From the archive · Page 1 of 6
Motivation is a powerful initial force. It provides momentum. When we start projects, we need that momentum to push us through the initial collision with reality when we learn of all the complex choices we have to make to get things off the
Read the essay →Today I want to share my learnings from a year of intense podcasting. I’ve been publishing new episodes of the Bootstrapped Founder podcast for almost a year now, just shy of twelve months. At the same time, I have been a guest on more than
Read the essay →When founders talk about validation, we often engage in wishful thinking. We say that we want to validate an idea, an audience, or a problem, but in reality, we hope to find a way to be sure. We hope to discover a guaranteed win—a surefire
Read the essay →This week, a few remarkable things happened in the open-source scene. First, Mapbox decided to change the license on their popular Mapbox-gl-js library, used by many to power their fancy in-app maps. They went from the very permissive BSD l
Read the essay →David Heinemeier Hansson tweeted about Shopify this week. A lot. He was shining a light on their use of the Ruby on Rails framework, which he open-sourced back in 2004. That sixteen-year-old software powers a business that processed over $1
Read the essay →There are many risks and advantages to being your own customer. Today, I want to talk about how I am doing this with my current business, PermanentLink, and how Danielle and I did this with our previous company FeedbackPanda. So, what do I
Read the essay →This week, I want to talk about a critical decision in the life of my new SaaS project PermanentLink. I’ve been doing some research on competitors and competitive alternatives. I looked into link forwarders, link shorteners, link branding s
Read the essay →It’s “pricing week” for my SaaS permanent.link. A few weeks ago, when I made the product public, it had only one price. I had pretty much guessed a random number to start with, and I landed on $25 per month. In the weeks after, I had many c
Read the essay →While working on permanent.link this week, I ran into the same issue twice. I had built something that was working great, only to scrap it for another solution a few days after. The first time this occurred, I had just finished my infrastru
Read the essay →Over the last week, I have metaphorically left the building and had several conversations with the audience for my most recent project permanent.link. Since this is a product aimed at authors, I’ve been chatting with writers about their exp
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