paulstovell

I call this the "grandpa's keys" problem!

When Grandpa was 20 years old he left the house and forgot to take his keys, so every time he left the house he checked his pockets for his keys.

When he was 24 he left the house and left the stove on. He learned to check the stove before leaving the house.

When he was 28 he left his wallet at home. He learned to check for his wallet.

...

Now Grandpa is 80. His leaving home routine includes: checks for his keys, his phone, his wallet. He ensures the lights are off, the stove is off, the microwave door is closed, the iron is off, the windows are closed in case it rains...

Grandpa has learned from his mistakes so well that it now takes him roughly an hour to leave the house. Also, he finds he doesn't tend to look forward to going out as much as he once did...

Thank you for this, it's brilliant! I have spent days drawing the wiring diagram for a modified 1961 MG MGA using LucidChart. The fonts available just didn't look great. I uploaded Routed Gothic and now it looks very natural and original. Great work on the font!

MG produced the MGA roadster from 1955 to 1962. This site has been operating by one person for 20+ years and has the biggest wealth of information on how to maintain and fix these cars. The tech section alone has over 4,000 pages of information on these cars.

You don’t actually have to pay for your own, but you are taxed an extra 0.5% if you don’t and earn above a certain amount. So in practice rather than pay the additional tax, people get private healthcare. If you then start earning below the threshold you can cancel the private healthcare and go back to the public system.

My hobby is tool collecting and occasionally, my wife makes me do work around the house to justify the tool collecting. So, I really enjoyed your creation here! I was going through it today and ticking off all the categories I own tools for (I got 96) and discovered a bunch of opportunities to expand the collection. Thank you!

> Plus concrete tools, for example, didn’t even make the cut

I must say I was surprised that hammers, fancy hammers, and mallets all got their own categories, while my noisy Husqvarna concrete demolition saw was bundled in the same category as regular circular saws. Now it makes sense!

> That tool bag, valued at $100,000

Must be a Festool!

Fascinating!

Thanks! My DM's are open, or paul at [my HN handle].com, happy to talk to anyone making this transition.

First is the right people - don't hire "Frank" from Paul Kenny's talk.

Second is to join sales calls or watch the recordings (Chorus.ai is great for this). Put yourself in the buyer's shoes and coach based on those recordings - I always listen from the point of view of "If I was the customer, do I think they really care about my problem, and is it credible that they will help me solve it?". Right now I watch 1-2 recordings a week and then chat with the team about what they think went well and where we might improve, and we are figuring it out together. That continuous process is what reinforces the culture. When the CEO is focussed on helping customers, and revenue as a secondary concern, it becomes the culture.

Third is probably for the sales team not to be an island. So get the engineering and product leaders to join the calls or watch the recordings too, so that the tiny features or friction points make their way onto the roadmap eventually.

This 100%!

My experience here: https://twitter.com/paulstovell/status/1389881033470869504

This talk by Paul Kenny is a really good talk here about the value of the sales function even if you don't want the revenue:

Paul Kenny: Selling Sales to Techies (2010): https://vimeo.com/96703844

Thank you for sharing this Kent, I got a tremendously valuable insight from it.

I run a company and I love my work. And I recognise that this puts me in an extremely lucky minority. And my business has been successful enough that I could even quit working, but I enjoy it too much to. I also love my family. But there are never enough hours in the day. I could spend 16 hours a day with my kids and it would not be enough. I could spent it working, and my business would want more. I look back on the last 10 years and feel many regrets about how my time was spent in both directions.

So I feel like a failure constantly. I am not the husband I wish I was, not the CEO I wish I was, not the parent I wish I was. Because they all want 100%. I can’t get this balance right.

The point I took from your post is that this balance is meant to be difficult when you love both sides of the things you attempt to balance. Because giving time to one takes from the other.

I feel a lot more at peace for reading it. Thank you for writing it.

PS:

Lots of the comments here question the “need to work” point or admonish those of us who do derive substantial meaning from our work and wish we had more time for our work. I think that’s missing the point. Replace “work” with something socially acceptable that you love, like I dunno, protecting baby penguins or teaching orphans. You could spend 100% of your time doing that. Now balance it against the other things you love. Don’t feel bad about not getting that balance right, because by giving to one you take from the other, and both would love 100%. If work for you is something to be minimised as much as possible then I don’t think a post about work life balance is particularly relevant to you, because you must have it figured out.

This is an important comment. When a company gets to profitability, the worst-case outcome is the company stops growing, it loses momentum and closes with a tiny payout. There is always an option to do that. By not aiming for profitability first he bet on spending big in pursuit of growth instead, which is the VC model. He was effectively his own VC in this case.

