There's been big drama about this technology recently.
Back in 1999, a man named Steve Gass invented a system that sensed flesh and allowed the blade to stop and retract before it could cut into hands and fingers.
This wasn't some gimmick. It actually worked. 40,000 people in…
The blade of a saw carries a small electrical signal. When skin contacts the blade, the signal changes because the human body is conductive and the change to the signal activates the safety system.
[📹 SawStop]
Here's what China banned.
Google
YouTube
Twitter
Facebook
Wikipedia
TikTok
GitHub
ChatGPT
Reddit
Instagram
WhatsApp
LinkedIn
Signal
Vimeo
Discord
Twitch
Dropbox
Medium
DuckDuckGo
HBO
Pinterest
SoundCloud
BBC
The New York Times
The Guardian
SlideShare
The Washington Post
Internet…
I find it distasteful, almost unethical, to say this when you have 18 million subscribers.
Hard to explain why, but with great reach comes great responsibility. Potentially killing someone else’s nascent project reeks of carelessness.
First, do no harm.
- You read 100 books. 99 are meh, 1 changes your life.
- You try 100 things. 99 don't work, 1 changes your life.
- You meet 100 people. 99 you never see again, 1 changes your life.
Life is more random than it seems. Act accordingly.
When I worked at Amazon we used to make some software slow on purpose.
Then when a problem caused real slowness, we’d remove the fake delays and things would feel normal.
The fake delays made users happier, even though they all wanted faster software.
Makes you think.
2000 customers @ $39/month is almost $1M/year.
- You don't need to dominate the market.
- You don't need to disrupt anything.
- You don't need to conquer the competition.
You can add 1 new customer/day & before you know it, you'll have a $1M/yr machine. Wouldn't that be enough?
- You read 100 books. 99 are meh, 1 changes your life.
- You meet 100 people. 99 you never see again, 1 changes your life.
- You try 100 things. 99 don't work, 1 changes your life.
Life is more random than it seems. Act accordingly.
If you’re a programmer, you can:
- Make SaaS products
- Write eBooks
- Make apps
- Create video courses
- Do freelancing
- Give live training
- Do paid support
- Publish a paid newsletter
If you accumulate $325/day from doing many of these at the same time, you’ll make $10K/mo.
Things you absolutely don’t need to launch:
- a favicon
- unit tests
- a logo
- an LLC
- tax compliance
- VAT handling
- a merchant of record
- terms and conditions
- a privacy policy
- a copyright notice
- a trademark
- commit messages
- code reviews
- code comments
- a…
Tech culture creates a bunch of grown-up babies. People earning $300K/yr complaining they don’t get free lunch. Bring your own lunch and have some dignity.
Believe it or not, house affordability hasn't changed much in the last 40 years.
What got inflated was people's desire for bigger and more luxurious homes. The median new house today is almost 1000 sqft bigger than 40 years ago.
Price per sqft, inflation adjusted:
2000 customers @ $39/month is almost $1M/year.
If your software can handle 2000 customers, you can worry about scalability once the $1M/year is flowing in.
Scalability doesn’t get you cutomers. First have customers, then worry about scalability. The order matters.
A few $100K/year revenue streams, for inspiration:
- 300 customers @ $29/mo
- 6 sales/day @ $45 each
- 1 sale/day @ $270 each
- 50 students/quarter @ $500 each
- 15 hrs/week @ $125/hr
No capital necessary. Parallelizable. Achievable as a one-person business.
Profile of a typical corporate drone:
“Engineering leader, husband, dog parent. Likes coffee, travel, outdoors. he/him. ex: amazon, google, microsoft. Opinions me own.”
Every interaction with these people is a posture to improve their employment status. A soulless conversation.
I've been in the self-published ebook business for 16 days now, and just crossed $40K in sales.
I can't pretend I'm an expert in this profession, but here's everything I did so far.
A thread.👇
DigitalOcean is how the cloud should have been.
You choose a $64/mo server, and at the end of the month you get charged $64.
No NAT_GATEWAY_EGRESS_INTER_REGION nonsense fees.
Just spent $360,000 today.
A 10 acre lot adjacent to our 2 acres just went on the market, and we snatched it. It comes with a gorgeous salmon-bearing stream in it.
A few $100,000/year revenue streams, for inspiration:
- 300 customers @ $29/mo
- 6 sales/day @ $45 each
- 1 sale/day @ $270 each
- 50 students/quarter @ $500 each
- 15 hrs/week @ $125/hr
All achievable on your own terms, as a one-person business.
Node.js with Express.js can serve 15,000 requests per second (1.3 billion requests per day) on a single MacBook Pro.
There are only 8 billion people in the world. You probably don’t need to scale beyond one server.
Today is my 3yr anniversary since I started working for myself.
I made $760K in revenue, and had a few realizations along the way. Here are some of them:
- You read 100 books. 99 are meh, 1 changes your life.
- You meet 100 people. 99 you never see again, 1 changes your life.
- You try 100 things. 99 don't work, 1 changes your life.
Almost everything consequential in life is randomly determined. Act accordingly.
The idea that anything is possible if you work hard enough is a dangerous delusion.
Life is more random than it seems, and favorable payoffs are more often attributable to making good bets rather than a good work ethic. Don’t sacrifice more than it’s worth.
Never set goals without cost constraints:
- I want to start a business… without spending more than $10K
- I want to make $100K… without working more than 2hrs/day
- I want to get promoted… without sacrificing my family
.. and so on.
Else you become a slave of your goals.
Forms of self-employment income for developers:
🔴 SaaS: Takes a long time for meaningful returns.
