JoshuaRowe

Thanks! I'll check it out.

My personal address isn't my business address. They are different. Mixing the two, while seemingly innocuous, actually can mean opening myself up to liability issues or a good argument that the biz that I operate isn't actually different from me the person. This isn't going to matter in 99% of things, but if you are ever sued, can be used as a reasoning to actually be able to retrieve damages from you the person versus just from the LLC. It's one of the reasons to try to have a strong separation early on in the biz, if you can. The IRS also doesn't like the mixing funds and such with bank accounts. It's the same reasoning, just different domains.

This is the perfect reason for having a true separation of personal / biz addresses and the reason I went for the UPS box in the first place. Business is business and home is home. It becomes more clear if I had some sort of public persona based biz too. Youtube etc. or some controversial company, even slightly so.

The separation of personal and biz addresses is an important concept in owning a business. Not only for privacy, but for proving the biz is a separate entity and such. This is probably one of 2 - 3 recent changes that they have imposed on my biz, all without seemingly any lead time. 15 days isn't really a lot of lead time to change your business address when you are over capacity already and have to (or would much prefer to) focus on things that actually make money. The one previously was a change that turned me previously paying $0 a month to over $60 (maybe $80 or more depending on volume) for the same feature set. Once again, without notice. Having a UPS box has for years been recognized as a legitimate way to have a biz address as well. Just not USPS PO boxes. The CTA and BOI legislation doesn't impose restrictions on that as far as I know, but Stripe does? My bank accepts my business address as a UPS box, but Stripe doesn't? That doesn't seem right. The CTA and BOI are more closely aligned with the banking secrecy act, which is just uncle sam wanting to know that a real person with a residential address owns a given bank account to prevent money laundering etc.

They don't even really specify this in their link in the email sent, but I am getting this error when going to my dashboard now:

Invalid address. Your business address must be a valid physical address from which you conduct business and cannot be a private mailbox. Please correct the following...

So now, I have to find a new business address (either rent a place, or do a virtual office), which isn't as simple as just getting a new address. I then have to update every single account online or in person that uses it, and officially ask my state's SoS to update my biz info. There is probably other stuff I am not even thinking of in this moment as well. In addition, Stripe wants me to get a new biz address before March 13th or "payouts" will be impacted. Not processing! They are happy to use my money to make money for themselves and hold it like they have done to others in the past indefinitely.

This is all probably related to CTA and BOI changes that began this year that are seemingly affecting small biz more than the corporate entities that this bill supposedly was about.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1974

https://www.fincen.gov/boi

Once again, Thanks Stripe. It's been real, but it's probably time to move on.

Adding a comment here in case anyone else is looking for a solution to save paying the difference. It appears that if you continue to use Stripe, but simply make payment links using the dashboard or programmatically, you will not incur these new fees. For instance, instead of using the Stripe Invoicing product, I might use Toggl Track or something else, then just create an associated payment link. Definitely an okay stop gap to avoid paying surprise mid-tier SaaS prices for something you have been using for free for the past year.

Yeah. I could see that. It isn't dire, but how much is too much to pay over a period of time? How much do they really need to run a solution that has been feature complete forever now? I get inflation and costs, but this increasing cost structure is way beyond that. What do your clients end up doing most of the time when migrating away? I ask because it is a real consideration.

Definitely not. Don't get me wrong. Stripe is a pretty good product, but it isn't "that" good, especially for SasS that is essentially feature complete and for my use case.

They did indeed use those things in their own setup. Whether that is good or bad is a matter of opinion, but I think they were trying to provide a realistic challenge into the work that needed to be done. I think he did realize the “challenges” in the combination, though.

I think it keeps what is good about React and ditches what is bad. It is familiar enough to pick up if you’ve done any component and hook based React. I think it probably serves as a framework that people who know what they are doing to get more performance and predictability out of their front end code and maybe a better mental model than wondering why React has an infinite rerender issue or other weird quirks we’ve grown to not notice / appreciate in React. I think there is probably more out of the box functionality that probably allows you to not then have to bundle React with some other meta framework, such as NextJS or similar.

While SolidJS is good, I really don’t think SolidStart is close to being useful or good. Not sure I really understand the value add on top of SolidJS quite like I understand NextJS on top of React. When I had to use SolidStart, there was a few times, I really just used SolidJS in place of some SolidStart built-ins because I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted and the docs were nearly non-existent. I even think I had to look at its src code to paint a complete picture from where the docs were at the time. In additional, I have no idea why people decide to use things that are so new for apps that are production used as much as they do. SolidStart really just made things more complicated for as simple of an app as I used it on. I couldn’t imagine using it for something that is non trivial at all.

I worked on a simple company idea chatbot style app as a take home test for a startup I was hoping to contract with. They asked me to use LangChain and SolidStart JS. No biggie it seemed as I’ve done a few SolidJS and OpenAI API things in the past. What I found was that I am either very much not a ML / prompt engineer / whatever term this falls under or LangChain is completely useless as an abstraction layer. The examples did not work at the time like mentioned in this thread and after struggling through and getting a few things working with the docs, I then had to add memory to the agent (to reuse the chat context in successive questions), and I really struggled to get that working. Part of it was also dealing with SolidStart, which docs were half baked as well. I eventually got it all working, but with what seemed like twice as much code and maybe three times the effort of maybe just using OpenAI’s API. I think the part that I really thought was off was the classes and the distinction between chains, agent, memory, and the other abstractions. They didn’t seem to add value or make the coding part of it easier. I even did a dry run with just calling OpenAI’s API directly and it just worked way better. It all reminded me sort of the fast fashion of Javascript years past after sitting there with a working solution and some time to reflect. I also feel like I understand the high level usefulness of the chain idea and such, but the solution didn’t really seem very pragmatic in the end, at least with LangChain.

