All Episodes
54: Building without a blueprint
Why do old special effects look good? Pennsylvania needs better websites. John wants to speak a lot more. We are building our PM business, but don't have an obvious bl...
53: Be a great place to work (empaneling Bossman Chris)
We empanel Bossman Chris. Daniel and Chris survived Philly's Super Bowl celebration. We recap Laracon EU, and give high praise to Amsterdam. Chris counsels us on how t...
52: Coaching clients to have more urgency
We talk retro video games. Daniel is wiring up his whole home. John preps for his Laracon talk. We recap what we learned from an uncomfortable client moment. We finali...
51: John built the client management app 🤫
John built the MVP client app! Daniel watched Survivor. We brainstorm what we want out of our 2025 OKRs.
50: Growing our product team
We talk about how it will work to have another PM around, the paradox of project scoping, good interview questions, and the power of learning from retros. On a less bu...
49: What does success look like in 2025?
We do a little vision casting for what a great year would look like. We have some disagreements about sales, plan to remove ourselves as individual contributors from m...
48: Holiday party
Daniel is moving, and we have some business logistics to figure out. We want to hire a junior PM. We do a roundup of our OKR results. We also talk game of the year, Jo...
47: Killing Harvest
John saw Hamilton. Daniel is moving. We are finally building the client management app that we've long resisted. We talk through the requirements and speak ill of Harv...
46: We want to buy your business (maybe)
We watched good movies this weekend. We re-learn that good management is mostly about un-blocking people. John's journey into React led him back to Livewire and Alpine...
45: The client onboarding checklist
Daniel played Colossi. We make a checklist of all the things that have to happen when we bring on a new client. Thunk wants to buy a small business??
44: Clarifying roles for Silly Season v2
John went jet skiing at the Statue of Liberty. We love Bluesky. Tech bros keep getting one-shot by psychedelics. Business is great right now. We clarify our roles, hea...
43: Getting personal about working styles
John used to be a choir boy. We remember being terrible at college, and wish we could have a second try. We talk working styles, and where we could do better. John bri...
42: Celebrating $1M in revenue!
(sorry for the terrible quality. SOMEONE forgot to record. We'll let you guess who). How to write a good email. John went to the Texas State Fair. We hit $1M in revenu...
41: Un-profitable software that helps people
Daniel survived a terrifying storm. We are building software to support Asheville. John is speaking at Laracon EU! We're in sales mode for Papercuts. We are making slo...
40: Pricing saga (part 3)
We've changed our pricing model again to solve a couple important problems. So far it is going great. We also talk about movies and games. It's an un-serious podcast!
39: Aaron said to put it out no matter what
Daniel's talk is out! Go watch it. We plan out future talks and screencasts. John talks about game projects he has in the works, and pushing Verbs to new levels of com...
38: Laracon recap
We share all the gory details about shipping (and almost failing to ship) our game and Laracon talk. Here is a video of the fun we had. And here's a full blog post abo...
37: International man of mischief
We plan the rest of our 2024 goals / OKRs. We're making t-shirts. We're shilling Verbs. John has intrusive thoughts and a therapy moment. There's a little something fo...
36: Thunk Pyramid Scheme (the super secret Laracon project)
We built a game for Laracon, and it rules. Also, John released his board game Colossi! Finally, we get started on our OKRs for the second half of the year.
35: The problems that Papercuts solves
John did a bunch of Papercuts interviews, and now has a way clearer sense of what problem we're solving. He talks about his process as a PM. And we talk through all th...
34: Go to papercuts.io
Our new Saas app Papercuts.io is up, and it is in Alpha testing. If it sounds useful to you, go sign up and we'll reach out shortly! We also talk about the future of w...
33: This too shall pass
We accidentally talk about movies for 15 minutes. Then we talk about calmly riding the waves when bad things happen (a bad thing happened). Finally, we review all of o...
32: Monday morning scrutiny
We took some time off. Papercuts is good now. Verbs is still good. We had an uncomfortable moment with a client, and learned some good things from it. Then Daniel disc...
31: Buying our time back
We're working fewer client days, but it costs us a lot of money to do that. So what are we getting for that money? We make a plan for what we can do with this extra ti...
30: Strategy brainstorm (empaneling Luke Roush)
Luke Roush is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Sovereign's Capital. John worked for Luke for 4 years. If John ever says anything smart, there's a 40% chance he's just quot...
29: Awkward money conversation
It's beef season. We have figured out how to not have Daniel on every client, and which roles we play with each client. Then we have a fun conversation about how we sp...
28: Short term profit vs. long term strategy
Business is great. But that means Daniel doesn't have time to do strategic stuff. John is pulling back on client hours to figure out how to do outbound sales. We plan ...
27: Silly Season (empaneling Steve Smallman)
Steve is the founder of a well established creative agency called fifteen4. Daniel used to work there! We asked Steve about how you do planning (especially with subcon...