In this episode:
- Phone.inc plans monthly, and a month already feels too long
- Niklas is a solo founder for the first time, and with growth and sales hires coming in, he has to step back from building product (his safe space)
- The “human CPU” test: if something new needs a person to keep it alive every week, is it worth it?
- Peter wants their editor working on the content system instead of every single video
- Phone.inc needs a bigger office with a studio, and Niklas wants to let other entrepreneurs use both for free
- OG Kit went down during a PHP security issue, and Peter went to the bar anyway
Peter is back after two weeks off. He started at Phone.inc on October 1, worked for a week, then took the break he’d made a condition of joining (a move, the Danish fall break, a friend visiting from the States). He half expected to spend it coming up with startup ideas, but Phone.inc was the only work thing running in the back of his head.
OG Kit did go down while he was away. A PHP security issue meant waiting for a patched build for the Linux distro it runs on, on the same evening as a bar night with his local entrepreneur friends. When he built OG Kit he promised himself it would never be mission critical, so he took the app offline and went out. Visti (who works at Laravel) asked for SSH access and had it back up before Peter got home. Existing images kept working the whole time, since they’re cached behind Cloudflare.
Niklas’s job is changing again. Phone.inc is still behind a waitlist, but hundreds of companies use it every day, Peter is leading growth, and Brian is joining as VP of sales. Niklas has always had a commercial co-founder before, so this is the first time he’s both. His old rule was not to hire product people before 100 employees, but that assumed a co-founder wearing the product hat, so he’s thinking about a product manager sooner. Building product from the couch is his safe space, and he knows that can’t be his job anymore.
Phone.inc plans monthly right now, and even that feels too long. The planned work could be done in a week, the rest of the month fills up with unplanned stuff, and planning a month ahead feels like planning a year. Next up is a goal for the month, with projects planned week by week.
They’re both becoming more manager than IC. Peter is mapping his role as engines and weekly rhythms (when someone ships a feature, Amp should at least draft a post for the internal releases channel), and putting his energy into the AI writing guide instead of nitpicking hundreds of pages of copy. Niklas’s test for anything new is whether it needs a human to keep it alive every week, because you run out of human CPU. He thinks one-person billion-dollar companies will be pretty niche, and pointed to
Amp running with a team of 21.
Peter also has a call with Joseph (their editor, who also makes the music for the videos) about building a content machine, so everyday videos get faster and there’s more time for launch videos and customer stories. Niklas wants a 15-minute way to announce small features, which right now just ship quietly.
Phone.inc is outgrowing its nine-person room in a co-working space (sales needs a boiler room, and that doesn’t work in the same room as the engineers), and any new office will be about 20 seats too big. Niklas got his start in 2009 in an Aarhus office that a consultancy didn’t need anymore and gave to young startups for free. He’d like to do the same: free desks for young entrepreneurs, and a studio anyone can use when Phone.inc isn’t. The gear is cheap now (maybe $5-6k for a basic setup), the room is the expensive part.
Niklas built an Amp plugin for their support tool, so a bug report goes into Linear, Amp fixes it and drafts the reply to the customer. A human still presses ship, and Lea is working on a support voice because the drafts don’t sound like Phone.inc yet. He’s also spent two weeks trying to reach Shopify about partner terms (a 15% cut feels fair for customers found in the App Store, not for everyone else). And he got the iPhone Duo on Friday, where the killer app turns out to be Amp.
Still Early is sponsored by Phone.inc: a business phone number, welcome greeting, call routing, and opening hours, all from an app on your personal phone.