Someone with less funding availability might well write the tweet thread about how they were crushed by the person who had $10m of their own money to spend.

I do think it’s great that he wrote this up and I have to say, as a bootstrapped (profitable) startup founder in a space with heavily VC backed competitors, it made me pause.

Octopus Deploy and TeamCity both parse output looking for commands in the same way (called Service Messages). I believe it is a common pattern in all CI servers.

The issue here doesn’t seem to be parsing the output, but what the parsed commands can do.

In Octopus there is no way to use them to run commands or set environment variables though. I can’t speak for TeamCity.

Update: TeamCity's documentation page about service messages:

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/teamcity/service-messages.htm...

The commands are quite specific though: test results, build numbers, etc. no generic commands like running commands or setting environment variables.

Also if the problem is "churn as a single number" is wrong because it misleads people (the example being churn is up because the company is growing) surely the answer is to show a cohort analysis or historical data - not a forward looking or "best fit" model?

Absolutely not an expert here, but I do obsess about our churn numbers.

It seems this post is trying to make a model to predict churn or guess what future churn might be. But the main case for understanding churn to me is historical.

Last month we had 10 customers paying us $10 each. Two of them cancelled. I have gross churn of $20. That's not a model, just a historical fact. What's "wrong" with that calculation that these models solve?

I will definitely get different churn numbers if I look at groups of customers in cohorts based on when they first signed up, or enterprise-vs-SMB, or whatever. So I have reports to create all of those cohorts and show me the churn for each. I look at that data - with all the historical context - and make a decision about what to do next in the business. "Selling to SMB's was a good idea, but wow they churn a lot more. Let's focus our marketing on enterprises this month."

To me the churn calculation at the top of the article is plenty useful. I'm not sure what value I'd get from these advanced models. If they just exist to predict future churn or LTV, that doesn't seem particularly useful.

This comment really resonated with me - I’m a founder of a company which hit $10m a couple of years ago, we’ve been through two heads of marketing with no success, and everything you wrote is spot on with my experience. Thanks for posting it.

Thanks for the kind words!

We built this internally to test that the UI we built for Kubernetes deployments was producing the expected YAML. Thought it would be useful to share.

British East India company had its own army and literally did run a big part of society. Amazon doesn’t have an army at least. Maybe we are trending in the right direction.

+1 your second observation. We bought a hundred year old house a few years ago. In that time I’ve gone from “knowing how to hang a picture” to full owner-builder, enclosing a garage, and lots of projects in between, all from YouTube.

Perhaps it allows them to begin to open borders between each other, but keep borders to other states closed? If those three states' economies are very interlinked it might let them get closer to normality.

Legally, is this possible in the US?

In Australia for example each state has closed or is controlling their borders with each other, and this seems to largely be a decision for each state (I don't think there's a federal law either way). I could imagine some states choosing to open up while others remain closed. Or if two states made big sacrifices but got the issue under control, while the others lagged behind, those two could open borders between themselves while remaining closed outside.

I am the founder of Octopus Deploy - we have #52 on that list. It was first registered in the same year I was born!

Asking because I’m genuinely interested in a solution: Is there a way to design a HR department against this?

For your own company, how would you set up a HR function that does not have this tendency?

It's free for small teams, and we can invite you to the GitHub org if you are a customer.

Compute is one part of it but not much different across clouds. Databases are the other big part (each customer needs their own DB). The SQL Server databases in Azure for our usage scenario turns out a lot cheaper. We’ll explain more in a future post.

The issue here is Octopus is like a CI server - customers can run arbitrary code in the instance (not a problem most SaaS apps have). So a VM per customer was almost the bare minimum.

Cloud CI platforms typically solve this by timesharing build agents, but that takes engineering effort, which is a waste of effort if there's not a lot of demand in the first place. That's why we started with the MVP.

The post didn't make this very clear. $10 was the starting price - at the time it was for 5 users. Similar to Confluence or Jira with a very cheap (in this case loss-making) starting tier. Once a customer got to ~10 users it became profitable.

What we didn't know if whether there'd be enough customers for us to care about the loss on those $10 tiers. E.g., if only 100 customers signed up a month, the costs would have been around $10K/month - enough to write off as a marketing expense. Once it got to $100K it became something we needed to fix.

None of this had anything to do with how the database is used.

We’re confident our v2 architecture can. Current costs are between $10-15 per trial. Future posts will go into detail around how it works.

The deployment itself worked flawlessly :-)