Standing in the Fire

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Standing in the Fire episodes

October 2218: Nobody Wants Your Web UI Anymore
This week we start with the small wins. Two Momentum coworking members grew enough to upgrade to offices, and Fireside shipped Air, a clean new website theme built around your cover art.
Then John plants his flag: within a few years, chat will replace clicking around in web apps. He's already stopped opening the dashboards for the tools he uses every day. Kris pushes back on behalf of the huge non-technical crowd that's still asking AI to rewrite their emails.
From there it gets personal. Why working with AI all day makes people feel harder, what to do with all the open loops in your head, waking up with dread, finally sending the ask you've been avoiding, and real advice on getting better sleep. And John explains why he's back on Claude after building a polished iPhone dice game in an afternoon.
In this episode:
Why members who outgrow coworking might be the best proof it works
Projecting success, and when it backfires
Fireside's new Air theme with light and dark modes
The web UI is disappearing, and what replaces it
Why AI-written tests are slowing everyone down
Async AI work vs. synchronous people
Using an AI project manager to clear the deck
Sleep, caffeine, cortisol, and shutting your brain off
Asking for what you want, even when it feels awkward
Building custom tools that solve only your problem
Just doing the thing instead of ruminating on it
Standing in the Fire is produced in South Bend, Indiana.
55 min
October 1317: Nobody Needs the Tutorial Anymore
John just got back from Rails World in Austin, his first conference of the AI era. One Cybercab ride had him seeing the future. Then hallway conversations about consulting drying up and apps losing revenue brought him right back down.
Kris shares the highs and lows of building Momentum, why AI-generated art is slowing down production at the screen print shop, and the new rule he wants for anyone sending AI reports without checking them first. Plus, Kris starts shipping real changes with Codex, and Fireside turns two.
Show Notes:
Celebrating wins when you're the one who has to lead the celebration
Rails World, robotaxis, and why self-driving could be everywhere in two to five years
What happens to consulting when every small business has an AI subscription
Why AI art makes screen printing slower, not faster
How to price work fairly when AI does most of it
Verification as the most important skill right now
Using Codex on a WordPress site, and a banner page that finally converted
Why project managers pick up AI coding faster than you'd expect
What happens when your software is a black box
Fireside's two-year anniversary
Standing in the Fire is produced in South Bend, Indiana.
51 min
September 2916: How Codex Fixed a Year and a Half of Bugs in Four Hours
Big episode. Kris crossed the line. John's running out of tokens again. And there's a lot of ground to cover.
Topics covered:
[0:00] Intro & Back From Summer
[1:17] Kris Installs Codex (Finally)
[3:36] Founder Fellowship: 5 Vibe Coders Walk In
[6:20] Hot Take: Will You Even Need to Learn to Code?
[9:36] Getting Unlocked vs. Getting Generic Answers
[11:06] AI Art in Client Brochures — A Trust Problem
[13:23] Automating Social Media with Box Out
[17:34] Trial Reels, Algorithm Games, and Quantity Over Timing
[20:09] Onboard Your Own Product — On Repeat
[23:50] Fireside New Site & Automated Weekly Emails
[26:34] GStack: Build a Feature From Scratch With Bumpers
[30:11] Building a Founder Fellowship Tracking App
[33:47] Todoist + MCP — Logging the Admin Work That Doesn't Count
[35:28] Flare Performance Reports Every Morning
[38:49] What's Shipping at Fireside This Week
[41:10] OpenAI Astra: Burned a Week of Tokens Before Breakfast
[48:14] The Virtuous Loop: Codex Fixed 18 Months of Bugs
[52:00] Recommendations: GStack, Astra & Leaders Eat Last
Mentioned:
OpenAI Codex / Astra
GStack (Gary Tan / Y Combinator)
Flare: app performance monitoring
Box Out
Speaker Deck
Fireside.fm
Momentum Founder Fellowship
UserList — lifecycle email
Todoist + MCP integration
Cloudflare (for building lightweight apps)
Jesse Hanley / Bento
Grok / Grok Bot
Like, follow, and leave a comment. First one's still up for grabs.
