With Toronto Tech Week still fresh in mind, I am reflecting on the events I attended and what made some stand out more than others.
Here are some of my thoughts:
Careful curation of attendees is super powerful as it helps gather people with similar interests in the same room and spark great discussions. I witnessed events that did this very well and those events were much more valuable for me to attend.
Many events allowed you to work out while networking which is a great habit stacking if you enjoy both things. I found myself joining 2 founders runs throughout the week and had a memorable time. From the other events I saw on offer there was something for everyone from pilates to paddle.
I also enjoyed events that promoted discussion and sharing rather than just passively listening to a lineup of speakers demo their products. For example, one event hosted a science fair where product builders could demo their product in a room between the main presentations, where attendees could approach the tables with the products they want to interact with.
Every fast-growing engineering team runs into the "tribal knowledge" trap: knowledge lives entirely inside a few senior engineer's heads. I d love to hear how other teams are tackling this:
Processes: How do you encourage developers to document key technical decisions without making it feel like tedious admin work?
Tooling: What tools or workflows have actually stuck for keeping internal docs updated as code continuously evolves?
Culture: How do you make knowledge sharing a default habit rather than an afterthought? Looking forward to hearing what s working (or not working) for your team!
I put off hiring for longer than I should have because the cost was obvious and the pain was not, until the week three things broke at once and I realized I had been quietly compensating for a gap the whole time. Curious what the actual moment was for other people, was it one specific event, or did it just accumulate until you could not ignore it anymore. And once you did hire, was the thing you hired for the actual problem, or did you find out later it was something else entirely.
I finally set up proper conversion tracking this week. I had put it off for a fortnight because it felt like plumbing rather than progress. It took about an hour.The first thing it told me was that one of my funnel events has never fired. Not rarely. Never, not once in 28 days.People run a scan. People hit the gate. People hand over their email address to unlock the report. And then nobody clicks through to the app. The step I had assumed was the easy one, the one after they have already given me something, is where it stops dead.What makes it worth posting rather than just quietly fixing: I had spent the previous two weeks working on the top of the funnel. More traffic, better ad copy, keyword research. All of it aimed at a stage that was already working, because I had no way to see which stage was not.The part I keep turning over is that the absence of the event was the finding. Not a low number, a zero. A low number I would have argued with. A zero I could not.So, two questions. What did you find the first time you actually instrumented something? And had you been working on the right part of the product before you looked?
I try really hard to be the kind of founder that listens to users. The whole idea of building something people want is that you're supposed to be paying attention to them, not building in a vacuum.
But every time I've followed the loudest requests, I've ended up building things almost nobody else wanted. One vocal customer asks for a feature, it feels urgent because they're right in front of me, and three weeks later it's sitting there barely used.
Just wanted to say a quick thank you to everyone who checked out Cue today.
I launched this morning not expecting much. It's a tool I built over the holidays that turned from a side project into the main project I'm working on. Seeing it hit #3 (so far) is honestly surreal.
I build HIPAA compliant AI for healthcare, and last month I deleted a feature I had just finished. It was a journey analytics module in our internal dashboard: stage by stage funnel, cohorts, drop off between every step. The module worked as designed. I removed it anyway.
The reason is that I could not name one decision it had changed. I opened it, read the stages, agreed with them, closed the tab. It described the past accurately and left me where I started, because a funnel tells you where people stopped and never tells you which of the eleven things on that screen to cut.
