David Ferguson

Don't be so mad at the rest of the world that you miss out in being what's good about the world. #StayPositive

@CodyBrownBets 128

🎁 I’m giving away $500 on Christmas. All you need to do is guess the total amount of points scored in all 3 NFL games combined… For example: 130 👇🏼 Comment below. One entry only!

Doing strategy work with my AI co-pilot, Claude. -Every idea I have? “Great idea.” -Change direction for the 5th time? Zero complaints. -Tell him he’s too verbose? No hard feelings. I’m keeping the humans though — they’re the ones who tell me when my ideas are bad. 🤪

Wrote my first Python script and imported ~17,000 cleaned & deduped records into Supabase. (By “wrote” I mean I dutifully typed the commands my AI buddy Claude told me.) 😅

"Can DashboardFox be translated into Arabic?" Customer asked yesterday. Done today. ✅ No dev agency. No 6-month wait. No $15K quote. Here's what I did: 📊 Exported 1,950+ UI labels from Phrase Manager 🌍 Uploaded to TextUnited (lifetime AppSumo deal I bought years ago) ⚡ Machine translated English → Arabic (General) 📥 Downloaded CSV, ran 2 SQL commands ✅ Arabic is live Total time: 2 hours Total cost: $0 (thanks AppSumo 🙏) The catch? 🤔 I don't speak Arabic. So I need the customer to validate it. Make sure translations actually make sense in context. Once they approve? We bake it into the product. This is what brandable actually means. 💡 Not just white-labeling a logo. Making the product speak YOUR language—literally. Rename "Dashboard" to "Command Center"? ✅ Change "Report" to match your CEO's terminology? ✅ Support Arabic, French, whatever you need? ✅ No engineering sprint. No vendor dependencies. What languages does your business need to support?

Small win before Thanksgiving: our toll-free Twilio number just got approved (2FA) ✅ Moving DashboardFox from on‑prem to the cloud, one step at a time. Grateful for the support—stay tuned!

"Why not just use Stripe?" Because I have a legacy Authorize.net account with lower fees. But Authorize doesn't support UK/EU Strong Customer Authentication. Stripe does. Solution: Chargebee with multi-gateway routing. US → Authorize (lower fees). UK/EU → Stripe (SCA compliant). Bootstrapped means optimizing every percentage point. Two months into taking DashboardFox from self-hosted to cloud SaaS. Progress update: ✅ 400% performance boost after finding real bottleneck (wasn't where I thought) ✅ 2FA ready (waiting on Twilio TCPA approval) ✅ Auto tier upgrades that dynamically adjust Kubernetes resources ✅ Custom domains working for agencies ✅ Backup/recovery tested and smooth ✅ Grabbed 3 OVHCloud servers on Black Friday for true K8s cluster setup Still doing this between selling, marketing, and running the business. Claude's my late-night DevOps partner. Progress is steady. The holiday won't slow me down. It'll speed me up. 🦃 💻 Founders: anyone else running multi-gateway payment setups? What's working?

The BI industry has been coasting on "good enough" for years. Slow dashboards. Bloated acquired tools. Blaming customers. We're bootstrapped. No acquisition bloat. No excuse to ship slow. Fast isn't hard. It's just inconvenient when you'd rather upsell than optimize.

Yes, you can screw up performance: Cramming 16 widgets on one page Cheap AWS instances with single core CPUs Data dumps instead of summary views But if your vendor's code is slow at its core? You're just rearranging deck chairs.

For every SaaS team embedding analytics: Your users don't care about features when they're watching spinners. They'll ghost the product and tell your support team "it's too slow." And you'll think it's YOUR fault.

That's why we're building our @DashboardFox cloud on bare metal servers. Yes, bare metal in 2025. Old school beats "scalable" cloud VMs on performance every single time. Fast CPUs. No compromises. No AWS tax.

We lost customers because our dashboards took 14 seconds to load. Then I looked at why customers were leaving our competitors. Same exact reason. The entire BI industry is shipping slow software and blaming the customer's database. Here's what we found when we actually fixed it: 🧵

Want to know the other scam? AWS and Azure sell you garbage CPUs on cheap VMs. Same exact code: 2.4 GHz CPU: 3.4 seconds 3.8 GHz CPU: 1.6 seconds 2X difference. Cloud providers make bank on underpowered compute.

So we tore apart our own code to find where time was actually spent: Database queries: 2.65s → 0.09s Frontend rendering: 11.14s → 1.52s The "optimize your database" advice? That's 20% of the problem. The other 80% is the application nobody wants to fix.

Heavy data grid (232K records): Was: 20 seconds Now: 7.7 seconds 61% improvement. Know what every vendor says when customers complain? "Optimize your database." Translation: Not our problem.

@yurbi version 11: 14 seconds Yurbi version 12: 1.6 seconds 88% faster. Same data. Same dashboards. This isn't some miracle. Every vendor could do this. They just don't.

Caught Christian McBride + Brad Mehldau at Kauffman Center. Felt old for a minute—been buying McBride CDs since the 90s, he’s my age. Reality check. Duo format—just bass + piano—no safety net. Christian played bass like a full instrument. Brad’s left hand = rhythm section, right hand = melody. Two people covering the whole band. That’s the bootstrapped founder life: make it work with less. Play all the parts—dev, sales, engineering, marketing—plus HR, legal, finance. No excuses. Just execution. Went down the stride/Art Tatum rabbit hole—left hand doing the job of a rhythm section, right hand leading. Oscar Peterson breaks it down: youtube.com/watch?v=Xata3H… My 30-year playbook: -Learn the part, then play it well. -Keep the setup simple. -Show up for people, consistently. You don’t need a full band to ship. You need discipline, taste, and the guts to carry rhythm and melody until you can add players.

(8/x) If you want self-service BI that’s powerful and affordable, comment or DM for a live demo of @yurbi / @DashboardFox. No sales pitch—just a straight product walkthrough.

(7/x) Want the inside details on the SaaS management platform? Check my recent posts—I’m documenting the build as we go.

(1/x) I run the business—sales, marketing, accounting, legal when needed 😭, janitor, chef, bottle opener. I’m also the product architect… but I hadn’t written real code in 20+ years.