Standing in the Fire is produced in South Bend, Indiana.
55 min
August 1015: Hot Takes: AI Art, Vibe Coding, and Why Codex Isn't All Bad
Sometimes the thing that's slowing you down isn't the business, it's the nasal spray. John's back, feeling good, and firing on all cylinders. Kris is deep in the work of letting go. This one's equal parts founder therapy and technical nerd session.
Show Notes:
(0:00) Intro: Starting with the Wins
(0:39) It Was the Flonase (John's Back)
(2:39) Collecting Validation: Save the Wins Too
(5:11) The Fireside New Studio: What's Working
(10:04) Delegate or Die: Letting Go Without Losing Control
(12:33) New Segment: Sparks Fly (Hot Takes)
(13:05) Hot Take: AI Art Is Ruining the Print Shop
(20:01) Hot Take: Codex Isn't All Bad
(24:59) Vibe Coding: What Nobody Tells You
(28:29) Fan the Flames: Try More Than One AI
(30:07) The Busy Light Saga
(35:28) Embers: Momentum Startup Cohort
(37:22) Embers: Podcast Art & Thumbnail Strategy
(38:20) Surviving a 5-Hour Railway Outage with Claude
(44:45) Flare, Box Out Click Tracking & What's Next
Check Out John's Stuff:
Fireside.fm: https://fireside.fm
Flipper Cloud: https://www.flippercloud.io
Check Out Kris's Stuff:
Momentum – Coworking space in South Bend: https://momentumsb.com
Access Imprints – Screen printing & embroidery: https://accessimprints.com
The Hardest Thing Podcast: https://hardestthingpod.fireside.fm
Standing in the Fire is produced in South Bend, Indiana.
48 min
August 0314: Stop Fixing Every Bug (And Let Claude Handle the Rest)
John (https://x.com/jnunemaker ) and Kris (https://www.instagram.com/kristopherpriemer) talk about the real side of running multiple businesses: open loops, hiring pains, patience, and what actually keeps founders going.
Show Notes:
(00:00) Intro & Catching Up
(01:39) Into the Fire: Idea Week Debrief
(02:58) Coworking Pivot: Why Private Offices Win
(06:42) New Category Thinking (Grüns Gummies)
(08:12) How to Fund the Build-Out
(08:52) Into the Fire: Health, Friendship & Hell Yeah or No
(11:06) Who You're Around Changes Everything
(12:23) Fan the Flames: Graham Weaver's Asymmetric Life
(14:07) Personality Isn't Permanent & Leadership Presence
(16:23) Cornelius Vanderbilt & the Art of No Grudges
(22:21) GStack: Gary Tan's AI Dev Workflow
(24:36) Using Claude to Fix WordPress Bugs
(26:33) YouTube Rabbit Holes & What John's Feed Looks Like
(28:29) Embers: Fireside, Flare & Flipper Updates
(33:05) Building an AI Watchdog That Redeploys at 3am
(38:23) Daily GitHub Summaries for $20/month
Check Out John's Stuff:
Fireside.fm – Podcast hosting for serious podcasters: https://fireside.fm
Flipper – Feature flag management: https://www.flippercloud.io
Check Out Kris's Stuff:
Momentum – Coworking space in South Bend: https://momentumsb.com
The Hardest Thing Podcast – https://hardestthingpod.fireside.fm
Standing in the Fire is produced in South Bend, Indiana.
43 min
June 24Bonus Episode: Open Loops, Hiring Pains, and Not Quitting
A lost episode, finally found and worth the wait. John and Kris get into the real conversations founders rarely have out loud.
