Hi everyone! 👋 I recently sat down with Justin Duke, an engineer at Stripe, and talked about tech, startups and time management. Along with a full-time job, Justin runs two startups (Buttondown, Spoonbill), manages two weekly newsletters, runs, and volunteers. Come learn about how he does it all!

This is the trial run of a podcast idea I have had for a while. I might continue recording similar interviews in the future. You can also listen to this episode on Spotify.

I asked Justin the following questions:

1. Justin’s intro
2. How do you manage time between all the different projects?
3. How has stripe been so far and what are you currently working on?
4. Why is it that most people I admire work at Stripe?
5. Thoughts about learning the business side of things in order to be a better employee.
6. Work-life balance at Stripe vs Amazon?
7. Do you feel like you have a better work-life balance at Stripe compared to Amazon?
8. Why work on Buttondown and Spoonbill?
9. What is spoonbill and Buttondown?
10. How did you get your first customer?
11. Any resources you used to figure out how to price products?
12. What is the target audience of Spoonbill?
13. Why go the Open Startup route and share financials?
14. Where do you want to take your startups? When will you stop working fulltime?
15. No immediate plans to focus on Buttondown as full time job?
16. Any major incidents that kept you awake at night while running your startup?
17. How do you use more than 1 email service provider?
18. Have your side projects opened any doors for you?
19. How many people are using Buttondown?
20. As a hacker, how do you divide time between features you like and features you need?
21. Any advice for people planning on running a side project?
22. Closing remarks

You can follow Justin on Twitter. If you have any questions/comments/feedback please let me know via Twitter, email or the comment box below. If you feel like I missed an important question, please let me know about that as well! ❤️