In episode 45 of The Technical Co-Founder Podcast, Lucas and Luna break down how a growing B2B SaaS startup turned its on-call rotation from a dreaded engineering chore into a structured product feedback loop. The company, a mid-market analytics platform with about 40 engineers, noticed that repeated alerts for the same customer-facing issues were being ignored by the on-call team. Instead of punishing engineers, the CTO introduced a lightweight post-incident review that feeds directly into the product backlog. Lucas walks through the three-part system: a severity tagging protocol, a 15-minute root cause analysis template, and a weekly 'on-call insights' report shared with product managers. Luna pushes back on whether this adds overhead during a crisis, and Lucas cites data showing that the company reduced repeat incidents by 60 percent in six months and increased engineer satisfaction scores by 30 percent. The episode closes with a look at how smaller startups can implement a similar process without dedicated SRE teams.

#OnCall #IncidentManagement #ProductFeedbackLoop #EngineeringCulture #DevOps #SiteReliabilityEngineering #PostIncidentReview #StartupEngineering #B2BSaaS #CTO #TechnicalCoFounder #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #EngineeringLeadership #AgileDevelopment #TechDebt #IncidentResponse #EngineeringProductivity

Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo

In episode 44 of The Technical Co-Founder Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore how a small startup replaced its stale internal documentation with literate programming — a technique where code and explanation live in the same file. They walk through the team's transition from a scattered Notion wiki to a documentation-as-code pipeline using a custom tool built on top of Jupyter Notebooks. The discussion covers the specific workflow: engineers write markdown interlaced with executable code blocks, and every doc update triggers a CI build that runs the embedded code and regenerates static HTML. They break down the concrete wins: 90% reduction in stale docs, faster onboarding for new hires, and a cultural shift where documentation became part of code review. They also address the trade-offs — the learning curve for non-engineers, the overhead of maintaining a custom tool, and why the approach doesn't scale to user-facing documentation.

#LiterateProgramming #DocumentationAsCode #InternalDocs #TechnicalDebt #DeveloperExperience #JupyterNotebooks #ContinuousIntegration #Onboarding #KnowledgeManagement #StartupEngineering #CodeReview #EngineeringCulture #DocOps #SoftwareEngineering #BusinessAndTechnology #FexingoBusiness #TechnicalCoFounderPodcast #BusinessPodcast

Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo

Most startups hire engineers by coding tests and whiteboard interviews. But one early-stage B2B SaaS company found that traditional technical interviews were screening for performance anxiety, not engineering skill. In this episode, Lucas and Luna break down how a 12-person startup replaced live coding with a paid writing exercise: candidates wrote a technical RFC for a real problem the team faced, then discussed it in a 45-minute conversation. The result? A 40 percent increase in offer acceptance rate and a team that shipped 30 percent faster in the first quarter because new hires already understood the codebase's design philosophy. We walk through the exact prompt they used, how they evaluated responses without bias, and why this approach works especially well for senior engineers who hate algorithmic puzzles but love systems thinking. Plus: how they avoided the trap of hiring only people who write beautifully but can't ship. If you're a technical founder tired of the same broken interview loop, this episode offers a concrete alternative.

#HiringEngineers #TechnicalInterviews #StartupHiring #RFCBasedHiring #WritingSamples #EngineeringCulture #TechRecruitment #B2BSaaS #StartupGrowth #AlternativeInterview #SystemsThinking #EngineeringTeam #FounderAdvice #BusinessAndTechnology #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #TechnicalCoFounder #EngineeringProductivity

Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo

Episode 42 of The Technical Co-Founder Podcast explores how a 15-person startup used workflow automation to eliminate three headcount requests without laying anyone off. Lucas and Luna break down the specific tools (n8n, Make, custom Slack bots), the engineering trade-offs, and why this approach beats hiring for certain repetitive tasks. They discuss the upfront investment in automation vs. ongoing salary costs, how the CTO sold the idea to the CEO, and the unexpected cultural side effect: engineers became more engaged when boring work disappeared. Plus, a candid look at where automation fails and when you still need a human in the loop. If you're a technical founder weighing build vs. buy vs. hire, this episode gives you a concrete framework to evaluate the ROI of automation.

#WorkflowAutomation #n8n #Make #SlackBots #StartupEngineering #CTO #TechnicalCoFounder #BusinessAndTechnology #EngineeringCulture #HiringStrategy #BuildVsBuy #AutomationROI #Efficiency #DigitalTransformation #NoCode #LowCode #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast

Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo

In this episode of The Technical Co-Founder Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore how a mid-stage SaaS startup uses error budgets to align engineering velocity with product goals. They break down the concept—inspired by Google's SRE model—and walk through a specific case where a company set a 99.9% availability target, tracked a monthly error budget of 43 minutes of downtime, and used that budget to decide when to halt feature releases and focus on reliability. Lucas explains the math behind the budget, how the team communicated trade-offs to product managers, and the concrete outcomes: reduced on-call burnout and fewer firefighting sprints. The hosts also touch on why error budgets beat arbitrary SLAs and how startups can implement them without a dedicated SRE team. A practical episode for technical founders and engineering leaders wrestling with the reliability-versus-features tension.