🟢 Info Products: High volatility, unpredictable, potential for extremely high ROI.
🔵 Freelancing: Predictable, stable, choose your own hours.
Mix together for maximum effect!
”Work hard, be bold, be willful, be over-confident…” and other BS nonsense.
The best thing you can do to get ahead in life is to realize you’re not special and to learn how to deal with all the uncertainty life throws at you.
My 9yr old wants to start learning how to make computer games. I was making small games in C at his age, but I’d rather spare him the trauma :)
What’s the best tech nowadays for teaching kids to code a Tetris-like game while also learning some programming fundamentals?
A few $100,000/year revenue streams, for inspiration:
- 300 customers @ $29/mo
- 6 sales/day @ $45 each
- 1 sale/day @ $270 each
- 50 students/quarter @ $500 each
- 15 hrs/week @ $125/hr
All achievable part-time as a one-person business.
@SteveClaflinIT
It's not clear, but likely because the saw would need to be much more sturdy (more mass, stronger materials) to withstand the energy from the brake when it engages.
But maybe it's mostly profit margin.
YC and some other “accelerator” called Neo are currently having a public meltdown on who runs the best Silicon Valley kindergarten for grown up children:
It's easier to break down targets to something concrete:
$100K/year
... can be visualized as $8,300/month
... which can be visualized as $270/day
... which can be visualized as 7 sales of $39
... which can be visualized as 140 views @ 5% conversion
Just crossed ¼ of a million sales on Gumroad from 2 products in 10mo.
Ads: $12,949
Gumroad fees: $12,102
Affiliate fees: $8,185
--------------
Cost of sales: $33,236
Ask me anything. I don’t have all the answers, but I can give you my perspective. 👇
I’m convinced that working 40hr/wk, 50 weeks per year, for 30-40 straight years, is against our nature.
Yet, the most skilled, educated, and highly paid people I know tend to be unable to consider any other path that doesn’t involve enduring this artificial lifestyle.
My advice to first-time info product creators:
1. Start with a very small product.
2. Choose a topic you know well that will almost write itself. Avoid doing research.
3. Timebox production to 2 weeks.
4. Charge $10.
5. Promote it!
All the lessons are in
#5
. Best of luck!
A killer use case for AI would be to upload all my 58,000 photos and let the machine organize them, enhance them, select the best ones from dupes, etc.
Amazon is a 1.5 trillion dollar company and still uses "top-left-round-corner.gif" to draw rounded borders.
You probably don't need those fancy CSS animations for your MVP.
There are two distinct types of careers:
- One where the payoff follows a normal distribution (doctor, programmer, plumber, architect).
- The other where the payoff follows a Pareto distribution (musician, author, startup founder, youtuber).
...
People tend to conflate the desire to work for yourself with the ambition to do grandiose things.
I’m not trying to become the next Zuckerberg. I just want to wake up whenever I want. Take mid-day naps. Spend time with my kids without asking for permission. That sort of thing.
People tend to conflate the desire to work for yourself with the ambition to do grandiose things.
I’m not trying to become the next Zuckerberg. I just want to wake up whenever I want. Take mid-day naps. Spend time with my kids without asking for permission. That sort of thing.
Barbell strategy: Either work at a big company where you get paid well or work for yourself. No middle. Most people at startups are overworked and underpaid, and instead of a few buttons all they have to show for is nothing (startups fail).
It's depressing to see so many talented people from top schools with amazing resumes go work years at FAANG, and the most they can point to having shipped are a few buttons in one minor workflow.
I mean I know FAANG can afford it, but you can't. Work at a startup!
Forget about becoming something. Just do stuff.
- Don't try to become a writer. Just write.
- Don't try to become a programmer. Just make something you need.
- Don't try to become an entrepreneur. Just start fending for yourself.
I once joined Andrew Tate's community as a "market research" exercise.
His reengagement emails are often hilarious. All the dark patterns you can imagine, but still funny.
"Instead you have nothing!" 😅
I learned a lot about the heart over the last 2 weeks, and discovered an amazing similarity between our heart and distributed computer systems. Let me show you how our heart deals with the CAP theorem.
Here's my story:
Starting in August, I increased my exercise volume to try…
Ways you can make money in 2021
- Writing ebooks
- Making video courses
- Giving live courses
- Making software apps
- Freelancing
- Starting a podcast
- Starting a newsletter
- Starting a YouTube channel
- Starting a community
$95/day from 3 of these will make you $100,000/yr
Never set goals without cost constraints:
• I want to make something… without spending more than a week on it
• I want to make $100K… without working >10hrs/wk
• I want to get promoted… without sacrificing family time
... and so on
Else you become a slave of your goals
• Don't try to become a writer. Start writing.
• Don't try to become a programmer. Start making something you need.
• Don't try to become an entrepreneur. Start fending for yourself.
Forget about the label. Just do stuff.
Everyone wants to decouple time from money.
The problem? It's an extremely unpredictable way to make a living. For every successful creator, there are thousands who make nothing or almost nothing.
So, how do you make the unpredictable, predictable? Here's what I learned:
I’m convinced that working 40hr/wk, 50 weeks per year, for 30-40 straight years, is against our nature.
Yet, the most skilled, educated, and highly paid people I know tend to be unable to consider any other path that doesn’t involve enduring this artificial lifestyle.
The idea that anything is possible if you work hard enough is a dangerous delusion. Life is more random than it seems, so act accordingly and think in bets.
Short term US treasuries are at over 5.5% now. $218,000 buys you $1,000/mo in almost risk-free income. This is the base rate that any other investment has to beat.