The behind-the-scenes journey of an indie maker

Podcast

I co-host a weekly podcast called The Art of Product.

Each week, my friend Ben Orenstein and I go deep on what's happening in our respective businesses. Our goal is to paint an accurate picture of what it's like starting a software business.

Products I’ve Built

• StaticKit Started in 2019

  StaticKit is a toolkit of dynamic components for static sites.

• Drip Started in 2012 and acquired by Leadpages in 2016

  Drip began with the mission to fix email capture and follow-up sequences. It grew to become a lightweight marketing automation tool and later on a leading automation platform used by thousands of companies.

• Codetree Started in 2014 and sold in 2016

  Codetree was a solution borne out of pain I experienced managing development tasks with GitHub issues across multiple repositories.

Essays

• 10 Questions for Teasing Out Market Opportunities

  Inspiration for your next idea brainstorm.

• Don’t Insult Me With Your Pricing

  Thoughts on utilizing manipulative pricing tactics.

• Just Keep Shipping

  Reflections on learning to thrive in the in-between.

• Finding My Next Bootstrapped Business Idea

  My process for narrowing down what to build next.

• I'm Walking Away From the Product I Spent a Year Building

  The story behind Level and why it failed.

• Validating My Business Idea

  The tactics I used to validate the idea behind Level.

• The War on Developer Productivity

  The manifesto that kicked off Level.

Technical Articles

• Using Tailwind with Phoenix

  A quick tutorial on getting up and running with CSS utilities.

• Elixir, Elm, GraphQL, Oh My!

  How I went about choosing the technology for Level.

• Solving Our Slow Query Problem

  How my team and I solved a tricky scaling problem at Drip.

• Choosing Your Technology Stack

  How to approach selecting a tech stack when starting something new.

Get in touch

Follow me on Twitter or email me at derrick [at] derrickreimer.com.

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