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“Defense tech” should not be a capitalist for-profit venture. The incentives are all wrong. The business model is basically “milk the government for as much money as you can get, over the longest possible time period”, which is never a good business model for incentivizing efficiency or innovation. That is how American defense manufacturing got so slow and costly. It’s why America struggles to produce something as simple as cheap artillery shells at scale: simply not profitable enough. Much more profitable to sell fancy tech at $3m a pop.

Yup and this is the reason I just use Apple devices. Google and Microsoft products are design-by-committee garbage, and most open source projects eventually devolve into a mess, unless it is tightly controlled by a single author (such as SQLite or Redis or even Laravel).

People forget that Nature's default is to devolve to the chaos of the jungle (beautiful, but does not work toward any human purpose). The absolute best human designs are those controlled by benevolent dictatorships with a ruthless focus on simplicity. Nature's default is for every garden to overgrow with weeds, unless a gardener keeps at it relentlessly. Eventually the weeds become a beautiful jungle, but the absolute worst gardens are those designed my multiple competing gardeners. Either have 1 gardener, or 0.

See also the incompetent clusterfuck that is the European Union.

No we don’t, and I’m working on solving this problem. There’s no reason for a pure SaaS company to pay these middlemen if the only thing they buy and sell is software. Software vendors can settle accounts directly like banks do, we just need something like an ACH for SaaS. And I’ve been thinking a lot about how to do this while having the equivalent of a petrodollar to create underlying value based on a commodity. For example a meta currency for compute credits that is cloud agnostic.

Warren Buffett has a term for this, it's called "float". At my current (active, not abandoned) startup, my guess is somewhere around 30% of active paying customers are also non-users. Lots of industries have this. The majority of gym membership sales (50%+) and even a significant number of airline tickets are unused.

You'll be surprised at how many people don't know or don't bother to refund.

You can guess from the number of reviews and downloads as they change over time. Everyone says it "doesn't work" yet people still download and try it, which means they paid for it. Granted some might chargeback and refund, but not all. Also my personal experience as the owner of such listings is that you get about 1 review per hundred customers (unless you have a very pushy review process). I've made thousands of sales with only a dozen reviews. Also I'll admit to once having an app on a marketplace that was never updated and barely worked still making hundreds of dollars a month almost a decade later.

I think the Flywheel analogy is great. One of the big differences between working a regular job and running your own product/content business is that it's a flywheel - it works even you don't. Your creative/productive output might be very sporadic and jerky, but the output tends to be smooth and compounded over years.

One of my "revelations" when I founded my own SaaS project a while ago is when I realized there are a bunch of abandoned, yes, completely abandoned, apps on various App Stores and marketplaces that still make a few thousand $ per month, years later, even though they don't even even work. The founder clearly put in a bunch of effort to build it initially, and then didn't carry on for whatever reason, yet it still gets a steady trickling stream of actual customers paying real money.

It's also one of the reasons it is counterproductive to burn out or over-hire or over-raise when building a bootstrapped SaaS. Just don't die, keep pushing the flywheel occasionally when you have some creative inspiration, and eventually you may build something truly great. Or maybe you won't, but at least it will keep you going. But have a flywheel, something that stores your energy and continues output, don't just waste energy trying a bunch of different unreleased projects.

Ooh, I love these points of Conventional Faith presenting itself as Reason. I would argue that most true Knowledge is actually knowing what is not true, yet commonly believed. Actually, if used wisely, you can execute arbitrages on financial markets for profit, aside from other social benefits, at the cost of appearing insane in the beginning. Peter Thiel says that almost every successful person has "secrets", i.e. things that they know about the world that fly in the face of Conventional Faith and that they therefore exploit to their advantage until it's a fait accompli. Personally, I have quite a few, which if I posted here, would get me downvoted like mad, even on HackerNews, but here are some of my LESS controversial ones:

* Cloud services like AWS actually take more time, resources, and headache to maintain than baremetal servers, whether at the scale of a few backoffice users or millions of consumers. Related: the vast majority (95%+) of apps could run on a single baremetal server and be more reliable than whatever cloud shit you use.

* Most SPAs are garbage. Unless you are building something like Figma, write backend code only, don't use a frontend framework like React, and when reactivity is needed, tie it to the backend with something like Livewire. Actually even Figma uses WASM.

* Using a framework like Laravel that makes the business logic easy is far more important than choice of a language based on its technical characteristics.

