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Slow & Steady (Benedikt Deicke, Benedicte Raae, and Brian Rhea)

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Pub. DateTitleDuration
10 Feb 2021Encouraged & Optimistic00:30:51

Brian and Benedikt are in good spirits this week. They talk about recent progress on Brian's board game, Benedikt's successful battle against performance issues, as well as how Bitcoin helps Brian with his year on the road. 

18 Nov 2020Back To Work00:30:56

Brian is back from a week away from everything in the Grand Canyon. Benedikt is trying to increase momentum by shipping smaller, less polished, increments.

26 Feb 2020Margins Are Good00:31:46

FemtoConf is, in fact, sold out and Benedikt is working on the finishing touches of in-app messaging. Brian shares the big news that he's going to start looking for full-time employment to build in a little more margin. Now we're _really_ going to need to rewrite that intro :)


30 Sep 2020"Does Headlamp have a market?" A convo with Justin Jackson00:46:07

Benedikt is out, so Brian talks with Justin Jackson of Transistor about Headlamp's market, the risks and benefits of going upstream, and how the heck to pronounce "portage."

10 Nov 2021Hiring, Bootcamps, and Winter!00:49:41

With Brian away, Benedikt and Benedicte discuss the nuances of why hiring can be difficult. Benedikt shares how the search for open roles at Userlist is going. Benedicte is scheduling the remaining Gatsby bootcamps and is open to experimenting with offerings and formats in the future. The two discuss valuable aspects of different educational content formats. Finally, winter is coming and Benedikt is not particularly excited about it.


Benedikt gives an update on hiring efforts at Userlist. The number of applications for the frontend developer position is well below the number of applications for the customer success position. Benedikt weighs waiting to hire someone who is an excellent fit versus hiring someone more quickly. Benedicte agrees that either way, it's important to find a personality that is willing to jump into the fold at a startup. If you are interested in this role, please apply or forward it to someone that might be.

Benedicte has scheduled the second of three Gatsby mini bootcamps and is finalizing the schedule for the third. As discussed previously, there is room for experimentation. Specificity in the content is important for making the learning relevant but a few questions remain. Are takeaway coding examples the valuable piece? How about asynchronous content delivery? Besides Gatsby, she hopes to sneak in some coding on POW! soon.

Winter is coming and Benedikt isn't thrilled. The two discuss some strategies for coping with less sunlight at higher latitudes — Vitamin D, sun lamps, and exercise. After a few days away from yoga, Benedicte is starting a new 30-day journey herself.

12 Sep 2019Feast or Famine00:37:31
17 Mar 2022Brian is back in town, literally00:45:09

After taking a three month break from the podcast, Brian joins Benedikt for an update episode. After ending their year on the road adventure after seven months, Brian and his family are back in their hometown in Colorado. In a couple of weeks they'll finally be able to move back into their house. 

Brian's board game project is in the pipeline with the potential publisher. However, things move a lot slower than Brian and his friend were hoping for. Nonetheless, everyone in the industry confirms that this isn't unusual in the early stages. To keep their creative juices flowing, they both started working on a new, competitive, deck building game. 

While he's sad that his dream of building a software business as a solo founder didn't work out, Brian's very happy about his job at GitLab. The work is still fun and fulfilling, even though the number of meetings on his calendar increased. Overall, he's a lot more relaxed so the move back into full time employment was the right decision for him. 

Benedikt has been fixing a problem with Userlist's data processing pipeline in the past week. A very specific set of conditions caused problems for a customer and it took quite some head scratching to figure things out. Ultimately, he's happy that he's now got a team in place so development work doesn't fully stop when unexpected things like this disrupt the week's plan. 

14 Nov 2019Building Branch with Special Guest Peter Suhm00:41:31

Brian is on vacation this week, so Benedikt is joined by Peter Suhm of Branch. Peter and Benedikt talk about the history of Branch, how Peter got into building software products, as well as his experiences with Tiny Seed. 

26 May 2022ScrapingBee with Pierre de Wulf00:51:49

Pierre de Wulf chats with Benedikt and Benedicte about ScrapingBee, PricingBot, growing with a small team, and leveraging communities.

It wasn't the best of times, but it wasn't the worst of times. Pierre, co-founder of ScrapingBee, was excited to come record and get some relief from debugging an infrastructure issue. Debugging can be challenging work but it comes with the territory of owning a SaaS — customers don't want to do this, so they will pay for it!

ScrapingBee is growing quite nicely thanks in part to a solid product with a good fit and a tightknit team. After first working on PricingBot, a price-monitoring service for e-commerce, Pierre and his co-founder pivoted as their runway was dwindling. They created a web scraping API very quickly with ScrapingBee, secured a spot in TinySeed during the pandemic, and passed the $1M ARR threshold with a fully remote team last year.

Pierre, Benedicte, and Benedikt discuss the impact of community involvement, support, acquisition, SEO, and more!

17 Oct 2024Do we really need an app for everything?00:35:34

Benedikt comes back from MicroConf. Benedicte returns from their fall vacation.

Benedikt is feeling a bit drained after having an eventful time at MicroConf. While the conference itself was great, he experienced interesting things along the way: from getting flights cancelled to being in the same hotel with a world leader.

