I used to rely on algorithmic feeds like X or LinkedIn to keep up with engineering and design blogs.

Lately though, those platforms feel more filled with self-promotion and hot takes than actual long form articles.

I m thinking about setting up a quiet space where I can just subscribe to personal blogs and technical updates directly without an algorithm sorting my feed.

We had a great welcome series. Branding, header, illustration, three pieces of advice, and a CTA button. The reply rate was around zero.

I swapped it with a bare text email, coming from me personally. Two sentences and a question, whether they want to do something with the tool. Around one in nine responds. Some of them influenced the next step we made.

The awkward thing is that it doesn t scale. I answer all of them personally, normally in the evenings, and I'm aware of the ceiling here.

And for those who already have several thousand users: did you stick with the personal email and hired someone for that, automated the process, or gave up on it altogether? I still can't tell whether I'm creating a moat or a trap.

I spent most of my budget building the product and have almost nothing left for marketing.

For anyone who has been in this situation, how did you get your first users without spending money?

Strange, yes, it works. Reading the critique internally allows me to skip past the point that hurts. But reading it out loud means that I have to read the whole sentence.

Three of the last five significant changes that we've made to our app have come directly from one-star reviews. The users who gave these critiques were rude and right.

I get asked this a lot. And honestly there's no single answer.

Most launches go with:

• product demos

• animated explainer videos

• a founder on Loom walking through a specific use case

Is RSS actually dead, or did it just become a thing that fewer people talk about?

I still like the basic idea: I choose what I want to read, and it shows up in one place. No algorithm deciding what deserves my attention that day.

But honestly, newsletters and social feeds have replaced most of my reading.

I see many countries promoting social media to raise the age for using it (e.g., Australia, the UK, etc.).

The sad thing is that some parents are already giving their toddlers a tablet to "entertain" them. This hurts the child's brain development. Not to mention when they get on social media and are exposed to various trends.

Some of the most inspiring startup journeys of the last few years happened in plain sight.

@levelsio built Nomad List and Remote OK live on Twitter sharing revenue numbers, failures, and pivots in real time. @marclou does the same, shipping products publicly and turning his audience into his distribution. Both have built massive followings and real businesses partly because of how openly they build.

I ve spent months trying to build a master dashboard that handles notes, daily task lists, and project tracking inside a single app.

While having one tab for everything sounds super clean, those heavy workspaces often end up feeling cluttered. Half the time I spend more energy adjusting layouts and tagging pages than actually getting work done. Lately, I ve been leaning back toward using fast single purpose tools for quick notes and keeping heavy databases completely separate.

Everyone says Validate before you build , but no one tells you what that actually means until you re deep in it.

Maybe you launched too soon, built too much before talking to anyone, or trusted feedback that sounded nice but meant nothing.