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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181: Tying Your Work to Impact (Brian Balfour)
February 8th, 2016 | Season 5 | 42 mins 12 secs
Chris talks with growth expert Brian Balfour on starting and sustaining SaaS business, and his team's approach to addressing growth issues.
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180: We Don't Deal With Paper
February 1st, 2016 | Season 5 | 48 mins 3 secs
Chris gets a surprise while reviewing Upcase's Q4 profit & loss statement, gains some insight into e-mail marketing, wrestles with the added complexity of adding github auth-to-access, and brainstorms new community-driven projects. Meanwhile, Ben gets his hands dirty with Formkeep's Ember removal, is tempted by the siren's call of distraction, and gets an open review from the Bootstrapped Web podcast. Also, Chris does a live user-test of Formkeep's new user activation flow.
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179: It's Tough to Iterate on Nothing
January 25th, 2016 | Season 5 | 58 mins 32 secs
Ben resolves to cut back on dashboard checkins, makes progress on Formkeep's Ember extraction, and struggles with product-market fit. Meanwhile, Chris tackles some analytics issues, opens up Upcase landing pages from behind the paywall to improve marketing and SEO, and steps up his marketing and social-media game.
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178: No-one Wants Form End-Points for Christmas
January 18th, 2016 | Season 5 | 1 hr 5 mins
Ben and Chris both struggle with cancelations coming into the new year, Formkeep continues to strip out Ember and focus on content marketing, and Upcase resolves a major issue in the exercise system and improves the checkout flow.
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177: I Forgot There Would Be Follow-On Tasks
January 11th, 2016 | Season 5 | 52 mins 47 secs
Chris tracks new members after the release of the new Mastering Git course from Upcase, launches a drip e-mail campaign to attract more members, and focuses on increased content output. Ben continues removing Ember from Formkeep, rethinks an activation sequence A/B test, conducts user tests to improve the checkout flow, and adopts a mindset of continuous improvement.
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176: The Pricing is Right
January 4th, 2016 | Season 5 | 54 mins 34 secs
As Ben transitions from Upcase to Formkeep, so too will the podcast transition to an open discussion around growing thoughtbot's internal projects and maintaining them as businesses, highlighting our hopes, experiments, tactics, failures, and success along the way! Today Ben and new co-host Chris discuss finding that magic feature or metric around which to structure pricing, selecting the right framework for your app, and customer acquisition tactics.
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175: Broaden Your Worldview (Ashe Dryden)
December 21st, 2015 | Season 4 | 30 mins 4 secs
Ben talks with Ashe Dryden about ways to approach diversity in the tech community from workplace, conference, and personal perspectives.
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174: Building Character (Laura Roeder)
December 14th, 2015 | Season 4 | 29 mins 43 secs
Ben and Laura Roeder, founder of Edgar, chat about anthropomorphizing your brand to build better engagement, going the extra step to care about customer success, and some tips for social media marketing best practices.
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173: Obsessed With Helping (Hiten Shah)
December 7th, 2015 | Season 4 | 30 mins 28 secs
Ben talks with Hiten Shah, co-founder of Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics, on the value of helping others, frameworks for a better life, being an infovore, and tips for finding a successful product niche.
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172: Go After the Hard Stuff (Eric Normand)
December 1st, 2015 | Season 4 | 41 mins 27 secs
Ben and Eric Normand of LispCast and PurelyFunctional.tv talk about the pros and cons of Haskell and Clojure, empathize on some of the pain points of running an educational coding platform, and hypothesize on how the next great programming "killer demo" will present itself.
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171: Always Be Hustling (Steli Efti)
November 23rd, 2015 | Season 4 | 37 mins 39 secs
Ben talks with Steli Efti, CEO and Co-founder of Close, on maintaining energy and passion in speaking, why engineers make great sales people (and how they can be even better), and managing your emotions to be more productive and happy.
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170: Make Things People Want (C. Todd Lombardo & Trace Wax)
November 9th, 2015 | Season 4 | 39 mins 38 secs
Chad talks with C. Todd Lombardo & Trace Wax about their new book, co-authored with Richard Banfield, Design Sprint: A Practical Guidebook for Building Great Digital Products, as well as the process and benefits of design sprints.
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169: Purpose Driven Development (Sara Chipps)
November 5th, 2015 | Season 4 | 36 mins 2 secs
Brenda talks with Sara Chipps on the desire to educate in code, her inspiration to work on hardware, and the troubles of manufacturing.
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168: 'Unpronounceable' (Star Simpson)
October 27th, 2015 | Season 4 | 31 mins 52 secs
Chad Pytel and Laila Winner welcome Star Simpson to discuss PLIBMTTBHGATY (Programming Languages I’ve Been Meaning To Try But Haven’t Gotten Around To Yet), fostering community through meet-ups, and the finer points of taco delivery via drone.
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167: A Place For Both (Brenda Storer)
October 12th, 2015 | Season 4 | 36 mins 46 secs
Ben talks with thoughtbot designer Brenda Storer on fitting both development and design in her job title, tips for public speaking, and introduces a new change to the show.
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166: Refactoring Health Care (John Norman)
October 5th, 2015 | Season 4 | 40 mins 13 secs
Ben talks with John Norman about his process and modified approach to the delivery, payment, and tech of modern managed health care. They also touch on age bias in the programming world, living a purpose-driven life, and dealing with startup growth.