Benedicte and her Pirate family spent a nice fall vacation on a boat with Captain Ola’s friend. But with the Framer Plugin launch happening in the middle of the vacation, she had to do some last minute changes because of a Framer API change. Benedicte also shares their summer plans for next year.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about cache busting, if we really need an app for everything, and more.

22 Sep 2022Conference Hacks00:44:06

Benedicte and Benedikt share tips on how to make the most out of conferences and more.

Benedicte is filled with happy hormones this week because of dancing, more work from Cloudinary, and a wonderful testimonial from a customer on Twitter. She’s working on her preparations for upcoming conference talks and has also received a call for proposals for another one next year.

Benedikt and the Userlist team also received praise on Twitter from a customer with a large following. The team’s also focused on finishing the editor integration work this month. And after skipping the MicroConf for the past two years, Benedikt will be attending this year’s MicroConf Europe along with their customer advocate, Katarina. 

Benedicte and Benedikt share their go-to conference tips so you can build new relationships during the event and more.


27 Oct 2022Outseta with Geoff Roberts00:54:16

Geoff Roberts of Outseta chats with Benedikt and Benedicte about Outseta, their uncommon operating and compensation model, and more.

While there are a lot of best in class tools out there, more often than not, early stage businesses only need basic functionalities to get things done.

Coming from the same experience, Geoff and Dimitris used it to build Outseta, an all-in-one tech stack (that includes payments, authentications, CRM, and email) for SaaS and membership style businesses. Their tool helps founders focus more of their time on building the product instead of spending time integrating several different tools before launching their business.

Geoff, Benedicte, and Benedikt talk about how they attracted both the technical and non-technical audience, how he juggles work and dad duties, and more!

28 Apr 2022Inbox Zero & Person of the Week!00:56:04

Benedikt closes in on a major feature implementation. Benedicte gets some feedback on 1:1 calls and POW!

Benedikt and the Userlist team are getting pretty close to finishing the new signup flow. Or they were... Benedicte points out a potential edge case. Either way, they've made progress and benefitted from treating the effort as a major feature instead of trying to cut corners. Benedikt celebrated a relaxing Easter recently as well — largely offline thanks to the maturing team and product. He cleared his inbox and recorded a video for Userlist with a friend who runs DataCater. If you have any suggestions for Heroku alternatives, send Benedikt a DM. He's finding it harder to stay a big fan amidst recent outages.

Benedicte is feeling appreciated, and for a good reason! She was named Smashing Magazine's "Person of the Week" and has received lots of love. No coding on POW! to report back this week, but plans are coming together and she received some feedback around product preferences on a Reddit thread. In addition to POW! feedback, she also got some on her Gatsby calls. The "emergency" branding might not resonate with everyone, but she finds the calls rewarding. Benedicte plans to do more selling and outreach for Queen Raae services. Surprise! Things don't sell themselves. As a reward for completing other work, she has been working with markdown, trees, and other fun tools.

03 Nov 2022Protect your email address and domain00:30:49

After running into a problem with her domain, Benedicte and Benedikt talk about how to protect your email address and domain.

Despite experiencing a “fail week” with technology, Benedicte celebrates a few wins with her projects such as getting Prune Your Follows ready for beta along with this week’s Xata launch and slowly converting her site to Tailwind. 

Benedikt and the Userlist team managed to build and ship their most requested Message Topics feature in a span of a week. And after weeks of frustration with his internet connection, things are looking promising as Benedikt decides to switch providers.

21 Sep 2023Picking up old hobbies 🩰🥁00:46:54

Benedicte and Benedikt talk about the old hobbies they’ve picked up and other updates from the week.

Things are going great for Benedikt and the Userlist team: they’re currently migrating to their new email service provider, and they’re making good progress with their visual workflow builder. He also shares that he and Michael Koper are taking on a 30-day drum challenge. 

Despite feeling a sore from riding camp and ballet lessons, Benedicte is now ready to work on her app projects this fall. Aside from POW! and Prune Your Follows, they’ll also be working on their new app idea called MixPod. For her work with Outseta, Benedicte shares that they’re almost done with the Framer integration and are currently working on their brand center.

24 Feb 2022Llama Life with Marie Ng00:53:37

Marie joins Benedicte and Benedikt to discuss building Llama Life, a productivity app centered around focus and fun, in public.

Llama Life is a web-based productivity tool that Marie built to help you work through a to-do list, not just build one. While she isn't new to startups, she is new to coding. Self-taught and working as a solo founder until recently, Marie reminds herself that indie hacking on Llama Life is a dream job that combines design, marketing, and her newfound capabilities in software development.

Moving quickly as both the designer and developer, Marie continued to build Llama Life after finding early encouragement on Twitter. The product started simple and grew to include authentication, a database, and payments. While the productivity application space is crowded, she built Llama Life out of her own needs. When diagnosed with ADHD, Marie became obsessed with solving for focus and attention and needed a tool that allowed for setting quick timers and one that was also fun.

Listen in to learn the story behind the fun branding, how Marie leverages her marketing strengths, and what's ahead for Llama Life!

18 Aug 2021Back in the Saddle00:49:55

Benedicte and Brian are back to talk about affiliates, guesting, and building an audience. Also! Backpack made it through the first stage of the boardgame design contest!

