Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots
About the show
A podcast about the design, development, and business of great software. Each week thoughtbot is joined by the people who build and nurture the products we love.
Episodes
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236: Care For Customer Support (Spencer Fry)
April 21st, 2017 | Season 6 | 37 mins 38 secs
Ben is joined this week by Spencer Fry, founder of TypeFrag, Carbonmade, Uncover, and Coach, to discuss carryover lessons of successful startups.
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235: Meta Talk Process
April 12th, 2017 | Season 6 | 31 mins 1 sec
As we prepare for MicroConf, Ben takes a new tact on his talk after giving an early demo, and Derrick recounts a positive pair-programming experience.
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234: Secret Features
April 5th, 2017 | Season 6 | 29 mins 46 secs
On FormKeep, Ben implements custom redirects on form submissions and starts a test to remove up-front credit card collection, as well as discusses evaluation of feature requests. On Drip, Derrick walks through the app with new devs, considers on-boarding automation, and continues his refactoring project.
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233: Insert Mode is the Worst Mode
March 27th, 2017 | Season 6 | 27 mins 34 secs
Derrick welcomes new Javascript and Rails developers to Drip. Ben prepares a content deal and interviews a Content Manager for Upcase, discusses the benefits and methodology to Vim proficiency, works on an integration with Wistia, and ponders growing / selling apps.
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232: Don't Be Boring
March 22nd, 2017 | Season 6 | 27 mins 24 secs
As Ben and Derrick prepare their talks for MicroConf, Ben shares his tips and habits for talk preparation and public speaking.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.