Wading through the morass of do-gooding with the help of 80,000 hours — In a recent post I described a feeling of uselessness associated with not working on things that felt “important” for the world-a sense that I should be working on saving the world instead of a building Django boilerplate or place card website. A big part of the problem I was…

March 2019 Retrospective — Happy April! The theme of March — much like February — was continuing to work on my Django SaaS Starter Kit. Major Milestones Opened up the Saas Starter Kit demo to the public (via an A/B test). Finally landed on a name for my SaaS Starter Kit. It’s SaaS Pegasus or Pegasus…

February 2019 Retrospective — I blinked and February was over. What went well? Development continues to progress well on the demo of my Django SaaS Starter Kit. My first round of potential customer interviews / onboardings on the project was incredibly insightful, and everyone I talked to was super nice and supportive of the project. For the…

My 2018 year in Review — It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the year of personal growth, and it was the year of personal stagnation. It was a great year for personal projects. Place Card Me—my SaaS product for making place cards online — grew steadily, and made…

Week 89: adapting to parenthood 👶, breaking new revenue milestones 📈, shipping passion projects 🚢, and planning for the end of year. 🎊 — Phew. We are now five and a half weeks into parenthood and slowly settling into the new normal. I gotta say, it’s quite the change! Both Ro and I are still trying to figure out the shape of our new lives, work schedules, and all that. I’m slowly ramping up…

Thoughts and observations on being a new dad, two-weeks in — You know that stuff all parents say, about it being hard but life-changing and rewarding in ways that are incomprehensible to non-parents? And you kind of nod your head thinking they’re silly and cliche and what they’re saying doesn’t really make sense… Well it’s all true. This is my attempt…

Why I take shortcuts all the time and you probably should too — A couple weeks ago I saw this little diagram on Twitter and it immediately resonated. Anyone who has ever built a product will immediately recognize the two axes and four quadrants. Often developers — and, to a lesser extent, product creators — are trained as to anticipate all possible ways…

Week 80 Retrospective — Well, I blinked and September is over. Still — it was a good month! Let’s dive in. Revenue Starting with the fun stuff, Place Card Me had another record-setting month in September, generating $1,530 with about 12 hours left in the month. This is almost 50% growth from last month! So…

August Retrospective — It’s September! 2018 is officially more than 2/3 over. Monthly transitions are always a good opportunity to take a step back and re-orient, so have decided to do that now. The month past August was busy! Almost 170…