The Trelliswork Podcast

This week we dive into some of the important assumptions we are making as a company. What assumptions did we have going into building the company? What assumptions did we develop recently since being in beta?

Sarah ask's Sam and Ben what their vision is around a few key "future of work" topics that have been swirling around everyone's head recently. Not only what is going to happen with the great return-to-office, AI disruption, flexible scheduling...etc, but how does Trelliswork look to fit in.

We have entered into open beta officially and are rolling out some pretty amazing new features. Sarah steps into the hosting chair to show Ben how it is done and asks the real questions.

We keep rolling out some important quality-of-life features ramping up toward our open beta. Sharing links, snoozing items, and sorting are all on the block this week, much more to come.

This week we talk about how product goals and marketing windows sometimes overlap in good ways and bad. As we ramp towards a more open beta announcement (shh not yet... DON'T YOU TELL ANYBODY ABOUT TRELLISWORK!)* what features are we focusing on to make sure first-time users are getting the best experience we can muster. (*reverse psychology, works every time)

Not every feature is the same, sometimes you have to eat your vegetables and ship a bunch of work around settings and how Orgs work to set up some big stuff coming soon. Trelliswork is creating a space for hybrid managers to run high-trust teams. Try our beta application today!

We continue to ship features at a speed previously unknown to neither man nor beast. Following, meeting leads, POLLS! All of that and a side of homemade bagels. We are shipping so fast that Ben nearly wrote a song about it on the spot. ACTION ITEM DUE DATES! ha, you thought we were out of features but no they just keep coming...actually, I think that's it for now...

Little whip around our production app talking about some small in complexity big big in philosophy features we shipped in the last week or two. Updates to Action Items, how to link out to your video call tools, and Live Session attendees. We are going to tell you all about 'em!

Mike's coming in hot with a new take on how to use the term "session" in our product. What does this mean for our existing users, product, and documentation? How do you move a noun from meaning one thing in your product to another?

Ben and Sarah are again joined by Mike to discuss content creation and all the different audiences you have when you are a very early-stage start-up. Not to mention knowing when to polish and hone a message vs when to be loose and know when "good enough" is actually enough.

This week Ben and Mike thought that getting up super early to discuss the current investor/venture landscape was a good idea. They go deep on what has changed for us over the last year of talking to various folks, what we would do differently looking back, and what makes today different than previous moments. Also massive misophonia trigger warning in the intro and outro.

Design is messy and confusing, and vulnerable. Because we have a high-trust team we are able to push back on each other, ask hard questions and be open with each other. Because we have a podcast, we get to do all of that in front of all of you! Come along as we have our first in-depth conversation about a big important future feature, live on the pod. It's messy but we get into some really important ideas.

This week we experienced an uncomfortable moment of vertigo when we couldn't match a simple use case that our generic product seemed capable of attacking, but was maybe not a great match for our story of "who is this product for?" What tools do startups have to attack this problem? Is building a generic first feature a bad approach? How do you guard against "Target User Creep"?

We have been discussing how we have really focused in on what we are doing and who we are creating Trelliswork for, and it occurs to us that it has been a while since we updated what it is that the product actually does. So this week we dive into what the product does today in early access and who exactly we are making this for.

This week we talk about how top-level messaging and mission can directly help you find clarity in product decisions when in doubt. Also, we are pretty over the idea that People Managers only employ so-called "soft skills". We also come out of the "West Wing Fan" closet to each other...surprising nobody.

Creating a start-up means dealing with people asking how you are dealing with or incorporating major tech trends of the day. "Yeah but how about that Chat GPT?" Investors of course want to show that they are playing in the trendy space of the day, Builders don't want to miss important innovations. Yet, it's important to stay true to your mission and don't forget why you started the damn thing in the first place.

Some things have Ben and Sam thinking about pricing and packaging. How do PLG and pricing work? What activities do different pricing models encourage or discourage? How can you be consumer-friendly while also not leaving growth on the table? Most importantly did the guys get on a plane in an ice storm last week?!

We take a holiday break to talk about the media we loved this year! We hope you are having a great holiday and staying safe in the travel chaos. Thanks for sticking with this experiment which is the Trelliswork pod itself in 2022, we have much more planned for next year.

At the moment Trelliswork is a very good machine for tracking discussion topics in traditional meeting sessions. Our ambitions and original intent are for it to be so much more than that. This week we discuss all the ways we are planning to inject other types of interactions that broaden our scope well outside of just "a meeting tool".

Now that we shipped our alpha our focus has shifted to "How do we get folks into the app and seeing value ASAP?" At the moment you can sign up at our website to be onboarded by the ever reliable Ben Parkison, We think that will probably not scale well... So how do we do it, where do we focus? A classic issue for most SaaS apps, but much more important in the world of Product Led Growth.

We shipped to full alpha this week! We discuss our baseline features and dive into why we think these areas are what we want to grow. You can join us in our alpha right now – signup for onboarding below! We would love to hear what you think. Come help us create a new space for you and your teams!

We take a holiday break and get sentimental about the year that was and what we are thankful for, not the least of which is you the listener of this podcast! P.S. Andor is really pretty great.

The gang starts out focused on the challenges of coming to an agreement about messaging inside a passionate start-up but, in a twist, we actually end up reflecting on how our bond as a team gets us through charged situations in ways other teams might not. We get into the features we could add to our app to help our users build those same bonds and create high-trust and high-performing teams.

So now that we are eight episodes in maybe we should introduce ourselves, We are Mike, Luke, Sarah Ben, and Sam. Come meet us officially and find out why we are here, doing what we are doing. BTW nice to meet you too!Trelliswork is creating a new lightweight space for hybrid teams to be themselves.

This week we endeavor to decide what features we want to build on the heels of the Alpha product. I daresay we go the long-way-round to say "the next most obvious feature." Dig in to find out where the product goes next.

This week we dive into if Product Hunt is even a thing. Where do people find out about stuff? Would you like to find out about our stuff? We are taking early access submissions right now!

Time is put under the microscope as we discuss just how much we want to care about time, calendars, and the such. Some deep issues are wrestled with. Mike joins us for the first time.

We are trying a new format this week. The podcast takes a look at three points in time over the course of a week while we wrestle with naming a core feature of our product.

This week we continue to overthink our delivery and focus. Signs are looking up. Seeing pieces of delight and fun starting to be built is creating some great momentum. We deep dive and discuss why we all are so focused on customer delight for this product specifically.

This was a sort of trailer for the podcast, Seeing as we all got set up and Ben had to go so soon. We dive into process and delivery. How worried should we be about the slow ramp to shipping? Are we focused on the right things? More importantly, when is swag coming?