Benedicte’s mother passed away after a decade-long battle with early onset Alzheimer’s. She looked back at some of the fun memories they had and shared that she’s planning a celebration of life gathering at a bar where her mom used to frequent. Benedicte also marked her last day Outseta, realizing that she won’t have enough brain space for two roles when things start ramping up at Whee. She looks forward to giving herself a slow April.

Benedikt and the Userlist team reviewed their Q1 and while they got a lot done, they got a bit derailed from their original plans. He also took a week off from work but a database issue made it challenging to settle into vacation mode.

Even when life hasn’t been cooperating lately, Benedicte realized that she’s still grateful for a lot of things. At Whee, bike financing came through, they landed a 3-year grant for an IoT project, and AI will enable the team to tackle things they’ve been putting off.

Benedikt spent a good chunk of the week deep in a new serializer implementation for Userlist. The full test suite was green for a while but it broke again in an effort to improve things overall. He also recorded two videos on array filtering and got more intentional with his social media posting.

Mentioned on the show:

• Customer Bastien: your MCP server has a permission problem
• Postpone
• From Domain Authority to Entity Authority: 2026 Google Discover Update

Despite getting a bit chaotic, Benedicte gave an energizing talk about Jean-Claw at the recent Oslo Claude Code Meetup last week. At Outseta, the team decided to lean into enabling AI operations.

Benedikt optimized their website with the help of AI: adding more structured data, creating dedicated author pages, adding an “updated” date field, and more. And while he’s certain that a perfect Ahrefs health score is just a vanity metric, he’s taking that small win.

Benedicte and Benedikt also talk about how AI speeds up experimentation, why they think good taste and experience matters these days, and more.

Mentioned on the show:

• Is it Queen or AI?
• More and more social posts are drafted while interacting with AI agents

Benedicte is working on Jean-Claw for her upcoming talk when things get a bit existential. In the middle of setting up the YAML file, the bot halts on the “Who are you? Who am I?” step. She also used Claude to create a Queen Raae voice skill to help her write more like she actually talks.

Benedikt shipped their MCP experiment, letting users generate broadcasts, use Liquid tags inside broadcasts, and somewhat create segments. And with Heroku’s recent announcement, he’s looking into alternatives once more.

Benedicte is deep in an AI rabbit hole these days: reading, building, and testing with AI as much as she can. She almost bought a Mac Mini to test out her Claude Bot but instead pitched the idea for a talk happening on Feb 25th.

Benedikt is doing an MCP experiment for Userlist. In the process, he realized that they might need a new way to manage their schema. The team has also shipped their webhook node behind a feature flag while they figure out the SSRF stuff.

With their year and quarter planning done, Benedikt shares some of their plans and targets for Userlist this 2026. He also shares how he used Claude Code to take care of “annoying projects” on their codebase, find crosslinking opportunities, and more.

Benedicte and Ola vibe coded, refined, and deployed the first version of the theft flow for Whee! which will be user tested soon. She also played around with AI for some docs work at Outseta and was amazed when it built a demo Next app in one shot.

Benedikt took a week off work to celebrate his 40th birthday. He spent his birthday week with a few parties with family and friends, and seeing two concerts. On the work front, he and the team built a Snowflake integration. And with the ETL infrastructure now in place, this potentially opens doors for other integrations.

Despite another major extended family upheaval, Benedicte carries on by going on morning walks and focusing on her projects. She recently shipped the new Framer plugin version, made demos, and is planning to get the documentation for the plugin.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about books, how fast the internet is breaking nowadays, and more.

Mentioned on the show:

• Surrounded by Idiots – a book by Thomas Erikson
• Antifragile – a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Nonviolent Communication – a book by B. Marshall Rosenberg

At Userlist, Benedikt’s team launched a Posthog integration and new segment templates to improve onboarding. He’s also experimenting with recording different formats for the video challenge.

Benedicte recovers from the flu and starts morning walks to boost focus. She is building Framer + Outseta demos that attract new users, exploring how designers use AI features in Framer and Webflow, and preparing to relaunch her “Let It Snow” script for the holidays.

Benedikt and the Userlist team are making progress on their Q4 plans, recently shipping new features through mini launches. They also started working on improvements for the message editor. And having recorded 3 videos these past weeks, Benedikt is currently leading the video challenge.

Benedicte is thinking of making mini-SaaSes in Framer with Outseta that will showcase the tool’s functionalities. Inspired by last week’s recording, she officially joins the video challenge and plans to make them about Framer + Outseta.

“De-inspired” from the conference, Benedicte decides to focus on Whee and Outseta.

Benedikt and the Userlist team are planning mini launches, a revamp of their email marketing, and a friendly video competition.

For the past days, Benedicte has been working on Framer Overrides with ngrok and fears she might have caused Framer to break. She and Ola are also working on the MVP version of Omway, hoping to have it ready before MicroConf Europe.

Meanwhile, the Userlist team just launched the fresh new look of their web app and website. They launched the new Userlist on Product Hunt and ended up getting the Top 5 spot of the day. Benedikt also tells us how they came up with the new logo.

Mentioned on the show:

• From Minimal to Whimsical: How We Redesigned Userlist in 2025

While writing the newsletter edition focusing on Omway, Benedicte stumbled across old photos from when she worked on a demo called Oslo Stories. On the work front, Outseta’s MCP server is now an npm package that can be used with Cursor, Claude, and more.

The Userlist team has been in full crunch mode these past few days to get everything polished for the September 9th launch. Benedikt also figured out the solution to a database performance issue.

Mentioned on the show:

• Oslohistorier (Oslo Stories)
• Outseta Admin MCP Server

Now that school is back on in Norway, Benedicte is trying to validate the idea for an audio guide platform called Omvei by reconnecting with former clients.

Benedikt has been working on a new API to manage topics, as well as templating support for workflows in Userlist.

Mentioned on the show

MicroConf Europe

The Userlist team makes more progress on their app and website redesign project, which will be shipped a couple of weeks from now. And after running it for 10 years, Benedikt has made the decision to shut down his very first SaaS product.

Despite feeling a little blah about the tech industry, Benedicte was able to code for fun again by testing out Laravel for Whee’s log in page. She and Ola are also digging into their old product ideas, using their family-product fit approach to figure out what’s actually worth pursuing.

Mentioned on the show:

• Episode 100
• Episode 200

Two weeks after jumping ship, the Pirate family have made new plans and are enjoying different activities. On the work front, Benedicte did a solid week of AI work for Outseta, and she and Ola are revisiting their old SaaS ideas.

The Userlist team’s redesign project is coming along nicely, with Benedikt focusing on the redesign of the website. They also brought back their co-working sessions so he and Jane can get more stuff done.

After sailing for 11 days, Benedicte and the Pirate family decided to jump ship because of a misalignment in expectations. Now back in Oslo, the family looks forward to a fun summer of chillaxing at home, doing work on Galleon, and more.

Benedikt and the Userlist team are quite busy these days: polishing the redesign, dealing with more technical tickets, and dealing with some database performance issues. He also shares how Stripe’s complexity is making it hard to move forward with their billing code.

Mentioned in the episode:

• The lost bacon (short by the Pirate Princess)

With Leo mainly focusing on the redesign project, Benedikt wraps up other projects: two new features and their migration to Dragonfly Cloud. He also shares why it’s challenging to pick up business books when you’re running a business.

Just two weeks away from their great sailing adventure, Benedicte and the Pirate family are busy packing their stuff as contractors will do renovations on their home within the 11 weeks. She and Ola have been hanging out on forums that helped refine their ICP for Galleon. They also celebrated the Pirate Princess’ first circus performance.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about kanban boards, escapism, and more.

Mentioned in the episode:

• RedisShake

Benedicte recently met up with her mentor group for a planning session and shares her goals and projected timeline for the next two years. Meanwhile, Ola has been taking charge of the user interviews for Galleon. And with just 4 weeks before their great sailing adventure, the Pirate family is also busy making preparations.

Benedikt and the Userlist team has made good progress on their big UI redesign project. And to address one of their customer’s needs, they are also working on a feature for array filters.

Keeping up with their quarterly planning, Benedikt and the Userlist team have decided on their big project for the second quarter: the UI redesign. Feeling excited and a bit nervous about the project, Benedikt hopes that doing it in phases will keep it from exploding into a huge project.

Benedicte and her Pirate family spent a nice vacation at the cabin during Easter and also doing some maintenance work. Work wise, the team at Outseta is currently doing paid search experiments to track where first touch referrals are coming from. Benedicte and Ola are also planning to do interviews with potential customers for Galleon.

