Marketer, self-taught developer, and the founder of
@Bento
. Designing a quiet family life in 福岡, Japan. Direct messages always open if you need help 🌿
for those curious on the email issue
@aarondfrancis
ran into during his big launch (cover in the podcast episode):
421 4.7.28 gmail has detected an unusual rate of mail originating from your spf domain [highperformancesqlite[.]com].
this deferral occurred because 1) the
marketing lesson: choosing software is often an emotional decision.
when I used to see
@rauchg
in my feed I was so excited to try vercel. dude has such good energy. i put our marketing site there just for fun cause i wanted to learn nextjs.
now all I see is
@cramforce
’s
We're all on the same page that running a sophisticated piece of business critical software with a database, exposure to the internet and stuff costs more than renting a single computer, right?
no doubt living in japan has influenced me.
pre-japan, I think I would have been pulled into the “build in public” / open revenue crowd.
now living in japan, I want to be more private.
does Bento make $1k MRR? $10k? $100k? $1M?
no one knows; and that gives me a lot of
As an ex-SEO: you *never* talk about an edge you have or a client’s edge publicly.
You shut up and ride it out.
It takes just one Google employee submitting a ticket to the web spam team to nuke you off the SERPs via manual actions which they seem to be doing for mass
We pulled off an SEO heist using AI.
1. Exported a competitor’s sitemap
2. Turned their list of URLs into article titles
3. Created 1,800 articles from those titles at scale using AI
18 months later, we have stolen:
- 3.6M total traffic
- 490K monthly traffic
I made a thing 🥺❤️
Baby “Evie” was born August 17th at 1:53pm, weighing a hefty 4.3kg. She is very healthy and very strong - exactly what we needed to hear.
8月17日の13時53分に次女が無事に生まれて来ました。4.3kgの巨大ベビーですが、とても元気でよく食べてよく寝てくれてます❤️
in rails i make a small change on an old app and redeploy fine.
in next.js i make a small change on a 6 month old app then have to spend ~30mins debugging vercel specific errors.
why is this?
@itsjustamar
@bandholz
Living in Japan, where everyone takes off their shoes, I’m now default “shoes off” as a guest. I think it’s rude to keep them on now lmao.
take a moment to appreciate how amazing it is that you can put code on a server, connect it to a payment gateway, and print money for your family. what a blessing.
a tiny, but important new development in
@bento
...
this week we have been sending a % of our email volume on our own, self-managed network.
please clap.
I’ve been listening to Dan on the
@TropicalMBA
since waaaay before I started my own company so it feels surreal to have been interviewed on the pod.
It’s a big, personal milestone for me and I’m proud with how it turned out. Please give it a listen! ❤️
whilst on this holiday, I have hit a revenue milestone I’m very proud of.
I won’t mention the number, but I do want to somewhat document it here.
software, and the opportunity it presents us, is beautiful 😌
Selfishly, after a break up I implemented this policy to give *myself* permission to take time off.
Since adding it, multiple staff have been comfortable reaching out to let me know what's going on and to take time off to heal.
Without it added, I don't think they would have.
got burned by poor performing freelancers for a few months last year.
commonly went missing or just didn't ship any work despite being paid.
didn't give up and found a couple of rock solid ones.
feels good man.
if you are a broke founder starting out do it somewhere in asia NOT in a city like sf, sydney, or london.
in 2015 I was paying $5/night in chiang mai. bed always made, fresh hot coffee downstairs, and always something interesting happening that day.
smiling thinking about it
Today's face palm: if you're using React, don't use a third party for server side rendering. If they go down or your credit card fails (example below) then your site will tank in the SERPs.
Self host for less headaches.
bonus marketing lesson: you want to pick enemies with scary boogie men, large concepts, and epic corporations — not individual companies or direct competitors.
@dhh
picks fights with “the cloud” and “apple”. easy to support and get behind.
Vercel picks fights with Rails???
It’s common for a Heroku bill to be over $1,000 USD / month even for relatively small apps. Do you know what you could get for that price if you just used one server with SQLite?
You could have a terabyte of RAM, 40 terabytes of NVME SSD storage and 128 core AMD EPIC CPU.
subtweet incoming: call me crazy but I don’t think you should doxx a freelancer if they screw you over as a founder.
send legal after them and then move on.
Spent yesterday afternoon learning Next.js, Prisma, and
@planetscaledata
then deploying it all on
@vercel
.
Toy app, not for anything special just wanted to learn.
Speed of deployment was kinda magical. DX was super fun. Learning curve very small.
Expectations met hype.
I think, after having a baby, I start to *feel* why the "small bets"/"start many projects" crowd is the worst path for making an independent living online from software.
Every two weeks I have a reminder to wipe my entire to-do list.
If something has survived 14 days w/o action, and my business hasn’t been destroyed by not addressing it, then it’s safe to say it’s not important at all.
