Building Jam

This week at Jam we’re defining the goals & priorities of our new growth team and feeling inspired by the future of AI. Since it’s week 12 of the pod, it’s time to evaluate & make a decision.

In this episode we discuss:

(00:17) The team reflects on 12 weeks of the podcast & what’s next
(05:36) Learnings on video distribution & repurposing
(06:45) Irtefa tells us the story of Heinz Ketchup & how its similar to AI apps
(10:47) A Benedict Evans quote that makes us really excited about AI tools
(12:20) Dani shares the first draft of our new growth team’s charter

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

This week at Jam, our users hit 3 million Jams created! It’s an important milestone, so we’re planning something special for No. 3M. And we’re thinking about the next 3 million—as we build out Jam’s first growth team.

In this episode we discuss:

(00:14) Dani reveals how close we are to 3M Jams & the email we’re planning to send

(02:43) Learnings from PLG greats & how they apply to growing Jam

(06:39) Ian’s videos for welcome emails, onboarding & more—it just makes sense!

(12:11) How we’re setting up Jam’s growth team

(14:00) Irtefa discusses a recent customer call & opportunities to make our users’ lives better

(15:12) Why Dani prioritizes product sense over growth experience for growth team hires

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

This week at Jam, we’re at Config! Figma is one of our investors and gave us free tickets (thank you Figma!). Ian is live at the scene to fill us in on what we can learn about events and community from one of the world’s best product design conferences.

In this episode we discuss:

(00:15) Admiring the scale of Config— it’s huge!
(01:00) The best part is meeting people from companies we admire
(02:18) Figma’s new slides product & a demo of Dot, an AI assistant that’s more like your friend
(05:40) Ian gives us a tour of all the Config swag & everything Figma got right
(09:09) Reactions to Figma Slides and reminiscing about Prezi
(11:11) Ian got to meet famous product educators, we’re all fans!
(15:43) A very special 3D printed cookie cutter

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. 

New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

This week at Jam, we’re deep into building the next iteration of Jam AI. After Jam engineer Rui shared the latest demo at standup, we knew we had to bring him on the pod to discuss.

This week on Building Jam:

(01:30) Our approach to incorporating AI at Jam
(04:32) Limiting the input space to build AI that works
(07:29) Rui’s tools & experiments for AI reliability & infrastructure
(10:16) Raza - the 2016 chatbot library that inspired Rui’s approach to faster AI iteration
(12:02) The Facebook approach to AI bug fixing & what makes Jam’s different

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. 

New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

What’s happening at Jam this week? Our founders Dani & Irtefa are prepping for a board meeting by analyzing a ton of data to get a bird’s eye view of Jam.

This week, we discuss:

(00:22) Why Dani loves getting the board deck ready + who’s on Jam’s board

(04:30) What happens in a Jam board meeting

(06:19) How Dani & Irtefa show up for the board is different than every day at Jam

(07:27) How does the board influence Jam founders’ decisions & what gets voted on

(10:57) What we talk about in Jam board meetings & taking their feedback to the rest of the team

(12:46) Ivanha’s takes on SEO (and learning with ChatGPT)

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. 

New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

What’s happening at Jam this week? We’re going after new tactics, new channels, doing more live onboardings— and figuring out how to do it all in a way that feels like Jam.

This week, we discuss:

(00:15) Irtefa just onboarded an enterprise customer
(05:42) Ian is making a Jam tutorial video for self-serve onboarding
(08:43) How can we better help new users who don’t know Jam?
(13:47) Seth Godin inspiration to make content that doesn’t feel like marketing
(14:48) Connecting a feature launch to the big reason we’re building Jam— one place w/ what you need to fix a bug
(18:58) Ignoring prioritization advice & trying to get faster
(22:21) How to Do Boring Stuff at Jam: onboarding 3 new engineers in person
(28:06) Team challenges of the week & giving constructive feedback via Slack

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. 

New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

What’s happening this week at Jam? We’re shipping design updates, making decisions about a new product launching soon & discovering that intuition is a form of data.

This week, Jam’s Lead Designer joins the podcast to discuss:

(00:18) Sharing some design iterations to Jam's Slack app

(05:06) Dogfooding at Jam

(09:10) Irtefa’s very niche idea for new Jam swag: “Only 1 Network Error”

(09:58) Future changes we’re making to Jam notifications

(12:17) Using intuition as a form of data

(17:34) Getting a new product in beta ready for GA: from Irtefa-led onboarding to self-serve

(21:56) Thinking about the “why” in Jam’s onboarding

(26:49) Team challenges of the week

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. 

New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

What’s it like building Jam this week? We’re hiring a second designer and realizing it’s one of the hardest positions to fill.

This week we discuss:

(00:15) Why hiring a designer is harder than an engineer

(6:57) How we look for designers at Jam

(09:15) How our designers’ personalities have shaped the product

(16:15) Working with sr. designers (tip: they don’t need your Canva file)

(21:41) Talking to new audiences about your product

(28:44) Google docs is Totino’s Pizza rolls & Notion is a calzone

(30:30) Answering “What’s your favorite product?” in a PM interview

(33:30) Reacting to a mind-blowing website (https://amie.so/)

(34:48) What bell-bottom jeans say about your startup

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. 

New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

What are the best marketing tactics for growing startups? We don’t really know yet, but we’re having a lot of fun figuring it out. This week, Ian and Ivanha talk about taking Jam marketing from 0 to 1.

(00:36) The owl video experiment & "Content-Market Fit"
(05:34) Getting comfortable with a blank canvas
(08:49) Deciding the tone and messaging of feature launches
(11:47) Sizzle reels & Building Things™
(16:16) Challenges of the week

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

Getting builders together has become a core part of what we do at Jam- with events for our community now happening 3-4 times a month. The truth is it hasn’t always been clear we should do this, especially as a remote team with users all over the world (150+ countries 🤯). This week, we share the story behind our approach to events and building community as a startup.

(1:14) Why did we start hosting events at Jam?

(4:45) Our first in-person user meetup

(7:42) The nerves behind hosting our first event

(10:07) How to predict your event’s attendance rate

(12:55) Our biggest challenge with hosting events today

(15:10) The story behind our first AI demo night

(16:45) How we find demos for Jam events

(18:24) How to host your first event

(22:00) Doing community marketing without a community forum

(23:00) Why building Slack/Discord communities is difficult for saas products

(24:45) Hot take- Don’t oversell your product to your community

(27:55) What is the Jam community right now?

(29:10) Spicy topic- Measuring event ROI

(35:46) Our challenges this week