Mentioned in the episode:

• Why you should stop coding your way to failure 
• Treasure | Stop Motion Movie by Lillian Raae-Vea

For their Galleon Gateway project, Benedicte’s been working with Claude to come up with a Laravel implementation that she can feed to Cursor. While it’s going well for a couple of her projects, here’s one thing that AI can’t help with just yet: time zone bugs.

Benedikt gave AI another try to help with the revamp of their Python library. While it turned out nice after a lot of revisions, he also ended up reading Python documentation to write better prompts. They’ve also just beta launched their transactional emails at Userlist.

Benedicte and Benedikt also talk about AI overviews, April Fool’s pranks, and more.

Recently named one of Norway’s Leading Women in Tech for 2025, Benedicte feels honored and realizes the importance of having role models in your life. And despite feeling scattered these past weeks, she’s getting to know the API katas for Outseta and was also able to deploy the first version of the script for Galleon Attributes.

Benedikt and the Userlist team are still wrapping up their transactional email endpoint. And in the process of making the documentation for this, they ended up rewriting and rebuilding their entire API documentation.

Benedicte and Benedikt talk about the cons of vibe coding, what you should actually use AI for, and more.

Mentioned in the episode:

• Norway’s 50 Leading Women in Tech 2025
• Watch the Benedicte’s video for Norway’s 50 Leading Women in Tech 2025
• Vibe coding takes a hit
• Galleon Attributes script V1

With the first quarter of the year almost coming to an end, Benedikt and the Userlist team are working on finishing and shipping a couple of projects including their transactional messages API. He’s also figured out how to do partial date matches (hint: leap years make it complicated).

Benedicte has been productive in the past few weeks: Galleon.tools is now live, she coded a new booking flow for Whee, and they just had the best month ever at Outseta. She also talks a bit about being filmed for a video that’s coming out this week, and the Pirate family’s new activity.

Mentioned in the episode:

• Galleon - Unlock the treasure of user data on your Webflow site
• Outseta’s best month ever

After the crazy beginning to her year, Benedicte is feeling recharged and productive. With the support load down, she finally released the article on WeWeb + Outseta and a companion expansion guide to the integration. Benedicte and Ola are also working on their latest project, Galleon.

It’s been pretty busy on the product-side for the Userlist team: they shipped company trigger support for nodes and the first version of the transactional messages endpoint and UI. With the product continuously evolving, Benedikt and Jane are thinking about doing a UI redesign of the platform. And while a customer cancellation is a bummer, Benedikt shares the bright side of the situation.

Mentioned in the episode:

• Why We Sleep – a book by Matthew Walker
• Galleon - Unlock the treasure of user data on your Webflow site

• Queen Raae’s let-it-snow script
• Userlist’s Conversion Goals feature

Things have been pretty busy on the product side for Benedikt and the Userlist team: launching the Conversion Goals feature, releasing new workflow node types, and more. And after working around a hard problem for quite a while, the team has finally refactored how the platform works with conditions.

With Webflow cutting their membership feature in 12 months, Benedicte is planning to make some good demos that would hopefully attract former Webflow customers. And despite being a bit nervous about the templates being filled up correctly, she successfully pushed the payment reminders for Whee customers. On the fun side of things, she and James applied a script to the Outseta website so it’s snowing for the holiday season.

Benedicte and her Pirate family have been low key sick all month. Despite feeling under the weather, they were able to bake and pack more than 100 cookies for the Christmas Market at school. She finished her Xano + Outseta (XO) Vanilla Demo for Outseta, and is doing price adjustments for Whee.

Benedikt feels recharged from his birthday vacation last weekend. On the work front, they recently shipped improvements on how they do condition on Userlist, making it possible to filter users by companies that are within the segment.

They also talk about some debugging horror stories, token exchanges, and more. 

• Benedicte is done with fun and modular furniture 
• A fun fact about the world’s first 4G network

To cope with the stressful events in the world, Benedikt went into productive mode these past week. They’ve made great progress with their company triggers, built some command line tools to help with debugging workflows, and more.

Benedicte recently attended a startup program by Telia with the Whee team. She’s also been playing around with Xano and met someone who’s currently using the tool for a large real estate business.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about coping with the overcast, minimizing the bus factor, AI, and more.

• Benedicte makes the Twitter-viral butter chicken recipe

With only two months left in the year, Benedicte is crushing her quarterly goal: to have an enjoyable everyday life. At Whee, she’s pushing the boundaries of their Make plan, and will be testing out a tool for their customer SMS.

Benedikt and the Userlist team are making good progress with the company triggers feature. While there’s still a long way to go, Benedikt shares that they’ve now got a rough idea of how they can streamline this feature with everything else.

• Benedicte’s view while coding on the boat
• Benedicte and tech are in a situationship

Benedikt is feeling a bit drained after having an eventful time at MicroConf. While the conference itself was great, he experienced interesting things along the way: from getting flights cancelled to being in the same hotel with a world leader.

Benedicte and her Pirate family spent a nice fall vacation on a boat with Captain Ola’s friend. But with the Framer Plugin launch happening in the middle of the vacation, she had to do some last minute changes because of a Framer API change. Benedicte also shares their summer plans for next year.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about cache busting, if we really need an app for everything, and more.

• The power of breaks, a story in three parts
• Leo’s talk at EmberFest

Benedicte’s excited for the wins at her fractional roles: they’ve just launched their Framer plugin at Outseta; and she discovered the wonders of Make.com while creating a Stripe webhook for Whee. But despite doing a lot of stuff at work, Benedicte now makes sure she has time to take care of herself.

Meanwhile, Benedikt is enjoying the conference season. He just returned from EmberFest in Dublin where he met Leo in person for the first time. He’ll also be going to MicroConf Europe. The Userlist team’s also making great progress on company triggers.

• EmberFest

Prior to his vacation in Munich last week, Benedikt and the Userlist team pushed a few of their upcoming features into production. He’ll also be meeting Leo for the first time in person this week at EmberFest in Dublin.

With so many factors that might affect the estimated arrivals of their rented bikes, Benedicte and the Whee team are looking for better solutions to this roadblock. She also shares her observations while she watches Lillian and the other neighborhood kids work on their lemonade stands.

• EmberFest
• Cards Against Artisans

Now that the school year has started, Benedicte is enjoying a freer mental space. With this, she decided that her focus project for next quarter will be “Lovely Everyday Life” so she can do activities that make her everyday life lovelier. Benedicte also recently attended Laravel Live Denmark where she talked about the Joy of Side Projects.

Benedikt is making great progress with his drumming and is thinking about signing up for in-person lessons to further improve his skills. Leo will be talking at EmberFest in Dublin this September and will also be the first time that the two of them will be meeting in person.

With most people going on vacations during the summer, businesses usually anticipate things to slow down a bit for the season. But unlike previous years, it looks like businesses are not seeing much of a summer slump this year.

Benedikt and the Userlist team have been chipping away at some small improvements on the product, dealing with weird bugs, and have an upcoming database maintenance.

Benedicte is also dealing with bugs at Whee and is plowing through dependency hell. She and her Pirate family are also preparing their rustic Airbnb property for the first guest who’ll be staying with them this week.

The summer brought nice summer nights and tropical storms in Scandinavia, giving Benedicte and her pirate family some memorable cabin office life experiences. She also shares that they’ve fixed up a part of their property and listed it on Airbnb. 

Meanwhile, It’s a hot and humid summer in Benedikt's part of Europe. Despite the heat, Bendikt and the team got a lot of things done: finishing the exports, improving imports, and now have a nicer overall batch operations architecture.

Benedicte and Benedikt talk about two-factor authentication, content repurposing, and more.

• Whee! wins the Oslo environmental prize
• Queen Raae and her family on the way to the cabin office

The past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind for Benedicte: attending Lillian’s flute recital, spending a spa day with Salma (@whitep4nth3r on Twitter) in Larvik, and traveling back to Oslo to receive Whee!’s award. Last week was also very emotional for her and the family because they finally moved mom to the nursing home.

Benedikt is feeling productive again this past week: finishing the Mixpanel integration and working on self-service CSV exports. He also enjoyed the meet up with bootstrapped founders at Frankfurt. And with everything going great with the new hire, Benedikt shares that this is Michael’s final week with them.

• Whee

The Userlist team went into hiring mode these past couple of weeks as a team member will be saying goodbye soon. On the upside, Benedikt has successfully completed the drum course and will be rewarding himself with some new gear.

Benedicte shares how Whee works, and the ideas they’re currently exploring to serve more customers in the future.

