Benedikt: 00:08

Welcome to Slow and Steady, the podcast where you get to follow along as we build products in public. Each episode gives you an honest peek into our lives as we share our struggles, our wins, and everything in between. I am Benedikt, and I'm feeling rather busy.

Benedicte: 00:22

And I'm Benedicte. Today is September 1. This is episode number 249, and I'm feeling thankful today.

Benedikt: 00:30

That is a nice feeling.

Benedicte: 00:33

I had to look at the feeling wheel. Oh. I was like, Like

Benedikt: 00:37

one of those days. Yeah.

Benedicte: 00:39

Yeah, because I was like, you know, and then I looked at the feeling wheel and I realized that's what because I just went to London and visited my dad with a good friend that I've known since seventh grade, I think. And we went to this festival. I mean, we felt like we were not moms. We were not wives. We were not we were just, like, hanging out and, you know, our our our preference had had changed a little bit.

Benedicte: 01:05

Like, there were some grievances about the beer and and and stuff that would not happen when we were 16 at the festival in Raskilde, but, but I just felt like I mean, I can just jump on a plane to London and stay with my dad and go to a festival and all of that after you know getting married as you witnessed so I can say wife now for the first time.

Benedikt: 01:32

Yeah How does it feel? It feels

Benedicte: 01:36

very similar but there has been some just like talking to other people and you're trying to like explain it was always this like in our region we have a word called sambur. You know but and then you wanted to convey that it's more than just you know some random dude I'm living with it's like the father of my kid and it's so actually a couple of times now with where I've had to say or not had to say but where I could say like yeah my husband will come soon or you know my husband can reply to that or whatever and it's just like oh this is very easy!

Benedikt: 02:09

Yeah suddenly it's a known concept that even has a word!

Benedicte: 02:14

Exactly! So it feels so that's been, like, feel good. Other than that, like, our lives are very similar, but it was an amazing day.

Benedikt: 02:24

It was.

Benedicte: 02:25

I've seen some of the photos, I I look very happy.

Benedikt: 02:30

You looked very happy. It was a lot of fun. And I feel I feel like your happiness infected all of us. Like, I had a really good day. The food helped as well.

Benedikt: 02:42

And the doughnut tower thingy.

Benedicte: 02:46

The doughnut tower definitely helps. Any event, I might just have to start buying that for any event or maybe I should just keep it as like a wedding thing. But a doughnut tower is highly recommended.

Benedikt: 02:59

It looked like at first it was like is this decoration or is this real?

Benedicte: 03:05

Yeah because he was standing there for the whole event so I guess a lot of people had those questions until we kind of said hey let's have dessert and started picking donuts off of it.

Benedikt: 03:17

Yeah, it was awesome. Had a good time. Thanks for inviting me. And I also realized it always felt like you're super far away, but the flight is super short. I'm not sure why I didn't come visit you earlier.

Benedikt: 03:34

I don't know. Kind of stupid, I guess, in hindsight.

Benedicte: 03:40

You can come anytime and hang out in my lovely neighborhood. So for for everybody who hasn't visited me, but that Benedicte has experienced now is that I live in a very tight knit little community in the central of Oslo, and we brought the whole wedding down to the impromptu unofficial street party at the end of the night to kind of kick everybody out and have like a nice way of kicking everybody out of the house. And we hadn't told them and they were so happy we arrived because it was supposed to rain so it was like half cancelled it wasn't cancelled and all of us showed up and I think a lot of my friends even who live in Oslo were like woah what is this neighborhood because you can try to explain and then people are like are you in a cult? Like what, you know, this is weird when you try to kind of explain and then so several of our friends were like, okay, when the kids are out of the house, we're looking at at houses down here and we can all hang out again. So it was kind of like a marketing event for the for the neighborhood as well.

Benedikt: 04:46

It was very it was very cool. And, like, even even just visiting the place and just walking there. And I think the first night I did some sightseeing, I well, night, morning. My my flight was super early. So eventually, I did walk around the city, and I I reached your neighborhood and was like, yeah.