Topics covered:
Recording in person vs. remote - why it changes everything from the conversation to the edit
Zoom fatigue and the surprising reason video calls wear you out
The compounding effect: Atomic Habits applied to building a podcast (and a business)
Hiring contractors vs. in-person employees - the messier, harder reality
Patience as a founder - why wanting things to move faster creates its own kind of damage
Open loops, stress, and why celebrating closed wins matters more than we admit
The cost of being a yes-person when your time is your most valuable asset
What's fueling the fire: books, podcasts, community events, and people showing up
Mentioned:
Atomic Habits – James Clear
Ready, Fire, Aim – Michael Masterson
$100M Leads – Alex Hormozi
My First Million Podcast
Momentum (coworking space, South Bend)
Like, follow, and leave a comment, it genuinely helps.
Standing in the Fire is produced in South Bend, Indiana.
31 min
June 1013: Running on Empty: Burning Out, Finding Margin, and Growing on Purpose
In this episode of Standing in the Fire, Kris and John pull back the curtain on what life actually looks like when you're managing multiple SaaS products, a coworking space, and a life that doesn't have a quiet corner right now.
What We Cover
Into the Fire: What's Been Hard
Kris opens up about a stretch where nothing feels like an oasis: hiring pressure, prepping for a big idea week at Momentum, and the small but real win of finally getting those emails out. John reflects on going deep into AI work with no buffer — and how a camping trip to Disney gave him the margin he didn't know he needed.
Fan the Flames: What's Been Inspiring
John shares a conversation with a friend about Essentialism and a question that's been sitting with him: what does intentional growth actually look like? Growing a business past a certain point means doing things you don't enjoy — so what do you really want? Kris has been listening to Personality Isn't Permanent, a change of pace from the typical hustle-heavy business books.
Embers: Small Wins and Experiments
Fireside's episode upload flow is getting a real look: streamlined fields, drag-and-drop uploads, and AI-suggested metadata from transcripts are all on the roadmap
Momentum is solving a surprisingly relatable problem: members don't want to leave when they're in the zone, with a dead-simple iPad + Square terminal snack shop
Fireside cover art generation is in early exploration: episode art, built right into the platform
Podcast Rec of the Episode
John's been listening to Physics of Startups on the road, specifically the "translation guide" episode on B2B sales and the push/pull framework. Highly recommended for anyone who's ever done a customer discovery call and walked away more confused than when they started.
Standing in the Fire is produced in South Bend, Indiana.
36 min
May 1312: Chest Tight, Calendar Full: Finding the Off Switch in a Season of Growth - Ep. 12
Ever feel like you're winning and burning out at the same time?
That's the tension at the heart of this episode of Standing in the Fire, the show where SaaS founders Chris and John skip the highlight reel and get into the actual heat of building businesses.
What's In the Fire This Week
John opens up about hitting a wall after weeks of peak AI productivity. The work was getting done, more than ever, but the cost was invisible: no mental space, chest tightness, podcasts in the car, laptop on the couch, doomscrolling AI Twitter at midnight. He breaks down what recovery actually looked like: basketball, pantry shelves, a journaling workbook, and an E Ink notebook for thoughts he doesn't even need to keep.
Kris brings the counterweight: a trip to Austin for pre-South by Southwest events with a room full of women founders at varying stages (bootstrapped, PE-backed, VC-funded, exited, bought back). The caliber of story and the in-person energy reminded him what's been missing: community, events, and the kind of conversation you can't get from a podcast.
"It's not a different caliber of people, it's different experiences. And that changes everything."
Fan the Flames: What's Been Inspiring
Brainstorming with Claude as a thinking partner, not just a tool, exploring business ideas you don't have to build
Reading Cornelius Vanderbilt and wondering: what gave historical figures their relentlessness? Was it just that there was nothing to do after dark except sit by the fire?