• Feelings Wheel
• Follow Shai on Twitter
• Check out Shai’s website
• Explore Shai’s reading list

Both coming from software backgrounds and coming into the online marketing world, Shai and Brennan created RightMessage to have marketing sites become a bit more dynamic and change based on who was visiting. Shai exited the company in 2023 after working on the product for six years. Since then, he’s been taking it slow and steady while he figures out what to do next.

Shai, Benedikt, and Benedicte talk about the lessons he learned in his SaaS journey, why it’s important to be honest with yourself about your current realities, and more.

• Whee
• Urlbox

Benedicte is enjoying the mix of her fractional roles with Outseta and Whee, giving her the best of both worlds of remote and in-person work. She also shares details about their upcoming collaboration with Urlbox.

Coming back from a long vacation and taking days off for some holidays the past few weeks, Benedikt is still trying to get back to regular programming at work. He’s also thinking about which feature they’ll focus on building next.

• Userlist
• Whee
• POW!
• Queen Raae & Family on YouTube
• Follow Benedikt on Twitter
• Follow Benedicte on Twitter
• Follow the Slow & Steady Podcast on Twitter

• Data in the Wild
• Subscribe to Queen Raae’s YouTube channel

Benedicte has been enjoying the slow life in Portugal for the past two weeks, enjoying the beach while still able to get some work done. She’s still polishing her latest services for devs and is preparing for the relaunch of Data in the Wild.

Benedikt and the team resolved two major bugs with the help of a customer, which goes to show the importance of testing edge cases. Still struggling to have longer durations of focused work, Benedikt thinks of how to be more deliberate about it.

Things are moving forward sales-wise for Benedikt and the Userlist team, sending a few custom-priced enterprise quotes in the past few weeks. Benedikt also shares his takeaway from his recent chat with Monica Lent.

With her new Go Live with Queen Raae service, Benedicte is thinking about how to help those dev founders who are a bit hesitant about going live. And while it’s unfortunate that she didn’t get the caravan, Benedicte refocused her energy on improving their property and possibly the Volkswagen bus that’s sitting in Sweden.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about the importance of following up, greenfield projects, and more.

• Should Benedicte and Ola get the Caravan? Let them know in this thread.

Mastering live streaming as a content creation flywheel for a couple of months now, Benedicte is now finalizing the details of her latest service for fellow dev founders. She’s also trying to convince Ola to get a Caravan to renovate as her office/studio.

Benedikt is feeling a bit scattered after having a stressful week: he had to do a few demo calls in between everything, and had a bit of a rough time with one of their largest customers renewing its annual subscription.

• Join Benedicte’s biweekly live streams on YouTube
• Check out MixPod’s revamped web design

Despite experiencing a few hiccups with their bank account and Stripe, the Userlist team celebrates a financial milestone as they’ve hit break even. As a bonus surprise, Userlist was able to sell a domain for a significant amount of money.

After powering through the birthday bonanzas in January, Benedicte spent 24 hours at the spa and is now feeling re-energized and ready. And with all of the streams and content creation she’s been doing for the past few months, she’s now opening herself to those who need a livestream host, a mystery dev, or video creator.

• JobLens — Brian’s product
• The Age of Spiritual Machines — a book by Ray Kurzweil
• Spiritual Machines — an album by Our Lady Peace
• Episode 131: Brian is back in town, literally
• Episode 120: We Have a Contest Winner!
• Follow Brian on LinkedIn

More than a year since he was last on, Brian tells us about his time at GitLab, JobLens, his consulting work, and his board games.

Benedikt, Benedicte, and Brian also talk about tech layoffs, AI, why you shouldn’t monetize your hobbies, and more.

• YearCompass — reflect on the year and plan the next one
• Docs for Developers

Despite feeling a bit all over the place, Benedicte and her family had a lot of fun during the holidays. With their newly renovated house, they were able to host about 30 people for the festivities. Benedicte also plans to work on her YearCompass in February after the birthday bonanzas this month.

Benedikt looks back at 2023 and it was a generally good year for him, reaching significant milestones in his personal and work life. He and the Userlist team are planning to step up their sales game this 2024. 

• Support Userlist’s visual workflows on Product Hunt
• Queen Raae’s viral Ikea clip
• Buy Back Your Time — a book by Dan Martell

After two and a half months of sprinting, Benedikt and the Userlist team finally launched their visual workflows. They also dusted off their website which included adding new copy, screenshots, pages, structure, and a new testimonial scroller section, among others. He’s guessing that this might have also helped get them new and better quality trials this month.

Despite the bank gig being over, this short stint made Benedicte realize that she loves collaborating with teams after all. With this minor setback, she might have to get the dev rel service business up and running sooner than she planned. And now that she’s collaborating with other contractors on her other projects, it looks like everything’s falling into place for her “build in public” narrative.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about why you should let features drip out over time, Framer, and more.

Still working on their visual workflow builder, Benedikt and the Userlist team are still in crunch mode. The velocity has been crazy as they were shipping stuff super fast like adding new node types in just a couple of hours.

Benedicte, together with her pirate family and AK, just finished their first stream on charting the course for MixPod. And as part of their marketing strategy, they’ll be releasing clips from the streams on various channels. She also has an upcoming mini-project which she calls SemanticAdvent, where she’ll select 24 Semantic HTML tags in 24 days.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about gamification (Polar Habits was mentioned), Lillian’s first marching band concert, how to get customer feedback, and more.

• Benedicte's Halloween Dinner
• Amazing CSS Demos

Benedikt talks about the progress on Userlist's new feature, and how setting deadlines increases stress, but helps prioritizing what's important. Benedicte shares recent challenges in Outseta's customer support, where people get confused by new client/server patterns in Next.js. Afterwards, she outlines the plan for the new streaming series for building MixPod which starts in a few days. 

• Sign the new letter to the U.S. Congress regarding Section 174
• Buy Back Your Time — a book by Dan Martell
• Four Thousand Weeks — a book by Oliver Burkeman

Despite crashing into her vacation, Benedicte was still able to chill with friends while surrounded by nature. Things are going nicely at Outseta: they got shout outs at Webflow conferences and are seeing some accounts going from zero to making a lot of money in a short span of time. Benedicte also talks about the preparations they’re doing for their next public build.

Since the last episode, the Userlist team has now finished migrating their sending infrastructure and have recently added bounce and spam complaint tracking. On the non-work front, Benedikt had an awesome time in Lisbon, enjoying both MicroConf Europe and the sightseeing with his wife.

• Here’s Michael and Benedikt on day 1 of their drum challenge
• POW!, Prune Your Follows — Queen Raae’s app projects
• MicroConf Europe

Things are going great for Benedikt and the Userlist team: they’re currently migrating to their new email service provider, and they’re making good progress with their visual workflow builder. He also shares that he and Michael Koper are taking on a 30-day drum challenge. 

Despite feeling a sore from riding camp and ballet lessons, Benedicte is now ready to work on her app projects this fall. Aside from POW! and Prune Your Follows, they’ll also be working on their new app idea called MixPod. For her work with Outseta, Benedicte shares that they’re almost done with the Framer integration and are currently working on their brand center.

• End of summer, end of Gatsby?
• Jamstack is Dead…Or Is It?

Coming back from his three-week vacation, Benedikt is feeling relaxed and recharged. On his first few days back, he was able to work on the proper solution for their issue with large broadcasts.

With the recent changes at Netlify, the dev community is wondering if Gatsby and Jamstack are indeed dead. Benedicte's recent challenges with support has given her a new product idea: a no-code authentication for no-coders. She also shares another project idea that could let people create a “mixtape” of podcast episodes.

Benedikt and Benedicte also talk about the tasks we offload to our smartphones, how to get into the flow zone, and more.

• Outseta
• Follow Geoff on Twitter
• Watch the productive morning routine video
• Tailwind fake businesses

Now that the business is a bit more stable, Geoff’s putting his focus back on marketing. He shares the three marketing experiments they’ll be doing later this year: “cleaning out the gutters”, working with creators, and building their content factory. 

Benedicte and Geoff also talk about SEO, content products, and more.

• Let us know if you’re joining the #SummerofUITweaks on this thread

Currently enjoying the last weeks of the European summer, Benedicte is loving the “chilling but still getting work done” vibe. Aside from implementing UI tweaks, they’ve also been working on the WeWeb and Supabase integrations at Outseta.

Meanwhile, Benedikt and the Userlist team encountered a bug that caused a broadcast to be sent twice to its recipients. They’ve also updated their frontend dependencies, got a new UI component for their new data structure, and more.

