Mark Goodhead

In the future, the most popular programming language will be English githubnext.com/projects/ai-fo…

Thanks Darragh, I appreciate the extra context (and a fascinating blog post in the first place!). In that case my obvious follow-up question would be how you manage the increase in complexity, not just of the codebase architecture itself, but the sheer volume of reviewing required, from LOC per month 3x-ing in such a short period? Of course the AI review takes some of the pressure off, and as you noted in the original post you've accepted some slippage on your quality metric as a trade-off for the velocity gain (although it appears to be reverting), but do you find the bottleneck is now the review process and ensuring that any Claude architectural sprawl can still be understood by the engineers? Finally, how far along are you on the spectrum from encouraging engineers to take the time to properly understand every line that is written, vs trying to manage the complexity through interfaces and abstractions which are well tested but the implementation details are only really understood by Claude?

Sharing here as a reply to this comment... tl;dr; more PRs AND bigger PRs Q: "How do you prevent Goodhart's law seeping into the PRs per employee metric? I assume, even if it's not explicit in performance reviews (or is it?), all the public leaderboarding of this metric is going to naturally encourage people to break up PRs even more than they normally would? I'd be interested to see if LOC / PR has changed over time which might be one way to observe this" A: I've not been worried about this, for one we've a very transparent and high trust environment, if all a person attempted to do was jack up the PR count but not accomplish more it'd be very obvious. What we've actually seen wrt LOC per PR is that it's increased too, this makes sense when you think about the ease at which CC will write e.g. tests, or it's growing ability to take on larger scope of problems. We expect some downward pressure with our use of AI PR approval (ideas.fin.ai/p/ai-is-approv…) which encourages smaller PRs. One related take away for me, is that I've seen internally and externally people get caught up on not finding the perfect measure, and allow that to hold them back from making progress in the right direction. I don't believe there's any one perfect measure for this, triangulation is very important, and it's a big trap to fall into to not peruse the bountiful gains available because the perfect measure doesn't exist.

@Davidjpark96 Nothing good ever came easy 🤝

we hit $1M MRR :) i don’t really have too much to say except i am very happy and this was really hard huge shoutout to the jenni team (esp. marc, matt, and shailesh) we're back baby!!!! 🥳

Don't get an agency or outsource, you want someone strong in house you have high trust with. Hire them the same way you hire any role - learn enough about it yourself to know what great looks like (even if you don't think you're great yourself) and interview as many people as it takes to find the perfect person. Let's talk deeper strategy on this in our next call 😄

@markgoodhead teach me your ways pretty much have always been let down by agencies or outsourcing 🥲

every 6 months i feel like i have to learn an entirely new skillset i really liked this aspect for the first ~5 years, but the latest few cycles have been challenging nowadays i have to get a better grasp on things completely outside of my wheel house (accounting, legal, tax, and/or compliance aspects of running a company) i hope this is a temporary lull and the future points i get to allocate in my skill tree are more interesting when in these times, it's tempting to ignore the boring aspects of the business and double down on what's most exciting personally, but i've hired well for these exciting parts of the business so it's best to just let those people cook for example, it'd be super fun to spend 8 hours/day scheming with my ugc guy, but the truth is he can figure out 90%+ of the problems himself in this sense, the founder always gets the distillation of the worst, existential, and/or first of it's kind problems that no one else can solve in each section of the business it is a part of the job i have a love/hate relationship with (but still mostly love) i'm curious what the next stage of learnings will be but i hope it's more on the growth side!

100% physical spaces are the wrong fit for your business. If your ARPU was $10k a customer I'd tell you a different story 🙂 Do you think AI SEO is different enough to SEO to warrant its own specialist? From everything I've seen about it all the tips and tricks seem to rhyme heavily with content that's also great for SEO purposes.

i've tried pretty much every channel not super bullish on physical spaces, conferences, any networking events in general unless it's hyper targeted also haven't seen much success with outsourcing any of our work, our in-house strats seem to drive all the revenue the good investments are the boring stuff influencer marketing, ugc, seo, paid ads, affiliate programs, etc im not sure though, one excellent person on a team can unlock an entire distribution channel so maybe i just haven't found the right person to take ownership of the more exotic growth channels (AI SEO, scripted content, clipping, etc)

Jenni has plateaued at ~$730k MRR for a year now Kind of hurts my ego to type it out, but I prioritized creating a profitable + robust startup over explosive growth I don't regret this decision, but when I see other products hitting insane growth milestones, I can't lie, I do get tempted to turn down the profitability knob and just speed run to $1M MRR lol However, we were able to stick to our original strategy and now I'm super happy with the composition of Jenni group and the diverse growth channels that we've been able to build out The systems are now in place where we'll be able to keep our profit margins and start growing modestly month over month There aren't too many seed strapped companies and even fewer that build in public like us It'd be great if we could be an example for future startups that there are a myriad of paths that you can take as a founder (besides just bootstrapping vs raising capital) Will be posting our new MRR total in 6 days at the end of the month and that'll be the first of hopefully many months where it's clear we are on our way to $1M MRR profitably It's definitely going to be a lot of work, but v excited for what's to come!

