10: Dynamic Website Personalization with Brennan Dunn

19: Gourmet Ruby with Avdi Grimm: This week Ben Orenstein is interviewing guest Avdi Grimm, Founder of RubyTapas, which is a subscription service that provides screencasts of “gourmet” ruby programming. Avdi discusses the topic of his talk at Southeast Ruby in Nashville, which was the value of avoiding code and strategies to bypass the need to write unnecessary coding. Join us as he shares his advice on optimizing workflows and his experiences building RubyTapas. by The Art of Product

31 min listen

1: Welcome to The Art of Product: Welcome to the Art of Product podcast. This is episode 1, and just the beginning of the journey. This is a show with Ben Orenstein formerly from thoughtbot and Drip co-founder Derrick Reimer. Ben recently quit his job at thoughtbot, and is now focusing on what he is going to do next. Stay tuned. This is going to be a fun journey. by The Art of Product

34 min listen

10: Dynamic Website Personalization with Brennan Dunn: Today Ben’s guest is Brennan Dunn, co-founder of RightMessage, a tool that allows you to personalize your website based on user information and behavior. This allows you to customize your messaging to each user’s unique story and needs. Brennan explains the value of customer targeting, shares his ambition for Right Message, his personal journey and advice for other software startups along the way. by The Art of Product

41 min listen

7: Learning from Successes, and Failures: This week Ben has been trying new productivity techniques and studying different systems of workflow. He finished a new course video on Page Objects, and has sketched out a second video to hit his pre-vacation goal. Derrick had a technical issue over the weekend, which his team worked out and stabilized. He has decided to adopt a “blameless post-mortem” approach to problem-solving going forward. by The Art of Product

39 min listen

12: Free Trials and Live Streaming Video Lessons: This week Ben discusses his experiment live-streaming a practice recording of his next video. He received helpful feedback and saw a spike in email subscribers, so it was very successful. Derrick has been working on the Drip free trial to help clarify the product plans. He debated split testing this move, but in talking to his team they decided to just go for it. by The Art of Product

39 min listen

4: Always Talk With the Decision Maker: In this episode, Derrick is broadcasting from California as he visits his family. Ben went to Vermont last week and quickly realized how relaxing it is to be outside and see greenery. Such a different feel from the tension in the city. Ben has been chatting with a couple of people about consulting as a revenue officer. He had an interesting chat with someone but their visions just weren’t aligned in terms of value and compensation. Also it turned out this person wasn’t the decision maker, and the founder wasn’t as agreeable to Ben’s terms. Lesson learned - always talk to the decision maker. Ben is also struggling with whether he really wants to be involved in consulting. He may want to just focus on his product. Enjoy the show. by The Art of Product

31 min listen

28: Quarterly Goals, and Why They're Better Than Annual Goals: Ben is having a successful push for the new cohort of The 30-Day Code Quality Challenge. He is also looking to improve future iterations of the challenge and is preparing to move to a new home outside of Boston. Ben and Derrick discuss their quarterly personal goals on this episode and the philosophy behind goal setting: developing habits versus achieving specific results. by The Art of Product

70 min listen

14: The Power of Simplicity: This week Ben has been managing his projects and to-do list with OmniFocus, which helps as his business and stress level continue to increase. He has outlined and will be recording his last video about form objects and is glad to be approaching the finish line on the course. Derrick has been in the trenches working on scaling Drip this week by strategizing on architecture with the backend team. They have onboarded one of their biggest customers and are working with them to segment and filter subscribers to be more efficient. by The Art of Product

42 min listen

6: Refactoring Rails and Shareable Workflows: On today’s episode we discuss Ben’s release of the first video in his Refactoring Rails course, on the benefits of following Rest in Rails applications. He goes over how he produced the video, sent it out and the feedback he got on his initial release. Derrick has been shipping even more this week, and has seen a huge improvement in his workflow by reducing the notifications on GitHub. His team is adjusting to a more efficient way of working instead of push notifications. by The Art of Product

34 min listen

13: Crossing the Chasm: This past week Ben has hit a mental slump in the final phase of his course. However, he is moving through it and will be recording another video today towards the new final goal of 8 total course videos. Derrick brings up a recent Giant Robots podcast episode with Seth Godin, which talks about the dips experienced in business, “crossing the chasm” by moving from innovators into the mass market, and the personal transparency of the host Chad Pytel. by The Art of Product