• Read the tweet that triggered this interview
• Learn more about High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails
• Check out Andrew’s blog
• Follow Andrew on Twitter

Andrew Atkinson is a staff software engineer at Fountain who is very passionate about Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL (just like Benedikt!). He’s so passionate about them that he’s actually writing a book called “High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails” that’s coming out very soon.

Benedikt and Andrew also talk about dealing with constraints and ActiveRecord, Rails validations, and more.

• Get a sneak peek of Benedicte’s second floor

Benedicte thinks about the best way to update Outseta docs without creating a big bang project. She’s also working on a pitch for version 2.0 of Prune Your Follows.

While Michael and Jane were away, Benedikt handled customer support, giving him a new appreciation on that aspect of the business. On the product development front, the team is making great progress — phase one of the trigger refactoring is finished, they shipped an improved Webhook integration, and their visual automation builder prototype is working nicely.

Benedicte and Benedikt also talk about archiving, note-taking apps, and more. 

Things were slow for Benedikt last week in preparation for his big day. Despite the slower pace of things, the Userlist team accomplished a few things: they worked on their message rendering refactoring, and made progress on their trigger unification. 

Feeling a bit frazzled, Benedicte wraps things up before they go on their summer vacation. She also enjoyed her time at the recent React Norway and felt very powerful (and old) when she helped someone out at her bank job.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about pull requests vs. merge requests, going down rabbit holes, and more.

Benedikt had a great time at the recent Rails SaaS conference where he was able to meet up with his Userlist co-founder Jane, and Benedicte. Now back in Germany and fully recovered, he’s catching up with his work at Userlist.

The past few weeks have been filled with travels for Benedicte: painting their cabin in Sweden, meeting up with the Outseta founders in Athens, and going on the Slow Business Adventure gathering the west coast.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about the weather in Northern Europe, documentation, AI, and more.

• Rails SaaS Conference
• Four Thousand Weeks — a book by Oliver Burkeman

Recording from Trondheim this week, Benedicte is back in town to serve as an external reviewer of the university’s IT Master Program. Her exploration of the university town felt like she was transported back to the early 2000s during her uni days.

With the upcoming Rails SaaS Conference, Benedikt is currently focused on preparing for his talk. They were also able to fix some memory issues at Userlist last week by introducing a request limit.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about their upcoming meet up in Athens, why you should let things take time, and more.

• Prune Your Follows
• @levelsio’s tweet that gave Prune Your Follows more following

The new Twitter API has changed the rules of the game, which makes Benedicte think about options on how to move forward with Prune Your Follows. Despite this, she’s been enjoying life beyond work: signing up for window restoration classes, a sauna membership, and doing renovations.

With the reporting feature wrapped up and shipped, Benedikt and the Userlist team are now working on their conversion goals feature. And while he ran into some complications with their trigger implementation last week, he was able to simplify the process and even ran an experiment with the Ruby gem, Scientist.

• Check out Lillian’s mmm.page

After getting feedback from churned users, Benedikt thinks about having a changelog or now page so that users could check for Userlist product developments. They’ve also just shipped their latest feature and is now available for all users.

Benedicte is excited about a few things in the past week: they just got a great offer for a staircase and she’s taking on her first devrel project for Outseta. She also guided Lillian in creating her first website using mmm.page.

• DNSimple
• Follow DNSimple on Mastodon
• Follow Anthony on Twitter, Mastodon, and LinkedIn

When Anthony and his brother created the product in 2010, they had developers in mind from day one. And unlike other domain registrars and DNS providers in the market, DNSimple lets you unlock what you can do with your domain so you can automate whatever you want.

Anthony, Benedicte, and Benedikt talk about marketing tactics, delegating decision making, what’s next for DNSimple, and more!

• Search three ways with Xata: Partial Match, Fuzzy Full-text, and Semantic (AI)
• Let Benedicte know if you would you like a “Clean code makes Benedikt happy” sticker or shirt

Now sick for a third time in recent weeks, Benedicte talks about how the Norwegian government could provide assistance during these situations. She also shares a memory from five years ago which influenced the naming of her role at Outseta.

With the upcoming roll out of their reporting feature, Benedikt and the Userlist team are brainstorming about how to market it. He also plans on writing a technical blog post about the new feature and presenting it to a conference this June.

• Episode 157: Outseta with Geoff Roberts
• Read Michele Hansen’s thread about Section 174
• Sign the Small Software Business Coalition Letter to the U.S. Congress

With all her little side quests across the years, things are culminating for Benedicte as she recently became Outseta’s new developer relations person. Now that she’s handling four jobs, she’s trying to figure out a way on how to juggle everything sustainably.

Benedikt and the Userlist team have deployed the backend side of their reporting implementation. And with a couple of customers now using the new feature, they now have an idea of what to tweak.

Benedikt and Benedicte also discuss how Section 174 affects small software businesses and what you can do to convince congress to roll it back.

• Lillylabs’ Tram Ride Audio on GitHub
• Check out Oslo Stories (in Norwegian)
• Lillylab’s Oslohistorier on GitHub
• See what Brian's up to on LinkedIn

A total turnaround from last week, Benedikt feels pretty happy with the refactoring he did on the reporting implementation. He found that breaking down the problem into smaller chunks really helped. Benedikt also looks forward to attending the in-person Frankfurt Ruby meetup.

While accompanying Lillian to a lecture at the library, Benedicte was able to pitch her location specific radio to some hip hop celebrities. She also reached out to her old VA for leads on people who could be part of her small content team.

• Data in the Wild Ep. 2 with Pierre de Wulf of Scraping Bee

Currently working on a couple of content projects, Benedicte’s dreams of having a small content team that can help with the editing and remixing. She also celebrates another milestone with Prune Your Follows which recently surpassed 1,000 users.

Benedikt bounces back from feeling super tired last week and got back into working on the reporting feature. Making slow and steady progress also means uncovering new issues and complications (which is still good).

Benedicte and Benedikt talk about content repurposing, if a team should only stick to one tool, and more.

• Data in the Wild Ep. 1 with Monica Lent of Affilimate
• See the type support in action  

After falling at horse camp the other week, Benedicte enjoys some “forced relaxation” following her doctor’s orders. And now that the “no screen time” days are over, she and Ola are excited to record the first episode of “Data in the Wild''. Benedicte also shares her joy over helping people out through her emergency calls.

The Userlist team recently launched the type support for the condition builder. With this latest milestone, Benedikt talks about how things have gotten better since working with a team.

• Add your suggestion for a podcast title on this thread

Despite not being able to push through with their vacation as planned, Benedicte found a great mood booster by dancing this week. She reached another milestone with Prune Your Follows which just facilitated 25,000 unfollows this week. Benedicte’s also brainstorming titles for their upcoming podcast with Xata.

Benedikt and the Userlist team have been making slow and steady progress with their reporting feature: it’s now in a shippable state and placed behind a feature flag. He also ran into some issues with deleting large amounts of data.

• Know someone who can be interviewed on the upcoming data modeling podcast? Reach out to Benedicte via Twitter

Benedikt feels excited about going to his first live concert after three years. Despite getting distracted with so many little things last week, he and the Userlist team were able to create a working internal version of the reporting feature. 

With the never-ending Twitter API saga and Netlify’s acquisition of Gatsby, Benedicte is waiting for the dust to settle while everything is currently up in the air. Meanwhile, she’s making great progress on her project with DNB. She’s also looking for guest recommendations for their upcoming data modeling podcast with Xata.

• Atomic Habits — a book by James Clear
• Read Benedicte’s first article on the Xata blog

Benedicte feels a little frustrated that a cold has interrupted her fitness habit. Despite this, she’s looking forward to bouncing back and taking ownership of this new fitness identity. She also shares the excitement of getting her first post published on the Xata blog.

Meanwhile, Benedikt and the Userlist team are making gradual progress on their upcoming reporting feature. He’s also trying to contribute more to the open source community by submitting pull requests on Rails.

• Read Michele Hansen’s thread on why you shouldn’t “build your house on someone else’s lawn”
• The Embedded Entrepreneur — a book by Arvid Kahl
• Check out Userlist’s new blog design
• The Rails SaaS Conference

With Twitter announcing that they’re discontinuing free access to their API, Benedicte is yet to see what this means for Prune Your Follows. She also shares why she monetized this side project differently.

Benedikt and the Userlist team have released their new blog design last week and are now shopping around for a new email provider. He’s also very excited about speaking and meeting up with his co-founder at the upcoming Rails SaaS Conference this June.

