Slow & Steady

Benedicte and Benedikt talk about their updates from the past three weeks, washing machines, winter preparations, and more.

• 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.

Benedicte and Benedikt talk about the old hobbies they’ve picked up and other updates from the week.

• 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.

Benedikt comes back from summer vacation. Benedicte grapples with Gatsby and Jamstack “dying”.

• 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.

Benedicte talks to Geoff about the marketing experiments they’re doing this fall.

• 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.

Benedicte and Benedikt take on the challenge of #SummerofUITweaks for their products.

• 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.

Benedikt talks to Andrew Atkinson about different types of database constraints and his upcoming book.

• 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.

Benedicte thinks about the best way to update docs. Benedikt gets excited about their product development.

• 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. 

Benedikt shares a major life update. Benedicte gets things wrapped up before vacation.

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 and Benedicte have finally met in person in Athens.

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.

Benedikt prepares for his upcoming Rails SaaS Conference talk. Benedicte visits her old university town.

• 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.