Carson McComas

Now that I'm in my 50s with an unqualified and extraordinary level of happiness — a postmortem on my decades so far: 20s - At the lefthand zenith of the "Dunning Kruger Effect" of life, but this was a good thing, it kept me moving forward boldly. Had fun, did fun dumb stuff, but also did hard things, got married, had children, started a business, and started to exercise the muscle of deferred gratification and discipline specifically around health, relationships, faith, family, and career/money. 30s - Started to lock in. Responsibilities mounted, pressure built, baseline enjoyment of life was solid, but weighed down heavily with the effect of choosing hard things in my 20s. Did more hard things. Had more kids. Invested more deeply in family, faith, career and relationships. 40s - Thanks to lots of reps, got generally better at the skill of life, being an adult, a business owner, a dad, a husband and all the things I'd spend the last 2 decades focused on. Things felt easier and more manageable as a result. Still hard! But payoffs from prior investments started to show up as a light at the end of the tunnel. 50s - The investments of the last 30 years are reaching maturity. This is the moment I was deferring things to earlier in life. Life is filled to the brim with things that bring me immeasurable joy, satisfaction, meaning and purpose. My business has provided financial security and an ability to reach goals I never even imagined. My health is good. My marriage is a treasure. All but one of my kids are adults now, charting their own path, and have become my very best friends. I sit in awe of who they are, and what they do. And I'm a grandpa — truly no hype prepared me for how awesome that is. My faith is my anchor to all of that. These are the things that matter to me and enrich my life. All the categories of my life where prior investments were made and compounded over decades are paying off now. It was worth the wait, and more. I acknowledge an immense amount of luck and good fortune across many factors which have allowed me to arrive here. Any one of those pillars could collapse overnight, and life still throws very difficult curve balls. But I also want to acknowledge that it works. The model of investing in things that matter, usually at the cost of great personal sacrifice and deferred gratification pays off enormously. The impact of compounding over decades on those investments is hard to describe. My life is far richer than anything I could have conjured up in my wildest dreams. Photo: my granddaughter with a tiny toolbox I made her last weekend.

@mhp_guy I love this high school teacher!

I could never say no to a cold email pitch like this. This stuff fires me up so much. Hard yes!

@Shpigford Your wife called, she said this doesn't count as getting rid of businesses.

giving away all of these domains for free to initialcommit.co club members this week. will be dropping them in discord. let's say...one a day. because why not. drops start tomorrow (wednesday).

@youderian We are now, but no - SEO work just carried over well.

@Carson Awesome to hear! Have you been specifically optimizing for LLMs? Or is the SEO work just carrying over well?

My organic Google traffic is down 90% over 2-3 years. Friends who out-disciplined me on content publishing are seeing the same thing. I've been hit by overnight 80% Google penalties before and rebuilt. This is different. It's systemic. When SEO agencies are rebranding away from the term, you know it's bad. And yet ~60% of us are still investing in SEO. A few numbers on effectiveness: **Meta** is the #1 traffic source for ~1/2 of people who use it. 50% effective. **Google** is the #1 traffic source for 1/6 of people investing in SEO. 16% effective. (Stats from eComFuel Trends Report, can access via link in bio) And no, SEO traffic isn't free. It takes a boatload of time and money to put out great content. So what to do? Unless you're seeing meaningful results, it's time to move on. Plenty of places to reinvest: YouTube, product quality, optimizing for the LLMs. Organic traffic isn't gone. But the long-term ROI just isn't there. Whiteboard Fridays, PBNs, page rank sculpting — a golden era that gave me so much. But I've moved on. If you're still hanging on and no seeing results, you probably should too.

@OisinO Whoa! Our fav. Congratulations to both teams!

My company, Recharge, just acquired Skio for $105m. This is the largest private acquisition in the space ever. Just 5 years ago I got a crazy phone call that nearly killed us... Here’s the story I've never told anyone before:

@youderian When does the full report drop (or has it)?

