by Steven PressfieldSeth Godin on "the resistance"pgMustard — review Postgres query plansMicroConf GrowthAfter checking in with Brian last episode, Benedicte is back on the show. Her travel isn't slowing down just yet — after she returns from Athens it will be off to America for MicroConf Growth. She's excited to talk to others in the space about growing the POW! team. So far, the decision still feels good. One of her goals is to define an "engine" for POW! similar to the one she has established for Queen Raae. It should help kickstart some increased productivity.Benedikt had a busy week working on a CSV upload feature. This feature should alleviate some of the customer support work where users have been sending in lots of sheets for import. The data structures differ, the instructions can be unclear — allowing customers to upload and manipulate their data before import should help out. Benedikt also spent some time refactoring which kicked off an interesting discussion about deciding when to refactor.If you know of ways to speed up Benedikt's testing, shoot us a message!

After taking a three month break from the podcast, Brian joins Benedikt for an update episode. After ending their year on the road adventure after seven months, Brian and his family are back in their hometown in Colorado. In a couple of weeks they'll finally be able to move back into their house. Brian's board game project is in the pipeline with the potential publisher. However, things move a lot slower than Brian and his friend were hoping for. Nonetheless, everyone in the industry confirms that this isn't unusual in the early stages. To keep their creative juices flowing, they both started working on a new, competitive, deck building game. While he's sad that his dream of building a software business as a solo founder didn't work out, Brian's very happy about his job at GitLab. The work is still fun and fulfilling, even though the number of meetings on his calendar increased. Overall, he's a lot more relaxed so the move back into full time employment was the right decision for him. Benedikt has been fixing a problem with Userlist's data processing pipeline in the past week. A very specific set of conditions caused problems for a customer and it took quite some head scratching to figure things out. Ultimately, he's happy that he's now got a team in place so development work doesn't fully stop when unexpected things like this disrupt the week's plan. 

Benedicte's app, POW!, turns two years old on International Women's Day. Benedikt enjoys the ability to pair program again.Benedicte's app, POW!Done for you Demo on queen.raae.codesBenedicte has worked on POW! for two years and she brings some exciting news this week — the team will be expanding! After being more of a back burner project last year, POW! is going to have a bigger focus in 2022 with another developer joining the team. There are some outstanding legal things to figure out, and Benedikt offers some advice when growing the "tiny muffin", but a bigger team will help tackle the complexity of the app. Additionally, Benedicte has finished the Done-for-you Integration Demo sales page.Though it is a bit tricky to test at this point, Benedikt is feeling good about the progress on Userlist's new authorization layer. The two discuss some of the complexity in working through that, but Benedikt thinks he's close to a rollout of an early version. Leo, the new developer at Userlist, continues to contribute and refactored lots of code last week. Benedikt has enjoyed the ability to pair again, particularly when the two of them arrive at a solution that is better than what they could have arrived at alone, individually.Finally, Brian will be returning to the show next week to chat with Benedikt. Unfortunately, Benedicte won't make it as she's headed to London. For those that will be in London on Wednesday, March 16, send her a DM on Twitter to attend her in-person meetup!

Benedicte enjoys a serene winter wonderland. Benedikt adds an unexpected integration.Userlist's Better Done Than Perfect podcastUI Breakfast Podcast. Episode 233: Demystifying Product Funnels with Rachel Obstler (of Heap)Benedicte and Benedikt are feeling calm. Benedicte has been staying in the woods outside of Oslo on vacation. Her cell phone and Twitter use are down, and she has been relaxing — skiing and spending family time. Before vacation, she was doing some refactoring on POW! to make it easier to add features in the future. Looking ahead, Benedicte will be traveling to London to visit her dad and to meet up with friends from the interwebs! After that, on to Athens.Benedikt details a win for Userlist — finalizing a new privacy policy and terms of service for GDPR compliance. It was expensive, not so fun, and they may need more updates again soon. Keeping with the recent integration theme, he worked on an unexpected one for Heap, a powerful analytics tool. After many years he also started building an authorization solution to allow for enabling access based on pricing tiers or user roles in the future.

Marie joins Benedicte and Benedikt to discuss building Llama Life, a productivity app centered around focus and fun, in public.Follow Marie on TwitterLlama Life — work through your to-do list with focus and funFirst version of Llama Lifewww.fidgetpage.com — a small project that drives Llama Life trafficLlama Life is a web-based productivity tool that Marie built to help you work through a to-do list, not just build one. While she isn't new to startups, she is new to coding. Self-taught and working as a solo founder until recently, Marie reminds herself that indie hacking on Llama Life is a dream job that combines design, marketing, and her newfound capabilities in software development.Moving quickly as both the designer and developer, Marie continued to build Llama Life after finding early encouragement on Twitter. The product started simple and grew to include authentication, a database, and payments. While the productivity application space is crowded, she built Llama Life out of her own needs. When diagnosed with ADHD, Marie became obsessed with solving for focus and attention and needed a tool that allowed for setting quick timers and one that was also fun.Listen in to learn the story behind the fun branding, how Marie leverages her marketing strengths, and what's ahead for Llama Life!

Benedikt asks some tough comparison questions. Benedicte leans on the "engine" and has some fun.Hacker News, Date ComparisonZach Holman: The Kobayashi Maru of Comparing Dates with TimesBenedikt's date and time comparison tweetSlow & Steady, on YouTube!Done-for-you Demo DraftYou're basically a house plant...Have you weighed in on Benedikt's data comparison conundrum yet? He stirred up quite the team conversation at Userlist, and on Twitter, too. There were some hot takes and lengthy discussions, but he was thankful to have a team to run some difficult date-handling questions by. He was also thankful to get back some deep focus time this week to tackle the challenge. He uploaded the catalog of Slow & Steady episodes to YouTube — now one more place you can listen!Benedicte relied on the Gatsby engine while she had some fun last week. Covid restrictions were lifted in Norway over the weekend. She got drinks with several friends and visited briefly with her sister in person after years apart. On stream last week, viewers seemed to enjoy a more freeform troubleshooting session and she finished a draft of her done-for-you demo. While POW! didn't qualify for TinySeed this year, Benedicte has a friend interested in helping with the marketing and customers interviews.And Brian? He's settled in Boulder and is doing well!

Benedicte shares some positive feedback. Benedikt moves forward with a suite of integrations.Queen Raae, testimonial tweet An embarrassed Queen Raae on streamUserlist Integrations pageBenedicte is feeling flattered, is receiving praise online, and saving this kind of feedback for the future in a "brag folder". She recommends starting one of these for brightening up a gloomy day or for reminding you of your achievements when it comes time for performance reviews. In addition to working on some new sales pages, Benedicte has applied to TinySeed with POW!. She doesn't meet the recommended MRR threshold but discusses the motivations behind applying anyway.Benedikt hasn't had the strictest focus given recent customer support issues and new hire ramp-up time, but he has made lots of progress with the Userlist integrations despite this. Some companies make this work easier for developers than others — Stripe is one of the good ones (add this to the list of non-sponsored Stripe shoutout episodes). In another milestone, Userlist has moved all email marketing to... Userlist! This was made possible with the feature update from last year and they finally made the jump over.