mijustin

Agreed! I get inspired just by seeing him talk through his approach to design problems.

Yes! And having too much of one in a given week (meetings vs. online chat) can throw off the balance too, especially for remote teams.

I also think there’s a benefit to being in-person depending on your age and career stage. Young people gain a lot from being around other humans. So much gets learned just by being in the room: how people talk to each other, how decisions actually get made, what good work looks like up close. You miss out on all that stuff in Slack.

100%

(Author of the post here) I think the key point is that even bad businesses take time and effort to create!

The distinction is between "low-hanging fruit" ideas ("Let's start a cafe!" "Let's start a WordPress theme business") and "high-value, high effort" ideas ("It's 2003. Let's build VoIP software.").

What’s changed now, with AI, is that you can have compressed learning cycles. Folks can build, deploy, and learn faster now than ever before.

Admitting when you don’t know something has always been important; but the ability to build, deploy, and find out has never been greater.

Instead of theorizing about what might work, you can just build it and find out.

I definitely think teams will be getting smaller, and will become even more outcome oriented.

100%. There are tons of vulnerabilities in JavaScript that are happily patched.

XSLT has a ton of value, especially if we want a more diverse/robust web.

Lots of kids still making games with engines like GameMaker Studio!

I think lots of kids will start playing around with Claude Code in this way as well.

Missed this! Nice to see an old piece I'd written resurface here.

This video is really well made!

I appreciate that Al describes what AI is bad at, what it's good at, and what types of products/work are at risk of being replaced.

Overall, I think building sophisticated apps/SaaS is safe because LLMs can't generate the overall quality experience that customers want.

But I agree with Al that AI allows people to generate apps for personal use and low-quality website templates.

100%. You need informed human actors generating "valuable" prompts.

This is true! However, "age" might be less of a deciding variable than experience, connections, and resources.

Here's the research on older entrepreneurs being more successful: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/younger-old...

> "Among the very fastest-growing new tech companies, the average founder was 45 at the time of founding."

However, the deciding factor appears to be experience:

> "founders with three or more years of experience in the same industry as their startup are twice as likely to have a one-in-1,000 fastest-growing company."

"In a study published in the journal Nature Aging in August, a team of Stanford scientists described “waves” of aging, where major biomolecular shifts happen in the body around ages 44 and 60."

Source: https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/feeling-suddenly-older-s... Mirror: https://archive.ph/7C1Wl#selection-2469.0-2473.75

I'm the author of the post. I think you've discerned the central tension I was exploring here.

Part of what I'm identifying is a simple truth: in your 40s, you don’t have that same kind of “raw firepower” you had when you were younger.

That doesn't mean you can't still be ambitious or leverage your accrued wisdom, network, and resources to launch a company; it just means the dynamics are different.

I'm the author of the post. I understand where you're coming from, but you're missing the nuance I mentioned in the article.

First, many "B2B" products are widely used by individual consumers for personal projects. For example, I've used Canva for family birthday cards and Mailchimp for my family newsletter. Running groups use Slack. Couples use Notion to plan their family calendar.

Second, today's line between "consumer" and "small business" is blurry. Is a YouTuber a consumer or an "aspirational business owner?" What about a freelance writer or a hobby podcaster? The prosumer movement is changing traditional definitions: users often start as consumers and evolve into businesses over time.

Third, the traditional B2B attributes (long sales cycles, demos, etc.) often don't apply to modern, self-serve software products. The buying process looks more like B2C: individual buyers with a credit card decide what to buy based on personal preference, brand, friendship groups, etc.

Finally, how useful is it to use the term "B2B" when it describes a solo freelancer buying project management software or a Fortune 500 company investing in enterprise-wide solutions? Are we lumping together the indie creator purchasing a $10/month tool with the government agency signing a million-dollar contract?

Products like Canva, ChatGPT, MailChimp, Carrd, Transistor, Fathom Analytics, Trello, Slack, Notion, and Tailwind UI achieved success by broking out of the traditional B2B mold and serving a broader spectrum of users with a single, versatile product.

Everything said here about LinkedIn is also true on X.com (Twitter).

As Elon posted in 2023:

> "Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don’t get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away. Best thing is to post content in long form on this platform."

Source: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1709244708533264592

These were the crucial bits for me:

> "Sundays are for listing everything that went wrong during the week on the blackboard we painted on the wall of my study, so we can figure out what needs to change."

and

> "I liked to think about our life as a piece of software. We had our routines and our principles, this was the code. We ran the code by living it. The list on the blackboard was the bug log, a record of the ways our routines broke down in contact with reality. We kept going through the code until our life did what we wanted it to do, more or less."

Love the idea of bug log/dev cycle as a metaphor to use for improving relationships.

The backstory of that podcast is fascinating: https://transistor.fm/customers/acquired/

Ben and David started the show in 2015 and initially focused on tech acquisitions, but now they've expanded the purview of the show to "great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them."

Their sponsorship model is wild: they charge up to $750k for a 6-month sponsorship!

Congrats on hitting 10 years! Most startups don’t make it that long.

Yes!! Tracking momentum is so much more encouraging. I just started working out and stretching again this morning (after weeks of travel and not exercising), and it was nice to feel like I'm just "picking up momentum again."

If you’re the owner of a small software company, there’s a group of us that have been petitioning congress.

You can sign the letter and send it to your representative here:

https://ssballiance.org/

Nice! What was your tech stack for this?

Reminds me of a bit of Telescope (Meteor.js): https://github.com/meteorhacks/Telescope

I've been using Polar Habits for the past few months.

Love the flexibility of being able to add goals like "3x a week"

I often say this to my teenagers: "You don't get any credit for the homework you thought about handing in. Even if it's not perfect, the only way to get a mark is if you hand it in."

So true for work and side-projects as well.

(I needed this reminder myself as I have a blog post I've been noodling on for 12+ months. I just need to publish the damned thing!)

I don't think small software companies in the US realize how much this is going to cost them.

Some folks are seeing an increase in taxable income of 466%: https://twitter.com/LandonB32/status/1636026627887964162

This is well done! I can see that you've done your research: you've synthesized so much of the written material on MySQL (books, docs) in each lesson. Makes learning these concepts really accessible.

I would still choose Rails or Laravel.

When we were building the MVP for Transistor.fm, we chose Rails because it's what my co-founder knew the best.

These old-school web frameworks are mature, and still have a big ecosystem (community, resources, etc). Beyond Rails, we used AWS with Postgres, Redis, nginx/puma, and sidekiq for background jobs.

With any business (especially early stage), you only make progress when stuff gets built, deployed, and into the hands of customers. Remove anything that slows you down (like learning a new stack).

When we were in the MVP stage we recorded this podcast and went into more depth: https://saas.transistor.fm/episodes/nerd-stuff-our-web-app-t...

I don’t think “learning to play the guitar” and “becoming a successful entrepreneur” are equivalent.

Statistically, entrepreneurship has a high failure rate because it’s incredibly demanding, and the path to success isn’t linear.

I decided to try it out (I recorded my initial impressions here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdmB0JnNF3s).

The software itself is pretty slick. Currently we're using Crisp Chat's help docs for our SaaS, as well as a static site generator for our API docs. I think this could reasonably replace both.

One thing I really like is the layout. Having general topics on the left, as well as anchor based menu in each article is super helpful.