Watching teammates build the impossible, like Box Out's OCR feature that extracted a name from a photo where a spiral notebook was covering half the letters
Ember Updates: Small Wins Worth Noting
Segmented email onboarding finally live for Speaker Deck - and the lesson: just launch with three emails, don't wait for seven
Geo SEO / AI visibility auditing - a WordPress plugin that scores how well your site shows up in LLM responses, generates an llms.txt file, and gives you a prioritized fix list you can paste straight into Claude
LLM self-verification as a design pattern - the insight that AI output is only as good as its ability to check its own work. Give it an API to render what it just built, compare against a reference, and let it loop until it gets there. Game-changing for template generation at Box Out.
The Thread That Ties It Together
Whether it's burnout recovery, event planning, email automation, or AI architecture, this episode keeps circling back to the same question: how do you define success clearly enough that the system (human or AI) can actually get there?
Standing in the Fire is produced in South Bend, Indiana.
39 min
April 17 11: Ship It Fast, Fix It Later - The New SaaS Playbook
What happens when the coffee runs out, and everything else goes sideways too?
Kris and John are back with a new episode format built around three segments: what's been hard, what's been inspiring, and what's been shipping. No highlight reels. Just the real stuff.
🔥 Into the Fire - What's Been Hard
Momentum was built around great amenities. Draft lattes. Cold brew on tap. Pour-over. The works. So when the RO water system ran dry and the kegs went empty first thing in the morning, chaos ensued. Kris breaks down their own version of "Watergate" — and what it revealed about turning a customer frustration moment into surprise and delight.
John gets honest too: the constant tension between deep builder mode and staying on top of customer support is real. Plus — why good AI support bots are genuinely useful, and why bad ones make you want to throw your laptop.
📖 Fan the Flames - Recommendations Worth Your Time
John just finished Alex Hormozi's $100M Money Models and one subtle pricing reframe completely changed how he thinks about annual plans. Instead of offering a discount, give bonus months. Small shift, big psychological difference.
Kris connects it to membership sales at Momentum and brings in Ryan Serhant's obsessive follow-up philosophy: people who don't respond aren't always uninterested. A three-month-cold lead just booked a tour.
Kris's tool pick: Jesse Itzler's wall calendar for mapping out an entire year intentionally, personally and professionally. They used it to plan 75 events without losing their minds.
✨ Embers - Small Wins & Things Shipping
John shipped Ember, a brand new embeddable podcast player for Fireside, and then turned a single customer feature request into a working playlist player in under an hour. The customer's response? "This is unreal."
The lesson: getting something good to production fast beats waiting for perfect. AI-assisted development has changed what's possible for small teams, and John's sticky note says it all "What has to be true for it to take half the time?"
Chris closes with some news: he's been named Outstanding Young Business Leader of the Year by the South Bend Regional Chamber, and yes, he announced it at Christmas dinner to very confused nieces.
Standing in the Fire is about what it actually feels like to own and grow SaaS products. Hosted by John and Kris, owners of Fireside.fm. New episodes dropping consistently, sometimes.
Like what you hear? Subscribe. It helps more than you know.
Standing in the Fire is produced in South Bend, Indiana.
28 min
March 23 10: The Neo Moment
In this episode, Kris and John dig into what's been hard and stretching lately — from December's packed schedules to leveling up the Box Out conference booth, hiring challenges at the print shop, and keeping Momentum's big vision alive through the day-to-day grind.
John shares his obsession with Claude Supermax and how switching to Opus-level AI coding has unlocked a "Neo in the Matrix" moment — pushing Speaker Deck links, Flipper Expressions, Box Out page views, and Fireside episode duplication all forward in a single week.
Kris recommends Opus (the video tool) for turning landscape podcast footage into vertical social clips.
They wrap up with goals for the new year: John wants to 2-4X his output, while Kris is focused on filling Momentum, growing strategically, and finding better work-life integration.
Standing in the Fire is produced in South Bend, Indiana.
31 min

About Standing in the Fire

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Dive into the fire with Kris, Garrett and John — three owners of Fireside.fm who know what it’s like to stand in the flames of entrepreneurship. In 'Standing in the Fire,' we tackle everything from…

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Standing in the Fire

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