Benedicte and Benedikt discuss how walking outside makes everything more joyful, why you shouldn’t rely solely on one platform when building a product, and more.

• Prune Your Follows
• Check out Userlist’s message composer in action

With the work on the message composer all wrapped up, the Userlist team is now focused on building new features. And despite having to take care of many small things last week, Benedikt was able to figure out the issue with the blog structure.

Benedicte encounters problems caused by their flaky internet connection. She also shares details about their upcoming 10-episode podcast with Xata. And as part of her plan to try out new things this year, Benedicte is now attending a dance class called Funky Adults 30+.

It’s been a nice weekend for Benedicte: going to a local ski resort then celebrating her birthday at her favorite spa by the ocean. It’s also been a great week at work because of new and exciting things: upcoming content creation projects with Xata and the potential of working with The Norwegian Bank.

As part of their annual company planning, Benedikt and the Userlist team have decided on the three major features that they’ll be working on this year. And to make navigation easier for their website visitors, they’re doing a blog redesign to include Categories.

• YearCompass — reflect on the year and plan the next one
• Listen to our 2022 goal setting episode

Benedicte was able to keep her 2022 slow and steady for the most part and was able to not get so distracted with shiny new things. For this coming year, she hopes to embrace her own content creation and take more mini breaks.

And while Benedikt wasn’t able to exactly hit his recreational and financial goals last year, he’s still grateful for many things. This 2023, he wants to be more mindful about doing fun stuff outside work and hit their targets at Userlist.

• Prune Your Follows
• Read the TechCrunch feature about Prune Your Follows
• Send Benedicte a message to join the Yoga Pirates

With things slowing down during the holidays, Benedikt and the Userlist team were able to successfully migrate their database to Crunchy Bridge. Despite experiencing issues a couple of days after the migration, all is very well with better monitoring and better performance (with less money thrown at the problem).

The recent TechCrunch feature on Prune Your Follows has certainly attracted more attention, bringing over hundreds of visitors to the site. The app currently has over 700 users and facilitated over 10,000 unfollows. And to start off the new year right, Benedicte created a Discord bot for Yoga Pirates.

• Prune Your Follows on Product Hunt!
• Prune Your Follows
• Crunchy Bridge

Prune Your Follows made it to #13 on ProductHunt last week and also "broke" Twitter in the process. Benedicte is happy about the results and enjoyed the buzzing energy of the launch. She also shares some things that worked well during the launch. 

Benedikt spent some time fixing annoying issues and didn't get any of the work done he planned to do. Luckily, he managed to deal with a couple issues that kept showing up in the monitoring system so it should also make for a quieter Christmas break. He also had a test run for the upcoming database migration and talks about plans to minimize downtime for the actual migration. 

• Upvote Prune Your Follows on Product Hunt!
• Take a look at Benedicte’s cool new wood stove

Recovering from a bad cold last week, Benedicte gets to work on launching Prune Your Follows on Product Hunt. And after finding out new information about Twitter’s unfollow rate limit, she’s currently thinking about a workaround.

Unable to get any of his planned work done, Benedikt feels annoyed with having to put out little fires and a small screw up with merging branches. Despite this, they’re making great progress on the refactoring work. 

Benedicte and Benedikt talk about sprints, kanbans, Christmas rom coms, and more.

• Prune Your Follows
• Here’s ChatGPT’s advice for launching Prune Your Follows on Product Hunt 

After doing a series of customer interviews, the Userlist team decided on the next big feature to work on: reporting. And with the holiday break coming up soon, they also kicked off the project to migrate their primary database from Heroku to Crunchy Data.

As Prune Your Follows gains more users, Benedicte gets to work on new and exciting problems with the user feedback. With the upcoming Product Hunt Launch, she gets sensible advice from an unexpected source.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about managing your energy, chatbots, data modeling, and more.

• Here’s why we had to push back the recording time of this week’s episode
• Getting Things Done – a book by David Allen
• Listen to Benedikt’s conversation with Brian Casel about shipping speed
• Prune Your Follows

After not being able to attend for the past years, Benedikt enjoyed himself at MicroConf Europe: nice weather, meeting their customer support advocate in person, and all the social events between the talks. Now back to work after his week-long birthday leave, Benedikt’s trying to figure out how to be smarter with his to-do list. 

Benedicte’s back to the daily grind after her short conference season in November. Aside from working on the readme files for their Cloudinary plugins, they’re also doing more work on Prune Your Follows as they prepare for their upcoming Product Hunt launch this December.

• Unleash
• Follow Unleash on Twitter
• Follow Ivar on Twitter and LinkedIn

What started as a side gig in a basement in Norway, Ivar and his brother turned their SaaS into a full time business in early 2021. Their tool allows teams to build features together, ship new features in small increments, and enables transparency within teams and stakeholders. 

Ivar and Benedicte talk about his journey to commercial exploration, how they talked to over a hundred customers, how they protect their users’ data privacy, and more.

Despite feeling tired after Jamstack Conf, Benedicte enjoyed a great week in San Francisco that was filled with partying and talking. She also had a nice chat with an encryption backend that might lead to a deal for POW! that’s similar to Prune your Follows.

After finishing the final touches on the message composer, the Userlist team is now rolling it out for everyone. Benedikt’s also wrapping up the work on the message topics feature before heading out to MicroConf Europe next week.

• Prune Your Follows
• BDTP S6E1: Email Deliverability with Lauren Meyer
• Read more about SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
• Postmark’s DMARC Reports Tool

Despite experiencing a “fail week” with technology, Benedicte celebrates a few wins with her projects such as getting Prune Your Follows ready for beta along with this week’s Xata launch and slowly converting her site to Tailwind. 

Benedikt and the Userlist team managed to build and ship their most requested Message Topics feature in a span of a week. And after weeks of frustration with his internet connection, things are looking promising as Benedikt decides to switch providers.

• Outseta
• Justin Welsh
• SDR Nation
• Follow Geoff on Twitter

While there are a lot of best in class tools out there, more often than not, early stage businesses only need basic functionalities to get things done.

Coming from the same experience, Geoff and Dimitris used it to build Outseta, an all-in-one tech stack (that includes payments, authentications, CRM, and email) for SaaS and membership style businesses. Their tool helps founders focus more of their time on building the product instead of spending time integrating several different tools before launching their business.

Geoff, Benedicte, and Benedikt talk about how they attracted both the technical and non-technical audience, how he juggles work and dad duties, and more!

• Should Benedicte get the black or steel refrigerator?
• Backblaze
• Xata
• Geoff Roberts of Outseta

Benedicte successfully lands the deal to rebuild Prune Your Follows with Xata, NextAuth, and Gatsby. With everything she has to get done before flying out to San Francisco, she’s looking forward to doing a good crunch time to fight the insecurities away. 

Benedikt is feeling a bit frustrated with the slow speed of moving rendered emails from their database to Amazon S3. And with the major chunk of work out of the way, Benedikt and Leo were able to do a lot of cleanup on their message composer code.

• Conference Buddy
• Geoff Roberts of Outseta

With the message composer now deployed to production, Benedikt and the Userlist team can now focus on adding more niceties and fixing other issues on the platform. 

Despite being unable to meet up with Benedikt last week, Benedicte had a nice and productive vacation in Germany. She was able to catch up with Mirjam Aulbach of Conference Buddy for brunch and send her proposal on the Sample App + Content Combo. As for Cloudinary related things, Ola’s doing a great job on the readme by bringing joy into it with emojis. 

• Read Benedikt and Jesse’s back and forth about shipping updates
• Prune Your Follows
• Campfire Labs – a content company
• Traction – a book by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
• First Ruby Friend
• Senior Engineer Mindset – a book by Swizec Teller

Benedikt and the Userlist team are putting the finishing touches on their message composer, which will be deployed to projection very soon. He also met with his First Ruby Friend mentee this week and got an interesting question: how do you become a senior developer?

Benedicte just pitched her latest side project, Prune Your Follows, to a database startup and will be having a meeting with them later this week. This new opportunity has gotten her excited about the prospect of turning future side projects as viable lines of business.

• Retweet Colby Fayock’s testimonial about Gatsby 
• Retweet Brian Lovin’s testimonial about Userlist
• Priya Parker’s “The Art of Gathering”

Benedicte is filled with happy hormones this week because of dancing, more work from Cloudinary, and a wonderful testimonial from a customer on Twitter. She’s working on her preparations for upcoming conference talks and has also received a call for proposals for another one next year.

