A podcast about what it’s really like to build Jam.dev, week by week. No fluff, just real conversations on upcoming features and startup moments. New episodes every Friday.
Today we're sharing our first impressions of GitHub's Copilot code review! Oskar and Tomasz are both senior devs on the Jam team, and share what we've found while building with it these past weeks.Let's get into it!0:00 Intro1:46 A real example from our codebase3:13 Oskar & Tomasz share why the feature is valuable for them5:03 Why Copilot's ability to catch every typo is actually a big deal6:52 Besides naming variables & catching typos, where is Copilot Code Review useful? Real Jam example w/ permissions!8:08 Imagining what's possible for Copilot w/ JamSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
Today we're diving deep into our first automated testing suite with Playwright! There's 180k+ people Jamming in 75+ countries, which is so awesome! But it also brings up a variety of web compatibility edge cases that can be tricky to identify with manual QA testing. So to keep shipping fast, we're making our automated testing more robust. Today, Jam Eng, Aidan, is sharing all the details with you all!On today's episode:(00:00) Intro(00:25) Why we added automated testing on top of manual QA(02:10) Walkthrough of Jam's Playwright testing suite(03:27) The biggest challenge of setting up our tests(05:04) Demo of our fetch requests testing page(10:37) How the new testing suite fits into our dev cyclesSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.New episodes drop every other Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!Join 175k+ happy users at https://jam.dev/ for 1-click bug reports that engineers love.
In this episode, we're sharing behind the scenes of how we use Figma at Jam! Our designer Martin gets into the details behind how we organize Figma files, handle developer handoffs, and build out our files over the course of the product development lifecycle.Ready to see our Figma? Let's go!(00:00) Intro(00:38) Real questions from Twitter & Reddit about Figma organization(01:52) Making Figma files part of the design process (we like double diamond!)(05:05) Page hierarchy: collaboration, discovery, exploration, review & development(07:06) What should be a new file vs. a page?(14:07) Figma playgrounds, drafts & tips for exploration(15:50) How to organize & document your files for design reviews with developers(23:27) Figma tour of our settings page & steps we take for design + dev alignmentSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every other Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
We just launched AI that writes your bug reports and today, we're sharing the story with the team that built it! We'll get into why we use Smaller Language Models instead of the larger LLMs, moved to an opt-in user experience, and all the user feedback that shaped what the feature is today.Let's get into it! (00:00) Intro(01:14) Why we changed the UX from opt-out to opt-in(02:35) How early access helped us fine-tune AI (not everything people Jam is a bug!)(03:53) Setting our quality bar to ship AI & how to measure it(06:02) Our biggest early access breakthroughs: auto-generated repro steps & short titles(08:55) Decisions we made to prioritize AI speed & accuracy(12:15) The story of how Jam AI was engineered from a van, Greece & sunny beachesCheck out Jam AI at: https://jam.dev/aiSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
We just launched AI that writes bug reports for you! It's our biggest launch yet, and we're really excited to show you all behind the scenes of designing AI. We spent 4 months iterating, testing feedback mechanisms and how to deal with AI latency, while making it still feel like Jam. So today, we're sharing all of the UX that didn't make the cut.Ready to see our design graveyard? Let's go!(0:00) Intro(1:07) Demoing Jam AI(2:58) Initial Concept Storyboards(8:44) AI-Generated Titles(11:04) Opt-in vs. Opt-out(12:09) Getting feedback(16:09) Summarizing States & Animation Concepts(21:29) The Final Animation(23:47) Reproduction stepsSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every other Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
Today we're showing you our new component library! Jam designer, Martin & developer Petar share how we implemented a design system w/ Radix UI. And walk through how it works from Figma to React by building a nav bar, live on the pod!Hope you enjoy (you can watch everything on YouTube!)
