👉 Listen on: Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

John Crickett is the creator of Coding Challenges, a newsletter for engineers that has over 54k subscribers. John’s LinkedIn profile grew from 3k to 150k+ followers in a year. In this episode, we dive into the process and mindset that allowed John’s following to grow so quickly.

👉 Listen on: Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Segments

• [00:34] Introduction

• [02:54] Spending a million Euros and a year on an MVP

• [05:30] Coding Challenges

• [07:51] MVP for an info product vs. software

• [13:27] Growth on LinkedIn

• [17:08] Post structure

• [19:24] Comments on posts

• [21:24] Twitter/X

• [24:51] Coding Challenges newsletter

• [26:48] Building a personal brand

• [33:45] Nicheing on LinkedIn

• [41:26] Selling B2B vs. B2C

• [46:54] Tangent on car salesmen

• [49:49] Book recommendations

Show notes

Where to find John

• John’s LinkedIn

• Coding Challenges

• Coding Challenges newsletter

• Coding Chats podcast

• 30 Day LinkedIn Personal Branding Challenge for Software Engineers (starts on May 20, 2024!)

Links

• Advent of Code

• Carrd website builder

• AirChat

Podcasts

• My First Million (Jason Cohen episode)

Books

• Stop Asking Questions by Andrew Warner

• Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

Get in touch

We’d love to hear from you!

• Email: hello@buildersgonnabuild.com

• Ilya’s LinkedIn

• Arnab’s Twitter: @or9ob

You can also leave comments on this substack post. Don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already!

This podcast is brought to you by Metacast, a podcast app that augments audio podcasts with transcripts, so you can listen, read, skim, bookmark, and share any podcast episode ever published.

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💬 Join our Reddit community at r/metacastapp

👉 Listen on: Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Jason Fried is a co-founder and CEO of 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and HEY. Together with his business partner David Hannemeier Hanson, Jason co-authored seminal entrepreneurship books Rework, Remote, and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work.

This episode was originally published on the Metacast podcast, episode 28 in July 2023.

👉 Listen on: Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Segments

[01:41] Introduction of Jason and 37signals
[04:17] Founder role vs. CEO role
[07:35] Working with the same co-founder for 20 years
[10:30] Disagreements between founders
[13:27] Disagree and commit principle
[15:23] The business side of things (numbers, accounting, etc.)
[19:07] On costs and profitability
[22:13] Intentionally keeping the company small
[25:50] Managing risk
[28:21] Jeff Bezos’ investment
[35:46] Working on several products at the same time
[36:57] Six-week cycles vs. long-term projects
[43:12] Evolution of 37signals
[50:25] Keeping products until the end of the Internet
[53:16] Calm companies
[53:41] Listening to customer feedback
[01:01:16] Jason's email is public. Is this a good idea?
[01:05:32] Employee performance reviews and fixed salaries
[01:07:38] Can the "calm company" mindset work in big companies?
[01:14:44] How does one find a calm company to work for?
[01:17:03] Publishing books
[01:20:38] On being contrarian and no politics at work

Show notes

Podcasts

• Rework

• #496: Marc Randolph on Building Netflix, Battling Blockbuster, Negotiating with Amazon/Bezos, and Scraping the Barnacles Off the Hull on The Tim Ferriss Show

Books

• Rework

• Getting Real

• It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work

• Shape Up

• Maverick by Ricardo Semler

Blog posts

• Founder & CEO is kinda a BS title by Jason Fried

• Basecamp's new etiquette regarding societal politics at work by DHH

• But what if you're wrong? by DHH

Get in touch

We’d love to hear from you!

• Email: hello@metacastpodcast.com (both of us get it)

• Arnab’s Twitter: @or9ob

• Ilya’s LinkedIn

You can also leave comments on this substack post. Don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already!

This podcast is brought to you by Metacast, a podcast app that augments audio podcasts with transcripts, so you can listen, read, skim, bookmark, and share any podcast episode ever published.

🎙️ Get Metacast at metacast.app
💬 Join our Reddit community at r/metacastapp

👉 Listen on: Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Corey Quinn is the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group and a big celebrity at the AWS circles well known for his sense of humor and unrelenting focus on making some good fun of the cloud providers.

In our interview, we are learning a bit of Corey’s background, how The Duckbill Group got started, and how he runs the media side of his business. As usual, we talked about bootstrapping and running consulting services while building a product.

This episode was originally published on the Metacast podcast, episode 32.

