UX designer Nathan Powell joins Benedicte and Benedikt to talk about his latest projects, some practical UX tips, and the struggles with onboarding.

Nathan Powell, formerly of Nusii, created the business proposal software back in 2013 as a solution to his own pain points as a freelance UX designer. But in 2019, he decided to move on from it and sold everything to his co-founder.

Nathan is now making a comeback in the SaaS game with a new UX course, an upcoming book, and Feature Flux. With his new SaaS project, he hopes to make collaboration and revisions easier for UX designers and development teams. 

Nathan, Benedicte, and Benedikt talk about the biggest UX mistakes SaaS companies are making, their struggles with onboarding and more!

Benedicte is enjoying the slow summer rhythm. Benedikt and the team are feeling good about the new pricing.

Benedicte is enjoying the summer with her family but to her surprise, there was way less recreational coding than she expected (which is a good thing). Despite the slow summer rhythm, Benedicte was still able to get meaningful work done: Cloudinary beta is now ready for testing, her workshop got accepted to the upcoming Modern FrontEnds Live! in London this November, and is in preliminary talks with a potential collaborator for POW!.

Benedikt is still figuring out how to work with the complexity of the Stripe integration while Leo is making great progress with the editor. The Userlist team is feeling good about the new pricing and is thinking about adding a new plan very soon.

Benedikt fights against spam sign-ups. Benedicte contemplates the next steps for POW! in light of the recent overturn in the U.S.

Both feeling under the weather lately, things have been a little crazy for both Benedikt and Benedicte.

Benedikt’s plan to work on the Stripe integration got derailed because of relentless spam sign-ups on Userlist. The team has put in a Slack integration to detect spammers early. Benedikt is thinking of adding another layer of protection with a scoring mechanism that can filter out potential spammers based on their email domain. On the plus side, Leo is making great progress with the WYSIWYG editor.

Benedicte ended last week with a happy bubble at React Norway. Ironically, someone told her that the recent overturn in the U.S. happened while she was talking on stage about reproductive rights and privacy. The recent happening has got Benedicte thinking about the next steps for POW!.

Michael Christofides of pgMustard chats with Benedikt and Benedicte about gardening, pgMustard, PostgreSQL, and doing marketing for SaaS.

While a relatively older database system, many companies still use PostgreSQL for its reliability and flexibility. However, many users find it difficult to figure out the problem when their database slows down.

Seeing this as a great pain point for their customers, Michael pitched an idea for a tool at his old workplace but unfortunately got rejected. He held on to this tool idea and launched pgMustard in April 2019.

pgMustard helps speed up slow database queries for PostgreSQL. But unlike other tools in the space, pgMustard pinpoints users to the source of the problem and even gives suggestions on how to move forward with it.

Michael, Benedicte, and Benedikt talk about gardening, Supabase, working at Userlist, SEO, and more!

Benedikt finally launches the new pricing. Benedicte talks about their ideas for the next season of the stream.

Benedicte had another "boring week" job-wise: regular work, emails, and the stream. On the marketing sales front, she started to follow some of the bigger plugins on GitHub to see what issues will arise. And with the final stream of the season this week, Benedicte shares that they are already thinking of new ideas to try out for the next season. 

Benedikt just launched the new pricing for Userlist and is a bit anxious about how it will turn out. The team also made great progress on their WYSIWYG editor. While building a good user experience is always a fun and exciting challenge for Benedikt, he shares that he needs to focus on backend work more.

Benedicte is feeling calm after an ordinary week. She is getting ready for summer and, beyond the routine activities, she has figured out solutions for the Cloudinary plugins. Now that the "fun" part is over, she will implement the solutions over the next two weeks. Oslo has been warm and Benedicte is taking full advantage. Her talk is approaching in late June and she is prepared to be... unprepared and stressed.