We built video annotations with tldraw! It's a new feature we're launching next week, and we're really excited for all you Jamming to try it. So today, Jam engineers: Max, Aidan, and Rui get into the technical details of implementing the tldraw library - so you can draw stuff while recording your screen.Excited to show you what we built!(00:37) Why implementing annotations was so different than the blur tool(02:55) How Max discovered we already had a tldraw license(04:25) Why we love tldraw: React-SVG dual architecture & more details(08:55) Demo of video annotations & why it's different than Jam's screenshot feature(11:29) Why we ultimately decided to use tldraw for video too (it looks so nice!)(12:52) Our biggest takeaway for building w/ 3rd party librariesSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
We're getting ready to release Jam's newest feature, the blur tool! We can't wait for you all to try it, so this week on Building Jam we're showing you everything. Figma walkthrough, staging demo, and all the unexpected twists and turns of blurring what's in your browser — as you're recording!(1:08) A lil blur tool demo(2:26) Figuring out an extra setting w/o cluttering our extension(5:27) Selecting, clicking + more design details in Figma(6:35) Why not make the selector a strawberry?(8:30) Why we decided against per-team access (more free blur)(13:14) The biggest eng challenge? Everything but the core feature!Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
Our startup is changing! This year we went from 11 to 20 people, launched a new product (+30 features!), and learned a lot along the way. So for this episode, all of us recorded our biggest lessons of the year. We're excited to share them with you all, hope you enjoy!What we learned:(00:21) Irtefa, co-founder(01:29) Chris, designer(04:50) Cyrus, engineer(06:54) Tomasz, engineer(07:48) Aidan, engineer(10:05) Ivanha, marketer(11:32) Ian, creator(13:20) Rui, engineer(15:10) Oskar, engineer(16:21) Dani, co-founderSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
We just had our first company hackathon! It was so much fun to get together & build stuff IRL! From AI agents to help you fix bugs & test fixes to silly buttons that break websites, we're excited to show you what it was like. This episode is different than usual, tune in on YouTube to see it all. We hope you enjoy!Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
This year we launched a new customer support product, 100,000+ people joined Jam, and big companies signed up entire teams! So, it was time to rethink how we welcome users to a new way of reporting & fixing bugs. Today, Jam designer, Martin, and developer, Petar, get into the details and challenges of building new onboarding flows to make it easy for anyone to start Jamming - no matter how they found it!We discuss:00:23 Martin's classic lil roast of our old onboarding02:28 Figma tour of Jam's new onboarding flows for self-serve & ‘invite your team'07:01 The first-ever question in Jam onboarding08:04 Getting data from prototypes before launching to our users (community surveys & Maze)13:20 Illustrations vs. the actual product UI to make onboarding easier16:39 Petar gets into variations for edge cases, live from our PR environment!Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
Today, we're trying something a little different! This week we hosted an awesome group of engineers w/ Cloudflare and Sourcegraph in SF for tech talks about the future of engineering w/ AI. The talks were so good - we grabbed the highlights to discuss and share them with you all!Let's get into it!(00:10) Why we love hosting dev events(01:24) Making AI work for large messy codebases - Beyang Liu, CTO at Sourcegraph(06:23) Why S(mall)LMs are the future of AI - Tejas Kumar, AI at DataStax(12:06) Rebuilding the terminal with AI - Zach Bai, tech lead at Warp(15:51) 5 things we learned building AI at Jam Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
Every week we share the story behind building our startup. Today, Jam eng, Aidan shares how we handled migration to MV3! Dig into all the technical details with us, and the challenges of doing a complete refactor of our browser extension + rolling it out to 150k users.We discuss:(0:40) The biggest challenge of the MV3 refactor(4:03) How MV3 changed our product roadmap(4:50) Why getting Jam's idle states for version updates was harder in MV3(9:56) The capture eng team & the support flows they took over(11:19) Balancing the scope & urgency of MV3 w/ building new features our users want(12:46) Now that we're on MV3 - what's next for capture?(17:06) Come work w/ us! New open role for Technical Support & QA!Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
