Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

231: Who Likes Using Ugly Software?

March 14th, 2017  |  Season 6  |  33 mins 1 sec

Ben & Derrick reflect on the S3 outage and how it affected their services, and muse on managing user perceptions. Derrick submits a talk to MicroConf on what it means to be "customer driven", and begins a refactoring effort to rework Drip's integration system. On Upcase, Ben integrates a referral widget, and enables subscription pausing, while on FormKeep he fixes a trial plan selection bug.

230: Sales Through Education (Anna Jacobsen)

March 6th, 2017  |  Season 6  |  32 mins 55 secs

Ben & Derrick welcome Anna Jacobsen, Education Director at Drip, to discuss customer demos / onboarding, sales and retention strategies, customer success, and best practices within Drip.

229: We Need More Counters

February 27th, 2017  |  Season 6  |  33 mins 33 secs

On FormKeep, Ben runs an A/B test on trial length and adds a short onboarding survey, meanwhile wrapping up team signups and working on a content licensing deal for Upcase. Derrick reports back from his machine learning class, and discusses an issue in quality assurance testing.

228: Start in Beginner Mode

February 20th, 2017  |  Season 6  |  24 mins 59 secs

Derrick travels to Portland to visit fellow bootstrapper friends, Ben recounts his recent conference travel, and a discussion of their most pivotal hires as well as account rescue techniques.

227: We Don't Do Fractional Pennies

February 13th, 2017  |  Season 6  |  30 mins 26 secs

Derrick celebrates a great shipping week, completing both 'live segments' and a Drip certification course. Ben recounts the rollout & results of the Upcase + Tapas promotion, and reflects on its successes and possible pitfalls.

226: There Are So Many Edge-Cases

February 6th, 2017  |  Season 6  |  22 mins 44 secs

Ben presses to meet the Upcase & Tapas launch deadline, and shares some lessons learned from its preparation, promotion, and launch. On Drip, Derrick rolls out more UI updates, is looking to hire JavaScript and Rails engineers, and details his hiring & interview process.

225: Abuse the Sunk-Cost Fallacy

January 30th, 2017  |  Season 6  |  31 mins 43 secs

Ben halts the search for a marketer to instead hire a sales consultant and focus on growth himself, and announces a collaboration with Ruby Tapas. Derrick enrolls in a machine learning class, and contemplates Drip team & work structure.

224: Sharpen Your Saw

January 23rd, 2017  |  Season 6  |  33 mins 17 secs

Derrick takes a solo retreat to reflect on new goals for Drip, and draws up preliminary plans for scaling team size / structure, as well as speeding up velocity through parallelism. Ben shares his experience with GrowthHackers Projects, hides the lowest plan and implements an automated annual upgrade reminder, pitches a content partnership for Upcase, considers a thoughtbot products bundle, and realizes a need for a mentor.

223: Work Deterrent System

January 9th, 2017  |  Season 6  |  25 mins 12 secs

Ben & Derrick discuss music in the workplace, optimizing Redis, reaching larger markets beyond early adopters, and standing out in job application e-mails.

222: Honesty Bait

December 19th, 2016  |  Season 6  |  30 mins 20 secs

Derrick considers learning a new language to be prepared for scaling Drip's optimization, and gives new details on the tech used to streamline queries for large accounts. Ben breaks down his post to finding the best candidate for product Head of Marketing, and pointers on developing an entrepreneur's mindset.

221: Power in Mimicry

December 12th, 2016  |  Season 6  |  35 mins 2 secs

Ben discusses the lessons of mimicked learning and tempering of judgmental thinking gleaned from a sports book, and muses on how to apply them to career advice. On Drip, faced with a mountain of catch-up work after the holiday, Derek confronts scalability.

220: Goin' Legit (For 2017)

December 6th, 2016  |  Season 6  |  33 mins 30 secs

Ben decides to hire a support firm, document support processes, completes the Hound pricing change, and prepares to make products their own division for next year. Meanwhile, on Drip, Derrick addresses a performance challenge.

219: Rails' Sidekick (Mike Perham)

November 28th, 2016  |  Season 6  |  31 mins 20 secs

Ben is joined by Mike Perham, author of Sidekiq, to discuss running a business solo, taking a side project from hobby to full time job, and scaling support as an app grows.

218: A Spark of Inspiration

November 21st, 2016  |  Season 6  |  35 mins 37 secs

On Drip, Derrick launches a free tier, and utilizes credit card anti-fraud measures. Ben publicly launches FormLinter, pauses exploring new product ideas in favor of giving attention to existing ones, and starts to rebuild the product team. They also discuss the merits of remote vs in-person collaboration, the pros and cons of open offices, and dealing with interruptions from notifications and meetings.

217: The Object Object Object

November 14th, 2016  |  Season 6  |  50 mins 51 secs

Ben and Nick get super nerdy this week and chat about Meetspace's architecture using Go, Postgres, and HMAC including custom cookie signing, rendering, error handling, tooling, and more!

216: The One With Laila & Brenda

November 7th, 2016  |  Season 6  |  38 mins 54 secs

Sadly, Ben is stuck in hammock somewhere, and we are without a new episode this week. However, we would love you all to check out thoughtbot's newest podcast, interviewing inspirational designers, developers, and other makers in tech, The Laila & Brenda Show!

Give their latest episode a listen here, and if you like it subscribe to their feed however you listen to podcasts!