Benedikt and the Userlist team also received praise on Twitter from a customer with a large following. The team’s also focused on finishing the editor integration work this month. And after skipping the MicroConf for the past two years, Benedikt will be attending this year’s MicroConf Europe along with their customer advocate, Katarina. 

Benedicte and Benedikt share their go-to conference tips so you can build new relationships during the event and more.

• Jamstack Conf 2022
• Modern FrontEnds Live!
• Prune Your Follows

With the summer over, everyone’s in “back to work” mode and the pace is picking up.

Benedikt is revitalized after his three-week vacation. The Userlist team is making great progress with the message editor. On the frontend, they’re currently polishing the UI and fixing small annoyances with the copy-paste function to make it easier for users. On the backend side of things, Benedikt is working on setting up the validation process for the new document schema and is tackling issues related to their original renderer.

Benedicte is gearing up for her upcoming Gatsby talks this November to hit three birds with one stone: two conferences and a video course. Work-wise, she’s still figuring out the right mix of Gatsby products and services. And while it didn’t win the Hackathon, she’s refactored Prune Your Follows to use NextAuth.

Benedikt and Benedicte also discuss a few existential questions about shipping updates like: how long should stuff take? What is good enough? How do you balance quality and speed?

• Feather.so
• Follow Bhanu on Twitter
• Vercel charged Bhanu ~$1.8k for hosting MDX.One

After quitting his job as a software engineer, Bhanu started blogging. He enjoyed creating content but the process was time consuming: after writing on Notion, he still had to convert it to Markdown, and then transfer it to the blogging platform.

He then thought about developing a tool that would make things easier for Notion users.

A rebrand of a previous product, Feather.so is a blogging platform that enables Notion users to write and publish their content without having to go through the tedious conversion and copy-pasting process. 

Bhanu and Benedicte talk about his other Notion-based tools, why marketing your product is as important as building it, and more!

• Jamstack Conf 2022
• Bhanu Teja P of Feather.so
• The Artist’s Way

Benedikt and the team had a pretty successful week in terms of stuff shipped: they finished the frontend query builder improvements, implemented an Amplitude cohort sync integration, and added a server-side rendering for their new message “document schema”. They also plan to work on a bug in their old editor that’s causing problems with their users’ inline image data.

Benedicte’s also on a roll: they had a great meeting with Cloudinary last week, talking to Newline for producing courses, and is currently getting ready for her talks at Modern FrontEnds Live! and at Jamstack Conf 2022. She’s also working on a fun side project to clean up her Twitter following.

• The ONE Thing by Gery Keller
• Episode with Pierre from ScrapingBee
• 1Password's password recovery process for teams and families
• Password managers don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than not having one

In the last week, Benedikt finally got some work done on the user interface of Userlist's condition builder. This was only possible by ignoring a lot of other things. However, he feels like the effort will pay off in the future by getting the fundamentals right.

Benedicte's focus is on cultivating good habits by keeping up the yoga schedule, being more mindful about preparing food, and enjoying time outside in the sun. She's also preparing to launch the Queen Rae live streams again, starting August 25th, and is looking for guests that have interesting Gatsby projects.

A recent support issue on POW! triggers a discussion about best practices around password management and how some of the advice we all learned in the past might not be the best anymore. 

• Modern FrontEnds Live!
• The tweet that got Benedicte the invitation to do an interview with Will Sentance
• The Culture Map by Erin Meyer

Both Benedicte and Benedikt have felt the unusual temperatures brought by the heat wave.

Aside from his struggles with the current weather in Germany, Benedikt is feeling a bit unfocused because of the load of small things that need his attention at work. He’s also looking into other hosting solutions for Userlist for future reference. Benedikt and Leo are at 90% with the WYSIWYG editor but progress seems kind of slow lately.

Coming home from their long summer vacation, Benedicte is still enjoying the remaining downtime left before school starts but is also excited to get work done soon. She’s back on the 30-day yoga challenge, has a couple of conference talks lined up, and is working on their streamlined offer for ongoing maintenance and support for Gatsby plugins. And in an unexpected turn of events, she got an invite to do an interview with Codesmith’s Will Sentance.

• Nathan’s first SaaS product, Nusii
• Laura Dunn
• Nathan’s UX course for developers, Develop Your UX
• Nathan’s latest SaaS project, Feature Flux
• Check out Nathan’s website
• Follow Nathan on Twitter
• Subscribe to Nathan’s YouTube channel

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!

• Modern FrontEnds Live!
• Nathan Powell of Feature Flux

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.

• Benedicte’s app, POW!
• Benedicte’s talk at React Norway 

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!.

• pgMustard
• PostgreSQL
• Talk Python to Me Episode #366
• Follow Michael on Twitter

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!

• Michael from pgMustard

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.

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. 

• Cloudinary
• Structured Content
• Gather's Escape The Island
• Introducing Stripe Apps

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...

• Scrapingbee.com
• Microsoft Clarity
• Nathan Barry on compensation at ConvertKit
• TinySeed
• Follow Pierre on Twitter
• The ScrapingBee Blog

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!

• Norway's Constitution Day

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!

• Userlist — Now Hiring: Community Advocate
• Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick
• Web Scraping with Pierre of ScrapingBee
• ScrapingBee — a web scraping tool
• React Norway

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.

• Rails Autoscale
• DataCater
• Using DataCater to connect your app to Userlist
• Smashing Magazine Person of the Week
• POW! Reddit thread
• Gatsby Webinar on Plugins (2019)
• Unified.js

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.

• Subscribe Sense — Anna's new business 
• Boondockers Welcome
• Music video fun
• Follow Anna on Twitter
• Smart Subscriber — Shai Schechter's email tool
• RightMessage — Brennan Dunn's & Shai Schechter's email tool
• Deploy Empathy — a book by Michele Hansen

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!

• Adam McCrea of Rails Autoscale
• Andrew Culver of Bullet Train
• Dr. Sherry Walling
• Michael Christofides of pgMustard
• Llama Life has raised a pre-seed funding round!

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!

• Steve's website
• Steve's artwork
• perfect-arrows
• perfect-freehand
• globs.design
• Cuttle
• Follow Steve on Twitter

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.

• Steve is coming soon!
• tldraw — Steve's app
• Gatsby ImageCDN stream
• MicroConf Growth

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".

• The War of Art — a book by Steven Pressfield
• Seth Godin on "the resistance"
• pgMustard — review Postgres query plans
• MicroConf Growth

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!

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!
• Done for you Demo on queen.raae.codes

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!

• Userlist's Better Done Than Perfect podcast
• UI Breakfast Podcast. Episode 233: Demystifying Product Funnels with Rachel Obstler (of Heap)

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.

• Follow Marie on Twitter
• Llama Life — work through your to-do list with focus and fun
• First version of Llama Life
• www.fidgetpage.com — a small project that drives Llama Life traffic

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!

• Hacker News, Date Comparison
• Zach Holman: The Kobayashi Maru of Comparing Dates with Times
• Benedikt's date and time comparison tweet
• Slow & Steady, on YouTube!
• Done-for-you Demo Draft
• You're basically a house plant...

Have you weighed in on Benedikt's data comparison conundrum yet? He stirred up quite the team conversation at Userlist, and on Twitter, too. There were some hot takes and lengthy discussions, but he was thankful to have a team to run some difficult date-handling questions by. He was also thankful to get back some deep focus time this week to tackle the challenge. He uploaded the catalog of Slow & Steady episodes to YouTube — now one more place you can listen!

Benedicte relied on the Gatsby engine while she had some fun last week. Covid restrictions were lifted in Norway over the weekend. She got drinks with several friends and visited briefly with her sister in person after years apart. On stream last week, viewers seemed to enjoy a more freeform troubleshooting session and she finished a draft of her done-for-you demo. While POW! didn't qualify for TinySeed this year, Benedicte has a friend interested in helping with the marketing and customers interviews.

And Brian? He's settled in Boulder and is doing well!

• Queen Raae, testimonial tweet 
• An embarrassed Queen Raae on stream
• Userlist Integrations page

Benedicte is feeling flattered, is receiving praise online, and saving this kind of feedback for the future in a "brag folder". She recommends starting one of these for brightening up a gloomy day or for reminding you of your achievements when it comes time for performance reviews. In addition to working on some new sales pages, Benedicte has applied to TinySeed with POW!. She doesn't meet the recommended MRR threshold but discusses the motivations behind applying anyway.