We're so excited about AI - not just the AI features we're building for Jam (can't wait to show you!) but all the great tooling that helps us move faster at our startup. So, today we're sharing the 13 AI tools we actually use — almost every day — how we use them, and why we love them!Let's get into it!(00:07) Gemini & OpenAI(01:02) GLIF(03:32) GitHub Copilot(04:33) Promptfoo(05:20) Wondercraft & Descript(07:17) OpusClip(08:51) Grain(09:51) ChatPRD(10:34) Perplexity(11:28) Claude(11:46) ChatGPTSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
The design team is growing! Jam's new designer, Martin shipped a whole new UX in the Jam workspace — in his first week (
Our biggest launch yet is a whole new product! Jam for Customer Support is the first extension-less version of Jam. We spent over 6 months building & testing it ourselves. Today we're sharing what that was like with all of you! In this episode, the engineers, PM & designer behind Jam for Customer Support discuss the challenges & moments making this new Jam.(00:13) Engineering challenges to capture end-user logs w/o a browser extension.(07:07) The purple mountain + more design iterations that didn't make it to prod(12:50) Decisions we made to simplify onboarding(14:10) Learnings from early access & the changes we made for GA(17:28) A cat, Australia, and other edge casesSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
We got to chat with Tamar Ben-Shachar! She's an engineering leader at Retool, and previously led eng teams at Stripe — so we wanted to know everything. Super excited to share this conversation with you all. We get into feature launches, eng hiring, and our favorite - Tamar's definition for product readiness: done, done & done.(0:26) What themes has Tamar noticed across exceptional engineering teams?(2:17) What does ready mean? Tamar's "done, done, done"(7:04) Dani wants to know how Tamar balances a high quality bar w/ scope creep(14:01) The impact of Retool's "quality bar dashboard"(15:32) Tamar's advice for eng hiring at startups(20:38) Dani & Irtefa share what it was like hiring Jam's first engineer(28:23) Building the ability as a team to say "no"(39:07) Tamar's advice to engineers: boast about your work!Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
Every week we get to talk to product experts about our startup challenges. Now we're hitting record on those off-the-record conversations, so you can learn with us too! Today, Staff Community Manager at Vercel, Pauline Narvas, joins us to talk about how to connect w/ devs on the internet.(00:38) Pauline's advice on building community w/ a global user-base(6:18) Do we need a community platform? How do we choose which one?(11:32) Forum-type platforms & why Vercel chose Discourse(16:40) Pauline tells us how to do Jam office hours online and keep them fun(19:46) Dani wants to start a debug support group(21:27) How Pauline started community sessions at GitHub & what she's planning for Vercel(24:19) Making our community a place that helps people achieve their goals(27:06) How Pauline measures community success: like a product!(32:09) Ian wants to know how content feeds into driving a healthy community(34:52) Where to join Vercel's community: vercel.communitySubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
We're getting ready to ship 3 new AI features! So, today, 2 engineers leading AI development at Jam, Tomasz and Oskar, join the podcast to give us an update on Jam AI. We're so excited for you all to use it. And to share how we're making it, how it's going, and the tools we're using. Hope you enjoy listening!We discuss:(00:13) The tools we're using to build Jam AI(02:56) Tomasz shares the challenges of non-deterministic software(06:00) Jam's process to build AI: data, validation & a lot of dogfooding(09:00) Irtefa's message to Jam users waiting for more AI features(10:00) How we evaluate our prompts(12:25) Unexpected LLM prompt hacks we've discovered(16:22) What's the experimentation stage of AI development like at Jam?Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
It's launch day! Which means… this is not a normal episode! We partnered w/ Cloudflare, LogRocket, Sourcegraph + 6 more awesome devtools to make a 10-tool stack, free for devs to build their ideas. So for today's episode, we joined some of our friends from Dev Starter Pack on PodRocket, to share the details and behind the scenes of the launch.(00:00) Intros: Beyang (Sourcegraph), Dani (Jam), Matt (LogRocket), Ricky (Cloudflare)(01:33) Dani shares the inspiration for Dev Starter Pack: Cloudflare!(02:34) Sourcegraph's mission to make it so everyone in the world can code(05:53) How to add and fix AI with the tools included in the pack(07:24) Why we launched a 10 tool stack & the future vision of Dev Starter Pack(09:09) Excitement about the wave of AI-native startups & more creative engineering(16:28) Beyang explains why LLMs can't code for production yet(20:45) Will the AI future arrive sooner than we expect? Let's go build it!Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