15 Apr 2020Getting Into Shape00:36:58

Brian and Benedikt talk about their weeks, including Brian's job interview progress and Userlist's new product development workflow based on Shape Up. 

07 Oct 2020Spend some time in a hammock!00:50:53

Benedikt is out again this week, so Brian is joined by his good friend, startup partner, confidant, and sometimes co-conspirator, Richard Miller. They talk about Richard's current project, the origins of the idea, and the importance of laying in a hammock so people will think you're sleeping.

No, really. It's important.

11 Apr 2024Just a couple of vacationers 🍹00:32:57

Benedicte enjoys her workation in Portugal. Benedikt and the team fixed two major bugs with the help of a user.

Benedicte has been enjoying the slow life in Portugal for the past two weeks, enjoying the beach while still able to get some work done. She’s still polishing her latest services for devs and is preparing for the relaunch of Data in the Wild.

Benedikt and the team resolved two major bugs with the help of a customer, which goes to show the importance of testing edge cases. Still struggling to have longer durations of focused work, Benedikt thinks of how to be more deliberate about it.

22 Aug 2019Microminds & MasterConf00:34:27

Brian's still exploring the formation of a Mastermind group and Benedikt upgraded Userlist to Rails 6 before going out sick for a few days. We also float the idea of meeting IRL at MicroConf in 2020.

21 Mar 2024Be persistent but in a polite and non-spammy, annoying way00:30:35

The Userlist team is seeing some progress with their sales process. Benedicte has some ideas of how to refine her live streaming service.

Things are moving forward sales-wise for Benedikt and the Userlist team, sending a few custom-priced enterprise quotes in the past few weeks. Benedikt also shares his takeaway from his recent chat with Monica Lent.

With her new Go Live with Queen Raae service, Benedicte is thinking about how to help those dev founders who are a bit hesitant about going live. And while it’s unfortunate that she didn’t get the caravan, Benedicte refocused her energy on improving their property and possibly the Volkswagen bus that’s sitting in Sweden.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about the importance of following up, greenfield projects, and more.

19 Dec 2024The calm before Christmas 🎄00:40:53

After a couple of eventful weeks, things are finally slowing down for the holidays.

Things have been pretty busy on the product side for Benedikt and the Userlist team: launching the Conversion Goals feature, releasing new workflow node types, and more. And after working around a hard problem for quite a while, the team has finally refactored how the platform works with conditions.

With Webflow cutting their membership feature in 12 months, Benedicte is planning to make some good demos that would hopefully attract former Webflow customers. And despite being a bit nervous about the templates being filled up correctly, she successfully pushed the payment reminders for Whee customers. On the fun side of things, she and James applied a script to the Outseta website so it’s snowing for the holiday season.

11 Aug 2021Talking shop with Daniel Alm00:38:47

Benedikt is joined by Daniel Alm, founder of Timing, to talk about Daniel's recent learnings from his time tracking app for MacOS. They talk about coming up with new product features, marketing strategies and work-life-balance. 

26 Nov 2021No Cell Service. No Internet.00:40:42

Brian is back! He returns from the Grand Canyon trip and reflects on his time spent while disconnected. Benedicte gives a progress update on her Gatsby work and her plans for streaming in the coming months.

Benedicte catches up with Brian after he returns from his trip to the Grand Canyon. She is feeling focused, hitting a good rhythm, and is cranking out code! She has a lot of excitement around the NPM package semantic-release this week and is headed in the right direction for her Gatsby-authority business. She shares her latest YouTube livestream plans as she wraps up season two of Gatsby Deep Dives with Queen Raae and the Nattermob Pirates.

Without cell service or internet connectivity, Brian had time to reflect while having a blast backpacking the Grand Canyon. The headline? He might be ready for a break from bootstrapping. Certainly not a "forever" break, but perhaps some time for hobbies to be just that — hobbies. To be continued...

15 Dec 2021We Have a Contest Winner!00:58:36

In his last episode before taking a break, Brian gets some great news about his game, Backpack. Benedicte recovers from a few sick days. Benedikt shares some hiring lessons from Userlist.

Brian is leaving on a high note. His game won FIRST PLACE in the board game design contest! His submission started as an accountability exercise and ended with real feedback, a cash prize, the option to publish, and credibility for future pitches. For JTBD.app, the future is still undecided. For now, Brian is having some conversations in the MegaMaker community and is staying open. 

Benedicte is recovering from a few sick days during a busy time. Thankfully, she had built up some buffer and won't miss her encryption talk this week. She has kept up with yoga despite the missed time and is celebrating non-hourly work. It's a great fit for how she wants to work and the flexibility is a benefit when working while feeling less than 100%. Benedikt will come on this week's livestream to help with data modeling decisions for ConferenceBuddy. 

While Jane was on vacation at Userlist, Benedikt focused on customer support and hiring. They have some promising frontend developer candidates moving through the later stages in the process despite a setback with the customer success manager role they previously hired for. Separately, Benedikt starts to regret a decision they made to use Markdown as the source of truth for messaging content and shares how he is thinking about moving forward.

11 Mar 2020A Lemonade Stand00:20:03

Another super short one this week as Brian provides an update on the job hunt and Benedikt brings us up to speed on Userlist's taxes and his progress on a JS snippet.