Benedikt: 05:06

This is different. Like, just from everything around, it looks like a proper big city and suddenly you're in this tiny little village inside of the big city. But in the end, the street party like it perfectly fit in there, I feel like.

Benedicte: 05:28

So I'll be sharing some photos that we can link to and folks can have a look because when you look from the ceremony, it looks like we are at the farm in the middle of nowhere in all of the photos, but it's actually our neighbor's garden. So who said yes, you know, to to hosting us? So that was lovely.

Benedikt: 05:45

That that was lucky because I feel like if that if they had said no, that would have been problematic.

Benedicte: 05:53

If they would have said no.

Benedikt: 05:54

People. Right?

Benedicte: 05:55

There was a lot of people. But if they had said no, I think we would just, like, close down part of the street like they did for the street party unofficially and just Right. Had the ceremony in our street and just, like and be like, whatevs. We're, you know, we're just we're just gonna

Benedikt: 06:10

do this. Fair enough.

Benedicte: 06:11

Yeah. No. But that it actually it really heightened the thing because then the chefs and everything could get all of their work done without us interfering while we were doing them doing the the ceremony. By

Benedikt: 06:23

the way, the the food was amazing, amazingly good. Like, I I don't think I had had the chance to try everything, but everything I tried was really good Except for the, like, tortilla bread thingies, they were a little bit dry. But other than that, like, everything was amazing.

Benedicte: 06:45

It's good that you could say something bad because then I know you meant the rest. Like, it's really

Benedikt: 06:49

Yeah. I I totally meant it. Like, everything was amazing except for those. They were, like, meh. But everything else was so good that I just

Benedicte: 06:57

Yeah.

Benedikt: 06:58

You can eat tacos And

Benedicte: 06:59

it was so fun. I think we had, like, three chefs working at the same time, and then it just gave a gave a good vibe. It gave us street fair festival vibe just from the food, which was the kind of why we

Benedikt: 07:13

For sure. Wanted. Yeah.

Benedicte: 07:14

Yeah. But other than that, have you done any work since last time? You've been you went to the wedding, and then you just had some time off. Are we just slacking these days?

Benedikt: 07:23

I yeah. I I mean, that's the summer. Right? Like, it's August. Like, no one's supposed to work in August, I guess.

Benedikt: 07:32

Yeah, I did not really do any work. We also didn't do anything special vacation wise. Like my trip to Oslo was like the furthest I got away from my living room, I guess. And then my wife had her birthday two weekends ago and we had her parents over and did go out with some friends and celebrated. And I baked a cake and stuff like that.

Benedikt: 08:01

So it wasn't like we did nothing, but we didn't do any traveling. And for the second week, we literally just stayed at home, watched Netflix, didn't do anything, and had a good time, which was it did its purpose. And I feel like by kicking off this entire two week span by going to Oslo, I was in vacation mode basically instantly. I was super productive working on the email CSS inlining thing that I talked about last episode. I was busy working on that right until Thursday night.

Benedikt: 08:39

And then on Friday, I got up super super early and went to Oslo. But, like, that was a hard cut. And I was a little bit worried that, like, it would I mean, sure. Like, it properly ruined my momentum on the work project. But then again, it's also a good thing that I didn't carry over that momentum into the vacation because then it's not a vacation anymore.

Benedikt: 09:02

So, yeah, I still have to pick get back Internet and pick it up. But, as I said, feeling rather busy. Like, I've been on a lot of calls and answering a lot of emails and doing a lot of maintenance stuff. It's also the first of the month, so I need to do some accounting and stuff like that. So I'm basically busy.

Benedikt: 09:22

I'm busy with other stuff and hopefully can get back into the exciting stuff by the end. No. Actually, I cannot get into the exciting stuff by the end of the week because my weekend's tomorrow. Having some more days off because it's the first day of school for my niece, and we're going to visit them and celebrate that big day. So it's a short week, I have to cram everything into three days, basically.

Benedicte: 09:46

Which makes it even busier.

Benedikt: 09:48

Exactly. But yeah, that's mostly it. The only one thing I did in between of all those calls is I implemented CIMD. I don't know what it even stands for, client ID metadata document or something like identification metadata document thingies, whatever. It's a new way to register all auth clients with your app, and apparently it's the new standard for MCP.