@Davidjpark96 New acquisition doing well then if it still grew healthy double digits!

x.com/Davidjpark96/s… Our May numbers for reference!

We made $660,423 in June 2025 ✍️ Jenni: $537,928 🤖 Stealth EdTech: $97,488 ⌨️ New Acquisition: $19,759 🧑‍🏫 Stealth B2B: $5,248 Unfortunately, a fair amount of churn due to summer break, but seasonality is part of EdTech Either way, very confident we hit $1M+ in September :D

@Davidjpark96 Also I hear your prospective acquirers sucked tbh so you dodged a bullet 🤭

Making decisions is difficult When we had acquisition offers I tried to figure out the best path forward I read about Sam Altman’s first exit (Loopt), he personally made $5M and it set him up for success for the rest of his life Then I read about Andrew Wilkinson’s exit (Dribble) where he sold his startup only to re-buy it again later because he regretted selling it so much Then I talked to a friend I respect and they told me definitely sell because being rich in your twenties is the best human experience possible Then I talked to a mentor and they told me that I would go into severe depression if I watched someone else 100x my business/baby It sometimes feels like the sum of all advice just zeroes itself out The best system I use for when I have a hard decision comes from my middle school english teacher He told me to write down all the pros and cons on a piece of paper, then immediately crumple the paper up, and just go with your gut Have all of the facts and data fresh in mind, but ultimately do what you must I did that when it was time to sell, and so far it seems I made the correct decision because we’ve doubled in size since our acquisition offer This could be a premature victory though, so at the very least, since I’m doing pretty much everything in public I get to be another data point for a future founder whether to sell or not haha I’m curious how the Jenni road will end, but I have plenty of paper to crumple whenever I’m unsure of what to do next

@Davidjpark96 👌

We made $818,793 in May 2025 ✍️ Jenni: $689,841 🤖 Stealth EdTech: $107,062 ⌨️ New Acquisition: $14,870 🧑‍🏫 Stealth B2B: $7,020 These numbers are about to be a lot less pretty with summer break coming up haha But very proud of what our team has accomplished this school year :D

Overconfidence is loved by the twitter algorithm (and is useful sometimes, eg if you are selling something) but I prefer the honesty of someone's true position. There's nothing like a startup to remind you, over and over, how wrong you can be on things you think you're sure of. It breeds the kind of epistemic humility David has and it's a valuable trait I wish more people had.

@markgoodhead @Davidjpark96 There is nothing inherently wrong with second guessing yourself but when speaking out be firm in your message.

