Love reading stories like this about what it's like in the early days of a new business. Those early decisions about what to do when you're struggling to get traction are so critical, but no one talks about them. Thanks for writing this.

You're most welcome!

Agreed, and I think those fall flat because they are trying to hide the fact that they're automated. There's nothing wrong with automation—just don't try to lie about it! Personally, I favor direct conversations over automated research. Even at smaller scale, it's just way more useful.

Like many here building our own businesses, I had to learn the hard way how to do customer research—on my own. I wrote this as a short summary of what I've learned. Thanks for submitting it!

Thanks! The chrome extension will let you create new "mods" for specific pages. When making a mod, it listens for any edits you make: CSS, HTML, text, etc. When you publish, it takes before & after screenshots and puts everything on a page you can share with other people.

I love that you are proving to others that it's possible to build a great business and still be healthy and happy. So often the message from startups is to sacrifice everything—even health and family.

I'm excited to see your business grow using this model, and hopefully others follow your example.

Heck ya! Now if only I could get Jason and Zack to catch up to my steps ;-)

I really enjoyed this book—useful guide to communicating with clients. Has me thinking a lot more about what I write before pressing send.

From my perspective, this article is not suggesting people try to be someone else.

It reminds me of the popular book "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking‎"

In that book, the author suggest that introverts fake extroversion in short bursts.

As an introvert myself, this is something I've done for a decade. It's tiring but pays off. Sometimes we introverts miss out on great opportunities because we don't stretch our comfort zone.

I think this article is good advice on small ways for introverts to put themselves out there and "fake extroversion".

"The author suggests that introverts fake extroversion" is still convincing someone to be an extrovert.

No, it's really not, especially if you don't drop the "in short bursts" qualifier.

This is a goldmine! Thank you.

This would be nice because it's always a good idea to have a fallback payment processor.

Love that this gem does things the right way, like including background jobs. As a Rails newbie trying to build billing, all the code/tutorials/gems I could find weren't nearly this high quality or robust.

He wrote the book on payments with stripe. Which also happens to be a high quality book and worthy of a purchase.