Benedikt has enjoyed good weather as well and planned some local sightseeing recently. The new pricing at Userlist is close, but it is tricky. The team is having difficulty getting the proration the way they want it. After diving into the Stripe Apps, Benedikt is also finding that effort more complex than expected. To kick off yet another, large, infrastructure-like  project, Benedikt and Leo meet and start researching on a new WYSIWYG editor. 

Benedicte and Ola win the Gatsby gig! Benedikt spies a new opportunity.

Benedicte and Ola hear back on their proposal — they'll be working with Cloudinary on their existing plugins! Benedicte is already digging through the code to tackle any bugs before summer starts. Speaking of Gatsby, she takes a moment to rant about community-based support. POW! picks up a few new customers despite Benedicte not focusing on that in the short term and Structure Content came to Oslo.

Benedikt celebrates as Userlist passes a $15k MRR milestone following a few preceding months of slower growth. The new pricing feature is coming along nicely and he's looking forward to the rollout. Benedikt is also excited about Stripe releasing their new Stripe Apps, a new way to build Stripe integrations. There aren't many companies in the new app marketplace, so it presents an exciting opportunity for Userlist. He would have to learn some React though...

Pierre de Wulf chats with Benedikt and Benedicte about ScrapingBee, PricingBot, growing with a small team, and leveraging communities.

It wasn't the best of times, but it wasn't the worst of times. Pierre, co-founder of ScrapingBee, was excited to come record and get some relief from debugging an infrastructure issue. Debugging can be challenging work but it comes with the territory of owning a SaaS — customers don't want to do this, so they will pay for it!

ScrapingBee is growing quite nicely thanks in part to a solid product with a good fit and a tightknit team. After first working on PricingBot, a price-monitoring service for e-commerce, Pierre and his co-founder pivoted as their runway was dwindling. They created a web scraping API very quickly with ScrapingBee, secured a spot in TinySeed during the pandemic, and passed the $1M ARR threshold with a fully remote team last year.

Pierre, Benedicte, and Benedikt discuss the impact of community involvement, support, acquisition, SEO, and more!

We're back! Benedicte waits to hear back on a Gatsby proposal. Benedikt returns from vacation.

Benedicte sent out a proposal for more project-based Gatsby work and is anxious to hear back. She made progress on her article for Smashing Magazine as well and is looking forward to feedback on the draft. She is finding it difficult to narrow down exactly what level of expertise the audience will have and knows that meeting her audience at their technical level will be critical when writing her book. Reluctantly, Benedicte places POW! on the back burner, at least for a few months. Leaning into the Gatsby work feels more important. Norway just celebrated Constitution Day, so Oslo was a party! Endless ice cream included.

Benedikt took a vacation last week. While the computer came with him, he didn't do anything more than a few notification checks — no fires to put out! Userlist finally, officially launched the new signup flow and they haven't seen any errors in the rollout. They are also getting closer to launching the new pricing plan as well, something that will likely be wrapped up by the end of the quarter. Benedikt might have some bandwidth to work on the Stripe integration, but it's unclear how much work remains there. Finally, Userlist grows again as the new community advocate just came aboard!

Benedicte is anxious about an inbound lead for new Gatsby work. Benedikt is almost done with the new signup flow implementation.

Benedicte has an inbound lead for some potential Gatsby work. It's exciting, but she's anxious to see what comes of it. She talks about Rob Fitzpatrick's book, Write Useful Books, and the difference in the effort needed to produce different types of content — short books, livestreams, produced video, etc. In other updates, Pierre, founder of Scraping Bee, will join Queen Raae on stream this week and Benedicte will speak at React Norway this summer!

Benedikt is (almost!) done with the new signup flow and he reflects on the complexity and work estimation. He's satisfied with the implementation but still hopes to learn how to better recognize and estimate these larger efforts in the future. Benedikt's planned Friday administration work got pushed in favor of some recreational coding — creating a password strength indicator for Userlist. Although he feels a little guilty, it was a fun break. Speaking of fun... Benedikt is taking a week off!

Finally, Userlist is hiring a part-time Community Advocate. Check out the job description in the show notes above.