How I would choose my next startup idea: 1. It must be a product in a growing market. Startups can take years or even decades to fully develop, don’t risk creating an amazing product just to have the user base dry up.
 2. The value of the product must increase over time. For example, as you upload more to a social media platform and make more friends, each month the product becomes more valuable to you. This will mitigate a lot of churn problems later down the line. Churn fucking sucks. 
 3. The product must have some growth flywheel. A product that inherently brings in new users is extremely powerful. Fintech companies do this very well where users can send their friends money, but they have to make an account to accept the money. Growth loops allows for exponential growth without any need for marketing hacks. 
 4. Must be scalable. Cannot be reliant on human labor, too capital-intensive, or requiring tailored solutions for each customer. I’ve made a mistake trying to make my life’s work an agency and I will never do that again. Agency as side-income is fine, but because the upside is capped, always go for a more scalable option.
 5. Startup idea must be validated and have clear monetization. Even if the startup idea comes from a personal pain point, I would not make a company unless there were already other players in the market selling similar things, or I would need to get multiple user to pre-pay for the tool. Anyone can build anything with AI. The question now is are you building something valuable? The fastest way to check is to see if people will actually pay.
This step literally would have saved me years of my life, not hyperbole. 6. Go to every genius you know and continually badger them to join your new startup. If none of them will join you, reconsider whether this venture is worth it. If you cannot convince your friends to join you, perhaps they know something you don’t. Perhaps you need to improve on your communication skills to convince them of this opportunity. Either way, if not a single person whom you respect will join you, this is a red flag. Unfortunately, some great ideas are so revolutionary that even the smartest people you know could wrongfully dismiss it, so I'd say point is a looser suggestion than others, but still important imo. 7. The idea (or at least most the idea) must be bootstrappable. Trading $125k for 7% in the AI era is pretty bad imo (unless you have a capital intensive business or you are in a winner take all market). With LLM’s, magic is now an API call away and it’s pretty easy to get early traction with minimal resources. If necessary, I’d rather self-fund and/or ask co-founders to put up some cash. Absolutely no VC’s at the start, and I would only add funding if I were in a super competitive market. 
This is coming from a SaaS bias though, if you're building rockets or something probably can ignore. 8. Consider whether you are the best person for the role of CEO, or you see a path to becoming the best. Could you face the top 1% of founders in this field and win? The answer most of the time is no. There are plenty of great startups in the world. I wouldn’t mind being CMO or head of growth or digital marketing specialist or intern at someone else’s company where I believe they are the absolute best CEO possible in their field. There is no shame in this at all. Tbh being CEO sucks most of the time. 9. The startup idea you are working on has to be so important to you that you’re willing to gamble all the blessings you’ve already received in your life. Remind yourself that you are about to have a really volatile and unpredictable decade+. I lost pretty much everything I care about in my personal life except for maybe a handful of friends and my parents. This could happen to you, or maybe it could be worse (I hope not!) 10. Reflect and choose an idea but don’t fall in love with the idea. You may think this contradicts 9, but it only furthers its importance. You will pivot several times before you stumble upon the winning product. As you pivot be sure to keep these 10 things in mind as you revamp your product and change directions. Overall, I challenge the notion that “ideas are worthless execution is everything”. Execution is definitely more important than the idea, but a few months of ideating and making sure your startup actually is necessary could save you years later down the line. It’s kind of like if you’re a great poker player you can play weird/weak hands and pivot them into bluffs if you need to, but it’s just better to start with a premium hand Even with all this being said, you might be thinking that my list is too strict or unrealistic. I would definitely agree! But if you want to create a company that can truly scale and set yourself up for a huge outcome, maybe this list has some value Either way, Jenni is super fun for me and I will unlikely make another startup anytime soon Just putting this out there for anyone who will be starting a company before I do I think this checklist could save you time if you try to verify these things before dedicating years of your life to a venture Or this could derail you from creating a monster unicorn because the list is too reductive and all things should be taken on a case by case basis Nonetheless, could be helpful to read this list and digest my perspective (then accept/reject it) Hope this helps somebody make a more informed decision, good luck!

@Davidjpark96 @ecomzander Maybe at some point people will realise the combination of confident and bold yet with constant vigilance for potentially being wrong is a super power for startups. Don't change 🫡

@ecomzander I tend to not like people who are supremely confident in their opinions It's why I lean more towards being open-minded and not taking hard stances on things unless I'm 100% confident on it But maybe I am overdoing it on disclaimers, thanks for input

@StokeyyG2 Wayne Gretzky is great, but no one dominates their sport like Don Bradman

Who is the actual goat of their sport? Like no one comes anywhere near 2nd to the first guy

@biobootloader @gfodor @Hoarder035 Also very interested in this! I have a 3 year old I figure this is too early for, but keen to start them on the same path when the time is right...

@gfodor @Hoarder035 what ages did you introduce them?

Giving very young kids access to real laptops with high ceiling video games is such a cheat code. My kids bootstrapped reading, math, spatial reasoning, etc, just because they had a *need* to do it since the carefully chosen games I've put them in front of *demand* it of them.

@Davidjpark96 💪💪💪👏👏👏

We did it :') Our churn rate is finally in the single digits! If you have a B2C AI SaaS, you know how much of a battle this was Huuuge shoutout to the Jenni team ❤️ Now...can we hit <8%? 🤔

@E2Teacher 😢

In December 2020, my overly-dutiful parents cancelled the family gathering even though we knew it was my mum’s last Christmas. It’s so galling.

@sama Why is the UK tricky from a regulatory standpoint?

unless you live in europe/the uk, but that’s not our fault :(

when we launched the openai pro plan in december i thought it was only a good deal for extreme power users. now with the addition of 100 deep research queries per month, unlimited sora, unlimited chatgpt, o1 pro and more stuff to come, i think it is a great deal for many users!

