Here are all the businesses I’ve tried:

(Half of them failed)

👇

Training Spectrum

A website showcasing local sports talent, health and fitness articles and interviews with personal trainers.

Started at 17. Lasted 4-5 months.
Food & Drink

A local website listing restaurants in each city (before Zomato was a thing).

Started at 18. Lasted 6-7 months.
Ambitionaire

An online magazine interviewing entrepreneurs for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Started at 18. Lasted 3 months.
10 Question Poll

A website asking 10 random funny questions and you share your results with friends.

Started at 22. Lasted 3 months.
Rank & Rent

Rank niched websites on Google and sell the leads or the website to businesses.

Started at 23. Some have worked pretty well, others have not.
Web Design & Marketing Agency

2 niched agencies and 1 general agency helping clients grow their business.

Started at 23. Slow start, but doing very well now.
Study Web Development

A website where I share what I know to help people get into web development and freelancing.

Started at 23. Slow start, but doing very well now.
Drop Shipping

2x drop shopping businesses.

Bought into 1 at 26. Started another at 26.

Both are doing well.
As you can tell, my journey has been a slow one filled mostly with failure and frustration.

I hope this motivates you to keep going 👍

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There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.


Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.

"Who is the prototypical client here?"

A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.

(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)

"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"

I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.

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The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.