Benedikt hasn't had the strictest focus given recent customer support issues and new hire ramp-up time, but he has made lots of progress with the Userlist integrations despite this. Some companies make this work easier for developers than others — Stripe is one of the good ones (add this to the list of non-sponsored Stripe shoutout episodes). In another milestone, Userlist has moved all email marketing to... Userlist! This was made possible with the feature update from last year and they finally made the jump over.

• TinySeed: an accelerator for SaaS bootstrappers
• How to Start a Podcast in 2022 – Beginners Podcasting Guide with @mijustin
• Emergency Gatsby Call Sales Page
• Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats with @wesbos and @stolinski
• Llama Life - calm, focused productivity
• Bannerbear — generate marketing visuals

Benedikt has a frustrating day but shares a big milestone — after 50 months, his shares in Userlist have fully vested. He details how the business agreement between the Userlist co-founders worked and why it was smart to have it in place early on. Benedikt also shares a "royal screwup" story from the past week. After deleting an entire account he was able to restore everything after only several hours of work. In fact, despite the undesirable set of events, the success of the recovery effort is a "win".

Benedicte launches her "Emergency Gatsby Call" sales page for those stuck on a reef — a one-on-one call to the rescue! She plans to make a page for giving talks as well. Some people think she works for Gatsby. These pages will help reinforce that she can help do Gatsby work for them. The upcoming streams include some plug-in making and code reviews.

The two talk integrations, dunning emails, and they tease a future guest!

• Lesley's website
• Follow Lesley on Twitter
• Newsletter Glue — Lesley's product
• WordPress Gutenberg
• Benedicte's Tree Top Hut getaway
• POW!

Lesley Sim, co-founder of Newsletter Glue and fan of unique top-level domains, discusses product pivots, finding co-founders and freelancers, bootstrapping, WordPress, and more.

Newsletter Glue is a plug-in that allows you to build and publish newsletters with the power of WordPress. The current offering is the result of a zoom-in pivot where Lesley solved one of her own problems. She works on the product remotely with her technical co-founder, Ahmed, and they've seen traction since the pivot.

The three wrap up with weekly updates. Benedicte gets a new customer for POW!, Benedikt shares a meaningful win, and Lesley is riding a productive wave.

• Blue Monday
• The Great Gatsby with Queen Raae - REACT 168
• Benedikt: Tree data structure thread
• Smashing Magazine

Benedikt is bathing in artificial light, exercising, and staying focused thanks to the new frontend developer, Leo, at Userlist. These factors, combined with a good year and small raise, have him beating the usual winter blues. Last week they helped a customer through a spam attack and he completed more integration work. Benedikt has enjoyed talking through the code with another developer. 

Benedicte, feeling confused about progress last week, is nonetheless keeping the engine alive. Schools are closing and childcare has been tricky but she had glimpses of "supermom". She completed her first non-hourly contract, started a draft for her Smashing Magazine article, kept up with yoga, and will even sneak in a short treehouse cabin trip this week. Like Benedikt, she has also enjoyed discussing code at a higher level with Ola as he comes up to speed.

• Latest stream with Mirjam 
• The Great Gatsby with Queen Raae - REACT 168

While Benedicte enjoys a birthday tradition, the momentum from last week has slowed down. Not to fear — the Gatsby "engine" is proving a valuable way to keep things moving along. Routine, systems, and daily email writing were all "winners" for the week. A podcast appearance on React Round Up went well, too.

Benedikt adjusts to working with Userlist's newest addition, Leo. Despite delegating tasks, Benedikt realized he is still spending time thinking about the delegated work. Otherwise, the onboarding is off to an excellent start and it has allowed Benedikt a chance to focus on the backend work. Exercise returns as a focus as well.

Admire anyone that is working "slow and steady" on their business? Let us know and perhaps we'll have them on as a guest!

• YearCompass — reflect on the year and plan the next one

Benedicte enjoyed a great Christmas holiday and New Year's celebration. Between a trip to the mountains, sledding on toboggans, and watching the fireworks over Oslo, she felt invigorated to get started in 2022. Her encryption and privacy talk went well and she already has a podcast appearance and streams lined up to kick off the year.

Benedikt's holidays were not quite as relaxing, but he still enjoyed some of the family time and took a trip to the Black Forest. One big win was onboarding Userlist's new frontend developer. Benedikt says he's a great fit, is learning the code, and it felt good that things were getting done while he was away. They also hired a new customer success manager from their previous short-list, who already jumped in and helped with a recent AWS outage.

For 2021 review and 2022 goal setting Benedicte and Benedikt used the YearCompass framework. Benedicte's theme is "slow and steady". She has goals to avoid "shiny object" temptations and to keep progressing the things that are working for Queen Raae. She still has to decide on what that means for POW! — will it be the year that POW! becomes all that it can be? Benedikt isn't big on trackable or concrete goals either, though he wants Userlist to become profitable. Not profitable for just the sake of it, but to break even for longer-term financial stability.

• Let's help Mirjam settle on a Data Model #ConferenceBuddy v2.0 with Benedikt Deicke
• Podcast: The Business of Authority
• BoardGameGeek — online resource and community for board games
• MegaMaker — a community for bootstrappers 
• ProseMirror — tool for building rich-text editors
• Sanity.io Portable Text

Brian is leaving on a high note. His game won FIRST PLACE in the board game design contest! His submission started as an accountability exercise and ended with real feedback, a cash prize, the option to publish, and credibility for future pitches. For JTBD.app, the future is still undecided. For now, Brian is having some conversations in the MegaMaker community and is staying open. 

Benedicte is recovering from a few sick days during a busy time. Thankfully, she had built up some buffer and won't miss her encryption talk this week. She has kept up with yoga despite the missed time and is celebrating non-hourly work. It's a great fit for how she wants to work and the flexibility is a benefit when working while feeling less than 100%. Benedikt will come on this week's livestream to help with data modeling decisions for ConferenceBuddy. 

While Jane was on vacation at Userlist, Benedikt focused on customer support and hiring. They have some promising frontend developer candidates moving through the later stages in the process despite a setback with the customer success manager role they previously hired for. Separately, Benedikt starts to regret a decision they made to use Markdown as the source of truth for messaging content and shares how he is thinking about moving forward.

• Blogging For Devs Community
• Go Rails — learn Ruby on Rails
• Benedicte's new plugin
• Yoga accountability Twitter thread
• Conference Buddy — an app by Mirjam Aulbach
• Now Hiring: Frontend Developer (Ember.js) at Userlist

While he feels conflicted, Brian plans to take a three-month break from the show. He's tired of the march to grow his MRR and doesn't feel like he has meaningful updates. He is enjoying his role at GitLab and wants to spend his free time away from building a SaaS — namely on projects like board games. Last week will be his final episode before the break.

Benedicte has updates on several fronts — a new plugin, a yoga accountability partner, and her first non-hourly gig! She plans to have Benedikt on an upcoming stream to talk databases after the next authentication stream. She also needs to unfollow some Twitter accounts to follow some new ones... without making 5000 clicks.

Benedikt's time has been spent almost entirely in hiring for the frontend development position at Userlist. They had to say "no" to the previous round of candidates and it isn't easy. In between hiring, he has snuck in some small features and bug requests. The good news in causing stupid bugs? They are easy fixes. Usually.

• Conference Buddy — an app by Mirjam Aulbach
• Stream: Use a plugin to accept Stripe donations of any amount 
• Stripe — making payments easy, NOT sponsored :)
• Smashing Magazine — for web designers and developers

Benedikt took last week off but didn't unplug 100%. He moved hiring forward on the frontend developer role. The pipeline is filling up and he expects to wrap up soon. While he was out, and completing some projects around the house, the customer success role was filled. 

Benedicte fills Benedikt in on her newest streaming plans — ones that will cover authentication and privacy in the context of Mirjam's app, Conference Buddy. She celebrates a small win for POW! as a user inquires about yearly pricing. After they shower Stripe with praise, Benedicte gives Benedikt an update on holiday baking!

• Queen Raae GitHub: gatsby-plugin-let-it-snow
• Conference Buddy — an app by Mirjam Aulbach
• Stream: Use a plugin to accept Stripe donations of any amount 
• semantic-release: Benedicte's "tech crush"

Benedicte catches up with Brian after he returns from his trip to the Grand Canyon. She is feeling focused, hitting a good rhythm, and is cranking out code! She has a lot of excitement around the NPM package semantic-release this week and is headed in the right direction for her Gatsby-authority business. She shares her latest YouTube livestream plans as she wraps up season two of Gatsby Deep Dives with Queen Raae and the Nattermob Pirates.

