Hard decisions at the start of the week. A few years ago, the hard thing for me was "to start". Today, it is "to stop". What makes you stop? (besides bankruptcy and running your funds... hh)
What amount of time is needed to know if it makes sense to try to run that business? *God, give me a sign.
In the October-December quarter, Facebook s (Okay, Meta's) daily active users fell by about half a million, from 1.930 billion during July-September to 1.929 billion. This loss was mainly due to a slide in contribution from Africa and Latin America. Source: https://indianexpress.com/articl... What's your take on this?Where is social media heading towards, and how do you envision a new future of social networks? This gif is totally unnecessary but I think it's alright
In other words, what's that one topic that you would really like to understand more about, but can't find anything that covers it in depth? Think team collaboration, time-off management, workplace cultures... literally anything you're interested in. I'm trying to understand what people want to read but can't find, rather than add to the same beaten topics while writing for Pause. Thanks in advance for the help
I recently installed @Augment Code based on an ad somewhere, and I'm super impressed, but haven't heard a peep about it in most channels. But it got me wondering what else I'm missing. This is a crowded field with a few frontrunners and a lot of more esoteric newcomers, but I want to know about the ones that blow your mind but hardly get any coverage.
In our first six months, whenever a paid user churned, our immediate reaction was: Ah, they needed Feature X. Let s build it."
Our backlog became a graveyard of quick fixes requested by churned users. Yet, retention stayed flat.
It took us a painful realization to see that the issue wasn t a feature gap; it was a friction gap. The product required too many context switches from our users' daily routines.
For founders who survived this phase: How did you shift your team's mindset from "ship more features" to "reduce workflow friction"? What metrics actually helped you spot this early?
I don't want to rant here (but I probably will a bit)...
I've been doing product marketing and growth for a while now, and I feel like every single piece of advice right now is telling founders they need to become full-time influencers. "Post on LinkedIn every day," "start a YouTube channel," "build in public."
I get the logic people buy from people. But it's exhausting. It feels like we've shifted from "build a great product and tell people about it" to "build a great product and then spend 4 hours a day performing authenticity on social media." And the worst part is, most of it just looks like the same recycled motivational platitudes.
So, how do you actually build trust and drive growth without forcing the founder to become a content creator?
There is one global CLAUDE.md that every project follows, plus one per project. Works most of the time. Not always. After a long session the agent drifts and does exactly what the file says you are not to do.
So I put anything that must never happen into a hook. There are 62 of them at the moment that run before the command and just stop it.
They include things such as DROP, rm -rf, editing files directly on a production server or clicking into a password field on the browser. The permission list contains 71 allows and 25 denies on top of that.
I've used ChatGPT and other AI tools while building my startup, and they've made it possible to take on work that would normally require a much larger team. Research, technical problem-solving, planning, and exploring new ideas can happen much faster. But one thing I've learned is that completing more work doesn't necessarily mean the business is moving forward at the same speed. You can build faster, solve technical problems faster, and make improvements faster, while the harder questions about customers, adoption, and business growth still take time to answer. It's changed how I think about productivity as a founder. I'm learning to distinguish between how much work gets completed and whether that work is actually moving the business forward.
For founders building with AI, what's one lesson you've learned about the difference between moving faster and making real business progress?
