Raoul

@marclou Why "deplatform"? It's a sales email - this is done all the time.

POV: you’re a giant startup marketplace trying to deplatform sellers from a tiny indie marketplace run by one guy

Yes, I do see the irony in this...

@jackfriks 15% monthly or annual?

apparently 15% churn is awful and my SaaS is not even worth 4x its annual run rate if i were to sell it to venture capital (thats okay cause i am not selling)

Try to remember when you last did any of this to your own father, realise how short and fleeting this time is, and enjoy every second. It honestly passes by too quickly. Later in life when we wake up without anyone jumping into bed with us, we come home and nobody is there to greet and shout HII DADDD to us, are we free, or are we alone?

@nico_jeannen Better hack: Marry her then you have a wife that takes care of you. 😉 Congrats man, she sounds like a keeper.

Lifehack: get yourself a GF that makes you 100% homemade bagels + coffee in the morning while you work

@DanielLockyer Nice - does it work with Heroku as source? Or is that locked to using WAL streaming?

Used this on a recent migration :)

I posted a job opening a week ago - we currently have 2000 (!!) applications from that job portal. But the job description explicitly says that applications should come be sent through our website. Less than 10% of the applicants actually read and did that, and so far amongst those, we're seeing a ton of AI answers (some with the ChatGPT prefix "sure let me write the answer for you"), many with resume links not publicly accessible, and so on. I've interviewed a bunch of the good ones, interesting batch. But the funnel math here is fascinating. 22 more days to go, let's see what happens.

This is a great cold email

@jamesonhaslam This is a great cold email

should I be running ads

Fatherhood is the end of philosophy. you can read every book ever written about meaning and purpose and discipline, but the moment a small human looks at you and believes you, everything you thought you knew burns down. because now you have to do it, not think it, not debate it, not post about it. the child watches your hands, what you do when you are tired, what you do when you are mad, what you do when nobody else is looking. that is your only sermon and you cannot fake it for one day because children are bullshit detectors made of flesh. if you are a weak man your son will know it before he can spell the word weak, and he either becomes you or becomes the opposite of you, both out of desperation.

Newborns are fairly easy. They sleep most of the day. They are only awake for a few hours, and while they are awake they are eating and being changed, then they go back to sleep again. Babies are a little more work, but they still sleep most of the day. What is really difficult is toddlers. As soon as they become mobile, as soon as they can crawl, they get into everything. If they are awake you have to be watching them, or you have to put them in a playpen, which I do not like. I prefer not to restrict my children’s movement like that. I prefer to prepare the house so it meets their needs. Then they start walking and it becomes even harder. Around five or six years old, something changes. If you have been teaching them, they can begin doing a lot of chores. They can clean up after themselves, get dressed, feed themselves properly, and handle many small responsibilities. Children can begin learning these things earlier, but around that age they usually become good enough that you do not need to intervene very much. After that point it gradually becomes logistically easier to take care of them. It may become more expensive in some ways, but it becomes easier from a logistical standpoint. Your focus shifts more toward moral training, bonding, and guiding them. What this means is that if you have children under the age of five, especially multiple children, it can be very difficult. The good news is that this phase only lasts for a certain period of time. After that it becomes easier again, assuming you train your children well. All of this assumes the children are healthy. If a child has serious health issues, that is a completely different situation. The key to getting through the under five stage is to simplify everything. Everything needs to be as simple as possible and as organized as possible, and ideally you should do that before you get yourself into that position. I would say the period when you have a newborn at home is when you should begin simplifying everything. What does that mean? First, have a simple roster of meals that repeat. Cook the same things every week or every two weeks in a cycle. Choose easy meals. One pot meals, or meals you can put in the oven and let them cook. They can still be homemade, nutritious, and very tasty. The point is to choose meals with very little preparation. Ideally something that takes fifteen to twenty minutes to prepare. The cooking time does not matter because the oven handles that, not you. Second, remove everything from your house that is not required for raising your children, at least from the areas where the kids spend their time. This way you do not have to worry about them breaking things or getting into things they should not touch. Empty space is perfectly fine. If the floor is cold, put down some mats so they have a place to play. A simple open area and a few toys is all they need. One small box of toys is enough. A two or three foot wide box with perhaps a dozen toys inside. A box of Duplos, a couple of stuffed animals, a few balls, maybe a few soft books. You may own more toys than that, but only keep a small number out at any one time. That way cleaning up after them takes five minutes at most. You also need to set up your bathing and changing stations so that everything follows an efficient pattern of movement. You move from one step to the next and it is done. You should be able to change your baby half asleep in the middle of the night. The only way that works is if everything is laid out very clearly. Nothing to trip over, nothing to bump into, and everything kept simple. One smart idea my wife came up with was to buy LED candles and place them in the areas of the house where you need to go at night to care for the baby. That way she could wake up half asleep, change the baby, and not need to switch bright lights on and off. She could stay half asleep and do everything almost on autopilot. That helped us tremendously. Our challenge was that we live in a small apartment and it is easy to accumulate too many things. Even so, simplifying the space helped a great deal. If you have older children when you have younger ones, that can make a big difference. For example, if you have a ten year old and new babies, that ten year old can be very helpful if they have been well trained. They can handle all of their own responsibilities, keep their own toys and mess organized, and help with things like loading and unloading the dishwasher, running the washing machine and dryer, folding clothes, or watching the baby for a moment while you step away. Those small contributions make a real difference. At this stage your biggest problem is not necessarily the amount of work. There is not actually that much total volume if you have simplified things properly. If you find there is a huge amount to do, it usually means you did not simplify earlier. The real challenge is interrupted sleep. You may lose two or three hours of sleep each night, and that loss adds up if you do not make it up during the day. The good news is that small children sleep a lot. Babies sleep a lot, toddlers sleep a lot. If you organize things properly, when your toddler sleeps, you sleep as well until you catch up. Then you can use some of their sleep time to get other things done. The whole approach is about reducing overhead as much as possible while still caring properly for yourself and for the children. Even if you do everything well, you will probably become more and more tired during the stage when your children are very small. The good news is that it does not last forever. Once they grow older you recover. Sometimes you simply have to endure the season. It passes, and you will make it through. Everyone else does. You can too.

