Talking Businessly

Daniel and John are out on the speaker circuit. John wants to give more developer talks. We want to mentor more programmers, because that has been an amazing source of clients. And we might convince our friend to become a Laravel dev.

Joel Clermont joins us for a discussion about our pricing model. Like us, he has tried a lot of models, and walked away from most of them. He gives us feedback on our latest idea.

Papercuts progress.  Daniel spent some time with the dutch.  Getting busy and landing business.  John give talks, Daniel gives talks.  Retro-driven company. 

Thunk is building a SaaS app. We talk about the plan, where the idea came from, and how it'll work. We also brainstorm ideas for the future. 

We review our 2023 goals, and set better goals for 2024. 

Allison is a former colleague of John's, and we're thrilled to have her on the panel of mentors. She has been a developer, product manager, and executive. She has a lot of good perspective on how developers can think more like PMs, and why that matters. We talk processes, metrics, building teams, living with legacy code, and a lot more.

Also: is programming art or science? John finds reading painful. Daniel finds small to-dos painful. Why are we paying so many Quickbooks fees? The 2024 budget.

We reflect on a problem with a client. Then we discuss the importance of learning new patterns, adopting new tools, and sticking to conventions.

After a scheduling snafu, we needed to use our recording slot to have our weekly check-in with Jacob. This is our regular roundup of clients, plus some pleasantries and goofs.

Daniel is jetlagged after returning from Sydney, where he launched Verbs at Laracon AU. We talk about the launch, talk about John's Kickstarter for Colossi, and do a quick catchup on our OKRs.

You can buy John's game on Kickstarter right now!  Daniel's new event sourcing package Verbs is nearly complete, and John loves it. Join us as we spend 40 minutes gassing each other up.

We do some bits. We talk about good practices while pair programming. Then we wonder if product development processes primarily exist to compensate for trust issues. High trust environments are the only ones we want to work in.

John is tanking a lot of bureaucracy Daniel is writing a LOT of code Daniel is going to Laracon Australia We discuss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgV6M1LyfNY

According to ChatGPT we discussed: Mentoring and meetings Age discussion Product management Splitting time between two companies Home inspector conference in Atlantic City Billing strategies Different pricing models (hourly, project-based, retainer) Composite team approach (offering product management, engineering, design) Value proposition for small companies Communicating and marketing the value...

We catch up as usual, and check in on the state of all our goals.

On this episode we dig deep and do a post-mortem on a messy wrap-up to a client engagement. Our key takeaways: Overcommunicate Overcommunicate some more

This episode is late because of an interesting process breakdown. Verbs Vacation A New "vision-mission-value" The Pre-Mortem

Aaron Francis (@aarondfrancis) officially joins Thunk's panel of mentors! Aaron gives John feedback on his blogs, and provides LOADS of good ideas for how to improve it and grow the audience. 

Who are our guys? We run through a list of potential panelists for our panel of mentors and discuss what it would event look like to empanel them.

John's game Colossi is almost ready The sales funnel is working Max is having a hard one We've made progress on our goals This is not the episode about hiring a mentor

We have glowing feedback for each other Daniel's blog feedback made the blog a lot better Getting creative with business development tactics We discuss the company's Vision, Mission, and Values

Daniel has feedback on John's blog posts.  Why do feedback? Why is it so painful?  The "FG Scale"  Does Jacob feel empowered to give us feedback?  Should we keep our docs in Slab?  Why set goals? What are OKRs?  In the back half of the episode, we get super detailed deciding what our goals are for the rest of 2024.