#ErrorBudgets #SRE #SiteReliabilityEngineering #EngineeringVelocity #StartupEngineering #TechnicalDebt #IncidentManagement #OnCall #ServiceLevelObjectives #SLO #SLI #GoogleSRE #ReliabilityEngineering #EngineeringCulture #ProductEngineering #Business #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast

Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo

Episode 40 of The Technical Co-Founder Podcast dives into how a real startup replaced lines of code and story points with a single metric: 'deployed value per developer-day.' Lucas and Luna unpack the story of a 40-person B2B SaaS company that publicly vowed to cut its feature-development cycle from 14 days to 3 days. They walk through the three specific signals the team tracked—cycle time, revert rate, and time-to-feedback—and how leaders resisted the temptation to optimize for velocity at the cost of quality. The episode also covers the dangerous gap between what we think we measure (busyness) and what actually matters (outcomes), and offers one concrete takeaway for any team building software today.

#EngineeringVelocity #DeveloperProductivity #CycleTime #DoraMetrics #VanityMetrics #FeatureDevelopment #B2BSaaS #SoftwareEngineering #TechnicalDebt #RevertRate #TimeToFeedback #LeanSoftware #StartupLessons #TechnicalCoFounder #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #Business #Technology

Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo

Episode 39 of The Technical Co-Founder Podcast digs into how a growing startup decides which tech debt to fix and which to leave alone. Lucas and Luna walk through the story of a 50-person SaaS company that used a weighted scoring system — balancing customer impact, developer velocity, and maintenance cost — to build a tech debt backlog that actually got done. They break down the specific criteria the team used: how many support tickets a piece of debt generated, how many engineers it blocked, and how long a fix would take. Plus, they talk about why the CEO had to approve every item on the list, and how the company avoided the trap of trying to refactor everything at once. If you've ever looked at your codebase and felt the weight of deferred maintenance, this episode gives you a practical framework for making the hard calls.

#TechnicalCoFounderPodcast #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #Technology #SoftwareEngineering #TechDebt #EngineeringLeadership #StartupEngineering #CodeQuality #Refactoring #BacklogManagement #EngineeringStrategy #DeveloperProductivity #SaaS #StartupLessons #EngineeringManager #Prioritization #TechnicalDebt

Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo

Most startups build monolithic codebases. Then they hit the wall at around ten engineers. In this episode, Lucas and Luna look at how a real startup — a B2B SaaS company called Station — broke its backend into internal APIs before it hit twenty employees. They walk through how Station defined API contracts upfront, used those contracts to parallelize work between frontend and backend teams, and cut feature delivery time by nearly forty percent. They also discuss the hidden cost: the overhead of maintaining a service catalog and the documentation burden. If you are building a product team or thinking about when to decouple your code, this episode gives you a concrete before-and-after to evaluate.

#InternalAPIs #Microservices #StartupEngineering #APIFirst #Technology #Business #SoftwareArchitecture #Station #B2BSaaS #ShipFaster #APIContracts #EngineeringProductivity #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #TechnicalCoFounder #MonolithVsMicroservices #BackendArchitecture #FrontendBackend

Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo

In this episode of The Technical Co-Founder Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore how a five-person startup turned its own debugging logs into a structured technical interview process. They break down the specific case of CargoVerify, a logistics API company that recorded every blocker its engineers hit during onboarding and then reverse-engineered those logs into a repeatable interview rubric. Lucas explains why most startup interview loops are broken — they test for textbook knowledge instead of real debugging behavior — and walks through the exact three-phase framework CargoVerify built: the log review, the paired debug session, and the post-mortem write-up. Luna pushes back on whether this approach scales past five people, and Lucas shares data showing that CargoVerify's first six hires all shipped code within their first week. The episode closes with a reflection on whether startups should stop imitating Big Tech interviews altogether. No fluff, just a concrete system you could adapt tomorrow.

#TechnicalInterviews #StartupHiring #Debugging #EngineeringCulture #CargoVerify #Onboarding #Logs #PairProgramming #HiringFramework #TechnicalCoFounder #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #StartupEngineering #HiringData #CodeReview #PostMortem #Scaling #TechHiring

Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo

Episode 36 of The Technical Co-Founder Podcast dives into the practice of writing Request for Comments (RFCs) before writing code. Lucas and Luna explore how this approach fosters alignment, catches design flaws early, and scales decision-making across engineering teams. They discuss a real-world example from a startup that decreased rework by 30% after adopting RFCs, and contrast it with the 'just ship it' culture. The episode also covers how RFCs differ from traditional documentation, how to structure one, and when the process might slow things down. If you're a technical leader looking to improve your team's decision-making, this episode is for you.

#RFC #EngineeringCulture #StartupEngineering #TechnicalDecisionMaking #CodeReview #SoftwareArchitecture #TechLeadership #EngineeringProcess #StartupLessons #Documentation #ScalingEngineering #BusinessAndTechnology #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #TechnicalCoFounder #EngineeringManagement #AgileDevelopment #Collaboration

Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo