34: Maker vs. Manager

It’s a Snow Day for Ben, and Derrick shares his woes about setting up his home office with two new, Dell monitors and his MacBook Pro featuring only two USB-C ports for a hub. You would think that laptops would offer more of a variety of ports. Other than that, things are going great for Derrick.

On March 5, Derrick pushed out his manifesto via Twitter. In response, people shared, retweeted, and posted supportive thoughts and messages. Developers resonated with his message. And of course, there were a few skeptics who wondered how Derrick’s ideas were different from other team communication and management options. There will always be multiple tools that can be used, but Derrick has a particular approach to what he offers.

Today’s Topics Include:

Maker vs. Manager: A good way to draw a line between how different people feel about a tool
“This is people problem, not a tool problem” There are a lot of people who just don’t get it.
Tools help guide the way users use the product and how your team works
Some tools generate stress and interruptions rather than constructive work progress
Goal: Communication centralized in one place
Email is now a black hole, and no longer for actionable items
Important information can get lost in all the noise created by some tools
Derrick plans to keep his email subscriber list warm by not over-emailing them without a product available yet
Derrick has received 400 emails so far as a result of his Twitter push and plans to do outreach, development, and validation with customers
Attribution Tracking App: Ben encouraged Derrick to request pre-pay for future products, like for the app he was thinking about building; pre-payments offers validation
Derrick has not determined a price plan or how to sell the dream yet
Derrick plans to keep thinking through product decisions on pen and paper
Deliver on the promise of the tool guiding people to use good communication patterns
Tools need to maintain connectedness
Entrepreneurship Porn: Share your thoughts, ideas, process, and journey with others
Engagement and Authenticity: A give-and-take between you and your subscribers
Journal milestones; the more chronicling, the better
Derrick’s prototype includes Phoenix, Elixir, and GraphQL
Ben shares his experience with Haskell vs. Elm; he has more questions than answers at this point
Haskell has a chance of being the gateway drug of functional programming languages
Attend meet-ups and conferences to learn more about Haskell and Elm
With programming languages, you need to be willing to make some sacrifices
Ben is beginning to appreciate aspects of project management and positively influencing processes

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Links and resources:

Ben Orenstein Website; Twitter
Derrick Reimer Website
Basecamp
Twist
Drip
Calendly
Jason Fried
Startup Stories Podcast
GraphQL
Elixir
Phoenix
Haskell; Programming in Haskell book
Elm
Ruby on Rails
Thoughtbot