Benedikt: 10:22

So I figured we should probably implement this rather sooner than later so everything can still connect to our MCP server. So that's what I've been doing on and off between all the calls yesterday and today. And I think it's done. Still have to do some final tests and then deploy to production, but there was a nice nice little side project in between. Yeah.

Benedikt: 10:49

And in other news, the only other exciting thing that happened is we will be on Jason Cohen's new podcast next week. I think the recording is next week. Not sure when it comes out. But if you have not listened to it, it's called SmartBear Live, and it's just so good. There's a handful of episodes out already, and it's literally It feels like a two hour founder hot seat thing where the founder just gets on a call with Jason.

Benedikt: 11:26

Some he also started inviting other experts. And it's literally just uncomfortable question after uncomfortable question. Are you ready? I'm not sure anyone can be ready for this. And it's not like, I mean, if you have seen or heard Jason Cohen, he's a super smart dude and also a super nice dude.

Benedikt: 11:56

Yes, the question might be uncomfortable, but not in a bad way. You learn a lot from just hearing

Benedicte: 12:06

He wants to help you that's the vibe.

Benedikt: 12:08

He wants to help you.

Benedicte: 12:10

It's very much he wants to help you. This is the knowledge he has more than let me tell you everything I know I'm cool. It's very much always feels like, okay, this is a service to me. Like, I needed to hear this when I read his blog post.

Benedikt: 12:26

Exactly. Yeah. And that's very much the vibe of the podcast as well. But like, and it goes super deep. Like, That's also why I think I cannot prepare for this properly because no matter how much I prepare, you'll probably have a question where I'm like, Oh, I don't know the answer to that.

Benedikt: 12:49

So, yeah, that's going to happen next week. I'm

Benedicte: 12:53

was thinking more in terms of, like, what are you willing to share? Not because I think that because I I I haven't I haven't listened to the podcasts yet. I've just seen clips from them.

Benedikt: 13:02

Right.

Benedicte: 13:03

Yeah. And I and I've I've sensed that, like, there will be a lot of tough questions. And, you know, if you haven't prepped yourself a little bit in in advance about, like, what do we wanna share publicly or not, even though I know you're very transparent, but, like, knowing that might be, where that line is might be easier

Benedikt: 13:21

That to answer questions was one of the first questions we asked ourselves internally. A, do we want to do this? And B, where do we draw the line? And we decided to basically make this a Pants Down Thingy. There's only a few small things that I don't think we're willing to share, but other than that, like revenue metrics, we figured we'd just share it all because that makes makes it more helpful and I guess also more transparent and more interesting.

Benedicte: 13:58

And I mean, if you if you didn't record this podcast and did the consulting, I don't know if you even know if he does consulting, it it would not be cheap.

Benedikt: 14:06

It probably would not be cheap. That was one

Benedicte: 14:10

of the reasons. Bit of transparencies. Exactly. With that.

Benedikt: 14:14

That was one of the reasons why we did not hesitate long to agree to this. And I'm just looking forward to it. I know it's going to be uncomfortable, but hopefully we learn a thing or two. One of the things I feel like that we're struggling with a little bit is we're doing this for nine years by now. Next year is going to be tenth year of user list.

Benedikt: 14:45

I think we're lacking this little bit of outside perspective, and we're very much in the hamster wheel of the day to day, even more so these days than in the early days. Because the thing is working sort of and running sort of, and there's a lot of stuff that just needs to be handled, right? Like customer support and development and ongoing marketing efforts. And I think we rarely take the time to take a step back and actually look at the big picture and think about stuff strategically. And sure, we kind of know that, and it's on us that we're not good at doing this regularly.

