Interviews with people who build awesome products. Hosted by Metacast co-founders Ilya Bezdelev and Arnab Deka.
Ben Curtis from Honeybadger discusses the challenges and ultimate success of switching from an unlimited pricing model to usage-based pricing. He highlights the initial anxieties and revenue dips, but also emphasizes the long-term benefits of fair pricing and sustainable growth. The episode details the importance of understanding customer usage patterns and the courage to make necessary changes.
Ben Curtis and Joshua Wood discuss the pivotal moment they decided to transition to working on their SaaS app, Honeybadger, full-time. They share their struggles and decisions around leaving their stable jobs, the financial gap they faced, and how freelancing helped them bootstrap their way to full-time salaries. The conversation highlights the challenges and rewards of focusing entirely on their growing business.
Ben Curtis and Joshua Wood, co-founders of Honeybadger, recount their journey to acquiring their first customers for their SaaS app and error monitoring service. They discuss leveraging personal connections for initial testing, utilizing a pre-existing mailing list for early adopters, and focusing on consistent, steady growth. Their primary goal was to reach $40,000 in monthly revenue, rather than fixating on customer numbers.
Ben Curtis and Joshua Wood, co-founders of Honeybadger, share their journey of bootstrapping their app monitoring platform, discussing the origins, growth, and challenges they faced. They delve into the evolution of their co-founder relationships, handling a co-founder's departure, and maintaining a calm company culture while building a successful business. The episode provides valuable insights and practical advice for entrepreneurs navigating the early stages of their ventures.
John Crickett is the creator of Coding Challenges, a newsletter for engineers that has over 54k subscribers. John’s LinkedIn profile grew from 3k to 150k+ followers in a year. In this episode, we dive into the process and mindset that allowed John’s following to grow so quickly. Chapters 00:58 - Introduction 03:18 - Spending a million Euros and a year on an MVP 05:54 - Coding Challenges 08:15 - MVP for an info product vs. software 13:51 - Growth on LinkedIn 17:32 - Post structure 19:48 - Comment...
Jason Fried is a co-founder and CEO of 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and HEY. Together with his business partner David Hannemeier Hanson, Jason co-authored seminal entrepreneurship books Rework, Remote, and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work. This episode was originally published on the Metacast podcast, episode 28 in July 2023. Chapters 03:17 - Introduction of Jason and 37signals 05:38 - Founder role vs. CEO role 08:37 - Working with the same co-founder for 20 years 11:10 - Disagreeme...
Corey Quinn is the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group and a big celebrity at the AWS circles well known for his sense of humor and unrelenting focus on making some good fun of the cloud providers. In our interview, we are learning Corey’s background, how The Duckbill Group got started, and how he runs the media side of his business. As usual, we talked about bootstrapping and running consulting services while building a product. This episode was originally published on the Metacast podc...
Dave Thomas, co-author of The Pragmatic Programmer and Agile Manifesto, on the true spirit of being agile (vs. "doing agile"), mistakes engineering teams make, and common practices of successful teams. Chapters 10:29 - The genesis of The Pragmatic Programmer 11:41 - People don't know what they want, importance of feedback loops 22:17 - Doing Agile vs. being agile 26:36 - Practices of successful engineering teams 36:35 - Being pragmatic at an early stage startup 44:10 - Things that are still true...
For 10 years, Henry built mobile apps at Google and Amazon. Now he is a partner at a software development agency studio.init() . Henry shares his thoughts on using cross-platform frameworks vs. native languages, argues that Apple’s 30% cut of the in-app purchases is acceptable, and tells us how Google layoffs became a blessing in disguise. Chapters 01:31 - Introduction 04:03 - Viral LinkedIn posts about layoffs 08:13 - Google layoffs 17:36 - Cross-platform app development with Flutter vs. native...
Dennis E. Taylor built software for 35 years before trying himself as a sci-fi author. His first novel Outland earned him some “Starbucks money” on Amazon, but his second book We Are Legion made him a best-selling author. Dennis retired as an engineer and became a full-time writer. In this episode, we talked about the parallels between writing software and writing books, Dennis’s process of coming up with ideas and turning them into reality, working with agents, and writing audio-first books. Ch...
Justin shares how he created Winamp and sold it to AOL at age 20 and tells us about his current project, digital audio workstation (DAW) Reaper. Chapters 03:16 - The genesis of Winamp 11:07 - Winamp whips the llama's ass 14:06 - Nullsoft 16:27 - Winamp as a platform 23:16 - The business side of Winamp 24:11 - What was it like to work at AOL? 27:06 - Why Justin doesn't use streaming services 30:03 - Justin's website 32:06 - Why Justin created Reaper 35:48 - Shipping v1 of Reaper 37:02 - Reaper is...
Christian tells a story of how Apollo got started, grew and eventually had to shut down following Reddit's API pricing decision. Chapters 00:46 - Introduction of Christian 01:58 - How Christian got into app development 03:36 - Internship at Apple 06:38 - The origin of the name for Apollo 07:49 - Launching v1 of Apollo 13:12 - Pricing the app 17:46 - Apollo t-shirts and custom app icons 21:38 - Adding notifications and being rejected by Apple 26:15 - Initial reception of Apollo and building a com...