It's a design episode! With Campsite! This week on Building Jam, Brian Lovin, CEO at Campsite, and Chad Pugh, Jam designer, join us to talk about what it means to build a design-led company — the path from designer to founder, designer personas, and the internal processes that make it possible to build beautiful software.We discuss:(00:28) Brian explains the differences b/w Designer and designer(04:40) How Brian came to terms w/ his designer persona: what do you get excited about?(07:24) How do you go from an idea in Figma, to building a technical product & company?(12:04) The intention behind Campsite design + the companies leading software design trends(14:10) Dani asks Brian what he thinks about an early Jam feature - should we bring it back?(18:34) Irtefa makes the case for feature add-ons to keep it simple, Dani wants to implement it immediately(19:29) Brian says we should try it & also the GitHub model - lots of customizable settings!(22:38) Stepping into unicorn territory, Brian's advice for hiring designersSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
This week on Building Jam, we get an inside look at what makes Warp's product development unique. Founder and CEO Zach Lloyd shares how engineers are directly responsible for project outcomes (rather than PMs), the team's thesis around building consumer-grade developer tools, and how Warp approaches the speed vs. quality tradeoff.We discuss:(00:52) Building consumer-grade developer tools(03:14) What does a feature launch look like at Warp?(07:21) Zack's advice for deciding what to build(10:55) Warp's team structure: core, AI, collaboration & revenue(14:11) Why engineers at Warp do PM-style interviews(19:00) “Founder Mode” and trusting the team to build a product that makes people happy(22:18) Trading notes on how Jam and Warp balance quality with velocity(26:00) Zack tells us about what it was like when Warp (40 people) was Jam's size (18!)(30:46) Growth at Warp is building community and showing the productSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
Building our startup, we get to meet and learn from the experts behind incredible products. Now we're sharing these behind-the scenes conversations on our podcast, so you can learn from our journey too. Today, Colin Sidoti, CEO at Clerk, joins us to talk about how they build product.We discuss:(00:29) The first thing we want to know: how is Clerk design so crisp and good?(04:24) Comparing product cycles - Clerk's demo day & Jam's 25% guideline(08:45) Clerk's 1st step in product development is writing the docs and it makes so much sense!(13:59) Team structure & hiring empathetic engineers who double as PMs(19:00) What dev profile is the best at writing docs?(20:55) Trading notes from when Clerk was Jam's size (18 people!)(24:47) Behind the scenes of Clerk's 200X growth in January 2023(27:59) Colin gives us advice for navigating this exciting and challenging stage of growth at JamSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
We got to learn from behavioral science expert, Matt Wallaert! Over the past two decades, Matt has led behavioral science at Microsoft and Frog Design, and currently advises Fortune 500s on how to create products that help people make good changes. He joined us on Zoom for a lunch & learn - an incredible opportunity we're excited to share with you all as this week's episode. We discuss: (00:24) Understanding behavioral science & how it applies to building product (09:05) Matt's favorite behavioral statement from Uber + steps to create one (20:53) The sufficiency test: Is submitting bugs the behavior we want to change? (31:10) Matt recommends partnerships based on Jam's behavioral statement (33:23) The #1 mistake Matt sees when companies implement behavioral science (35:13) The 5 behavioral archetypes for Jam bug reporting + why people buy M&MsSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
Season 2 of Building Jam is all about learning from builders we admire. When we used WorkOS to build Single Sign-On for the Jam Enterprise plan, we loved our developer experience so much that we wanted to learn more. This week, CEO Michael Grinich joins us to give an inside look into what it has taken to build their product.In this episode, we discuss:(01:06) How does WorkOS determine what meets their quality bar?(03:45) The importance of "the second 80%" of any project(06:55) Internal Operating Principle: “Earn the wow”(10:53) How to put a great product experience into words(15:02) The quality vs. speed dilemma for startups(19:49) How does WorkOS write docsSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there! Join 125k+ happy users at jam.dev for 1-click bug reports that engineers love.
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) Implications for what developers will build(11:58) Why progress with AI is like a stepwise function(14:09) How LLMs will lead to more personalization & accessibility(20:54) Why AI raises the bar for all software developmentSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!Join 125k+ happy users at jam.dev for 1-click bug reports that engineers love.
