Des Traynor is one of my favorite writers and speakers on the topic of SaaS businesses, and jobs-to-be-done . Notable quotes “I think not talking to your customers was always a pretty pathological thing to do” – Des Traynor “Customer service is the new competitive edge. Everyone has SaaS businesses. We’re all using the same frameworks, copying the same design techniques. Most software being produced today is infinitely better than it was years ago. The competitive edge isn’t going to be who has ...
Dec 12, 2014•47 min•Ep 71•Transcript available on Metacast Samuel has become the internet’s authority on user onboarding . In this personal and open interview, Samuel talks about how he was able to discover his niche, build an audience, and launch his first product. He also talks about what to do after a dissapointing launch. Near the end of this interview, Samuel and Justin get passionate about the idea of greeting our product users like human beings: “Hello, welcome! We’re glad you’re here; we’ve been waiting for you.” Show notes Useronboard.com @samu...
Nov 07, 2014•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast In June of 2013, I was introduced to Nir Eyal through Ryan Hoover . Nir had been blogging a lot about psychology and analyzing what makes a highly engaging product. Nir eventually published a book on that topic: Hooked – How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Hooked is a guide to building habit-forming technology, written for product managers, designers, marketers, and startup founders. In this episode we get into how you can design your products, especially the initial experience, to create tract...
Oct 31, 2014•52 min•Ep 69•Transcript available on Metacast Brian Casel is a bootstrapper with a lot of projects: he has a podcast, a hosting platform called Restaurant Engine, and a new course called Productize .We talked about Brian’s story (from developing WordPress themes, to building an audience online) as well as what a productized service is. Show notes Brian’s new course is: http://casjam.com/productize/ Brian is the host of: http://bootstrappedweb.com/ He tweets at: https://twitter.com/CasJam His products are here: http://casjam.com/ Note from J...
Oct 23, 2014•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mike Rohde is a designer and an author, but he’s probably best known for illustrating the 37signals books: Rework and Remote . Mike is now building his own products: The Sketchnote Handbook, and the Sketchnote Workbook. Both are unique books, which also include video. Mike has a secret agenda: to get more people drawing again. Show notes XOXO Festival “Let’s make some stuff” Mike Rohde’s homepage Mike Rohde on Twitter Buy Mike’s first book: The Sketchnote Handbook Buy Mike’s new book: The Sketch...
Oct 02, 2014•38 min•Ep 67•Transcript available on Metacast Marc-André Cournoyer is a passionate coder and product person from Montreal, Quebec. If you’re a developer, engineer, or technical person looking to make the jump to building products, you’re going to love this one. Show notes Marc’s homepage Marc on Twitter Owning Rails Great Code Club Note from Justin This interview is a smaller segment of a full-interview with Marc, available on Product People Club. Go to productpeople.club , and sign up for the waiting list. Screenshots are up now! Want to h...
Sep 04, 2014•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Andreea Mihalcea is a dynamic young founder from Romania. Her and her team are building a new product called Startup Kit . I loved her insights into how and why people buy software products. Startup Kit is targeting an interesting problem: managers and CTOs who need to get a handle on what products their team is using and paying for. Notable quotes “When you’re working on a team, you have to make sure that your tools play nice with other team’s tools” – Andreea Mihalcea Show notes StartupKit.io ...
Aug 28, 2014•27 min•Ep 65•Transcript available on Metacast First, you need to know that Jarrod Drysdale is a good dude. He’s also the author of Bootstrapping Design , and the creator of Cascade.io . He’s smart, and humble, and talented and he has tons of great things to say about building products, succeeding and failing, and the importance of really caring for the people you’re serving. Show notes Jarrod’s blog Jarrod on Twitter Bootstrapping Design Cascade.io Note from Justin This interview is a smaller segment of a full-interview with Jarrod, availab...
Aug 21, 2014•43 min•Ep 64•Transcript available on Metacast Sacha Greif joined me again for a chat on how he marketed Discover Meteor , and why certain blog posts get popular. Notable quotes “I’ve always believed that people really respond to quality content.” – Sacha Greif “You can tell when someone has written something with no research; getting quality data, screenshots, and diagrams really helps.” – Sacha Greif “There’s a direct relationship between the amount of time I put into a blog post, and how popular it is” – Sacha Greif “People respond to boo...
Aug 15, 2014•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast I freakin’ love Paul Jarvis. He’s creative, he’s unique, and he’s Canadian. Notable quotes “When you work for yourself, your boss is an asshole” – Paul Jarvis “I’m vegan so I’m always hungry” – Paul Jarvis “I want to help people build their business online.” – Paul Jarvis “It’s funny: people think that when they’re done school, they’re done with homework. Do a bit of homework! You’ll stand out.” – Paul Jarvis “People don’t hire web designers because of skills. They want someone they trust.” – Pa...