👉 Listen on: Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Show notes

Where to find Corey

• Screaming in the Cloud (podcast)

• Last week in AWS (newsletter)

• AWS Morning Brief (podcast)

• X: @QuinnyPig

• Duckbill Group

Books

• Practical Monitoring: Effective Strategies for the Real World by Mike Julian

• Never Eat Alone by Tahl Raz Keith Ferrazzi

Other references

• Route 53, Amazon’s Premier Database

• Writing New Editions and Ticking All the Boxes with Andreas Wittig

• Metacast Ep. 8 - SquadCast Founders on Remote Collaboration in Podcasts

• Yes, I Test in Production (And So Do You) by Charity Majors

This podcast is brought to you by Metacast, a podcast app that augments audio podcasts with transcripts, so you can listen, read, skim, bookmark, and share any podcast episode ever published.

🎙️ Get Metacast at metacast.app
💬 Join our Reddit community at r/metacastapp

👉 Listen on: Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Dave Thomas, co-author of The Pragmatic Programmer and Agile Manifesto, on the true spirit of being agile (vs. "doing agile"), mistakes engineering teams make, and common practices of successful teams.

👉 Listen on: Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Segments

[08:32] The genesis of The Pragmatic Programmer
[12:34] People don't know what they want, importance of feedback loops
[20:10] Doing Agile vs. being agile
[24:29] Practices of successful engineering teams
[34:28] Being pragmatic at an early stage startup
[42:03] Things that are still true 24 years after the book was published
[53:18] How does a book define its author's identity?

Show notes

• The Pragmatic Programmer

• The Pragmatic Bookshelf

• The Agile Manifesto

This podcast is brought to you by Metacast, a podcast app that augments audio podcasts with transcripts, so you can listen, read, skim, bookmark, and share any podcast episode ever published.

🎙️ Get Metacast at metacast.app
💬 Join our Reddit community at r/metacastapp

👉 Listen on: Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

For 10 years, Henry built mobile apps at Google and Amazon. Now he is a partner at a software development agency studio.init(). Henry shares his thoughts on using cross-platform frameworks vs. native languages, argues that Apple’s 30% cut of the in-app purchases is acceptable, and tells us how Google layoffs became a blessing in disguise.

Follow Henry on LinkedIn.

👉 Listen on: Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Segments

[01:31] Introduction
[04:03] Viral LinkedIn posts about layoffs
[08:13] Google layoffs
[17:36] Cross-platform app development with Flutter vs. native languages
[30:12] Getting apps into app stores
[31:43] Apple's 30% in-app purchase fees
[42:09] Building apps within Google and Amazon
[50:30] Starting studio.init() and finding first customers
[56:58] Book recommendations

Show notes

Where to find Henry

• LinkedIn

• studio.init()

Books

• Permission to Screw Up by Kristen Hadeed

• Crucial Conversations

• Getting More by Stuart Diamond

• The New One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard, Spencer Johnson

This podcast is brought to you by Metacast, a podcast app that augments audio podcasts with transcripts, so you can listen, read, skim, bookmark, and share any podcast episode ever published.

🎙️ Get Metacast at metacast.app
💬 Join our Reddit community at r/metacastapp

👉 Listen on: Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Dennis E. Taylor built software for 35 years before trying himself as a sci-fi author. His first novel Outland earned him some “Starbucks money” on Amazon, but his second book We Are Legion made him a best-selling author. Dennis retired as an engineer and became a full-time writer.

In this episode, we talked about the parallels between writing software and writing books, Dennis’s process of coming up with ideas and turning them into reality, working with agents, and writing audio-first books.

👉 Listen on: Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Segments

[02:30] Introduction
[04:42] Transition from software engineering to writing
[07:37] Primer on Dennis's books
[12:02] Parallels between writing software and writing books
[16:10] Where do ideas come from?
[19:41] The process of writing
[22:38] Writing for an audio-first format
[27:28] Narrating a book
[30:43] Engaging with fans
[32:06] Doing research for sci-fi
[36:17] Making money with books
[38:58] Dennis's favorite authors
[41:04] On following the best practices in writing
[44:22] How writing has changed over time
[46:06] Advice for aspiring authors
[47:10] Where is the Bobiverse series going?

Show notes

Where to find Dennis

• Audible profile

• Amazon profile

• Twitter/X

Books

• Bobiverse #1: We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

• Bobiverse #2: For We Are Many

• Bobiverse #3: All These Worlds

• Bobiverse #4: Heaven’s River

• Outland

• Roadkill

This podcast is brought to you by Metacast, a podcast app that augments audio podcasts with transcripts, so you can listen, read, skim, bookmark, and share any podcast episode ever published.