22 Dec 2022The numbers are in00:30:15

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 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. 

22 Feb 2024Hitting break even 🎉00:41:18

Benedikt and the Userlist team celebrate a significant financial milestone. Benedicte leans into the human aspects of content creation.

Despite experiencing a few hiccups with their bank account and Stripe, the Userlist team celebrates a financial milestone as they’ve hit break even. As a bonus surprise, Userlist was able to sell a domain for a significant amount of money.

After powering through the birthday bonanzas in January, Benedicte spent 24 hours at the spa and is now feeling re-energized and ready. And with all of the streams and content creation she’s been doing for the past few months, she’s now opening herself to those who need a livestream host, a mystery dev, or video creator.


08 Dec 2022Full steam ahead with Prune Your Follows00:35:38

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

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.

18 Mar 2020Standup Comics00:36:34

Brian and Benedikt resort to telling jokes to give their listeners and themselves a break from the information overload induced by worrying events and bad news.

29 Jul 2020Pricing and Positioning00:34:07

Benedikt launched the new Userlist website and is trying to play catch-up on some other tasks. Brian is back from the wilderness and is wandering around in the confusing terrain of SaaS pricing.

13 May 2020Analysis Paralysis00:29:21

Brian got unstuck from paralysis analysis and is working on a new Headlamp MVP. Benedikt talks about being torn between shipping vs. rebuilding features that aren't perfect, yet.  

10 Mar 2022POW! Turns Two00:42:30

Benedicte's app, POW!, turns two years old on International Women's Day. Benedikt enjoys the ability to pair program again.

Benedicte has worked on POW! for two years and she brings some exciting news this week — the team will be expanding! After being more of a back burner project last year, POW! is going to have a bigger focus in 2022 with another developer joining the team. There are some outstanding legal things to figure out, and Benedikt offers some advice when growing the "tiny muffin", but a bigger team will help tackle the complexity of the app. Additionally, Benedicte has finished the Done-for-you Integration Demo sales page.

Though it is a bit tricky to test at this point, Benedikt is feeling good about the progress on Userlist's new authorization layer. The two discuss some of the complexity in working through that, but Benedikt thinks he's close to a rollout of an early version. Leo, the new developer at Userlist, continues to contribute and refactored lots of code last week. Benedikt has enjoyed the ability to pair again, particularly when the two of them arrive at a solution that is better than what they could have arrived at alone, individually.

Finally, Brian will be returning to the show next week to chat with Benedikt. Unfortunately, Benedicte won't make it as she's headed to London. For those that will be in London on Wednesday, March 16, send her a DM on Twitter to attend her in-person meetup!

21 Apr 2021Packing, Packing, Packing00:29:19

Brian and Benedikt started to pack up their homes. In addition to that, Brian is fighting literal bugs and Benedikt is building a Zapier integration.

20 Jan 2021How Does Sailing Even Work?00:48:11

Benedikt got some much-needed rest over the weekend watching some American Football and a sailing race that completely baffles Brian's understanding of how wind works. Brian is also getting very close to being able to share his board game ... stay tuned!

30 Sep 2021Vote for Queen Raae00:46:39

Benedicte got nominated for The Jammies Awards. Brian is feeling a bit overwhelmed by too many things on his plate. Benedikt realized why they are procrastinating a bit on the new marketing feature. 

14 Oct 2020Introducing Brand Patrol00:41:41

Benedikt is back from vacation and already swamped with work. Brian share's some details about the new thing he's working on. 

30 Jun 2021On-brand Vacations00:49:04

Brian is back (joining from Bar Harbor, Maine) and sharing his progress on the JTBD app as well as stories from the road. Benedicte is taking a quick break from her vacation to launch Gatsby Summer Functions. Benedikt is scared to deploy the double opt-in implementation and fighting with email rendering in Outlook. 


29 Jun 2023Major life update!00:32:08

Benedikt shares a major life update. Benedicte gets things wrapped up before vacation.

Things were slow for Benedikt last week in preparation for his big day. Despite the slower pace of things, the Userlist team accomplished a few things: they worked on their message rendering refactoring, and made progress on their trigger unification. 

Feeling a bit frazzled, Benedicte wraps things up before they go on their summer vacation. She also enjoyed her time at the recent React Norway and felt very powerful (and old) when she helped someone out at her bank job.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about pull requests vs. merge requests, going down rabbit holes, and more.

28 Oct 2020Pricing, Activation, Validation, and Outreach00:55:43

Brian is working on (in)validating the idea for Brand Patrol and might be close to signing a consulting deal related to Headlamp. Benedikt is trying to stay focused and talks about upcoming pricing changes for Userlist. 

17 Oct 2019Getting in Shape00:37:10

After giving a short update on their past week, Brian and Benedikt talk about Ryan Singer's book Shape Up. 

02 Sep 2020What to focus on?00:34:16

Brian considers changing the primary focus of Headlamp, while Benedikt wonders what's an opportunity and what's a distraction. 

02 Jun 2022Getting the Gig!00:34:15

Benedicte and Ola win the Gatsby gig! Benedikt spies a new opportunity.

