Benedikt closes in on a major feature implementation. Benedicte gets some feedback on 1:1 calls and POW!

Benedikt and the Userlist team are getting pretty close to finishing the new signup flow. Or they were... Benedicte points out a potential edge case. Either way, they've made progress and benefitted from treating the effort as a major feature instead of trying to cut corners. Benedikt celebrated a relaxing Easter recently as well — largely offline thanks to the maturing team and product. He cleared his inbox and recorded a video for Userlist with a friend who runs DataCater. If you have any suggestions for Heroku alternatives, send Benedikt a DM. He's finding it harder to stay a big fan amidst recent outages.

Benedicte is feeling appreciated, and for a good reason! She was named Smashing Magazine's "Person of the Week" and has received lots of love. No coding on POW! to report back this week, but plans are coming together and she received some feedback around product preferences on a Reddit thread. In addition to POW! feedback, she also got some on her Gatsby calls. The "emergency" branding might not resonate with everyone, but she finds the calls rewarding. Benedicte plans to do more selling and outreach for Queen Raae services. Surprise! Things don't sell themselves. As a reward for completing other work, she has been working with markdown, trees, and other fun tools.

Anna Maste is the founder of Subscribe Sense, a business she started after exiting Boondockers Welcome.

Benedikt and Benedicte host Anna Maste, founder of Subscribe Sense. Subscribe Sense is an email tool created to ensure subscribers to your mailing lists are confirming their subscriptions with a double opt-in. Before exiting her previous business Boondockers Welcome, Anna realized that she had leads who had not confirmed their signup to her lists. Subscribe Sense aims to increase confirmation rates.

Benedikt and Anna talk about some of the opportunities and dangers when working with email providers. Userlist has had to ask similar questions about handling emails and user behavior. The three discuss how Anna's previous exit played out, what her expectations are for Subscribe Sense post-exit, how she delineates development and marketing work, and how education and software stacks play a role in getting to an MVP.

Not to mention, Anna can make a killer parody music video!

Benedikt is working on a new signup flow for Userlist. Benedicte has fun at MicroConf.

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 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.

Benedicte 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.

After 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 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.

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.

Llama 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!