Benedikt: 15:27

But I'm having hopes that this is an outside forcing function to just force us to think about these things and force us to talk about or talk through the problems and potential solutions maybe. I'm not sure that will be I mean, there will not be silver bullets for sure. Well, maybe there are, but

Benedicte: 15:51

You never probably know! Hope he gets people That back would be interesting. Like if he did another like try to get most of the founders on again in a year

Benedikt: 16:03

to see. Maybe. I don't know. I mean, project is super new, so I'm not sure he has thought about that

Benedicte: 16:10

I think part it's part of marketing for his new book. I pre ordered, so it just arrived. The first first the hidden yeah yeah yeah I just started skimming through the introduction it seems very good and right now I don't why I think some of it might apply to we but I was like oh I should have had that like six months ago when I was still at Alceta because like some of those things it was like that's exact yeah yes we need to do that yes we need to do that yes some of it still applies to to WE because we have a similar situation where the founder and operations team has been doing this for a long time and as I said before for a long time we didn't really have anything to sell so everybody became a little demotivated on marketing and kind of the sales funnel and everything And we're starting that up again now and I can see that like I have fresh perspective where some things they've just complicated in, you know, in their their head from like past things that have happened that aren't true anymore or that maybe never were true, but it was, like, true in that team.

Benedicte: 17:14

And I was like, well, we could just hit, like we could have just gone into, you know, our marketing system just, sent an email to, like, these 300 people and said that we had trial rides down in Oslo on Sunday. Like, just sent it off to all of them. But they were like, well, then we we didn't have, like, a trial ride system in place. I was like, we we don't need a trial ride system in place where when we're showing up at a location, you just need to blast them and say we're there. Come if you want to because we're gonna be there anyway.

Benedicte: 17:45

But it you know, because they've had the trial ride system that isn't in place anymore. So you know? And then it's like, oh, yeah. We could have. And that's like you know?

Benedicte: 17:54

It's it's just

Benedikt: 17:55

like Exactly.

Benedicte: 17:56

Like, that's that's

Benedikt: 17:57

exactly what I'm hoping to get out of this. Like yeah.

Benedicte: 17:59

Yeah. One of the things he says that everybody should do, which is so hard and we should do at We Too, it's like, look at your favorite customers and figure out how they differ from your worst customers. Because often you just look at them and you look at the numbers and you are like, oh, these are the characteristics of our best customers. But then all of those characteristics are true for your worst customers as well. So you have to find that difference because otherwise you're just gonna get equal amounts of both and your worst customer costs you way too much money.

Benedicte: 18:31

You have to find a way to find that's also one of the things we need to hone in on I guess. Yes. As I said, I've read maybe three of the ones three of the multiplies or something, and this was one of them.

Benedikt: 18:41

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Benedicte: 18:43

The one I remembered.

Benedikt: 18:45

I just started re I actually started reading it on the plane to Oslo. Yeah. And I wanted to finish it by the time we record, but I have a feeling that's not going to happen. But hopefully, can at least do the whale analysis, like figuring out who your customers are and, like, where they fall on the spectrum. That's that's the thing that I kinda wanna get done before we record because I have a feeling he'll he's going to ask about that in some way

Benedicte: 19:12

or not. And it's so embarrassing not knowing if you've already got the book. So the whale analysis is where you you plop, like, your most like, who are your most profitable customers, and then you plop them into a graph. And you can see that, like, the top 20% stands for, like, what, 90% of your revenue or something. And then or those kinds of things

Benedikt: 19:33

that Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Benedicte: 19:35

Yeah. So on that note, I've been doing a major lift, around our communication channels. And we because it was, like, all over the place. And now that we are co kind of creating a little monolith, I spent some time working on a system or an architecture that seems to be working. If we say, oh, now we wanted to recover card via SMS, it's easier to say, okay, let's do it via SMS as well or just via the ticketing system and then I also realized that the ticketing system or support system can do a lot of heavy lifting for some of our our harder flows.

Benedicte: 20:10

So both for like recovery, with a recover cart because a lot of people in our case a lot of our customer just wanna ask a million questions. And it's a little annoying, but we're still at that stage where we kinda have to do it. And that will, like, get them over, you know, to actually, like, give us their credit card information, and it's very hard to automate all of that. Like, AI can help a little bit with, like, drafting responses if we put more data about our bikes into the system. I see because some are like, is this engine on that bike?