Benedicte and Ola hear back on their proposal — they'll be working with Cloudinary on their existing plugins! Benedicte is already digging through the code to tackle any bugs before summer starts. Speaking of Gatsby, she takes a moment to rant about community-based support. POW! picks up a few new customers despite Benedicte not focusing on that in the short term and Structure Content came to Oslo.

Benedikt celebrates as Userlist passes a $15k MRR milestone following a few preceding months of slower growth. The new pricing feature is coming along nicely and he's looking forward to the rollout. Benedikt is also excited about Stripe releasing their new Stripe Apps, a new way to build Stripe integrations. There aren't many companies in the new app marketplace, so it presents an exciting opportunity for Userlist. He would have to learn some React though...

27 Aug 2019Webmaster of Puppets00:43:22

Benedikt's experience at a Metallica concert leads us to reminisce about building band websites in the old (and not so old) days. We also talk about our successes and failures and what we've learned from them.


02 Feb 2023Trying out new things00:20:37

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

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+.

15 Dec 2022Prune Your Follows is now on Product Hunt!00:34:47

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

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.

02 Nov 2023Scary Bell Peppers00:32:31

Benedicte and Benedikt share updates on Userlist's upcoming visual workflow builder as well as Benedicte's new project, MixPod. 

Benedikt talks about the progress on Userlist's new feature, and how setting deadlines increases stress, but helps prioritizing what's important. Benedicte shares recent challenges in Outseta's customer support, where people get confused by new client/server patterns in Next.js. Afterwards, she outlines the plan for the new streaming series for building MixPod which starts in a few days. 

12 Aug 2020Cold Emails, Google Analytics, and Facebook, Oh My!00:42:58

Benedikt and Jane celebrated the 1-year anniversary of Userlist last week and Benedikt has been busy! Userlist has also started advertising on Facebook and we discuss a few hesitations he has about that. Brian is trying to find an effective mix of direct sales, content marketing, and paid ads.

31 Mar 2021Moving is great! Moving is the worst.00:41:17

Benedikt got some bummer news about his lease and Brian might have a prototype of Backpack in his hands sooner than he thought.

07 Jul 2021A Kitchen Would Be Nice00:26:43

Brian manages to join for an entire episode and share some updates on the JTBD app. Benedikt deployed double opt-in and got a kitchen all in the same week! Unfortunately, Benedicte was unable to join this week, but we promise, one of these days we'll have all three co-hosts on for an entire episode :P

08 Jul 2020Zero To Sold with Arvid Kahl00:46:32

Benedikt talks with Arvid Kahl about his recently published book Zero To Sold and how having too much momentum after selling one's business can lead to unexpected opportunities.

21 Oct 2020Busy weeks & Burnout00:51:56

Benedikt had a stressful day when a code change accidentally sent 1000+ emails and Brian shares that he's feeling completely burned out.

04 Nov 2020Halloween Candy for Sale00:28:57

Brian's got some new client work lining up to ease some anxiety and Benedikt's schedule continues to be a bit hectic.

02 Jun 2021Live Streaming with Benedicte Raae00:46:30

Brian is kicking off his year on the road, so Benedikt invited Benedicte Raae to talk about live streaming on YouTube. They chat about how to get started, what formats work, and the benefits of using live streams to "build in public". 


23 Jun 2022pgMustard with Michael Christofides01:12:07

Michael Christofides of pgMustard chats with Benedikt and Benedicte about gardening, pgMustard, PostgreSQL, and doing marketing for SaaS.

While a relatively older database system, many companies still use PostgreSQL for its reliability and flexibility. However, many users find it difficult to figure out the problem when their database slows down.

Seeing this as a great pain point for their customers, Michael pitched an idea for a tool at his old workplace but unfortunately got rejected. He held on to this tool idea and launched pgMustard in April 2019.

pgMustard helps speed up slow database queries for PostgreSQL. But unlike other tools in the space, pgMustard pinpoints users to the source of the problem and even gives suggestions on how to move forward with it.

Michael, Benedicte, and Benedikt talk about gardening, Supabase, working at Userlist, SEO, and more!

06 Feb 2020Feature Audit is Dead, Long Live Feature Audit00:33:35

Brian talks about the end of his involvement in Feature Audit and its (hopefully) bright future. Benedikt shares a bit of the struggles that they experience as an international founder team dealing with traditional institutions. 

27 Apr 2023DNSimple with Anthony Eden00:40:31

Anthony Eden chats with Benedicte and Benedikt about DNSimple, marketing, how they delegate decision making in their team, and more.

When Anthony and his brother created the product in 2010, they had developers in mind from day one. And unlike other domain registrars and DNS providers in the market, DNSimple lets you unlock what you can do with your domain so you can automate whatever you want.

Anthony, Benedicte, and Benedikt talk about marketing tactics, delegating decision making, what’s next for DNSimple, and more!


20 Apr 2023Clean code makes Benedikt happy00:19:21

Benedicte takes it easy this week as she nurses a cold. Benedikt thinks about how to market their latest feature.

Now sick for a third time in recent weeks, Benedicte talks about how the Norwegian government could provide assistance during these situations. She also shares a memory from five years ago which influenced the naming of her role at Outseta.

With the upcoming roll out of their reporting feature, Benedikt and the Userlist team are brainstorming about how to market it. He also plans on writing a technical blog post about the new feature and presenting it to a conference this June.