Aug 07, 2014•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s interview is with one of my favourite people on the internet: Nate Kontny. He’s the solo-founder of Draft , a web application that helps you improve your writing through collaboration. He also blogs at Ninjas and Robots . Notable quotes “Solve your own problems!” – Nate Kontny “Take two or things in your life that your passionate about, and merge them together. Then you’ll start creating cool things.” – Nate Kontny Show notes Draft Nate’s blog Nate on Twitter Note from Justin I’m releasi...
Jul 24, 2014•44 min•Ep 61•Transcript available on Metacast This week’s guest is Ryan Hoover . We’ve been online friends for a few years now. Back in 2013, Ryan invited me to join a new site he’d created called ProductHunt.com . In the last 3 weeks, it’s exploded. He was interviewed on Fox News , he was interviewed on This Week in Startups , AND he just announced that he’s joined YCombinator. I actually recorded this episode on January 24, 2014 (5 months ago) – before Product Hunt got huge. I thought it would be interesting to revisit that conversation: ...
Jul 17, 2014•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dan Norris is the co-founder of WP Curve , and the author of The 7 Day Startup . He gave himself 1 year to build a profitable product. After spending a year on a product called Inform.ly, with no profits to show for it, he came up with the idea for WP Curve, and made it got his first paying customer in 4 days. Notable quotes: “With my first business, I just wasn’t selling something people wanted.” – Dan Norris “We’ve launched 4 business in the last 12 months, and 3 of them failed. We started lis...
Jul 10, 2014•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Garrett Dimon is the founder of Sifter and author of Starting + Sustaining . We talked about finding an idea, validating an idea, and building your product. Our conversation started with this question: “What are the biggest misconceptions about running a SaaS product?” Notable quotes: “If you just want to create stuff, and write code, starting a business is not the best way to do that.” – Garrett Dimon “I definitely thought I was would be able to do more development and design; but it’s not real...
Jul 03, 2014•41 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast Brennan Dunn is the go-to guy to talk about marketing automation. He’s build a SaaS, called Planscope , but these days he recommends first-time entrepreneurs build something smaller (like an eBook, or a webinar). He’s also the author of Double Your Freelancing Rate , and has lots of good insight on pricing, marketing, and automating your sales funnel. Notable quotes: “We get so fixated on the medium (is it a SaaS, ebook, webinar) when really all that matters is the results for the customer.” – B...
Jun 27, 2014•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ok, so ages ago I interviewed Sean Fioritto , the author of Sketching with CSS . I like Sean a lot. He’s from Chicago, and he struggled for years trying to build products. Then he wrote this book, and it took off. You’ll hear his story, and how he succeeded after lots of failures. I haven’t put out an episode in awhile. I have a bunch recorded but I haven’t had time to edit them and put them out. I’ve just been slammed: haven’t had time or energy for anything. It’s been pedal to the metal at wor...
Jun 19, 2014•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week you’ll hear from Patrick Mackenzie (Patio11 on the internet), an influential member of the self-funded, bootstrapping community, as well as a high profile member of Hacker News. Patrick is a great guest: he’s a great storyteller, and is always completely himself. (He does some great voice impressions too) Our topic was: how to market yourself, make connections, and promote that app, SaaS, or other product you’ve just built. Notable quotes: “I like to play League of Legends. The vast ma...
Apr 11, 2014•57 min•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast David Heinemeier Hansson started working with Jason Fried at 37signals about 14-15 years ago. 10 years ago, they created Basecamp, their first SaaS product. This past week they decided to stop using the 37signals brand, and sell off (or stop developing) their other products (notably Highrise and Campfire). Our topic was: Why is 37signals changing it’s name to Basecamp? How will this change the company? Was it worth building those other products? Notable quotes: “Basecamp was special because it w...
Mar 17, 2014•49 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast Alex Hillman is many things: first, he’s the king of JFDI (he even has the tattoo to prove it). Second: he’s the founder of IndyHall, a co-working space in Philadelphia. Third: he’s Amy Hoy’s partner in 30×500. And fourth: he’s just recently launched his own product called GroupBuzz.io . Our topic was: What do communities & product businesses have in common? Notable quotes “Having a connection with people is really important. A lot of people build tools without thinking about the people that...
Feb 22, 2014•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast Amy Hoy is known for her unfiltered, straight-shooting opinions on building product businesses. Her and her husband Thomas Fuchs have built Freckle , an awesome time-tracking web app – and have become well known in the bootstrapping, design, and Ruby on Rails communities. Amy is also a passionate teacher: her and Alex Hillman run the excellent 30×500 bootcamp whose students include the likes of Brennan Dunn , Chris Hartjes , and Jaana Kulmala . Our topic was: finding an audience, discovering nee...