Benedicte: 20:40

And, like, at least I have no idea because I don't. But our operations guys obviously knows, but then if I could put all of this into the little AI brain and the support system, maybe we could get some more semi automated, semi manual system. But for instance, for theft, we were working earlier in the air on the theft flow, that is a wizard, and you go through the flow as a customer if your bike has been stolen, and it's mostly to get them to do the steps needed as fast as possible, like calling the police, But at some point, we have to step in and kind of follow-up, and it can go any way. Like, trying to make this an automated system is just it you know, we don't have that many thefts. We just need we need them to do a couple of steps, and then we have to take over.

Benedicte: 21:26

And then I was like, oh, we could just push that into the ticket system system as well now that we have a great ticketing system with, you know, API access and everything, and you can start a ticket by sending an email to the customer saying, like, hey. We received your test report, and then we can follow-up manually. So I've been doing a lot of work on around that, and it feels really good because now we can, you know, we can act and also the prospects, they've we've had all these forms people fill out, got lost in the somewhere in the system, the matrix. They also just kick off tickets now where they can get be followed up and the questions can be answered. So I think we're on a path that will be super helpful in terms of sales, hopefully.

Benedicte: 22:08

And then we can start figuring out who are the you know, how how how can we unqualify people so they don't cost us, way too much. But it's been a lot of fun, but also weird because it's been very AI intensive. And I find that when I go on a break and I come back, it's even harder to get back.

Benedikt: 22:27

Mhmm.

Benedicte: 22:28

And by break, mean a weekend. Harder to get back into the code because it, you know, it wasn't mine. Mine to begin with, but it was mine, but it wasn't mine. And you have

Benedikt: 22:37

to be like

Benedicte: 22:37

hey what did we discuss last week like what's the status on this because because it's a little bit early but but also pushing things that are you know larger efforts that wouldn't have been this quick had it not been But through all this, my new gripe, my new soapbox, I don't want personal API tokens. I want the account to have API tokens. They use the vehicle like service tokens or I don't I don't care. They I've had so many issues at We after taking over because A Pai tokens were connected to people who have left the company.

Benedikt: 23:17

Right.

Benedicte: 23:17

And it's a hassle to kind of figure all of that out. And then in the case of the support system, I don't want the ticket replies to come from me. I want it to come from like the robot or the know, it needs to have a name and a sender ID that is not me. And then obviously we can make another user and say that that's the systems user and we'll probably do that. But even then I want anything that's created by the AI or by just regular code to be marked with a little robot icon or I don't know we need to standardize this but I need the other people on the team to know if it was me who wrote that email manually as a reply while I'm when I'm working in operations or if it was me as the system who sent this reply.

Benedicte: 24:05

You might have already have this in place, Benedicte, but I don't know how your system is working right now. But this is this is my it's my wish to all of you SaaSes out there.

Benedikt: 24:18

Yes. Yeah.

Benedicte: 24:19

Let me

Benedikt: 24:20

It makes so much sense.

Benedicte: 24:21

Authenticate as a system slash robot slash agent slash whatever that is not me. And let the other admins delete it, refresh it, change it, roll it, all of those things.

Benedikt: 24:34

Yeah. That's that's basically how we do it in user list. The API tokens you use to send data are associated with the account, not with the user. And that also means that everyone who has access to the account has also access to the token. But, yeah, it is what it is.

Benedikt: 24:52

It doesn't make any sense to tie it to a user in that sense. So we did No. That in the first

Benedicte: 24:59

In some way, not set up. People would make other front ends to allow their kind of users that have set up their team to do things via the API, and then it could make sense. But then it's more should be more of a auth flow where they authenticate us themselves.

Benedikt: 25:15

Right.

Benedicte: 25:15

And and then get a a token, and they're working as themselves. But because I think that's why a lot of the personal tokens came about, that it was supposed to identify you as the kind of person doing

Benedikt: 25:28

things. I mean, the the But I think, like, if there's a room for to do. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Benedikt: 25:32

Exactly.