02 Mar 2023Brainstorming for a podcast title00:28:37

Benedicte brainstorms titles for their upcoming podcast series with Xata. Benedikt runs into issues with deleting large amounts of data.

Despite not being able to push through with their vacation as planned, Benedicte found a great mood booster by dancing this week. She reached another milestone with Prune Your Follows which just facilitated 25,000 unfollows this week. Benedicte’s also brainstorming titles for their upcoming podcast with Xata.

Benedikt and the Userlist team have been making slow and steady progress with their reporting feature: it’s now in a shippable state and placed behind a feature flag. He also ran into some issues with deleting large amounts of data.

01 Dec 2022Crunching through the to-do list00:27:43

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

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.

14 Apr 2021Game changers00:35:57

Benedikt is feeling excited about the feedback on Userlist's proposed marketing email functionality, and Brian has officially held a version of "Backpack" in his real-life hands!

03 Jun 2020How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change00:12:20

There isn't an episode of Slow & Steady this week. It didn't feel appropriate. Instead, Brian reads an essay from Barack Obama and a short snippet from presidential hopeful Joe Biden.

09 Feb 2023Don’t build your house on someone else’s lawn00:33:27

Benedicte and Benedikt discuss platform risk and more.

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.

22 Jul 2020Into the Wild00:28:15

Brian got up super early today to get an episode in before his next camping trip. He also talks about his recent demo calls and next steps for Headlamp. Benedikt is working on the new Userlist website and close to shipping it later this week. 

16 Sep 2020Double Negative00:27:20

Brian wants to get himself more margin by improving his consulting offering around remote work. Benedikt's deploy of a new feature didn't go quite as planned. 

09 Jun 2022Ship it, ship it, ship it!00:28:42

Benedicte is feeling calm after an ordinary week. She is getting ready for summer and, beyond the routine activities, she has figured out solutions for the Cloudinary plugins. Now that the "fun" part is over, she will implement the solutions over the next two weeks. Oslo has been warm and Benedicte is taking full advantage. Her talk is approaching in late June and she is prepared to be... unprepared and stressed.

Benedikt has enjoyed good weather as well and planned some local sightseeing recently. The new pricing at Userlist is close, but it is tricky. The team is having difficulty getting the proration the way they want it. After diving into the Stripe Apps, Benedikt is also finding that effort more complex than expected. To kick off yet another, large, infrastructure-like  project, Benedikt and Leo meet and start researching on a new WYSIWYG editor. 

14 Nov 2024Too old for fun and modular startup furniture00:46:23

Benedikt is in productive mode. Benedicte plays around with Xano.

To cope with the stressful events in the world, Benedikt went into productive mode these past week. They’ve made great progress with their company triggers, built some command line tools to help with debugging workflows, and more.

Benedicte recently attended a startup program by Telia with the Whee team. She’s also been playing around with Xano and met someone who’s currently using the tool for a large real estate business.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about coping with the overcast, minimizing the bus factor, AI, and more.

26 Sep 2019Keeping up with the Bootstrappers00:46:14

Brian makes good progress on his new product and Benedikt is finally done with researching how to implement in-app messages for Userlist. Inspired by Brian Casel, we also wonder how to make the podcast more interesting to listen to. 

14 Jul 2021Take the Duck Tour00:43:47

Benedicte talks about the launch of her upcoming Gatsby Functions course. Benedikt is talking about the recent live streaming experiment. Brian is starting to enjoy the year on the road and is working on the JTBD app.

24 Feb 2021Bricks, Games, and Profiles00:31:09

Brian talks about his new consulting gig and the first blind playtest of Backpack. Benedikt shares the progress on Userlist features and marketing. 

13 Jan 2022Party in Oslo!00:28:16

Benedicte celebrates her birthday and Benedikt dives into backend work.


While Benedicte enjoys a birthday tradition, the momentum from last week has slowed down. Not to fear — the Gatsby "engine" is proving a valuable way to keep things moving along. Routine, systems, and daily email writing were all "winners" for the week. A podcast appearance on React Round Up went well, too.

Benedikt adjusts to working with Userlist's newest addition, Leo. Despite delegating tasks, Benedikt realized he is still spending time thinking about the delegated work. Otherwise, the onboarding is off to an excellent start and it has allowed Benedikt a chance to focus on the backend work. Exercise returns as a focus as well.

Admire anyone that is working "slow and steady" on their business? Let us know and perhaps we'll have them on as a guest!

29 Apr 2020The Walking Teddy Bear00:45:34

Brian talks about his new puppy and gives an update on the job search. Benedikt talks about performance optimization whack-a-mole and shares thoughts on pricing of Userlist. 

12 Dec 2019Die Eier von Satan00:36:37

Brian and Benedikt discuss recent developments in their businesses which include spammers, pre-sales, podcasts about remote work, and metal bands from the '90s.

31 Mar 2022Google Workspace Woes00:30:41

Benedikt's productive week included migrating to Google Workspace. Benedicte heads to MicroConf in Minneapolis.

Benedicte is feeling frustrated. While Steve will still be coming on in a future episode, she yearns for more time and energy to do all of the things! Knowing that progress will go slow and steady instead, planning out focus projects should help. On the less frustrating side, the Gatsby version of the POW! marketing site will be complete soon. For those headed to MicroConf that want to meet up, reach out to Benedicte on Twitter.

