Slow & Steady

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about owning their identities and more.

• 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.

Benedicte and Benedikt discuss platform risk and more.

• 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.

Benedicte tries out a new physical activity. Benedikt works on new features for Userlist.

• 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+.

Benedicte celebrates her big four-o with a spa day by the ocean. Benedikt and the Userlist team work on their blog redesign.

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.

Cheers to the new year! Benedicte and Benedikt look back at their 2022 journeys and set new goals for the coming year.

• 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.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about their wonderful holiday breaks and upcoming plans for 2023.

• 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.

Benedicte and Benedikt talk about the recent launch of Prune Your Follows on ProductHunt, migrating from Heroku Postgres to Crunchy Bridge, and preparing for some time off for the holidays. 

• 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. 

Benedicte launches Prune Your Follows on Product Hunt. Benedikt deals with small annoyances at work.

• 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.

Benedikt and the Userlist team decide on their next big feature. Benedicte comes across new challenges with Prune Your Follows.

• 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.

Benedicte and Benedikt return to the daily grind after enjoying the conference season.

• 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.