Benedicte: 25:33

There there's room for both. Because if I made if I don't like this interface for some reason, I make my own little interface, you know, I I manually type things. I don't want to get the robot icon.

Benedikt: 25:44

Yeah. Yep. Exactly. And that's also like, that's, yeah, that's how the Aura stuff and user list works as well. Those are like personal access tokens, right?

Benedikt: 25:54

They are tied to a user. But they're also the thing you use to interact with the data and act as you, right? That's what you do by manually clicking in the UI and stuff like that. But everything that's automated shouldn't go through that system, right? Unless it's impersonating you in some way.

Benedikt: 26:13

Like the MCP is also personal access tokens.

Benedicte: 26:16

Mhmm.

Benedikt: 26:17

Which arguably sometimes.

Benedicte: 26:19

Yeah. Well, then that could be I I would like then to be, okay. It's me because I'm doing the work through the MCP, but I still then want, like, a little robot icon. That's what I think we should all standardize for. Cute little robot next to everything that you didn't Right.

Benedicte: 26:35

Really do yourself or, like, that came through the API. Because then it it would make sense for other users too because I I sent support request and I was like, could it be, like, generated by API or something? And I realized, no. We don't want, like, the other ops people in our team. You know, that oh,

Benedikt: 26:53

Party.

Benedicte: 26:53

Yeah. Was Party. Doing I was doing weird things to the screen. So whoever is watching, there was balloons. Yeah.

Benedicte: 27:01

They wouldn't really know what the API is. But now with all of the agent work in AI, like, even more people are getting more familiar. I think, you know, having a little bit of a signage that this isn't necessarily, you know, manually done by the the person behind this this this sender could be could be smart.

Benedikt: 27:22

Yeah. Agreed.

Benedicte: 27:23

Yeah. And then in the other news, our king died.

Benedikt: 27:28

I know. Heard about that. Yes.

Benedicte: 27:31

So we have a new king. It felt like a major milestone, but I'm not that

Benedikt: 27:40

this like the second king you remember? It been another one in your lifetime?

Benedicte: 27:48

Remember the last king died. So when I was about Lillian's age, I was in late elementary school, King died, and then king Haral king Haral took over, and now we're at king Hakon.

Benedikt: 28:06

Makes sense.

Benedicte: 28:07

So yeah. So I think maybe I need to take Lillian down to the castle and look at, like, all the flowers, and I don't know if we're we might be too late because I remember it being, like, a very big event when I was, like, her age. But I also think the king had a little bit more of a presence in my life than it has in hers because we have we had also had the Olympics arrived before then, he would, like, you know I think he was alive for the Olympics, or was he not? I can't remember. But I feel like he was more you know, it was a different time.

Benedicte: 28:38

Right? It was it was Right. She felt like a figure. And then, yeah, I remember, like, I made a drawing and would put it down on on the castle grounds. And it it was a big thing.

Benedicte: 28:48

I don't think Lillian feels that she kinda knew the king situation at all. But then also, you know, when she grows older, it could be nice that, like, been here for this historical moment. You know?

Benedikt: 29:04

Right. And, you know,

Benedicte: 29:06

so maybe we'll go and see the procession tomorrow or something. We'll figure that out. We'll figure that out. Yeah. And I forgot to say, I was thankful for everyone who showed up for the wedding.

Benedicte: 29:18

I kinda said I was happy for the wedding, but I was very thankful that so many people wanted to travel and join us for the join us in the celebrations.

Benedikt: 29:30

Once in a lifetime opportunity

Benedicte: 29:33

for Hopefully.

Benedikt: 29:34

Percent of the people, I guess. I

Benedicte: 29:40

will be very embarrassed when it took us seventeen years to get married if we get divorced. But you will never know.

Benedikt: 29:48

Whatever. Right? I mean, let's hope not. But it comes

Benedicte: 29:55

to that, it comes to that. Yeah. That is true. Yeah. Okay.

Benedicte: 29:59

I guess that's it.

Benedikt: 30:01

I guess so too. Yeah. Quick and easy, rather than slow and steady, and, talk to you in a couple weeks.

Benedicte: 30:10

See you around the interwebs. Bye.