Feb 08, 2014•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to a brand new episode of Product People: this is the show that exposes you to the scrappy underworld of people creating their own products. No bullshit, no pretending: what does it take to build and launch your own thing? This my conversation with Nathan Barry. It originally occurred on the community I run for bootstrappers called JFDI.BZ ( Just Fucking Do It). JFDI members were able to ask questions live, and have access to the full (video) interview. The podcast version is abridged, b...
Dec 31, 2013•33 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast Jakub Linowski is a Toronto (Canada) based interface designer. He surprised everybody this year (including himself) by releasing a viral hit called GoodUI.org . In this interview we go behind the scenes, and try to unpack that success. There’s lots of good insights in here for content marketing and conversion optimization. Sponsors This show wouldn’t be possible without these great sponsors. When you support them, you support the show! Are you creating an application that needs charts or a dashb...
Oct 30, 2013•32 min•Ep 50•Transcript available on Metacast Part 2 of our conversation of my conversation with Ruben Gamez and how he outsourced the early development of Bidsketch. Sponsors This show wouldn’t be possible without these great sponsors. When you support them, you support the show! Are you creating an application that needs charts or a dashboard? FusionCharts is a JavaScript charting solution trusted by over 450,000 developers around the world. They have tons of interactive and animated charts with advanced features like tooltips, drill-down...
Oct 23, 2013•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ruben has some great advice on outsourcing, staying focused, getting work done, and building a profitable business that’s not based on your personality. Sponsors This show wouldn’t be possible without these great sponsors. When you support them, you support the show! Are you creating an application that needs charts or a dashboard? FusionCharts is a JavaScript charting solution trusted by over 450,000 developers around the world. They have tons of interactive and animated charts with advanced fe...
Oct 16, 2013•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week I get into the meat and potatoes with Chase Reeves. This is part 2 of our discussion. This week we talk about that struggle of building products, especially when you’re just starting out, and trying to figure out which direction to go in. Sponsors This show wouldn’t be possible without these great sponsors. When you support them, you support the show! Are you creating an application that needs charts or a dashboard? FusionCharts is a JavaScript charting solution trusted by over 450,000...
Oct 09, 2013•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, I’m joined by a man. A man named Chase Reeves. We’re going to talk about the business they’re building over there at Fizzle.co. Chase and I both like to talk, so this is a two-parter! This is part 1. Sponsors This show wouldn’t be possible without these great sponsors. When you support them, you support the show! Are you creating an application that needs charts or a dashboard? FusionCharts is a JavaScript charting solution trusted by over 450,000 developers around the world. They hav...
Oct 02, 2013•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast In our last episode we talked about how David started working as a contractor for 37signals making $15 an hour. He eventually worked his way up, and became an owner in the company (along with Jason Fried). In this episode we talk about he and Jason work together on a daily basis – and we go behind the scenes on their decision to rebuild Basecamp. We also talk about how he got into driving race cars (a mere 2 years after he got his license). This is part 2 of the interview. Sponsors This show wou...
Sep 18, 2013•25 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast David Heinemeier Hansson started working with Jason Fried as a contract worker from Denmark. How did he eventually become a partner at 37signals? I’ve kept in touch with David over the years, and we’d planned on doing an interview for awhile now. It finally happened this past week. This is a pretty personal interview. I spoke with David about growing up in Copenhagen, and how he met Jason (there’s a great story in there). We also discussed his new book (with Jason Fried) called Remote , and how ...
Sep 11, 2013•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Paul Jarvis ( Everything I Know ), Sacha Greif ( Discover Meteor ), and Nathan Barry ( Authority ) invited me to host a Self-Publishing Hangout with them this week. It was a great opportunity for me, because I’m about to publish my first “book” ( Amplification ). Our Google Hangout ended being a 2 hour marathon of us sharing our experience with writing, publishing, and promoting eBooks, as well as answering questions from everybody in the chat room. In Part 2 we discuss: is the self-publishing m...
Sep 04, 2013•48 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast Paul Jarvis ( Everything I Know ), Sacha Greif ( Discover Meteor ), and Nathan Barry ( Authority ) invited me to host a Self-Publishing Hangout with them this week. It was a great opportunity for me, because I’m about to publish my first “book” ( Amplification ). Our Google Hangout ended being a 2 hour marathon of us sharing our experience with writing, publishing, and promoting eBooks, as well as answering questions from everybody in the chat room. In Part 1 we cover choosing a topic, whether y...
Aug 28, 2013•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