AMZ is moving from mandatory -> ancillary. 17% like selling on AMZ. 93% like selling on their own site. And DTC is more lucrative. Even after accounting for the increased CAC spend, DTC-first brands are making more money per our recent Trends Report. Can't ignore brand demand on AMZ, makes sense to capture it. But as an optional pain-plagued growth channel? AMZ can only squeeze so much. #chartoftheweek

I love this. Good job dad. I still remember my daughter when I finally caved, and seeing her happiness will go down in history as one of the greatest moments of my life. And I'll confess, I like the little rascal.

"Dad, just so you know, morale is extremely high." That was my daughter on the first day we brought the puppy home. She'd been asking for a dog for 10 years. A decade of lobbying, and that was her victory speech. I never wanted a dog. I'm an optimizer. An efficiency guy. My brain runs on systems, logistics and ROI. We traveled a lot for years as a family, and "who's going to watch the dog?" was my undefeated excuse. Also, I have 3 kids and own/run a business. I'm not exactly on the prowl for more responsibility. Then we settled down, stopped traveling as much this year. And suddenly my excuse arsenal was empty. I didn't cave because I wanted to. I caved because I ran out of excuses. Two weeks in, here's what I didn't expect: I really like the little guy. He was running around while my daughter and I worked out recently. Even with him peeing all over the floor mid-session, it was still more fun with him there. He just lightens things up. My family loves catching me in the act. Any time I pick him up or ruffle his ears or show the slightest affection, I get the look. "Whoa.... Dad actually likes the puppy!!!" Like they're documenting a rare wildlife sighting. But the moment that got me was walking into the living room and finding my son passed out on the couch, shirtless, with the puppy burrowed under a blanket against his chest. Both were completely out and completely peaceful. That image isn't leaving my head anytime soon. Will a dog make travel harder? Probably. No scratch that, he 100% will. Is he inconvenient and inefficient? Absolutely. But I'm sometimes guilty of running my life like a spreadsheet, and spreadsheets don't capture your son asleep with a puppy on his chest. They don't capture your daughter's face when morale is "extremely high". Sometimes a little inefficiency is the whole point.

Doing this again for Easter dinner.

HUGE UNLOCK. Previously Plus-exclusive B2B features are now on all @Shopify plans.

@soundslikecanoe Ohhhh yeah. Nothing quite as masochistic as you, but def.

@Carson you guys doing anything fun with the vibes??

Super nerdy but if you're vibe coding software you may like this. It's about to change my life I created a "Feature Request" Chat on my app, powered by Sonnet Anybody on my team can use this chat to request a new feature or report a bug in the app. It asks a few simple questions and then turns that into a thorough spec. Then the spec gets posted to a backlog where I manually review it and (1) add notes if I have them, (2) Move it to Spec Ready Then I have a Scheduled Claude Code task that picks up items in Spec Ready every night and implements the spec + moves it to PR Ready with a link to the PR. Then I have a separate scheduled task (fresh context!) pick up those items and do a thorough code review and testing on each. Claude also posts comments to the comments box in the card every time it makes an update / has feedback. ALL of this stuff I used to do manually. It was getting to be way too much this took forever to set up and I'm still tweaking it. I know many of you have cooler agent setups but this has been a lightbulb moment for me, so thought it was worth sharing.

@Shpigford Same thing that would happen if a cheetah joined the zoo.

i sometimes wonder what if i'd taken that job at facebook in 2006

@BillDA *These are bath toys

@BillDA These are called bath toys, Bill.

I have decided small government is overrated. Kids toys should be required by law to have a hidden switch inside the battery compartment to disable the all the 🚨🚨🚨 sounds.

@kurtinc @home_assistant ooooh I hadn't thought of this use case

Having Claude Code configure @home_assistant unlocks crazy levels of automation and convenience. I've almost entirely replaced Alexa.

Sometimes when I'm doing my taxes I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just go to prison.

@BillDA lol, touché

@Carson To be replaced by tolerance for bad-to-worse totally unmaintanable vibe coded apps?

Our collective tolerance for mediocre-to-bad SaaS apps is going to zero, and quick.

@youderian They chose standard time though. Up here we need DST, esp in the winter. Getting dark at 3:45 does not enhance my mental health!

@Carson There’s always Arizona 🌵

I'm insanely jealous.