IndieRails Podcast: The Conductor
I hopped on IndieRails with Jess and Jeremy (again). We covered a lot of ground in about 90 minutes. Quick business catch up and then dove into how AI has changed pretty much everything about how I work.
Some of the highlights:
Business Updates. Flipper Cloud almost doubled revenue last year, with most of the growth in the last few months. No AI headwinds on docs or conversion. Fireside is stabilizing — we flattened churn and had our first three month stretch of even or growing customers since taking it over. Momentum, the coworking space I invested in, is filling up and becoming a real community in South Bend.
Following the Inspiration. I'm a mood person. I follow the energy. Having multiple products at different stages (five, six, and seven figures) means there's always something that matches whatever I'm feeling that day. I've spent 20 years intentionally building toward that flexibility.
Support-Driven Development. With Fireside, I'm close to the customer again. Someone asks for a responsive player, I build one from scratch in three days. Someone wants playlists, done. Someone wants custom colors saved, done in an hour. They're blown away because the product had been dormant. That feedback loop is addicting.
The Company Brain. For Box Out, I'm building an internal AI system using LibreChat with MCPs for our read replica database, Stripe, and a custom internal API. The goal is letting our small team query business data naturally — hydrate conference attendee lists, look up support patterns, pull subscriber counts. Eventually I'll wire in Metabase too for the verified reports.
Working Styles. Jeremy, Jess, and I got into how different developers use AI differently. Garrett goes heavy on docs and specs and skills. I go vanilla — whisper flow, let it roll, see what happens. Both approaches work. A lion doesn't concern himself with tokens.
The Arbitrage. There's a window right now where you can get significantly more done. Not just a little more — I'd say I'm working 1.3-1.5x the hours but shipping 10x. That won't last forever, but right now the gap between people using these tools and people who aren't is massive. And we're still just the nerds. Most people haven't even tried a chatbot yet.
What's Next. I think the AI era means more people shipping more code, which means more demand for developer tools — monitoring, debugging, feature flags, experiment frameworks. That's why I'm building an APM tool and planning to build something like GitHub Scientist next. The incumbents have no incentive for you to send less data. I think there's room for opinionated, affordable, AI-friendly developer tools.
Conductor in the Web. What I really want is my dev environment on a server somewhere, always on, accessible from my phone. Spin up workspaces, prompt the next thing, check in from the couch or car line. Someone's going to solve this well in the next couple months. I'd pay as much as I do for Claude for that solution.
We also got into the health and sustainability of all this, the farming lifestyle analogy (Jeremy and I both grew up in farm country), consulting economics in the AI era, and whether developers should be pushing harder toward ownership.