Talking Businessly

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.

Steve is the founder of a well established creative agency called fifteen4 . Daniel used to work there! We asked Steve about how you do planning (especially with subcontractors) when you have lumpy sales cycles, and no predictable sales process. But he ended up giving us some free consulting on branding, positioning, and strategy for the target customers we want.

The sales strategy worked! Great leads are pouring in, and we're closing new business. We talk about our strategy on sales calls, and disqualifying ourselves quickly from the wrong kinds of leads. Also we are sleepy.

We want to find a long term partner, and we want your help. Then things come completely off the rails and we stop talking about business. John rants about healthcare "markets", we discuss Kendrick vs. J. Cole beef, and recommend tv shows.

We are looking for 2 big, gnarly, interesting projects to sink our teeth into over the next 6 months. And we want your help finding them. We also recap all of the smart little things we've learned from retrospectives in the last couple months.

We have an opportunity to do something big, difficult, and pretty different from our other clients. John went on the Over Engineered podcast to talk about whether sprints and estimates matter. We review our OKRs.