This is amazing, but also drives home the point that it's less about the *software* in SaaS, but the *playbooks* that the software embodies. The vast majority of the market either doesn't know the playbooks cold the way the SaaStr team does for all their functions, but more importantly, companies want the playbooks consistent in their org through employee turnover and changes

Been standing here for 15 minutes. Nothing!

@_willcompton Enjoy this phase man, it absolutely flies by too quickly

Was just upstairs laying w my 3-year-old, giver her my world famous nightly back scratch to help her fall asleep I noticed she was staring up at the ceiling I wondered if she’d articulate an answer if I questioned what she was thinking about, given that she’s 3 So I asked her, “what’re you thinking about sweetheart?” She sat there for about 3 seconds Turned her head towards me “Turtles” That’s a mental state I yearn for. Not stress. Not work. Not shit I need to do. Just turtles

@t31kx Btw I just checked, do /model in claude code and keep opus 4.6 (if not change to opus 4.6) and switch to HIGH thinking, mine was on medium which seemed to be more silly.

@raoulsnotes First ones to go during the AIpocalypse

Claude code being super fckn dumb today???

@helloitsolly > I will try hiring locally in Cape Town and collabing in person This is the way

Final #buildinpublic thoughts on hiring an engineer Engineer will need to document as they go, like everyone else (including me). Updates might include: -> Reproduced the bug locally -> Found the issue: image resizer not handling SVGs correctly -> Tried a CSS fix first before touching the component -> CSS fix didn't work, going deeper into the component -> Fix working locally, pushing to staging -> PR open. Tested on Safari, Chrome and Firefox (these could be automated -> @linear ) Automate Gitbhub to @linear issue status updates There will be a daily check in on Slack I am going to remove the Svelte requirement I am going to keep pay at $9,000 a month and open up the option for a profit share Continue to share the SOP in the job description I will keep no recurring meetings but have a one-week onboarding with as many 1:1 calls as required, plus ongoing calls as required I will try hiring locally in Cape Town and collabing in person I will do a deeper review after a week and a few weeks No passive Slack messages - let the person do their work or not, let go of control

Neither of these men are married or have kids. Both are simply obsessed with their own personal perfection and optimization. There is nothing impressive about a single man with no kids sleeping well and being fit. Show me a man with young children, a full time job, disrupted sleep, who works out regularly, eats healthy, trains Jui Jitsu, with a muscular body… THIS is impressive. THIS requires extreme discipline.

I disagree with the pushback you're getting in the comments, for a hands-on CEO with high velocity team this type of expectation is typical. That being said, it's hard to do *remote*, which is why a lot of us (myself included) have defaulted back to in-person. If you're back in London, hiring folks for in-person (even if it's 4 days a week) might get you what you need.

For context: he committed to an EOD update. His EOD passed. I followed up with this. That’s not micromanagement, that’s holding someone to what they said they’d do. The job description and onboarding explicitly states cards must be updated as you work to maintain momentum. He read it and agreed to it before the trial started.

Another engineer quit midway through a trial $9,000 a month and apparently keeping Linear updated as you go is too much Listed twice in job description Designed to facilitate remote work and fewer meetings

"Cool" was just so different back then. And forgive me, but I think it was actually cooler too.