@Davidjpark96 The more you practice, the luckier you'll get 😉

I ran a TikTok agency on the side and we hit ~$300,000 ARR We closed it down this week We had to close it down for a few reasons: 1. It was taking too much time. I have to spend 95% of my time on my startup and even the 5% bandwidth spent on our agency was getting frustrating to deal with. 2. Because I wasn't all-in, the quality of our services started to go down for later clients, and honestly this was the worst feeling. It takes a lot of effort to scale agencies, and I just didn't have the time to properly do it. We refunded some and did extra unpaid work for others. This is by far what I am most bummed about, not killing it for everyone who paid (although we did for most!) 3. One reason I wanted to start this agency was because I wondered if I just got lucky with a "GPT wrapper". So my goal was speed running to $100k ARR with a new business. After we kept growing past that, the money didn't really excite me at all because I had already completed my "goal". That lack of intrinsic motivation was unfortunately the root cause of all these other issues. 4. I felt really guilty that my partner was putting in so much more work than I was. We started 50/50, then I diluted myself to 70/30, then I just stopped taking any of the profits of any new clients because it was clear I was focusing almost entirely on Jenni. I do think that if Jenni AI wasn't doing so well, I could've done this agency full-time with him and it would've been a huge business. Maybe in the next life. The TikTok agency was the first time I had any success outside of Jenni AI, and it was a fulfilling experience At our peak we worked with some pretty big brands and I got to help out some friends that I always respected We definitely could've kept this agency as a source of side income, but it's better to just pull the plug than to keep the agency limping along I started the agency wondering whether I got lucky with Jenni AI, but now I'm fortunate enough to have hit $100k ARR four times, $1M ARR twice, and will hit $10M ARR soon I do still feel like I experienced so much luck in all the various businesses I've started/acquired, but the imposter syndrome seems to weaken over time It's unlikely I'll be doing any agency based business in the near-future, but this post still serves as a nice little retrospective for myself and maybe for anyone else experiencing imposter syndrome Thanks to MengMengDuck and all the early clients who believed in our agency!

@Davidjpark96 "2-3 acquisitions this month" lmao my man you don't mess around 🤣

Our 2nd product just hit $100k MRR 🥳 It's been super fun re-living these early growth milestones again via acquisitions Will likely be finishing up 2-3 more acquisitions this month! Current ARR of our tools combined: $8.96M

@Davidjpark96 But also congrats on the pivot starting to pay dividends!

@Davidjpark96 I have so many questions lol 😄

After 5 months of no growth, we're finally getting back into our groove 🤠 We did a big product pivot this year and it's been painful cutting some of our previous distribution channels and churning away some of our old users But luckily it's looking like the worst is behind us and we can get back to some reliable growth In the long-term niching down should make our product 10x more delightful, and help us move way faster I already feel like Jenni is getting so much more robust now that we're focused on a more specific market segment (researchers + grads) The last 5 months were quite painful though, after getting used to ripping 10-20% monthly growth anything less felt like a failure 🥲 Due to the slowed growth over the past few months, we're really on the clock now for our $10M ARR goal by 2025 We're currently at $8.5M ARR and adding $1.5M in one month is quite ambitious tbh But regardless, the game plan does not change Just need to keep improving product + innovating on distribution and we shall see if we can pull off the big milestone 🤷

@Davidjpark96 I promise you, it'll work out. There's a path to healthy balance and you'll find it. Always happy to chat when you're feeling stuck (or just whenever!). Good luck 🫡

Despite the newfound success with my startup, my personal life has been challenging Earlier this year, when I went to visit New York, I was really excited to spend time with my friend But when I arrived, I immediately got an acquisition offer, and I spent the whole month locked in my room preparing data and going through DD I didn’t even get to share one meal with my friend, and unfortunately she passed away shortly after I left New York I have enough money now to afford a table for two anywhere in the world, but it’s impossible to fill the other seat This past year I completed our largest acquisition yet, and it was quite stressful dealing with the lawyers, bankers, and accountants Speaking and thinking became so cumbersome that when I met with my girlfriend I’d regularly reply with grunts or nods She would chastise me and say that I was never present because I was so hell-bent on finishing this acquisition Well, I was able to get the deal done, but she broke up with me because she ran out of patience I told her that I could change, but she said it’s too late and that her heart had left me 🥲 It was hard to hear this from the person I planned to marry I fear that I’ve unintentionally made some Faustian Bargain What else would explain my cancer diagnosis right after hitting $1M ARR? Each new level of startup success came with it a new trauma Sorry to write a super personal post, I promise I will get back to the regularly scheduled positive + actionable startup advice soon But the fact of the matter is I have literally sacrificed everything for my startup There are other founders who seem to have a healthy social life while also running a startup, but I haven’t been able to figure out that balance I write this post because it’s clear to me now that if I don’t figure out this balance I may end up with a pretty lonely + sad life I’ve started going to therapy and trying to find things that make me happy outside of lowering churn and increasing user counts It’s led me to rekindle my love for creative writing and I take a lot more walks now Tbh I still miss my girlfriend and I still put a high number of hours into my work But each day I find new things outside of my startup that make me happy, and that’s been very encouraging I’ve got a lot to figure out, but for now, I’m cautiously optimistic about this more balanced life!