33 min listen

9: Deep Thinking and Finding Your Groove: This week Ben is adjusting to jet-lag from his travels to Las Vegas and Martha’s Vineyard last week. He did however manage to release another episode of his sample campaign that was recorded before his vacation, so he is making good progress with the course. Derrick is celebrating and reflecting on the one year anniversary of the Drip acquisition. They have gone from 3 to 10 engineers in the last year, and have really hit their stride in productivity. by The Art of Product

24 min listen

61: Unconventional Growth Tactics with Julian Shapiro: Ben is working on marketing plans for Tuple and it’s associated Pair Programming Guide. So, what does someone he admires think of his growth and content marketing plans? In this episode, Ben’s special guest is Julian Shapiro, who shares lesser known growth tactics he has used in his content marketing to be successful. by The Art of Product

73 min listen

11: The Founders Dilemma: Derrick is coming back from a much-needed vacation in San Francisco and enjoyed walking tours thanks to the Detour app. He returns refreshed and was able to get back into the swing of things and even into his yoga classes. Last week Ben published a new sample course video on speeding up slow test suites. He is improving his recording and editing processes using Final Cut Pro. He is now working on the fifth video and nearing the halfway point on the course. by The Art of Product

33 min listen

2: From Good to Great: Welcome to the Art of Product podcast. Derrick is rocking his “I ♥ yoga” shirt because he started practicing yoga at a studio down the street. He also gives us an update on new changes and features at Drip. Derrick was inspired by Ben’s newsletter and decided to work on his own newsletter, which gave him a great opportunity to use his own product. Ben is discovering that unemployment is a roller coaster. His stress level has been about 5X his normal baseline stress level. He started working at the co-working space and attending mixer events. He is emailing people on his list and sharing his ideas to get feedback for possible products for him to work on. Ben has been reflecting on how people and relationships make him shine and is considering finding a co-founder for his product. by The Art of Product

35 min listen

38: Choosing Tech Stack and Taking Preorders: Derrick is still moving in the right direction with the product he is developing called, Level. He used Product Hunt’s Ship to set up a landing page. He plans to promote his upcoming product and control its launch. Also, Derrick published a blog post titled, Building Level #2: The Tech Stack. It summarizes his rationale and reasons why he chose specific technologies. Plus, he posted his and Ben’s conversation, Live Level #2: Branding and GraphQL Mutations, and created a Twitter handle for Level. by The Art of Product

19 min listen

8: Different Paths to Software Development with Ian Nance from Drip: This episode Ben is on vacation and we have a guest, Ian Nance, a Drip team member here to talk about his backstory and how he got into software development. Ian has an interesting story about how he started programming later in life and his work experiences. Join us as he shares his journey and some great advice for beginners in the field. by The Art of Product

30 min listen

5: Ways We Maintain Focus: Today we talk about how Ben just launched his new landing page and set up the domain for his new Rails video course. Derrick has been shipping stuff this week. He just rediscovered the pulse tab on GitHub which gives a nice summary of what they have done over the week. by The Art of Product

33 min listen

24: Tailwind CSS with Adam Wathan: Ben and Derrick are joined by guest Adam Wathan, an esteemed software developer, writer, speaker and entrepreneur from Ontario, Canada. He is the creator of Tailwind CSS, author of Refactoring to Collections and host of the Full Stack Radio podcast. Listen in as he shares how he built his own products over time and became an independent entrepreneur, and talks about his new project Tailwind CSS. by The Art of Product

48 min listen

22: Finishing the Year Strong: Ben’s course sales are still going strong, and he shares his updated sales metrics and the purchasing trends of his customers. He also spoke on the Ruby on Rails podcast recently to discuss the course and his experience making it. Derrick and the Drip team are preparing for Black Friday. They built models to predict peak hours and optimize their servers. As a result they had a super successful test send at over 4,000 emails per second, putting them in a great position leading up to the big day. by The Art of Product

27 min listen

17: Launch Planning and Speaking at Conferences by The Art of Product

33 min listen

30: Nailing an Interview, and the New Drip Design: Ben has moved into his new apartment and had an interesting discussion about fitness with the movers. Derrick got back is Bod Pod results and is formulating his precise fitness goals for fat loss and muscle gain. Ben is still on the job market and had an interview last week. In Drip news, Drip recently got a brand refresh, including a new logo, marketing site, color palette, new messaging, app skin, and more. by The Art of Product

