Every other week, Niklas Stephenson and Peter Suhm hang out and talk about what's been going on in their businesses.
Still Early
Claim This Podcastby Niklas Stephenson & Peter Suhm
9 episodes
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Podcast Overview
Every other week, Niklas Stephenson and Peter Suhm hang out and talk about what's been going on in their businesses.
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Publishing Since
4/17/2026
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Recent Episodes
July 28, 2026
The business books we keep re-reading
<p><strong>In this episode:</strong></p><ul><li>Summer special: Peter and Niklas each brought five business books off the shelf (plus a pile of honorable mentions)</li><li>Positioning, knowing when to quit, OKRs, marketing channels, and how to stop fooling yourself about your own idea</li><li>Why Getting Real still holds up twenty years later</li><li>The Mom Test and Deploy Empathy as a pair (and why they'll probably kill your idea)</li><li>Radical Focus vs Measure What Matters: the startup version of OKRs and the enterprise one</li><li>A reading list for the summer, since Niklas is driving to Norway</li></ul><p>No updates this week (they already recorded once), so it's just books.</p><p>Peter's five: April Dunford's Obviously Awesome (April was a mentor at TinySeed when Peter was in the accelerator, and his advice is to actually do the steps, not just read them), Seth Godin's The Dip (he re-reads it every time he's about to quit or sell something, to double check it's the right call), Poor Charlie's Almanack in the Stripe Press edition, John Doerr's Measure What Matters, and Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares (19 channels and the Bullseye framework, which Peter has read so many times he doesn't really need to open it anymore).</p><p>Niklas's five: Build by Tony Fadell (his "get fired up" category, next to The Social Network and the Isaacson Jobs biography), Getting Real from 37signals (his startup bible, published in 2006, free on the website, and he's given away more than a hundred printed copies), The Mom Test, Inspired by Marty Cagan (his scaling bible, and the thinking behind getting engineers in front of customers at Trustpilot), and Radical Focus, which is basically the startup-sized version of OKRs.</p><p>Both of them gravitate toward books that work like debugging tools. The Mom Test and Michele Hansen's Deploy Empathy pair up really well (one is short and hands you the questions, the other is dense and gives you the whole customer interview process). Peter's take: if you're reading The Mom Test and The Dip at the same time to solve the same problem, you probably should have read The Mom Test a lot earlier.</p><p><br>Honorable mentions: Purple Cow, The War of Art, Scaling People, Derek Sivers' Anything You Want (Adam sent Peter four Sivers books in the mail when he started at Tailwind), The Entrepreneur's Guide to Keeping Your Sht Together* by Sherry and Rob Walling (Rob's TinySeed was the first investor in Peter's previous company), Business Model Generation, and Founder-Led Sales Explained, which Niklas is a third of the way through. On that last one, Peter also recommends Jen Abel's two episodes of Lenny's Podcast (in order). They've helped him a lot with the Tailwind CSS partner program, where he's the founding salesperson and pulls in Adam when a deal needs the founder in the room.</p><p><br>---</p><p>Still Early is sponsored by <a href="https://www.phone.inc/">Phone.inc</a>: a business phone number, welcome greeting, call routing, and opening hours, all from an app on your personal phone.</p>
July 14, 2026
Are building blocks the new end product?
<p><strong>In this episode:</strong></p><ul><li>Peter's thesis for the AI era: build building blocks, not end solutions</li><li>Memo.sh update: 43 waitlist signups without a launch tweet, and a new workspace instructions feature</li><li>The value hacking phase (Mike Maples Jr.) and betting on yourself as customer zero</li><li>Phone.inc's new infrastructure: deadline day, three smartphones, and a 50-bullet testing list</li><li>Why the phone system should be primitives, and everything around it wide open</li><li>The shorts factory experiment: 30-something shorts in an hour and a half</li></ul><p>Peter's been heads down on <a href="https://memo.sh">memo.sh</a>. The waitlist is at 43 people, and he hasn't even done the "hey, this is what I'm building" tweet yet (just leaving the link in regular tweets, which keeps converting one or two people at a time). He also added a follow-up form after signup with three questions, and almost everyone describes the same problem they hope Memo solves. That's a good sign. Next step is a demo video (the new Osmo Pocket 4 gets its first job), then inviting the first users. He's leaning towards charging them from day one, mostly as a filter.</p><p>He's thinking about all of this through Mike Maples Jr.'s value hacking framework: a startup is a group of people trying to productize a unique insight, and before you worry about growth, you nail the value. Peter's bet is that he's customer zero for Memo, and that today's AI power users look a lot like tomorrow's normal users.