Growing Software
Darby Frey & Ethan Gunderson
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Two software engineers exploring the facets of developing SaaS businesses while working their day jobs. Hosted by Darby Frey, co-founder of Lead Honestly, and Ethan Gunderson, founder of Glean.
Available episodes
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Oldest first
Sep 14, 2022
33: No Code, Low Code, Artisanally Crafted Farm To Table Code
What we covered in this episode:
* Ethan's Training
* Code Beam America
* LogSnag
* Pipedream
* Zapier
What we're working on:
Darby is building Lead Honestly
Ethan is building Glean
Have something you want us to talk about?
Twitter: @growingsoftware, @ethangunderson, and @darbyfrey
Leave us a ZipMessage
Thanks to our monthly supporters:
Clark Kampfe ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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Sep 7, 2022
32: The Employee Satisfaction Index
What we covered in this episode:
* Ethan's upcoming training at Elixirconf
* The Pomodoro technique
* The SEO tool we reference is Keysearch.co
* Copy.ai
Have something you want us to talk about?
Twitter: @growingsoftware, @ethangunderson, and @darbyfrey
Leave us a ZipMessage
Thanks to our monthly supporters:
Clark Kampfe ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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Aug 3, 2022
31: Do Nothing, A Bold Launch Strategy
What we covered in this episode:
* Writing blog posts, keywords, and being useful.
* Ethan failed his homework, or did he? Yes, he did.
* Is it coding week or marketing week?
* Bootstrapping a SaaS Product to $36k MRR. Examples of marketing week ideas is at 23:54.
* Building up a product around a conference workshop.
Have something you want us to talk about?
Twitter: @growingsoftware, @ethangunderson, and @darbyfrey
Leave us a ZipMessage
Thanks to our monthly supporters:
Clark Kampfe ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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Jul 11, 2022
30: Sorry, The Crab Isn't Good Today
What we covered in this episode:
* Ethan's trip to Disney Word
* Chef's Table
* The consistently low bar of user experiences
* Lead Honestly's new marketing copy
* Paying for blog posts
* Progress on Glean
Have something you want us to talk about?
Twitter: @growingsoftware, @ethangunderson, and @darbyfrey
Leave us a ZipMessage
Thanks to our monthly supporters:
Clark Kampfe ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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May 24, 2022
29: Fractions of a Year
Ethan's conference talk ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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Apr 7, 2022
28: A Masterclass in Deleting Code
Darby looks for marketing help and Ethan shuffles code around
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Mar 25, 2022
27: Marketing Made Simple
It's book club time again! This week Ethan and Darby talk about Marketing Made Simple. Special guest appearance by a toddler in search of a bowl of cereal.
https://storybrand.com/marketing-made-simple-book/
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Mar 22, 2022
26: Ethan Stars Over
Darby gets an unexpected traffic boost and Ethan `git init`'s a new Glean.
A note from Ethan: This episode was originally recorded in February, but due to some editing issues is just now being published on March 21st. We'll be back to our normal schedule soon.
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Mar 3, 2022
25: Brian Casel of ZipMessage
You can find Brian at:
* Twitter
* ZipMessage
* Bootstrapped Web
Questions, comments, or other feedback? Send us a zip message! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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Feb 8, 2022
24: Profit First
Profit First
The application Ethan used to model the accounts and framework outlined in the book is Summit.
A screenshot for the Summit canvas that Ethan made can be found here. ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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Dec 21, 2021
23: Tis the Season for a Retrospective
Lets end the year with a retrospective on Growing Software, and laying some plans for next year. Also, Ethan talks about opportunity cost without saying the phrase opportunity cost.
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Nov 18, 2021
22: Two Kinds of Warm Beverages
Ethan drinks tea and Darby puts up a job listing!
https://angel.co/company/lead-honestly/jobs/1743870-head-of-marketing
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Nov 11, 2021
21: Edge Cases on Top of Edge Cases
Darby sees some usage on the new Lead Honestly feature and Ethan has a crisis of confidence.
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Oct 28, 2021
20: Shaking the Rust Off
After a short break Darby and Ethan are back to discussing traction channels and Lead Honestlys product launch.
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Oct 15, 2021
19: Gearing Up for a Launch
Darby and Ethan talk through being on call as an indie developer, using slack to store time series metrics, and the upcoming launch of Lead Honestly for Google Workspace.
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Sep 24, 2021
18: An Egg Salad Sandwich With an Instagram Account
On this exciting episode of Growing Software -- The pros and cons of managed database providers, side project objectives, the story of gathers.us, and Darby figures out his Google API permission scopes.
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Sep 20, 2021
17: The Best Laid Plans Part 2
Darby and Ethan go over the results of the previous episodes mini experiments.