The CSV import feature that Benedikt has been working on is getting very close and he feels optimistic. On the backend application, he updated to the latest versions of Ruby and Rails. And Userlist published their Heap integration and it is working smoothly. This was an integration they have worked on for a while and it will provide some promotional opportunities. Finally, though it wasn't the easiest, Userlist is making the switch to Google Workspace. While Benedikt is thankful that the Google apps will work more nicely together, the process isn't the most "fun".

06 Jan 2021The Year Ahead00:39:30

Benedikt has some huge news from the break and Brian is still feeling much more relaxed after shifting his focus to a hobby project. We also dig into our "Year Compass" reflections and talk about 2020 and 2021.

31 Oct 2024Pushing boundaries00:28:41

Benedicte is winning at her quarterly goal. Benedikt makes great progress with company triggers.

With only two months left in the year, Benedicte is crushing her quarterly goal: to have an enjoyable everyday life. At Whee, she’s pushing the boundaries of their Make plan, and will be testing out a tool for their customer SMS.

Benedikt and the Userlist team are making good progress with the company triggers feature. While there’s still a long way to go, Benedikt shares that they’ve now got a rough idea of how they can streamline this feature with everything else.

01 Aug 2019Hello World00:30:51

Brian and Benedikt talk about how the idea for the show came about and what they're hoping to share along the way.

15 Jul 2020Headlamp has a paying customer!00:29:01

Benedikt is rested up after some time off but still feeling a bit overwhelmed by his todo list. Meanwhile, Brian has what is probably his most exciting update yet!

04 Aug 2022Kind of Done with Summer00:40:03

With the summer almost over, Benedicte is excited to get back on the grind. Benedikt deals with the heat wave and the load of small things at work.

Both Benedicte and Benedikt have felt the unusual temperatures brought by the heat wave.

Aside from his struggles with the current weather in Germany, Benedikt is feeling a bit unfocused because of the load of small things that need his attention at work. He’s also looking into other hosting solutions for Userlist for future reference. Benedikt and Leo are at 90% with the WYSIWYG editor but progress seems kind of slow lately.

Coming home from their long summer vacation, Benedicte is still enjoying the remaining downtime left before school starts but is also excited to get work done soon. She’s back on the 30-day yoga challenge, has a couple of conference talks lined up, and is working on their streamlined offer for ongoing maintenance and support for Gatsby plugins. And in an unexpected turn of events, she got an invite to do an interview with Codesmith’s Will Sentance.

01 Sep 2021Focused. Unfocused.00:51:32

While Brian is struggling with his internet connection, Benedicte is thinking about productized offerings for Gatsby, and Benedikt is back from vacation.

09 Aug 2019First Day of School00:41:33

Benedikt celebrates the successful launch of Userlist and some stressful hiccups that happened in the days prior. Brian gets some advice on restructuring his business model.


07 Nov 2019Trial & Error00:26:10

Brian is inching toward being ready to start pitching his prototype to customers and Benedikt is feeling a bit uneasy about Userlist's trial conversions.

13 Jan 2021Planning for the new year00:46:32

Brian and Benedikt are sharing a bit about their plans for 2021. Brian is preparing for their year on the road, Benedikt is sharing details about a new direction for Userlist. 

23 Feb 2023Waiting for the dust to settle00:25:08

Benedikt and the Userlist team make more progress on their reporting feature. And with everything that’s going on with Twitter and Gatsby, Benedicte waits for the dust to settle. 

Benedikt feels excited about going to his first live concert after three years. Despite getting distracted with so many little things last week, he and the Userlist team were able to create a working internal version of the reporting feature. 

With the never-ending Twitter API saga and Netlify’s acquisition of Gatsby, Benedicte is waiting for the dust to settle while everything is currently up in the air. Meanwhile, she’s making great progress on her project with DNB. She’s also looking for guest recommendations for their upcoming data modeling podcast with Xata.

11 Jan 2024Holidays, birthday bonanzas, and 2024 goals00:36:54

Benedicte talks about the fun during the holiday season. Benedikt shares his 2024 goals.

Despite feeling a bit all over the place, Benedicte and her family had a lot of fun during the holidays. With their newly renovated house, they were able to host about 30 people for the festivities. Benedicte also plans to work on her YearCompass in February after the birthday bonanzas this month.

Benedikt looks back at 2023 and it was a generally good year for him, reaching significant milestones in his personal and work life. He and the Userlist team are planning to step up their sales game this 2024. 

15 Jun 2023We finally met in person!00:26:37

Benedikt and Benedicte have finally met in person in Athens.

Benedikt had a great time at the recent Rails SaaS conference where he was able to meet up with his Userlist co-founder Jane, and Benedicte. Now back in Germany and fully recovered, he’s catching up with his work at Userlist.

The past few weeks have been filled with travels for Benedicte: painting their cabin in Sweden, meeting up with the Outseta founders in Athens, and going on the Slow Business Adventure gathering the west coast.

Benedikt and Benedicte talk about the weather in Northern Europe, documentation, AI, and more.

