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Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years
In January 2010 I soft-launched launched Preceden, a web-based timeline maker tool, followed a few weeks later by a larger launch on HackerNews: Today – almost 13 years to the day since the i…
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Products I Wish Existed
Below is a list of products or startups that I am keeping an eye out for. I skipped listing things I wish existed that can *not* be implemented with today's technology in strong form - for example, the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer - although weak forms of this may be possible today.
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Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup
When I first joined a startup in 2012 I did my best to ask the right questions when interviewing. My engineering background prepared me for engineering tasks and helped me write a resume, but it didn’t prepare me well for how to evaluate a startup offer. While this might be obvious to some, this is what I wish I knew…
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Pricing niche products
I recently visited a friend who runs Keycult , a business that designs and sells $500 keyboard kits.
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We turned $140k on Kickstarter into $40k debt and broke even
This is Part 3 of “Making The Contender: Conception to Completion”. Here are links to Part 1 (how we made the game) and Part 2 (how we ran…
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I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure. Here's the stack I landed on, what was harder than expected, and what you still can't avoid.
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Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch
No co-founders. No funding. No connections. No customers. No — you’re not nuts.
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Hard Startups
The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one. A hard startup requires a lot more money, time, coordination, or...
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Three Years as a One-Man Startup
I’ve spent most of the past 3 years creating one language learning web-app, Readlang.
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Why's that company so big? I could do that in a weekend
I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean , so the…
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Black Swan Farming
September 2012 I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing. The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best…
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Before the Startup
October 2014 (This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to potential founders at other ages.) One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give advice, you can ask yourself "what would I tell…
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Reflections on Being a Female Founder
Not a lot is written about being a female founder and CEO. I used to believe that my journey as a startup founder was the same as any other founder's experience, regardless of gender, in that it is...
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Persisting as a solo founder
I quit my job in January 2020 to build...
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What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast
What can software engineers learn from the shutdown of the company? Exclusive details.
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Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad
A version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review VC’s have just changed the ~50-year old social contract with startup employees. In doing so they may have removed one o…
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Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
Why VC funding can hurt startups: selling equity for cash, chasing traction over profitability, and why bootstrapping may be safer for founders.
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How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company
Detailed breakdown explaining questionable marketing techniques used by AirBnB. By David Gooden, marketing expert & MN luxury realtor.
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How to sell a B2B product
Lately, a bunch of early stage founders have emailed me to ask for go-to-market (GTM) advice. They have a real product, it solves a real problem for their handful of customers…