* People who are outwardly racist are often the easiest to work with, as a minority. And vice-versa, people who outwardly appear anti-racist are often masking a deeply inbred superiority complex and patronizing attitude (hello Democrats), and are the most difficult to work with unless you submit to their authority. Allowing open racism actually makes it easier for a minority to live, and I say that as a minority.

Oh I could go on but I'll stop here.

This problem is as old as time itself and a part of human nature that monotheistic wisdom (or even Buddhism) has always cautioned against. People attributing love, protection, adoration, etc. to fake images construed in their imagination is also known as "idolatry", or "polytheism".

YC was always the dream for me, and I've applied about 25 times over the last 10 years. My work has been all about startups/side projects since I was about 14 years old. I live and breathe startups. But since then I've learned there are downsides to even applying for YC, let alone actually joining.

1. People will steal some of your good ideas. I interviewed with YC back in 2021 where I discussed some unique marketing strategy that had not yet been done in my space. Very suspiciously, I was rejected, yet some large YC companies working in adjacent spaces immediately started implementing that exact specific idea over the next few months. It's possible that was a coincidence, but the timing was very suspect, especially since I was explicitly told during the interview "you have good ideas, but a large team could do this better". And so I'm pretty sure they stole my ideas and gave them to larger teams on the YC portfolio. Beware!

2. It's just a massive distraction if you can actually go it alone. Sam Altman famously said earlier this year, it's only a matter of time before there is a billion dollar company run by a single person with AI. I used to say that back in 2021 even before ChatGPT was released. For many types of SaaS companies which could effectively just be a single person, there is no need for funding, networking, or anything else except writing code and talking to customers. Everything else is just a distraction. YC advice is free on the internet. Vinod Khosla said many investors bring negative value to the companies they invest it.

3. The Silicon Valley groupthink bubble. I laugh at some of the nonsense that comes out of SV, but it doesn't matter to them because there is so much money sloshing around SV that as long as you can attract money by playing their high school popularity contest, you are validated. No matter if there is no substance to your idea. YC companies should count their actual revenue as not including money that comes from other YC companies because it is suspicious if your “product” only matters to people with VC money to splurge. For me, the ultimate test of a good idea is if people are willing to give you their OWN hard-earned money.

4. I, personally, don't do well under intense competition and social pressure. My best ideas and most productive spurts of my life have been when I don't feel pressure to grow, but I work out of a sense of enjoyment in the craft and wanting to solve people's problems that I care about. I have a feeling that YC is one intense pressure cooker, and I'd most likely die there.

Who wants to bet that Google will be dead (or as about as relevant as Yahoo) in less than 5 years?

I keep hearing this comment everywhere Claude is mentioned, as if there is a coordinated PR boost on social media. My personal experience with Claude 3.5 however is, meh. I don't see much difference compared to GPT-4 and I use AI to help me code every day.

Ok you’ve convinced me to give Aider a try. But is there a way to feed it documentation of a particular library or API? I want it to read the Stripe docs for me for example and then implement a feature.

For me, Copilot and its sisters have been like self-driving cars: a slightly more advanced IDE autocomplete, analogous to a slightly more advanced cruise control. But it's far from Level 5 self driving and it's not obvious whether we will ever reach that.

You still have to keep your hands on the wheel and you need driving expertise. But since writing uncommitted code has less disastrous potential consequences, it is much more usable.

I still don't believe the people who claim they are using AI to write or rewrite entire codebases. Maybe for the first version of toy projects. But I've yet to see anyone using AI to automatically write entire features that span an enterprise software codebase.

Sorry I meant Pushover not Pusher. https://pushover.net/

Pushover is supposedly dead simple to use, but I've been lazy to integrate it and download the apps for my system, setup the dashboard, deploy the endpoint to handle the webhook, etc.

I want a dead simple webhook to phone notification system, and I would use it in a lot of places.

I want a webhooked Telegram / pusher bot. Email has a 2-3 second delay which is annoying for my deployment notifications.

Curious, have you ever lived for an extensive amount of time in a walkable European city? As a person who was born and raised in suburban East Coast car-hell and then moved to Europe, I would never want to go back. I still want a luxury car for rare drives to the countryside, but I hate it every time I have to go back to North American car-dependent cities, except for the nicer walkable downtowns.

It only took 9 years for him to get to where he is now.