41 min listen

34: Maker vs. Manager: It’s a Snow Day for Ben, and Derrick shares his woes about setting up his home office with two new, Dell monitors and his MacBook Pro featuring only two USB-C ports for a hub. You would think that laptops would offer more of a variety of ports. Other than that, things are going great for Derrick. On March 5, Derrick pushed out his manifesto via Twitter. In response, people shared, retweeted, and posted supportive thoughts and messages. Developers resonated with his message. And of course, there were a few skeptics who wondered how Derrick’s ideas were different from other team communication and management options. There will always be multiple tools that can be used, but Derrick has a particular approach to what he offers. by The Art of Product

48 min listen

36: Building Level: Derrick continues to talk with customers and gain insights about a team communication and management tool he is developing called, Level. Derrick is developing personal connections with people interested in his mission, and his conversations with customers is reinforcing patterns. Today, he shares the main problems with “Chat” functionality and why people are frustrated with the tools they use today. He is exploring possible solutions for Level to replace Slack and other tools. What issues do you experience? by The Art of Product

30 min listen

3: New Pricing Strategies: Updates and pricing strategies highlight today’s episode. Ben did yoga this morning, and he is feeling relaxed as he is settling in with his new lifestyle. Next week Ben is closing his first part-time chief revenue officer engagement. Now it’s time to come up with a contract and a pricing strategy. by The Art of Product

33 min listen

15: Lessons in Scaling SaaS: This week Ben is on vacation and Derrick is here to share some fresh knowledge behind the scenes at Drip. They’re experimenting at Drip with how to scale the system to handle more customers and what changes are needed to make the architecture support all their customers and future large customers in the sales pipeline. Derrick goes over his team’s recent brainstorming session and plans to repeat the exercise for more subsystems at Drip. by The Art of Product

7 min listen

21: Launching Refactoring Rails: Ben has officially launched his course Refactoring Rails. He is pleased with his choice of back-end tools including Gumroad for fulfillment. Ben shares his course launch metrics including email success rate, sales numbers and revenue. Derrick announces Drip’s new project teased last episode: a visual email editor. Due to Drip’s widening customer base, there is an increased demand for visual and polished marketing emails. by The Art of Product

36 min listen

23: Refactoring Rails Launch Breakdown: Ben keeps us posted on the Refactoring Rails course launch progress and shares his continuing sales metrics and marketing strategies. He is considering experimenting with free samples, bundling and cross-promoting going forward. For his next project, Ben is creating a new course called The 30-Day Code Quality Challenge, which goes live on November 13, 2017 by The Art of Product

26 min listen

42: Fostering a Culture of Creativity with Rob Walling: Ben is away, so Derrick invited a special guest for this episode. Rob Walling was the co-founder of Drip and is the co-host of MicroConf. Rob recently removed Slack from his phone, and is waiting for Derrick’s Level product. Level is an open source team communication tool that Derrick hopes will replace Slack among software teams. Others are looking forward to Level, as well, and wondering how many clients Level is going to be available on: mobile, desktop...As Derrick continues to work on Level, the two also reminisce about their days together at Drip. by The Art of Product

61 min listen

20: The Ups and Downs of Working From the Road: Ben is set to launch his course and is using the looming deadline as an efficiency booster. He recently spoke at Rocky Mountain Ruby, and spent time prepping the talk with a friend at a beach house but unfortunately lost his data due to a hardware malfunction. The talk was still a great success, but a very stressful experience. Drip.com is now live after a long process, and the Drip team is thrilled. Derrick has also found an opportunity to use Elm at Drip, and is looking forward to implementing it in a new project he can’t yet discuss. by The Art of Product

24 min listen

26: Optimizing Team Structures: Drip successfully sailed through Black Friday and Cyber Monday unscathed with no queue backups or problems. Derrick has been thinking about shifting the Drip team structures after Black Friday weekend and is considering adopting more efficient workflows and processes. Ben and Derrick discuss different team structures, including those at Basecamp and Spotify. They also talk about team size, communication overhead, and growing revenue versus growing team size in business. by The Art of Product

48 min listen

Discover this podcast and so much more

10: Dynamic Website Personalization with Brennan Dunn

10: Dynamic Website Personalization with Brennan Dunn

Description

Titles in the series (100)

More Episodes from The Art of Product

Related podcast episodes