You really don't have to put you or your family at risk to have a profitable business that is a benefit to you and the people around you. You also don't have to work long hours or get no sleep to get there. There is no doubt that you probably won't be the next unicorn trying to go this path, but I honestly don't think those people are really as happy as everyone thinks they are. You can have a sustainable business that is profitable in several different ways that adds true value to the economy and to your customers and clients. You can even create a job or two that can provide a good opportunity down the line for someone else.

Take a look at some ideas that can be done as a solopreneur, parallel entrepreneur, or with a self sustaining small business that doesn't require a ton of capital or reoccurring expenses. Don't overcomplicate things or add a ton of stress to your life and build a product or service that you simply can put out there to see if anyone responds. It's important to note that not all startups have to be technology based or what everyone calls a "startup" here. You can be an urban farmer, or sell simple products that you, yourself have been wanting to find in the market. Talking to your local SBA office doesn't make you less of an entrepreneur than launching on HN either.

If you're unsure if an idea is worth it, put out a landing page to see if anyone cares about the idea or what you already have to offer. Spend a weekend or a few nights here and there and make something you're nearly ashamed of, then go try to sell it. You'll learn along the way what works and what doesn't. You'll also learn who you truly are and what you can do and handle. The only thing you need to know is whether or not people are buying what you're selling, and you can live with what it takes to make that happen.

I'm a huge fan of the advice that is contained in the 37 Signals / Basecamp books, so feel free to check those out to learn more about the themes I've suggested here in a better, more articulated package. There is also a book titled "The Parallel Entrepreneur" by Ryan Buckley that I've found useful too.

Good luck on whatever you find yourself working on!

Yes. I am not sure I have ran into this problem in a super major way before, but I remember not being able to do some things at previous gigs. I could not imagine having to ask to install software or config to just get my job done. In the past, we have also dealt with HIPPA data, and it was nice to be trusted with that as well.

I've been working this one out in my head, but I think that the above is generally a good indication of the quality of the code / project docs and thoughtfulness with on-boarding and making projects that people want to work on.

I think a good tech one that is a bit opinionated is: Does a project(s) build, and run (fully, without problems) in 5 or less steps?

This is a great take and a good set of questions. I totally agree on being more concrete and specific to get, at least, closer to the responses you are looking for. I feel like I have asked some more open ended questions, which can be good, but for finding specific info quickly (as time is limited in interviews), putting a sort of spin on those questions makes sense.

I agree. There really needs to be a team first sort of culture to produce the best outcome of giving individual members more say. It is probably hard to ensure that always happens, but I think if you hire people who generally want the same things and work hard amoung other things, then you'll get there most of the time.

No kidding. I feel like this happens a lot. It is nice to have both individual and team goals and hopefully they also align in a few ways.

Not necessarily. I think sometimes those committees are composed of people who never will work with a perspective employee. That isn't bad, but I think a team should have its on sub-culture and be able to make decisions for itself most of the time. I really only have experience with smaller? teams 5 - 10 people.

I think this is generally a good thing. Teams should make decisions together, but I could see the above point as a downside of that if taken to its max. I think that decisions should be made generally as a team, but there probably should be some extra emphasis on key decision makers that are the leaders of the team to allow them to make the perceived best decision even if one or perhaps more people give a no hire. If there is also some sort of tie, then someone has to be the tie-breaker.

Yes. It is probably a rare thing, but some companies that I know of actually pay overtime willingly (to a degree) to get more good work done. I think the tradition thoughts that a lot of companies have that overtime is the worst thing. Overtime isn't bad, but you should compensate your people accordingly.

I could see that. I guess a better way to say it is just to pay attention to their overall body language.

I totally agree. Their perspective and thoughts also matter. This kinda goes along with the whole "Do they allow their entire team in interviews".

Another one that I like to ask product companies is if they use their own products and like them!

Yes. I think this is especially important if you are a more senior person or work more independently than a lot of product companies.

I agree. Usually, I tend to think that things can only really be improved if there is a culture that allows it. I can't count the number of times that someone had legit improvements, but they just stall after some initial effort as real change isn't really embraced.

Yes. Just asking about work life balance always tends to get boilerplate answers ("Of course we do!"). This is a great way to get that same info without making them produce those selling point ones.

I could see that. I think there should be routine talking up and down the chain of command. I once worked at a place where most people actually kind of feared talking to a VP. I always thought it was very strange.

Yes. I think this is a great one. Teams should make decisions together. Every time there has been grumblings about a decision made at places I've worked, it has been made without input. Sometimes people will not like something regardless, but at least they would have got a chance to let their voice be heard if decision making is shared.

I've actually never had a skip-level one-on-one. What do you think you get the most out of them?