The Art of Product

Ben and Derrick discuss some recent instances of founder CEOs stepping down from their posts. Derrick is shipping a unique feature this week. Ben is trying (but failing) to avoid getting into antique watches.

Derrick has found a new groove working in public again. Ben is polishing a job posting for a Senior Product Designer role at Tuple. The guys discuss long-term visions and harvesting profits vs. reinvesting in the business.

Ben is enjoying working on marketing activities. Tuple is beginning their experiment of offering pairing coaching calls to customers. Derrick shipped a differentiating feature and received very positive response. A new part-time head of marketing is starting with SavvyCal in November. The guys opine about specialists vs. generalists.

Derrick shipped the next part of team functionality, which opened the door for expansion revenue. Ben is zeroing in on hiring a pairing coach for Tuple customers. In his down time, Ben is taking up playing the piano - something his childhood self would be appalled about.

The Tuple team is contracting with Thoughtbot for pairing and leveling up their Rails skills. Derrick is working on team permissions and thinking about working with a marketer after wrapping up most of the work around the StaticKit sale.

Derrick is joined by Cole Krumbholz to talk about Formspree's acquisition of StaticKit. They delve into Cole's history as a bootstrapped founder, dealing with competition, defining success, how the deal came together, and what's next for both products.

SavvyCal is officially launched! Derrick talks through how the launch went and how he's managing his freshly-restocked information pipeline. The Tuple team is nearing the finish line on their large upcoming release and recorded a "peek behind the curtains" screencast for customers.

Ben is trying out Roam for organizing his notes. He shares some tips for engineers applying for jobs. After manually onboarding customers for a few weeks, Derrick is soft-launching SavvyCal to accelerate his learning from real-world customers.

Ben reflects on their latest all-hands meeting and a major upcoming release that will improve the Tuple internals. Derrick recounts the Mighty Cal rebrand to SavvyCal.

Derrick is continuing to manually onboard Mighty Cal users and is incorporating their feedback into the product. He is driving towards optimizing self-service onboarding to enable opening up signups more broadly. Ben is considering hiring a someone to optimize trial conversions. They discuss OKRs and what skills this person might need.