Topic
Essays, mostly not about software. About the gap between deciding and starting, about shipping something with a wobble in it, and about why the quiet quarter you are waiting for is never going to arrive.
14 articles
"Behind" implies a race with a leader in it. What is actually happening is that one customer's information lives in eight places, and the tasks that cross the most boundaries are the ones that never get done.
August 31, 2026 · 5 min read
A first sales hire inherits the gaps between your tools, not your judgment. The case for making the acquisition loop run end to end first, then hiring into something that already works.
August 31, 2026 · 5 min read
A two-person company has about one person's worth of attention available for customer acquisition. The tools you buy at seed decide how much of that goes into the work and how much goes into the gaps between products.
August 31, 2026 · 5 min read
Getting to a hundred paying accounts is not a strategy problem for a technical founder. It is a loop with four moves, and most people quit at the third one.
August 31, 2026 · 6 min read
The famine month was decided eight weeks earlier, while you were billing forty hours and nobody was writing to strangers. Here is the smallest acquisition loop that keeps turning during the weeks you are unavailable to run it, and what each piece actually costs.
August 31, 2026 · 5 min read
An agency's retainer is priced against what each client gets. Its software is priced against how many clients it has. That mismatch is where the margin goes, and it has nothing to do with how hard anyone is working.
August 31, 2026 · 5 min read
Deploying is not launching. The work that turns a live URL into revenue is a different job, and buying a specialist tool for each step of it turns the founder into the wiring between them.
August 31, 2026 · 5 min read
Dev built something genuinely better than what his whole industry was limping along with, then waited a year and got eleven customers. Most makers skip the half of the job that decides whether anyone ever hears about the work, and call the skipping integrity.
July 29, 2026 · 5 min read
Terry bought the van, paid for the logo and read a nine-hundred-post thread about clipper blades, then spent eight months not grooming a single dog. The confidence he was waiting for is only ever made by the thing he was avoiding.
July 28, 2026 · 5 min read
A man in Sheffield has owned the domain for his woodworking studio since 2019. It still points at nothing. The gap between deciding and doing is stuffed with activity, which is exactly why so few people ever notice they're stuck in it.
July 7, 2026 · 5 min read
Dale has a note on his phone with forty-one things he'll do when work slows down. He started it in 2019. The slow week has never once arrived, and what the waiting cost him doesn't show up on any statement he's ever read.
June 25, 2026 · 5 min read
Ray has fixed espresso machines for fifteen years and writes every job in a spiral notebook. He'd never call it a strategy, and he's never once felt it working, which is exactly why almost nobody builds anything like it.
June 23, 2026 · 5 min read
One man spent fourteen months building a perfect workshop and never made a chair. Two bays down, a woman sold a wobbly stool for forty dollars and got asked for four more. The difference wasn't effort, and it wasn't talent.
May 7, 2026 · 5 min read
The path from idea to first paying customer is too expensive, too slow, and too fragmented. We built Rocketship to collapse that entire journey into minutes.
April 12, 2026 · 5 min read
