Benedikt Deicke

Hello Bluesky 👋 I'm Benedikt, a full stack software engineer turned (mostly) bootstrapped founder 😄 Together with my co-founder I run and build Userlist, an email marketing automation platform for SaaS businesses 💌 Mostly working with Ruby on Rails, Ember.js, and PostgreSQL at the moment 🛠️

A few weeks ago, we had a very interesting conversation with Mariya Delano and Jason Cohen for the Smart Bear Live podcast. It was a great experience and we got some good insights and ideas. The episode is on YouTube and your favorite podcast player now! youtu.be/7gJvwR78ot8

Does everything have to be super fast? Some things for sure, but some certainly not. On The Hallway Track by Chris Vannoy, we talk about how we do monitoring, alerting, and auto-scaling for @userlist.com using @appsignal.com and @judoscale.com

I'm still a fan of the "Minimum Viable Product". I guess the only challenge is that the expectations towards "viable" have grown over the years. Chris Vannoy and I talked about this on The Hallway Track podcast: share.transistor.fm/s/a5f5987e

Had the great pleasure to be a guest on Chris Vannoy's The Hallway Track podcast a few weeks ago. We talked about how customer interviews guide product decisions at Userlist and how we build our product in general. share.transistor.fm/s/a5f5987e

Here's a crazy fact about our little show

Why do I keep running into support chat widgets that tell me to contact support to help with my issue? What does it think I'm trying to do? 😩

You all should check out @michristofides.com's new PostgreSQL monitoring tool: pgcustard.com It's early days, but it has already helped me identify some issues that I was unaware of earlier.

On August 1st, 2019, @brianrhea.com and I published the first episode of Slow & Steady. A lot has happened since, including the addition of @raae.dev as a co-host and Brian leaving eventually 🤯 Today, Brian joins us to celebrate episode #250 of our humble podcast 🥳 share.transistor.fm/s/8a5d1de7

It’s never too late to admit you made a mistake. It’s more powerful to admit a mistake, than to persist when everyone else knows it’s a mistake. It’s a mistake either way, but only one way means you’re either oblivious or disingenuous.

Yesterday has been crazy, stressful, and an emotional roller coaster. The joys of being an entrepreneur 🎢 Still, I’m glad that for the most part, we’ve built a company that we enjoy working at, despite the challenges thrown at us regularly 🤗

Every schema constraint you skip becomes an if statement in six places, and one of them will be missing. Put it in the database where it cannot be forgotten. #RubyOnRails #Rails #PostgreSQL

After more than a year of labor, my book 𝘏𝘪𝘥𝘥𝘦𝘯 𝘔𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘳𝘴 has launched! It's all my best ideas -- and best writing -- on how to grow your company with your existing budget and team. And yes, I read the audiobook myself. :-) (1/5)

Top 5 tips for managing B2B email marketing (as someone asked today): ▪️Don't be afraid to email more ▪️Treat this as a process with continuous improvement/expansion, rather than a one-off project ▪️Be helpful ▪️Keep your messages short and focused ▪️DON'T OVERTHINK Simple, not easy.

I’ve got a super early 7am flight to Oslo on Friday and have a couple of hours to kill before checkin and an evening event 🇳🇴 Any recommendations on how to spend those hours? 😄

Selling an ESP is like selling a mattress. A mattress is bulky, hard to replace, essential for your sleep. It's unlikely you'll rave about your mattress or post about it on social media. Replacing a mattress won't make you sexy/healthy/rich. It's just a mattress. It's just an ESP.

RuboCop 1.89 is out with improved rubydex integration that unlocks several project-wide analysis opportunities metaredux.com/posts/2026/0... Enjoy! #Ruby

Here's exactly why consultants are paid to do their thing. Only a fraction of SaaS companies have dedication, resources, and knowledge to expand their lifecycle marketing in a systemic way. Also, who makes comments this long and awesome?

I will likely not buy from you if you have a free or cheap price and I can’t explain how you can make money and make it sustainable.

Did you know that the Split Test node isn't just for A/B tests? It's a random group generator, splitting users into up to 5 paths at whatever percentages you choose. Split testing is the obvious use: create different user journeys, then compare using email metrics or conversion goals. Classic.

