Hypothetical Validation
Asking people if they like your idea feels like research. It isn't. There's a hierarchy of signals, and most founders stop at the wrong level.
Asking someone if your idea is good practically begs them to lie.
Blog
The Template Play
Building a starter kit for an emerging tool and crossing $5K in three weeks isn't luck. It's a pattern. The tool gets the press; the template captures the revenue.
Someone built a starter kit for an open-source AI coding tool and crossed $5K in three weeks.
The Active Parameters
A 35B parameter model that activates only 3B per token isn't a compromise. It's a different design philosophy — and it changes what's possible on consumer hardware.
A 35 billion parameter model that activates 3 billion parameters per token sounds like a trick. It isn’t.
Not Venture Scale
An investor told a founder their business wasn't venture scale. The founder agreed — and didn't care. That framing shift is worth examining.
An investor told a founder their business wasn’t venture scale. The founder agreed. Then they went home and kept running their profitable business.
Entertainment Value
The most viral developer tools aren't the most useful ones. They're the most enjoyable to encounter. There's a lesson in that.
The most viral developer tools aren’t the most useful ones.
The Zero-Backend Bet
Some of the most viral tools built recently have no server, no database, no account. Everything runs in the browser. The absence of infrastructure is the feature.
Some of the most-shared tools being built right now have no server.
The Niche Depth Play
The counterintuitive truth about narrowing your focus: everything gets faster, cheaper, and more referrable when you serve fewer types of people.
At some point, almost every person running a service business realizes they’re managing too many different problems at once.
Content That Keeps Working
A post published today is still bringing people to your product in eighteen months. A paid ad stops the moment the budget stops. The math is different.
The paid ad stops working the moment the budget does.
Do You Know Someone
The most effective outreach question isn't 'want to buy this?' — it's a gentler ask that almost always produces a useful answer.
There’s a question that outperforms almost every cold pitch.
The Seventy Percent
Building the product is the easy part. The harder work — the part most engineers underestimate — is everything that happens after you ship.
Most engineers think building is the hard part. It isn’t.