🎙️ Get Metacast at metacast.app
💬 Join our Reddit community at r/metacastapp

👉 Listen on: Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Justin Frankel started Winamp in 1997 and sold it to AOL in 1999. They had no VC funding and had just two developers. It was funded by users sending checks in mail because they really loved the revolutionary music player program for the revolutionary mp3 file format.

When we got a chance to talk to Justin, I was star struck. Holy llama, it's the man himself.

Here are a few things that stood out to me from the conversation.

Justin was not afraid of tongue-in-cheek naming

The company's name was Nullsoft, which "was just a play on that being non-existent, because Microsoft was this massive company making massive Windows 95." If Microsoft was "micro," Nullsoft was nothing.

Justin embedded his own sense of humor into the application

When a user installed Winamp, the program played the "Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass" audio clip, which Justin thought was funny. It's a quote from Wesley Willis' "Whip the Llama's Ass" song. In the age of faceless, boring software, that was unusual.

Justin shared his work publicly and listened to users

For example, Winamp skins were created in response of users embedding their own image assets by hacking into the Winamp executable. With each upgrade, users had to patch the .exe once again, so Justin turned Winamp into a platform that supported skins and plugins. Skins became the signature feature of Winamp and brought in ad revenue from the skins catalog website.

Post-acquisition, Justin stuck around AOL for a few years

He cared about the product and didn't want Winamp to be ruined. People were saying "you can't give a 20-year old a bunch of money and expect them to stick around," and Justin's response to them was "F.U., I'm gonna be here." Justin says that he should've bought Winamp back from AOL and open-sourced it when he had a chance.

Oops, he did it again

In 2006, Justin released the first version of the digital audio workstation software REAPER, which is as powerful as ProTools, Logic and other tools produced by the industry's behemoths but costs only a fraction of their price. REAPER is cross-platform and is built by a team of just 2 people (with occasional contribution of another person). I've used REAPER for years and use it to produce our podcasts.

Zero marginal cost of distribution

One of the primary reasons Justin is able to pull off massive hits with small teams is that he has no backend infrastructure. The software runs on end users' machines and there's no ongoing maintenance cost. The marginal cost of each extra installation is effectively zero.

👉 Listen on: Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Segments

[03:16] The genesis of Winamp
[11:07] Winamp whips the llama's ass
[14:06] Nullsoft
[16:27] Winamp as a platform
[23:16] The business side of Winamp
[24:11] What was it like to work at AOL?
[27:06] Why Justin doesn't use streaming services
[30:03] Justin's website
[32:06] Why Justin created Reaper
[35:48] Shipping v1 of Reaper
[37:02] Reaper is built by just a few people
[38:53] Cross-platform codebase
[40:48] Reaper as a platform
[43:42] Future of Reaper
[44:40] AI in Reaper
[47:09] Questions lightning round
[53:36] Book recommendations

Show notes

Where to find Justin

• Mastodon — justin@cockos.net

• Justin’s website

• Ask Justin Frankel

Books

• Masters of Doom by David Kushner

• Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

• Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott

Podcasts

• Interview with Justin on the Internet History Podcast

Software

• Winamp

• Reaper

This podcast is brought to you by Metacast, a new podcast app that augments audio podcasts with transcripts, so you can listen, read, skim, bookmark, and share any podcast episode ever published (except exclusives behind corporate walled gardens of course!)

🎙️ Get Metacast at metacast.app
💬 Join Reddit community at r/metacastapp

Christian tells a story of how Apollo got started, grew and eventually had to shut down following Reddit's API pricing decision.

👉 Listen on: Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube

Segments

[00:46] Introduction of Christian
[01:58] How Christian got into app development
[03:36] Internship at Apple
[06:38] The origin of the name for Apollo
[07:49] Launching v1 of Apollo
[13:12] Pricing the app
[17:46] Apollo t-shirts and custom app icons
[21:38] Adding notifications and being rejected by Apple
[26:15] Initial reception of Apollo and building a community
[31:32] Apollo's growth
[39:39] Challenges with Reddit API
[41:51] The demise of Apollo
[47:11] Apollo in metrics
[54:14] PixelPals
[56:05] Advice for app developers
[57:26] Podcast and book recommendations

Show notes

• Christian on Twitter/X: @ChristianSelig

• Pixel Pals Widget Pet Game on Apple App Store

• Apollo app subreddit r/apolloapp

• Apollo merch

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