What makes a perfect welcome email? (hundreds of companies still obsess about a single email, while forgetting about the rest of their lifecycle) But seriously?

This January we offered a review call to all paying customers, and most people who replied were newly added team members. They didn't know much about @userlist.com, or what's happening in their accounts. This blew our mind. So we set up a simple workflow (took me 15 minutes).

Working from home in a fully remote company means that I don’t have a commute 😎 That’s great… but it also means that there isn’t a good time to “wind down” 😵‍💫 However, I realized cooking dinner is my way to do this these days 👨‍🍳

Upgrade Rails immediately, kids, this is a big one. github.com/rails/rails/...

Features we're adding to @userlist.com's new theme editor, that nobody will ever appreciate, but make me very happy: When saving theme schemas, server side validations will render inline in the embedded code editor 🤩

"Now that I have user onboarding in place, what else can I do?" Your best next step is: a workflow for your paying customers. It runs at a slow pace (every 1-2 weeks) and combines educational content, feature nudges, and customer loyalty interventions (asking for referrals, reviews, etc).

Software companies overthink email marketing in the same way we overthink social media. A single post won’t impact your LinkedIn account. A hundred of them might. A single email won’t impact your growth. A hundred of them might. Zero emails… Safe bet. #bdtpblurbs #emailmarketing

Getting my feet wet with Terraform and AWS so we potentially, maybe, can migrate off of Heroku… Still a bit intimidated by the thought (and the complexity), but also intrigued by the new possibilities 👀

see indie hackers make this mistake all the time. The advice is: solve your own problem, then find more people like you. The problem? You probably wouldn't pay $50/month to solve that problem, so people like you probably won't either.

On the last episode of Slow & Steady, I talked about why it's important to remind people of who you are when emailing your list after being quiet for a while. People will just forget you. Quickly. You have to be very explicit to help them remember.

Time delays in @userlist.com now support advanced calendar settings. E.g. the 10th of the month, the first Monday, or the second Tuesday in March. Now you can send messages related to billing cycles, monthly check-ins, or annual reminders landing on a specific day. Give it a try in your workflows.

One unexpected side effect of adding full WYSIWYG editing to Userlist: We now have fairly decent support for right-to-left languages in our editor 😊

Starting Userlist merch production with my nieces 🤣

The hardest part of improving existing features is figuring out a smooth transition path from the old to the new way of doing things so there are no interruptions in production 🙈

Customer facing thing we worked on lately that nobody will ever actively notice: Improved server side validation for conditions, recurring rules, and workflow tree nodes 🙃

We're in year 9 of working on @userlist.com and some days it feels like we're way behind on our goals and ambitions 🥵 However, if you'd told my old self from back when we're started about where we're at now, my mind would've be blown 🤯

Still can't find time to set up your lifecycle emails? We're stoked to announce a new lineup of done-for-you services at @userlist.com 🔥 We refreshed the existing packages that have been running for years, and added a few new ones. Check'em out: userlist.com/services/

Small but useful @userlist.com update from @benediktdeicke.com. You can now edit user (and company) properties manually from the profile page. Previously, this was done via integration sync. With this, Userlist can cover more of your CRM workflow, with custom fields editable on the spot. Woot 🙌

been seeing so much of this kind chatter around how LLMs are affecting software teams. not sure we have enough empirical data, but this analysis does make sense to me https://agileotter.blogspot.com/2026/06/draft-faros-whiplash-and-systems-view.html

"Hello [FIRST_NAME]" gets boring fast. That's why we've collected a ton of email greeting and salutation examples over on the Userlist blog 👀 userlist.com/blog/saas-email-...

We're currently working on getting full WYSIWYG to our message editor, so it actually renders the email inside the selected theme while editing the content, not just when previewing 💅 There have been a few challenges, but we're close to getting it shipped. And it's a massive step in terms of UX 🤯

A couple of things I wish we'd have done differently in Userlist's codebase: Allow accounts to have multiple workspaces, enforcing data types on data ingestion, and partitioning a couple of our largest stables right away 🙈 I'm sure we'll get to all of them eventually, it's just a lot harder now 😬