Without cell service or internet connectivity, Brian had time to reflect while having a blast backpacking the Grand Canyon. The headline? He might be ready for a break from bootstrapping. Certainly not a "forever" break, but perhaps some time for hobbies to be just that — hobbies. To be continued...

• Queen Raae GitHub: gatsby-plugin-let-it-snow
• "Let it Snow" in action
• Now Hiring: Frontend Developer (Ember.js) at Userlist
• Rewardful: affiliate & referral setup for SaaS companies using Stripe

Benedicte is feeling creative after working on a short, fun Gatsby plugin, "Let it Snow". On the topic of plugins, there has been a change in plans. After canceling the launch of the pay-what-you-want bootcamp last week, she plans to rework the bootcamp offerings in favor of creating Gatsby plugins. The new strategy is to offer these plugins and have additional paid, asynchronous coursework available for those who want to customize or dive deeper.

Benedikt moves ahead with hiring at Userlist for the frontend developer position. Questions still remain about the process and he ponders the best way to structure a paid test project. After preparing the test project for interviews, he spent time on a rejuvenating task — improving the integration architecture. The Rewardful integration is scheduled to launch today!

Finally, in a shared win of mutual accountability, Benedicte continues yoga and Benedikt continues walking.

• Now Hiring: Customer Success Manager at Userlist
• Now Hiring: Frontend Developer (Ember.js) at Userlist
• Develop and deploy a pay-what-you-want feature with Stripe
• BREATH - A 30 Day Yoga Journey

Benedikt gives an update on hiring efforts at Userlist. The number of applications for the frontend developer position is well below the number of applications for the customer success position. Benedikt weighs waiting to hire someone who is an excellent fit versus hiring someone more quickly. Benedicte agrees that either way, it's important to find a personality that is willing to jump into the fold at a startup. If you are interested in this role, please apply or forward it to someone that might be.

Benedicte has scheduled the second of three Gatsby mini bootcamps and is finalizing the schedule for the third. As discussed previously, there is room for experimentation. Specificity in the content is important for making the learning relevant but a few questions remain. Are takeaway coding examples the valuable piece? How about asynchronous content delivery? Besides Gatsby, she hopes to sneak in some coding on POW! soon.

Winter is coming and Benedikt isn't thrilled. The two discuss some strategies for coping with less sunlight at higher latitudes — Vitamin D, sun lamps, and exercise. After a few days away from yoga, Benedicte is starting a new 30-day journey herself.

• JTBD.app
• Now Hiring: Customer Success Manager at Userlist
• Userlist's Marketing Email feature
• Benedicte's Gatsby Bootcamp
• Jonathan Stark
• Benedicte's POW!

Brian's first day at GitLab was as expected — he started setting up and filled out HR paperwork. Learning about the remote-first culture was fascinating, though. On JTBD.app, onboarding development help is getting more exciting. He expects progress on feature improvements soon.

Benedikt recaps the email marketing feature launch from last week at Userlist. He feels good about it but anticipates some time before seeing an impact beyond the initial marketing splash. Userlist is looking to hire a customer success manager and a front end web developer and Benedikt is finalizing the job post for the latter.

Benedicte is preparing for the Gatsby mini bootcamp that launches this weekend! Between planning other topics, iterating on pricing, and building a community, there's a lot of work to be done. Ideally, the up-front effort could make for a rewarding long-term project. POW! is something that Benedicte wants to maintain on the side because... "Don’t we all want a successful SaaS?"

• Check out Userlist on Product Hunt
• Matt on Twitter
• Matt's company, Summit
• Userlist's Marketing Email feature
• Benedicte's Gatsby Bootcamp

• Gatsby Func Jam
• Benedicte’s Submission
• Art of Product with Penelope Phippen of Stripe
• Rob Walling's Stairstep Approach to Bootstrapping
• How Not to Stairstep

• ZipMessage
• Brian’s Productize & Scale course
• Brian’s Website
• AudienceOps
• FounderGigs

• Vote for Benedicte at The Jammies Awards
• pgMustard
• The Gatsby FuncJam Challenge
• Tilde

• Peak Performance
• Sprint Hard, Rest Hard

• Live Pair Programming with Adam McCrea
• Queen Raae Codes
• Real Python

• Userlist Website
• Call Paul with Benedicte

• @raae's Norweigian Horseback Vacay 

• Timing
• Daniel on Twitter
• AudienceOps
• Postaga

• Benedicte's workcation
• Benedicte on Twitter
• Benedikt on Twitter

• Headlamp
• Securing Your Gatsby
• Gatsby Summer Functions
• Tabletopia
• Backpack on Tabletopia

• Queen Raae on Twitter
• Benedikt on Twitter
• Brian on Twitter
• POW!
• Userlist
• HireBrianRhea.com from the Wayback Machine
• The whole HireBrianRhea story

• Gatsby Summer Functions
• Slow & Steady wins the race
• Sidekiq
• jtbd.app

• Benedicte’s on-brand vacation
• Gatsby Summer Functions (30% Discount Code: SLOWANDSTEADY)
• VS Code
• VS Code Remote Development
• GitHub Codespaces

• Jonathan Stark
• Gatsby Summer Functions 
• Userlist on Zapier

• Gatsby Summer Functions with Queen Raae and the Nattermob Pirates 
• POW! — the privacy-first menstrual cycle journal
• Zapier 
• Userlist on Zapier

• Benedicte on Twitter
• POW!
• Benedicte on YouTube
• Snuti
• Streamyard
• OBS
• Elgato Wave 3
• Elgato Keylight Air

• Brian Casel
• ProcessKit
• Example of the JTBD Analysis Software

• Aurelius
• TinySeed
• EnjoyHQ
• @happytrailsfamily
• Golden Game Guild
• Visa trial subscription requirements

• Tuple
• Matt Swanson on Twitter

• Zapier
• Jupyter Notebook

• The Game Crafter
• Company Accounts by Userlist on ProductHunt
• Brian’s Tweet about Backpack 

• Userlist's new companies feature
• Brian's website
• Hammerstone

• Pgmustard
• Binary tree indexes
• GIN indexes
• Gather Town 
• The Game Crafter

• Jane McGonigal TED
• Jane on Knowledge Project
• Jane on Ologies
• Yarn Deduplicate
• MicroConf Remote

• Peter Suhm
• Reform.app
• OpenAPI
• MicroConf Remote
• Ruben Gamez
• Gather.town
• Backpack on BGG

• John on FounderQuest
• Harmony
• Gaug.es
• Flipper Cloud
• Speaker Deck
• Box Out Sports
• Fewer and Faster
• John’s Website
• John on Twitter

• Brian's Truck and Fifth Wheel
• First Half of Brian's Trip
• Hasbro commercial (German) (English)
• SegMetrics

• Brian on Twitter
• Benedikt on Twitter

• LessAccounting
• Backpack on BoardGameGeek

• Ably
• Backpack on Board Game Geek
• SaaS Summit

• SaasSummit
• pgMustard
• Substance Lab
• Video: How to Play Backpack
• Backpack Rulebook on Google Docs
• Backpack on Tabletopia

• Life Profitability: The New Measure of Entrepreneurial Success
• Ryan Holiday
• Paulo Coelho - The Alchemist
• Herman Hesse - Siddhartha
• Andre Agassi - Open
• Yung Pueblo – Inward
• Adii Pienaar on Twitter

• America’s Cup
• PRADA Cup Race Weekend Wrap up
• Incredible explanation of how a sailboat goes into the wind
• Tabletopia
• Nusii
• TinySeed
• MegaMaker

• Readable Postgres Explains
• Postgres Explain Visualizer

• Brian's board game in progress
• Year Compass

• Benedikt on Twitter
• Userlist
• Tabletopia

• Brian on Twitter
• Benedikt on Twitter

• Bootstrapped with Kids

• Arc
• Userlist alternative pages
• SaaS Podcast Awards

• Brian on Twitter
• Benedikt on Twitter
• Userlist's Laravel Package
• Please consider nominating Slow & Steady for the SaaS Podcast Awards

• Better Done Than Perfect Podcast
• Userlist Happy Hour

• Headlamp
• Brand Patrol
• Userlist

• Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
• Rails Autoscale
• Snapshooter.io
• Forbes: 10 Signs You're Burning Out -- And What To Do About It

• BrandPatrol
• Userlist's User Onboarding Guide
• FullStack Radio
• Statamic
• Tailwind CSS
• Jane's Tweet about the new podcast

No, really. It's important.

• @richardkmiller
• Richard's personal site
• Goldie May
• Rich Hickey’s “Hammock-Driven Development”

• Transistor
• Justin on Twitter