Building Jam

This week we’re joined by Rui and Oskar, two Jam engineers leading our internal development of AI features. Oskar shares our latest demo with Chrome's built-in AI and what it means for anyone building in the browser. In this episode: (00:25) What is Chrome’s Built-in AI? (02:26) The tradeoffs between local and remote LLMs (04:54) Oskar demos our early experiments with Gemini Nano (09:32) Implicati...

Meet two of Jam’s newest engineers Max & Aidan! In this episode they discuss what engineering onboarding is like at Jam, plus all the “boring” parts of software development. Internal docs, codebase organization, local environments… As a company totally focused on bug capture; at Jam, these topics are our Jam! We discuss: (00:13) Why we love talking about the “boring” parts of eng (they’re not...

The joy of building a startup is that you get to learn from a lot of different people, but usually these meetings are not recorded. In this season of Building Jam we're sharing these raw conversations where we ask the experts about our startup. This week we’re learning from Product Hunt’s Head of Growth, Jason Levin. (00:49) Jason’s top lesson for community growth: doing things that don’t scale to...

This is the first episode of Season 2: Learning in Public. This season we’re getting advice and sharing the raw conversations as we learn and get feedback from experts. Today, we’re bringing our own dev community questions & challenges to Lizzie Siegle, an incredible dev advocate & community leader at Cloudflare (prev. Twilio). We discuss: (00:00) Introducing Lizzie & season 2 of the p...

This is not a normal episode. This week we’re sharing an honest internal conversation about how things are going with the podcast. The truth is, after 12 weeks, we didn’t get the results we hoped for, but we still feel excited about it. So in the spirit of sharing behind the scenes of building Jam, here’s our retro. We discuss sticking true to our vision, podcast distribution, and our new directio...

This week at Jam we’re defining the goals & priorities of our new growth team and feeling inspired by the future of AI. Since it’s week 12 of the pod, it’s time to evaluate & make a decision. In this episode we discuss: (00:17) The team reflects on 12 weeks of the podcast & what’s next (05:36) Learnings on video distribution & repurposing (06:45) Irtefa tells us the story of Heinz...

This week at Jam, our users hit 3 million Jams created! It’s an important milestone, so we’re planning something special for No. 3M. And we’re thinking about the next 3 million—as we build out Jam’s first growth team. In this episode we discuss: (00:14) Dani reveals how close we are to 3M Jams & the email we’re planning to send (02:43) Learnings from PLG greats & how they apply to growing...

This week at Jam, we’re at Config! Figma is one of our investors and gave us free tickets (thank you Figma!). Ian is live at the scene to fill us in on what we can learn about events and community from one of the world’s best product design conferences. In this episode we discuss: (00:15) Admiring the scale of Config— it’s huge! (01:00) The best part is meeting people from companies we admire (02:...

This week at Jam, we’re deep into building the next iteration of Jam AI. After Jam engineer Rui shared the latest demo at standup, we knew we had to bring him on the pod to discuss. This week on Building Jam: (01:30) Our approach to incorporating AI at Jam (04:32) Limiting the input space to build AI that works (07:29) Rui’s tools & experiments for AI reliability & infrastructure (10:16) R...

What’s happening at Jam this week? Our founders Dani & Irtefa are prepping for a board meeting by analyzing a ton of data to get a bird’s eye view of Jam. This week, we discuss: (00:22) Why Dani loves getting the board deck ready + who’s on Jam’s board (04:30) What happens in a Jam board meeting (06:19) How Dani & Irtefa show up for the board is different than every day at Jam (07:27) How...

What’s happening at Jam this week? We’re going after new tactics, new channels, doing more live onboardings— and figuring out how to do it all in a way that feels like Jam. This week, we discuss: (00:15) Irtefa just onboarded an enterprise customer (05:42) Ian is making a Jam tutorial video for self-serve onboarding (08:43) How can we better help new users who don’t know Jam? (13:47) Seth Godin in...

What’s happening this week at Jam? We’re shipping design updates, making decisions about a new product launching soon & discovering that intuition is a form of data. This week, Jam’s Lead Designer joins the podcast to discuss: (00:18) Sharing some design iterations to Jam's Slack app (05:06) Dogfooding at Jam (09:10) Irtefa’s very niche idea for new Jam swag: “Only 1 Network Error” (09:58) Fut...

What’s it like building Jam this week? We’re hiring a second designer and realizing it’s one of the hardest positions to fill. This week we discuss: (00:15) Why hiring a designer is harder than an engineer (6:57) How we look for designers at Jam (09:15) How our designers’ personalities have shaped the product (16:15) Working with sr. designers (tip: they don’t need your Canva file) (21:41) Talking...

What are the best marketing tactics for growing startups? We don’t really know yet, but we’re having a lot of fun figuring it out. This week, Ian and Ivanha talk about taking Jam marketing from 0 to 1. (00:36) The owl video experiment & "Content-Market Fit" (05:34) Getting comfortable with a blank canvas (08:49) Deciding the tone and messaging of feature launches (11:47) Sizzle reels & Bui...

Getting builders together has become a core part of what we do at Jam- with events for our community now happening 3-4 times a month. The truth is it hasn’t always been clear we should do this, especially as a remote team with users all over the world (150+ countries 🤯). This week, we share the story behind our approach to events and building community as a startup. (1:14) Why did we start hostin...

What happens when you spend months looking for the perfect candidate… And then the engineering team grows by 50% all at once?  This week, the Head of Engineering at Jam talks about the challenges of scaling and hiring in our startup: (00:26) Why hiring takes so long— 5 months iterating the process! (09:30) What’s going to break: the stuff we know, and what we don’t (11:01) Changing the format of d...

We’re trying something new: hitting record on an unfiltered conversation about what it’s actually like to build Jam each week.  This week we discuss: (00:29) This week’s offsite and building in person (04:32) Bringing up difficult or confrontational topics with the team (07:18) Choosing what to focus on when there’s a lot going on (08:02) Finding the right format for team retros (10:11) Breaking t...