Ask

six interviews and everyone said "interesting" - is that a no or do i need more calls

Stop asking about the idea. Ask about the last time they did the thing.

Walk me through the last month-end close. What did you open first, what took longest, what did you have to redo. Then stop talking. If they cannot remember the details, it is not painful enough to be a business. If they can, you will hear the workaround out loud, and the workaround is always the same shape: a spreadsheet with someone's initials in the filename, a macro a former employee wrote, a Sunday evening.

The two questions that actually predict money for me are what are you paying for today that touches this, and who else has tried to sell you something for it. People with a budget line already have opinions about vendors. People with no budget line say interesting.

96 · in/before-you-code ·

Wearing it 24/7 gave me a rash and I have no idea where the sleep data ends up

The rash is nearly always trapped moisture and soap residue rather than an allergy to the band. The pattern that gives it away is that it fades when you take the thing off and comes back when you put it on, which is what you describe.

What worked for me: loosen it a notch so air gets under it, take it off in the shower rather than washing your hands with it on, rinse and dry the band and your wrist properly a couple of times a week, and swap wrists every few days. If it persists after a fortnight of that, or if it spreads or weeps, that is a dermatologist question rather than a strap question. Mine cleared in about ten days and has not come back in two years.

194 · in/wearables ·

put a 90 second demo video above the fold and signups went from 4.1% to 2.6%

Before you conclude anything about placement, check your play rate. If only 8% of visitors pressed play then the video did not cause your drop, it just occupied the space where something that was working used to be.

Also check average watch time. Ninety seconds of narration where the first fifteen are you saying hi and explaining what the tool is called is a very common way to lose people who were already sold.

151 · in/sunset-or-sell ·

Mix it myself for the tenth time or pay someone - where does hiring out actually pay off?

Practical numbers from hiring out over a few years: mixing is quoted per song and varies wildly by who you ask, mastering is much cheaper per song and often has an EP rate that is better than five singles. Turnaround was one to two weeks for mixing, a couple of days for mastering. Get the revision policy in writing before you pay, because two included revisions versus unlimited within a window is the difference between a good experience and a tense one.

131 · in/home-recording ·

One habit at a time or stack three while the motivation is high?

One more thing about the lose them all at once pattern. Write down, now, what happens when you miss. Mine is: miss one, nothing happens, no comment. Miss two in a row, the next one is the smallest possible version and it happens the same day. That rule is the thing that stops one missed run from taking the whole set with it, and it has to exist before the bad week, not during it.

138 · in/habit-building ·

The only two places my users hang out both ban self-promotion: how did you get a first customer out of a community without getting banned?

Ask the moderators. Genuinely, just ask. I emailed the admin of a community in my sector, explained what I had built, said I did not want to break the rules, and asked what was allowed. She gave me a monthly vendor thread I did not know existed and later mentioned the tool in a newsletter. Two of my first ten came from that. The worst case of asking is a no, and the best case is that the person enforcing the rule tells you the sanctioned route through it.

207 · in/first-ten-customers ·

My feet are freezing for the first hour in bed but socks feel wrong

Socks every night for six years, thin merino, and I fall asleep noticeably faster with them. The bit that clicked for me is that a cool room and warm feet aren't in conflict, you want the room cool and the hands and feet warm, because that's how your body dumps heat before it drops core temperature.

So the sock isn't fighting the cold room, it's helping the cold room work. That reframing stopped it feeling like cheating.

118 · in/better-sleep ·

Three years in and my photos still look like snapshots, what changed for you and roughly when

Mine was going out and shooting the same corner of the same street at six different times of day for a fortnight. Nothing about my technique changed and the pictures got dramatically better, because I finally stopped thinking about the subject and started seeing where the light was coming from and what it was doing to the surface. That was somewhere in year two and it is the only thing I would call a step change rather than a slope.

271 · in/photo-craft ·

six weeks of answering questions in forums got me 41 clicks - dead channel or am i doing it wrong

Disagreeing with the no-linking rule. Not linking is a slightly performative kind of honesty that mostly costs you. If someone asks how to do X and you built a thing that does X, saying so in one sentence at the end, clearly marked as yours, is what people actually want.

The rule that matters is that the answer has to be complete without the link. They should be able to solve it themselves from what you wrote. Do that and nobody has ever complained at me.

41 · in/no-audience ·

answering questions in communities without getting flagged for self promo, what ratio works

Thing that made me much less nervous: I read the last two months of removed posts in the communities I cared about, which some of them make visible. It became very obvious very fast that what gets removed is the one line post with a link and nothing else, not the person who wrote four paragraphs and mentioned at the end that they work on something related. Once I had seen the pattern I stopped freezing.

30 · in/no-audience ·

Wrist heart rate disagrees with my chest strap by 20 bpm on intervals - which one is lying?

Before you write off the wrist entirely, fix the fit, because most people wear it wrong. Snug enough that it does not slide, a finger's width above the wrist bone rather than on it, and higher up the arm during hard efforts. Cold weather makes it much worse because peripheral blood flow drops. Wrist tattoos in the sensor area can defeat it completely. Mine went from useless to acceptable on easy runs purely by moving it two centimetres up my arm.

176 · in/wearables ·

handing over a $900/mo tool, what order do stripe, dns and the repo move in

One correction on the domain: a domain can be locked against a registrar transfer for sixty days after certain changes, which people discover on closing day. If you are both at the same registrar you can usually push the domain between accounts internally and it is effectively instant. Check which situation you are in a month early, not the morning of.

43 · in/sunset-or-sell ·