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 boring to us!)(02:32) Finding alignment as the codebase and team get bigger(05:06) A sneak peek at a new feature Aidan just built(10:42) Max and Aidan debate how much DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) is too much(12:53) Dani shares the 7 different versions of Jam's UI before we found PMF!
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 connect with people.(03:07) Our top community challenge is trying to scale as our userbase grows - so what do we do?(07:10) The reason Jam doesn't have a community Slack & Jason's experience on why maybe we should(11:33) Jason wrote a book about memes, so we asked him for advice on how to make Jam a meme (philosophically)(16:23) Brand marketing vs. performance marketing w/ a Nike cameo(18:49) Jason, the Head of Growth at Product Hunt, says we should embrace the cringe(22:41) Our 3rd Product Hunt launch: Jam Genies(29:46) Jason's feedback on Jam's approach to community-led growthSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
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 pod(00:25) How do we scale dev community as our userbase grows?(04:43) Lizzie's Twitter, making real friends & sharing about more than work(08:18) The different sub developer communities & the DevRel vibes(13:15) Jam Airlines: supporting more open source devs(17:17) Brainstorming ideas for conferences, swag & more fun ways to connect w/ devs(31:08) Lizzie's hot take on DevRel & how to get good at it(36:50) Lizzie breaks down what's working for Jam & areas we can improveSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
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 direction going forward.Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
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 Ketchup & how its similar to AI apps(10:47) A Benedict Evans quote that makes us really excited about AI tools(12:20) Dani shares the first draft of our new growth team's charterSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
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 Jam(06:39) Ian's videos for welcome emails, onboarding & more—it just makes sense!(12:11) How we're setting up Jam's growth team(14:00) Irtefa discusses a recent customer call & opportunities to make our users' lives better(15:12) Why Dani prioritizes product sense over growth experience for growth team hiresSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
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(02:18) Figma's new slides product & a demo of Dot, an AI assistant that's more like your friend(05:40) Ian gives us a tour of all the Config swag & everything Figma got right(09:09) Reactions to Figma Slides and reminiscing about Prezi(11:11) Ian got to meet famous product educators, we're all fans!(15:43) A very special 3D printed cookie cutterSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
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) Raza - the 2016 chatbot library that inspired Rui's approach to faster AI iteration(12:02) The Facebook approach to AI bug fixing & what makes Jam's differentSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
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 does the board influence Jam founders' decisions & what gets voted on(10:57) What we talk about in Jam board meetings & taking their feedback to the rest of the team(12:46) Ivanha's takes on SEO (and learning with ChatGPT)Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
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 inspiration to make content that doesn't feel like marketing(14:48) Connecting a feature launch to the big reason we're building Jam— one place w/ what you need to fix a bug(18:58) Ignoring prioritization advice & trying to get faster(22:21) How to Do Boring Stuff at Jam: onboarding 3 new engineers in person(28:06) Team challenges of the week & giving constructive feedback via SlackSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
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) Future changes we're making to Jam notifications(12:17) Using intuition as a form of data(17:34) Getting a new product in beta ready for GA: from Irtefa-led onboarding to self-serve(21:56) Thinking about the “why” in Jam's onboarding(26:49) Team challenges of the weekSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
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 to new audiences about your product(28:44) Google docs is Totino's Pizza rolls & Notion is a calzone(30:30) Answering “What's your favorite product?” in a PM interview(33:30) Reacting to a mind-blowing website (https://amie.so/)(34:48) What bell-bottom jeans say about your startupSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
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 & Building Things™(16:16) Challenges of the weekSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
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
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 decision-making now that there's more people (and opinions)(18:30) The different factors that go into choosing the right candidate(20:36) What happens when the team goes from 15 people to 20(22:40) Does anyone know the perfect designer:engineer ratio?(26:57) More team challenges: unexpected hires and financial planning, balancing strategy with execution, and showing up for the team with a meeting-packed calendar.
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 the news that a beta product needs more iteration(11:51) Trusting your gut vs. data(12:29) Excitement and uncertainty about an upcoming launch(14:15) How to make hard-boiled eggs in Bogotá