</p><p>That leads into the big idea of the episode: in the age of AI, you should probably be building building blocks, not end solutions. Everyone can now assemble their own workflows with AI, so nobody wants something too opinionated. They want great, slightly opinionated blocks they can put together themselves. Peter's newest Memo feature doubles down on this: per-workspace instructions for the agents connecting to it, which turns Memo into a flexible storage and search layer people can build things with that he hadn't imagined. Niklas pushes back a bit (he still believes in super opinionated products, and thinks the blocks will need to get more opinionated as non-builders arrive), but they mostly land in the same place.</p><p>Niklas is recording on the day of Phone.inc's internal infrastructure deadline, surrounded by three smartphones and a 50-bullet manual testing list (testing telephony is a project in itself). The new setup is built around conference calls instead of logical phone lines, which makes the whole call life cycle simpler and way more responsive. They're moving their own number over now and customers after the summer holiday. His conclusion fits the building blocks theme: the phone system itself should be a simple set of primitives, and everything around it (MCP servers, APIs, webhooks) should be wide open. One prospect on a recent call has written 450,000 lines of code with AI in six months and just wants his phone calls in that pipeline.</p><p>They also debrief the shorts factory experiment (30-something shorts in 90 minutes), and Lea reports that the vlogs are changing Phone.inc's hiring: candidates show up already knowing the company. Niklas's takeaway: when you judge content like this, count customers, hires, partners, and investors, not just views.</p><p>---</p><p>Still Early is sponsored by <a href="https://www.phone.inc/">Phone.inc</a>: a business phone number, welcome greeting, call routing, and opening hours, all from an app on your personal phone.</p>
June 30, 2026
I bought a $1500 domain name
<p>In this episode:</p><p>- Peter bought memo.sh (a $1500 domain) about fifteen minutes before recording, mostly so he could announce it on the pod<br>- What he's building: a shared memory layer for AI tools, so Claude, ChatGPT, Codex and the rest stop making him repeat himself<br>- His latest solo retreat, the Suhm ApS "board letter", and why doubling down on network beat doubling down on software<br>- Niklas is back from San Francisco energized, hiring another engineer, and pulling his ops hire's start date forward to Monday<br>- Why terms and privacy policies actually matter when you're venture-funded (it's the due diligence, not just the text)<br>- AEO/GEO: how comparison pages and FAQs are quietly how AI decides what to recommend</p><p>---</p><p>Niklas makes a new podcast rule on the spot: if someone just bought a domain, that's where the episode starts. Handy, because Peter had spent $1500 on memo.sh maybe fifteen minutes before recording, partly so he could talk about it here. The idea came out of a recurring annoyance. He uses a bunch of different AI tools (ChatGPT on forest walks because the transcription's better, Cursor or Codex or Claude Code back at the desk) and they never share context, so he keeps explaining the same thing twice. On his last retreat he vibe-coded a fix he calls Memo: a shared space where his agents write stuff down and read it back later. Codex one-shotted a Laravel app off a spec he'd built with Fable, wired up to the MCP and Passport packages he worked on at Laravel, and it just worked. He used it nonstop for two days and it stuck. The waitlist is up now at memo.sh. Niklas thinks fixing context across agents is going to be huge no matter who wins, and got a Turbopuffer plug in while he was at it.</p><p>The other big thread is the retreat. Peter does these solo (a hotel, ten thousand words of notes, Claude helping him spot the patterns) and writes himself a board letter to Suhm ApS, where the board is just him. The takeaway, again: every time he thought the opportunity was software, the thing that actually paid off was network and personal brand (the conference circuit, the speaking, working with Niklas, this podcast). OG Kit stays the perfect side project, not the main bet. Niklas suggests publishing a public version of the letters, Berkshire-style.</p><p>Then it's Niklas's turn. He came home from SF fired up, mostly from seeing companies further along and wanting to pick up speed. They're wrapping a big telephony infrastructure project (important, but invisible to customers), hiring another engineer, and his new ops person now starts Monday instead of after summer. He also gets into why legal isn't optional when you're venture-funded: terms and privacy policies are the contracts that get picked apart in due diligence, and AI-generated ones come back to bite you. Plus a rant about the FCC robocall program sending him more spam than it stops.</p><p>They close on AEO (answer engine optimization), following up from last time. The short version: AI recommends products off bite-sized comparison pages, FAQs, and testimonials with a clear source of authority. Tactics that are dead for SEO but work great for LLMs. Probably something both OG Kit and Phone.inc should build.</p><p>---</p><p>Still Early is sponsored by <a href="https://www.phone.inc/">Phone.inc</a>: a business phone number, welcome greeting, call routing, and opening hours, all from an app on your personal phone.</p>
9 total episodes available
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