17 Mar 2021Timezones are the Worst00:54:36

Brian shares about the latest round of revisions for Backpack and a customer sends the first ever marketing email via Userlist.


28 Jul 2021Re-energizing by recording a podcast00:46:59

Brian answers a listener question about Headlamp and shares some updates about Backpack. Benedikt deployed the new sign-up forms for the marketing feature and is thinking about hiring a developer. Benedicte talks about her recent launch of Gatsby Summer Functions and the learnings so far. 


23 Sep 2020Vacation Starts Now!00:39:16

Benedikt is trying to tie up a few things so his vacation can get started and Brian is settling into truly believing that "Slow & Steady" is the way to go.

26 Aug 2020Flying Solo00:20:45

Benedikt is out this week so Brian gives a solo update on his SEO efforts and recent customer discovery calls.

07 Apr 2021Going full circle00:44:30

Benedikt talks about launching the companies feature of Userlist as well as some database performance break-throughs. Brian is very happy about how his consulting business is turning out this year and is dabbling with some new productized service ideas. 

26 May 2021Checking in00:20:32

Benedikt is almost done with moving to a new home while Brian is almost ready to leave for a year on the road.

07 Sep 2023Are Gatsby and Jamstack dead?00:54:03

Benedikt comes back from summer vacation. Benedicte grapples with Gatsby and Jamstack “dying”.

Coming back from his three-week vacation, Benedikt is feeling relaxed and recharged. On his first few days back, he was able to work on the proper solution for their issue with large broadcasts.

With the recent changes at Netlify, the dev community is wondering if Gatsby and Jamstack are indeed dead. Benedicte's recent challenges with support has given her a new product idea: a no-code authentication for no-coders. She also shares another project idea that could let people create a “mixtape” of podcast episodes.

Benedikt and Benedicte also talk about the tasks we offload to our smartphones, how to get into the flow zone, and more.

01 Jul 2022Protecting data privacy00:24:07

Benedikt fights against spam sign-ups. Benedicte contemplates the next steps for POW! in light of the recent overturn in the U.S.

Both feeling under the weather lately, things have been a little crazy for both Benedikt and Benedicte.

Benedikt’s plan to work on the Stripe integration got derailed because of relentless spam sign-ups on Userlist. The team has put in a Slack integration to detect spammers early. Benedikt is thinking of adding another layer of protection with a scoring mechanism that can filter out potential spammers based on their email domain. On the plus side, Leo is making great progress with the WYSIWYG editor.

Benedicte ended last week with a happy bubble at React Norway. Ironically, someone told her that the recent overturn in the U.S. happened while she was talking on stage about reproductive rights and privacy. The recent happening has got Benedicte thinking about the next steps for POW!.

29 Sep 2022What makes a senior developer?00:49:36

Benedicte pitches her latest side project to a database startup. Benedikt gets an interesting question from his mentee.

Benedikt and the Userlist team are putting the finishing touches on their message composer, which will be deployed to projection very soon. He also met with his First Ruby Friend mentee this week and got an interesting question: how do you become a senior developer?

Benedicte just pitched her latest side project, Prune Your Follows, to a database startup and will be having a meeting with them later this week. This new opportunity has gotten her excited about the prospect of turning future side projects as viable lines of business.


12 May 2021To Productize or Not To Productize?00:44:49

Brian thinks through some possible paths toward productizing the JTBD traction he's seeing and Benedikt is chipping away at small tasks while the upcoming home move chips away at his energy.

31 Oct 2019Domain Expertise00:34:00

Benedikt is excited about an expensive purchase while Brian is ironing out the last kinks in the onboarding flow of his new product. 


19 Oct 2023A major luddite00:40:12

Benedicte and Benedikt talk about their updates from the past three weeks, washing machines, winter preparations, and more.

Despite crashing into her vacation, Benedicte was still able to chill with friends while surrounded by nature. Things are going nicely at Outseta: they got shout outs at Webflow conferences and are seeing some accounts going from zero to making a lot of money in a short span of time. Benedicte also talks about the preparations they’re doing for their next public build.

Since the last episode, the Userlist team has now finished migrating their sending infrastructure and have recently added bounce and spam complaint tracking. On the non-work front, Benedikt had an awesome time in Lisbon, enjoying both MicroConf Europe and the sightseeing with his wife.

17 Feb 2022Comparing timestamps to dates?00:43:30

Benedikt asks some tough comparison questions. Benedicte leans on the "engine" and has some fun.

Have you weighed in on Benedikt's data comparison conundrum yet? He stirred up quite the team conversation at Userlist, and on Twitter, too. There were some hot takes and lengthy discussions, but he was thankful to have a team to run some difficult date-handling questions by. He was also thankful to get back some deep focus time this week to tackle the challenge. He uploaded the catalog of Slow & Steady episodes to YouTube — now one more place you can listen!

Benedicte relied on the Gatsby engine while she had some fun last week. Covid restrictions were lifted in Norway over the weekend. She got drinks with several friends and visited briefly with her sister in person after years apart. On stream last week, viewers seemed to enjoy a more freeform troubleshooting session and she finished a draft of her done-for-you demo. While POW! didn't qualify for TinySeed this year, Benedicte has a friend interested in helping with the marketing and customers interviews.

And Brian? He's settled in Boulder and is doing well!

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