Your software project will *always* have a set of known bugs and todos that will never be important enough to fix this week.
Don't worry about it.
You don't need to track them. They'll just make you feel overwhelmed and guilty when you look at the list.
just wanna run the equivalent to a local coffee shop in my industry (email marketing). I don't want to be Starbucks or コメダ coffee (yet).
keeping my ambitions cozy during this phase of my life.
here’s my summary for people who don’t have time scrolling through everything:
> a8c needs $$$ (see: investors).
> they make lots from hosting affiliate already. hard to grow install base with current product offering.
> idea! what if all hosting companies, our competitors,
Every single time I added a fancy animation to
@Bento
I’d get a message from a customer that said “my Filipino VA says her machine lit on fire when they clicked this button can I have a refund”.
new video: ip pools (also known as shared IPs)
when talking about the "deliverability" of an email marketing platform, you're often referring to the health of that companies IPs and how they manage them on a day to day basis.
most platforms group their users into pools based on
new video: predicting inbox placement.
i used to think inbox placement was mostly a matter of tweaking the subject + content of your emails, but after sending almost a billion emails i now understand that’s the wrong way to think about it.
in this video, i advocate using
Ecommerce guide for those who enjoy less risk:
🤔 start an affiliate site.
💪 turn into a content machine.
📊 find top performing articles.
💴 check sales referred to partners.
👌 find best sellers.
🏭 manufacturer your own.
🥰 put yourself one in your list.
👏 Done 👏
@dr
I feel like I want to DM you my graph, I’m so happy I didn’t stop. Was stuck at that MRR for 3 years then 🚀
Growth often is all 🧠 stuff. We are our largest blockers.
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.
okay 24 hours after this I may roll back.
yes, it's faster.
yes, it's very good.
but it keeps making EXTREMELY SUBTLE MISTAKES so can't be trusted.
it just randomly inserted german in a fairly straightforward code autocomplete.
hello friend!
want some low hanging fruit to start your day?
rate limit the following to 3 per hour:
sign ups
forgot password attempts
team invites
any form that sends email on submission.
+ remove all personalization (name, etc) from them.
future self will thank you ᡣ𐭩
new to demos and unsure what to say? simple, open with:
“hey {{ name }}, how can I make the next 30mins most useful to you? what do you need to know about {{ product }}?”
then just guide them to close those loops and ending w/ next steps.
that’s it. that’s how to do demos.
Man, what an intense 48 hours.
Just so happy to be back home with
@ciaela
.
Thankful for everyone who reached out, I read your messages just no energy to respond.
Your love is received and it’s already getting to work holding us together 🖤
here’s my summary for people who don’t have time scrolling through everything:
> a8c needs $$$ (see: investors).
> they make lots from hosting affiliate already. hard to grow install base with current product offering.
> idea! what if all hosting companies, our competitors,
As we don’t have any family in Japan, we’ve hired a “Japanese grandma” to come over a few times per week and help us stay on top of things.
Cooking, cleaning, looking after the little one if we want to go on a date, and teaching us baby basics.
She crushed dinner last night 😍
Trains are 10x > than planes.
Biggest difference is the energy of who you’re with.
Average flyer is anxious, cluttered, ungrounded. Train riders are calm, content, patient.
Just flew to Tokyo today and already can’t wait to catch Shinkansen back to Fukuoka.
Being able to run upstairs when you hear giggles 🤭 and capture your babies first laugh on camera 📷 is *the* reason why working from home is so important to me.
Hey friends, clients, and customers.
A few of you are in the loop of what’s going on in my personal life but for those that don’t spend a minute reading
@ciaela
’s post below.
I was looking forward to becoming a father and it looks like I still will, but, just for a moment.
Hi.
I am turning off of public DMs and comments for this, but I felt it was time to share our story. Thanks for listening. ❤️
突然の辛い発表で申し訳ございませんが、最後までの応援よろしくお願いします。❤️
wild that many of you are still shocked by Vercel, Planetscale, etc changes.
ya’ll bought the equivalent of a flying lambo for your dog washing app then we’re shocked when they aligned pricing to their ideal ARPU (enterprise).
if you are under $1M/ARR you should be buying a
see developer founders posting this kinda stuff all the time.
there’s not really any reason to be privately rude … and then push that behaviour as marketing?
In the last week, I’ve chatted to three competitors happily in DMs.
the market is big enough for all of us.
things that are true about this industry:
at scale all email providers become cost effective as you enter volume enterprise relationships with them.
cost is NOT the driving factor in choosing who to send with.
additionally, most email marketing companies send through
Just finding out the big guys (Beehiiv, Convertkit, prob others too ...) are not even sending emails by themselves
They rely on Sendgrid 🤯
Do they have specific pricing though?
just banned a very large organisation because I didn’t believe they’d actually sign up but they just confirmed via email they are real 😭😭😭
need to bring out my best 土下座.