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Sep 3, 2021
16: The Best Laid Plans
Darby and Ethan talk through some idea validation and customer interview plans, dogfooding products, and how difficult it must be to build medical device hardware.
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Aug 25, 2021
15: An Effective Pivot
Darby has some successful onboardings after pivoting and Ethan gets stung by a bee.
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Aug 20, 2021
14: Changing Directions
Darby changes directions on the new version of Lead Honestly, and then tries to convince Ethan to do the same.
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Aug 4, 2021
13: Give the people what they want, emails
Darby talks about the experience of on-boarding a new power user, where to find a community for your product, building communities, and a dive into some potential features of Glean.
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Aug 2, 2021
12: So, you need another checklist?
This week on Growing Software -- Vacation brain, wildfires, traveling, and an impromptu conversation on personal productivity. Also, talking about software.
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Jul 13, 2021
11: The Mom Test
Links
Datadog
Prometheus
Zipkin
Metabase
Honeycomb
The Mom Test
Deploy Empathy ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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Jul 2, 2021
10: Make Sure the Thing Works
This week Darby and Ethan talk about JavaScript testing, getting feedback from users, and the legality of fireworks.
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Jun 15, 2021
9: The Many Hats of Indie SaaS
Does Lead Honestly pass the Google security review? Does Ethan finally ship transactions? All of these questions and more are answered in this weeks episode.
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Jun 8, 2021
8: We Finally Used the Podcast Name in the Episode
José Valim's blog post on a authentication solution for Elixir's Phoenix https://dashbit.co/blog/a-new-authentication-solution-for-phoenix ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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Jun 1, 2021
7: Almost Ready for Launch
Ethan gives some details on his debugging complaints from last week and Darby gives an update on the lead honestly code retreat and upcoming MVP launch.
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May 25, 2021
6: The One with Podcast Music
Darby laments their progress on launching the new version of Lead Honestly, but has a plan. Ethan shifts his workflow again.
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May 18, 2021
5: Results of the Great Experiment
Ethan gives an update on his day dedicated to working on Glean
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May 13, 2021
4: The Value of Code Retreats and Database Seeds
This week Darby gives us an update on how his week of focus on Lead Honestly went, Ethan contemplates taking a day off, and they talk about the value of live data in database seeds.
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May 11, 2021
3: Marketing as a Roadmap
Darby gives an update on the new version of Lead Honestly and Ethan talks about his work on the Glean marketing page and how it can drive the product roadmap
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May 4, 2021
2: It’s not about working faster, it’s about cutting scope
Lead Honestly
Glean
Transcript
Ethan: [00:00:00] Good afternoon.
Darby: [00:00:00] Hello? Good afternoon. Happy Thursday.
Ethan: [00:00:02] Did you get your, your, did it your shot on Friday or on Monday?
Darby: [00:00:06] I did. Yeah. Yeah. It was three hours of driving pulled into the parking lot of this little community center. And walked in, they do the barcodes and everything. It's it was like a military run. I guess what is it? It's not the coast guard. The national guard, I guess yeah. Is running it. They were super nice, super easy.
So literally walked in and did the thing and got the shot sat for 15 minutes, got back in the car and drove through.
Ethan: [00:00:33] Yeah. That is almost exactly what we did. Yeah.
Darby: [00:00:35] Yeah. Yep.
Ethan: [00:00:37] Drove North until we were like 20 minutes outside of Canada, like a little hospital in the middle of nowhere.
Darby: [00:00:47] Yeah. Yeah, that, it must be the thing with borders. We were right by Iowa, right by the borde…
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Apr 27, 2021
1: Rewrites and Refactors
Ethan: [00:00:00] Good afternoon. Okay.
Darby: [00:00:02] Happy Friday. Don't normally do this on Friday, but it's kinda nice.
Ethan: [00:00:06] It is a little nice.
Darby: [00:00:07] Are you done with the day job for the week?
Ethan: [00:00:10] no, I'll have probably another hour after we're done here. But it's Friday. So that's a late day anyways.
Darby: [00:00:16] Yeah. Things get real quiet for me around Noon.
Ethan: [00:00:19] Is that because most of your team is overseas?
Darby: [00:00:22] Yeah. Yeah. A of, A lot of people kinda wrap up fairly early. There's usually some stuff that trickles in, but it's much quieter than the rest of the days,
Ethan: [00:00:30] Yeah.
Darby: [00:00:30] I don't mind it. Yeah. So I'll go first today.
Ethan: [00:00:34] Okay.
Darby: [00:00:36] Last week we were talking about My idea this Google docs idea that I was working
on. So I had, I don't remember how this started, but my brain just started turning on this idea. And I was like, if we, so we have…
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