150k users supported by one man holy shit! This is obviously a B2C freemium app, right? Would love to see a writeup on how you handled the devops/deployment for this. Load balancers, serverless, or just one baremetal server?

If anyone wants some one-man-SaaS ideas, here's a few which I desperately want. Somebody please build these and let me know! I already have my own startup so I don't have time to build these other ideas.

- A cheaper and simpler version of visualping.io, they used to be really good but now they're too expensive and enterprise-y. Would be easier and better with AI.

- AI-based email assistant which instantly brings up the entire history of contact I had with a person (even if they used a different email or sent to a different inbox) and can quickly be used to draft replies based on that history and a set of canned response templates. Note that I don't want a full email client, I want to use my own email client, I just want an assistant that is plugged in via API/whatever. Yes I've already tried all the alternatives in this space like Mailbutler/Spark/Superhuman but they're all crappy and force you to be locked in to their client.

- An Apple TV/Android TV app for the Anki memorization app. Lots of people have made successful Anki plugins and little hardware devices and made good money, like AnkiRemote.com. TVs are extremely well suited to laid-back studying and memorization, so you could easily promote this within the Anki student community if you made one.

Even Google has outages sometimes. The chances of an outage happening at that exact moment when you are "drunk and dancing at a wedding" are probably lower than "catastrophic deployment failure at FAANG, multi-hour outage", especially because you are certainly not deploying any changes at that time. And if the outage is due to a third-party dependency failing then you can blame it on them and there's not much you could do even if you were online anyway.

Only a government has sufficient power to disrupt the Visa/Mastercard duopoly as a payment network, and even then only within its borders. See what India did with UPI to mandate a single interface for bank-to-bank transfers and a single app for payments. The EU also kind of muddled its way through with SEPA and there are country-specific transfer methods like Interac in Canada.

I’ve wondered why a network the size of Stripe has not issued its own currency to bypass the Visa/Mastercard middleman. Maybe political pressure? If SaaS vendors used a SaaS specific currency to settle payments for software subscriptions, that would have petrodollar implications for global currencies markets. In countries where even food and transportation is paid for by a software subscription this could finally jump the barrier which crypto failed to cross: being able to actually pay for everyday stuff like bread and milk with internet money.

Yup. Startups like GoCardless and government initiatives like UPI are all about direct bank to bank transfers to cut out the middleman by becoming the new middleman.

This is precisely why I'm considering appending to a sqlite DB in WAL2 mode instead of plain text log files. Almost no performance penalty for writes but huge advantages for reading/analysis. No more Grafana needed.

Sometimes I think about the billions of dollars invested in stupid marginal tech like voice assistants, or boilerplate spreadsheet replacement SaaS and wonder if capitalism has failed. Why is this money not being invested in something that is obviously more desperately needed, like building more housing? As this article pointed out, some of this stupid marginal tech like Alexa isn't even making a profit, Amazon is *loosing* billions on it. Then why do this? We have real crises facing us, like climate change and the housing crisis and war, and meanwhile YC is funding "developer tooling". As if what society needs most right now is that developers with 6-figure salaries need to make their already cushy jobs slightly easier with some IDE widget.

Same here though my preferred tool is OmniOutliner or any similar tool with hierarchical branching. There are other tools like Roam/Obsidian but Omni has proved to the fastest offline local macOS app with the most rich feature set.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Maybe because the revenue isn't directly attributable to AI itself, but is realized in the cost savings and productivity improvements in already existing revenue streams? That's where AI has been useful to me. I can't put a number on how much AI has made me exactly, but it has certainly helped all aspects of my bootstrapped startup.

Yeah but physical products are hard work, and cost a lot to store, move and display properly. Yet you can still sell directly to consumer if you wish. Software distribution costs basically nothing on the internet, AND Apple makes it impossible to sell directly to the user.

Apple's App Store policy is unbelievably ridiculously hubristic. Imagine if Google/Microsoft charged you 30% of your entire business just because you ran it on top of Excel/Sheets and Gmail/Outlook. Or if Adobe took a 30% royalty from all artists creative works. It's madness, plain and simple. Developers already pay an annual fee to publish to the App Store, and consumers pay massive dollar to buy their iDevices. And yet they still have the nerve to demand 30% of entire business revenue, and charge a tax even when conducted outside of the App Store (so-called Core Technology Fee)? Even most governments in the world don't tax out-of-jurisdiction income.