Talking Businessly

Erin is an outstanding product manager who is fairly new to the agency world. She shares her feedback on our process. We brainstorm how to position and sell our product management services. 

Daniel got a 3D printer. John got a new iPhone that he feels meh about. We are feeling out how to consult when there are issues way outside of our control. Getting uncomfortably explicit is awkward in the moment, but makes everyone happy later. John has a wild story about Emily Belz's article. 

We hung out in Philly and had a little role reversal. Chill clients abound. The sales funnel is decent. We talk about who Kapow is really for, and brainstorm what features are next. 

Spring is here, and the boys are out frolicking. We sent our first invoices from the client app. The Laracon game is going to be its own company. Clothing sizes are a lie. 

We watched a lot of movies, and gambled a little. We are deep into silly season, and talk about our relationship with anxiety. Finally, we talk about politics and urbanism again. 

We are now a professional podcast. Ian Landsman gives us some feedback on our goals, and our new client app. He is smart. And we don't talk about poker even once! 

John got star struck on Easter. Daniel got a new couch. We got a big new client. John is working nights and weekends on the Laracon game, and it's awesome. Daniel is working on the client app. We review OKRs.

John is locked in, and made a playlist so you can lock in too. We are in silly season, but we have an excellent new PM who will get us through. We lost a client, but for good reasons. We recap what we learned. John is grinding on the new game, and Daniel gives technical guidance. We try to diagnose what's wrong with tv writing. The Iranian film maker John couldn't remember is Kiarostami. Here's a funny scene from Hail Caesar. 

John's Macbook air is having problems. We made a bonus episode. We have a new trick for finding the decision maker at a prospective client. Always negotiate. We LOVE Adolescence. Finally, we talk politics :(

At a PHP x NYC event, we realized we had a critical mass of Laravel podcasters. Apologies for the audio problems. 

Spring is here. John was on the Over Engineered podcast to discuss running product processes on small teams. We are sunsetting Papercuts. We do a quick retro about why, and what we learned. John did a heroic refactor on the new client app. Daniel is making home improvements

John got married. We got paid by a delinquent client. John spoke at PHP x Philly. The client management app is getting really good, which can now invoice clients. Finally, John thinks tv is maybe bad.

You need to build vertically, not horizontally.

Also: Point Break is a good movie (Broey Deschanel's analysis). We helped a client dismiss a scammy wordpress agency. Squarespace is good. Daniel bought a suit. John is making a DJ set, and thanks Daniel for being the reason he learned to do that.

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 blueprint to follow. 

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 to be a great place to work.

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 finalize our OKRs. John was on Joe Tannenbaum's podcast talking about games. John talks about doing jiu jitsu against the Dutch. 

John built the MVP client app! Daniel watched Survivor. We brainstorm what we want out of our 2025 OKRs. 

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 businessly note, we also talk Survivor, Pecking Order, gas leaks, soothing YouTube videos, cable management, and trying to feed our notes into ChatGPT.

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 many clients, and to get better at scheduling / planning. 

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, John is about to release a digital game, and get into the weeds testing a board game.

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 Harvest.

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. John is speaking at PHP x NYC. And finally, we discuss the (probably terrible) idea of buying a small business / product. 

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??

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, headed into silly season. Daniel dreams up where Verbs will go in the long run.

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 brings up some important feedback from recent retros about how we work. John is writing a game in React! Daniel still insists that John start playing Deadlock. 

(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 revenue, and Daniel bought John a gift. We touch briefly on the Wordpress drama. Joker 2 looks awful but fun. Finally, we review OKRs.

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 slow progress getting better at client communication. John watched THREE good movies.

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!

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 complexity. We talk about the killer future feature of Verbs: analytics.

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 about it. We also go deep on game design, jiu jitsu, and more. This is an unserious episode.

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 for everyone in here.

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.

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 the problems we won't solve with Papercuts. At least not yet.

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 where this app might go. If you work at an agency or run an agency, please reach out to john@thunk.dev. We want to talk.

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 our OKRs from the first half of the year. Spoiler: we made good money, and made ourselves unhappy doing it.

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 discovers we might owe the state of New York $11,000.

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 time to invest in the future.

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 quoting Luke without giving him credit. Luke loves nothing more than brainstorming how to make a business tick.

Apologies for the sound quality, we had a little snafu. 

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 spend money, how much we save for the future, and when to take money out of the company. This is a very real peak behind the curtain, and we're slightly awkward. Build in public.

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 out an onsite (or is it offsite?). Finally, we review our OKRs.