Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots
About the show
A podcast about the design, development, and business of great software. Each week thoughtbot's Chad Pytel is joined by the people who build and nurture the products we love.
Episodes
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214: My Cat is VP of Marketing (Nick Gauthier)
October 24th, 2016 | Season 6 | 42 mins 52 secs
Ben talks to Nick Gauthier, founder of MeetSpace, about the importance of validating ideas, reading through API documentation, and pricing surveys.
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213: Madness Free
October 17th, 2016 | Season 6 | 40 mins 59 secs
Derrick finds some new areas to improve after walking new hires through Drip's architecture, and discusses his custom billing engine. On Hound, Ben delegates the new-pricing project, and validates a new product idea.
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212: Good Enough, Namaste
October 10th, 2016 | Season 6 | 38 mins 23 secs
Derrick brings a few more new hires onto the team, and ships a change to make clients' Javascript snippets more performant. On Hound, Ben does some direct outreach sales, considers bringing on someone to help with marketing, and muses on the balancing act between product manager, developer, and marketing.
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211: Battle Hardened Over Time
October 3rd, 2016 | Season 6 | 39 mins 45 secs
On Hound, Ben sends out announcements for pricing changes, questions when a decision is the "right" decision when it comes to customer feedback, and toys with per-seat pricing model feasibility. Derrick has a successful first week on-boarding the new dev-ops hire, offers Ben some advice on balancing features with price, and discusses some customer acquisition campaigns.
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210: s/Walden/Andover
September 26th, 2016 | Season 6 | 32 mins 19 secs
Ben plans a camping trip, acquires a new Twitter account, releases his notes on giving great conference talks, and begins to tell users of Hound's new pricing. Derrick reacts to the announcement of Github Projects and what that means for Codetree, ships the new form design on Drip, and muses on the ramifications to Google's announced penalizing of intrusive mobile pop-ups.
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209: Playlist Driven Development
September 19th, 2016 | Season 6 | 33 mins 54 secs
On Drip, Derrick deals with a high-bandwidth customer and hires a new devops team member. Meanwhile, Ben brainstorms new pricing structures for Hound.
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208: Efficiency Starts With a Haircut
September 12th, 2016 | Season 6 | 40 mins 2 secs
Derrick switches domains from getdrip.com to drip.co, begins to update the design of the Drip widget, and tries to find balance in his varying roles as CTO. Ben hands off the reins of Upcase, switches to a low-tech project management solution, and mixes work and personal todos.
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207: Database & Queue are Dirty Words (Derrick Reimer)
September 6th, 2016 | Season 6 | 33 mins 21 secs
Ben welcomes guest co-host Derrick Reimer, co-founder of Drip, getting to know his background and products for our first outside-thoughtbot view on SaaS strategy (as well as Ben's arm-twisty methods for getting him on the podcast in the first place)!
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206: I'm Glad We Talked About This (Chad Pytel)
August 22nd, 2016 | Season 5 | 47 mins 13 secs
thoughtbot CEO Chad Pytel joins Ben to discuss our recent office closings and reasons necessitating this decision, what this means for the product team, and the future of thoughtbot. Also, a teaser of what to expect next from Giant Robots Podcast.
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205: Bottling Calm
August 8th, 2016 | Season 5 | 42 mins 59 secs
Fresh back from vacation, Ben shifts his attention to a Hound project, adding in tiered plans and pricing. Chris begins to build out a drip sequence for content recommendations, prepares to roll off to return to client work, and leaves us with some final reflections, takeaways, and lessons learned while on Upcase.
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204: Disinclined, For Simplicity's Sake
August 1st, 2016 | Season 5 | 56 mins 55 secs
Chris delves into marketing mode for the TDD course, removes more client-side analytics code, and starts redesigning the information architecture on Upcase. On FormKeep, Ben alerts users to site down-time, removes all pay-per-form logic from the codebase, and begins to set up trials sans credit-card.
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203: Worry Beads on Business Chains
July 25th, 2016 | Season 5 | 45 mins 57 secs
Ben receives some insight on customer referrals for FormKeep, applies his pricing philosophy to Hound, and realizes a personal blind-spot when it comes to customer satisfaction. On Upcase, Chris patches an automated follow-up messaging bug leading to enhanced focus on server-side analytics, welcomes Tyson to the team to begin work on trail mapping course content, and soft launches the Fundamentals of TDD trail.
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202: A Full 360
July 18th, 2016 | Season 5 | 41 mins 17 secs
Ben rants about bad jokes on twitter, doesn't ship any improved activation features on FormKeep this week, irons out some bugs on FormLinter, and begins an ad campaign. Chris contemplates shifting Upcase's business model, and walks through the impetus driving this decision.
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201: The Difficulty is in Focusing
July 11th, 2016 | Season 5 | 48 mins 34 secs
Ben encounters a downed FormKeep and enables a monitoring service, completes the un-grandfathering process for accounts on old tiers, and begins work on improving activation flow. Chris sends out a survey to users and discovers a shift in the Upcase demographics.
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200: Summertime Sadness
July 4th, 2016 | Season 5 | 46 mins 29 secs
Chris digs into the causes for a MRR drop, discovering usage trends with seasonality; and in the process gets a clearer picture of Upcase's user base. Also, he welcome Geoff to the project, and begins a new marketing initiative driven by user testimonials. Ben welcomes Tyson onto team Formkeep to begin redesigning on boarding, and continues FormLinter improvements / marketing.
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199: Heartening Frustration
June 27th, 2016 | Season 5 | 51 mins 22 secs
This week, we ruminate on the meta-organization of project management. Ben embraces team feedback on FormLinter.com, reaches the end of Formkeep's grandfathered pricing window, and removes sandboxing to streamline plan structures. Chris contemplates Upcase's role as a product within thoughtbot, prepares to welcome on new team members (bye Gabe!), and restructures topic relationships to improve discoverability. Also, the return of Dance Talk!