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Josh Pigford Profile
Josh Pigford

@Shpigford

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47K
Following
69K
Media
8K
Statuses
51K

✨ dabbler 🏒 collector 💰 @maybe 💱 @synth_finance *️⃣ @revisedev 🧰 @toolstashapp 🪴 @cedarandsail 🕵️‍♂️ @withoptic

🪩
Joined January 2007
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
2 years
Everybody acting like they’d turn down $20,000,000,000.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
8 months
Genius. A Home Assistant user hooked up GPT-4 Vision with their security cameras and now can do things like find items in their home.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
9 months
i hope books are already being written on how one man completely destroyed DECADES of brand equity over his obsession with a single letter of the alphabet.
@elonmusk
Elon Musk
9 months
All core systems are now on
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
5 months
hetzner the only honest server company on the planet.
@AndreyAzimov
Andrey Azimov
5 months
Switch to Hetzner they say
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
tl;dr We paid a designer ~$70,000 to create some 14,000 stock market icons for us (think AAPL, VTI, SPY, etc). We've only received ~1,500 of them and he's now ghosting us. Buckle up. here's how that played out and where we're at now. .
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
10 months
Nearly $20/mo just to remove ads is starting to feel. ballsy. YouTube is substantially better without the ads, but no way do they stop at $18.99.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
6 years
Here's a spreadsheet of the 50+ projects/businesses I've started/built/sold/shut down over the past 15 years, along with what happened to them and links to Wayback to see how terrible they were. 😛.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
4 years
I sold @Baremetrics! After 7 years of work building this little company, Baremetrics has a new home. See the numbers, how we got here, what's changing (and what's not), what's next and more!.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
5 months
all my @cursor_ai settings, for those that care!
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
8 months
this alone is like 57 startups.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
8 months
and here everyone joked about openai killing startups with each new release. apple just actually did it.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
4 years
Hiring a frontend engineer who's really great at HTML + CSS is surprisingly difficult.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
1 year
Here's what $1,000,000 worth of fintech software looks like.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
8 months
i mean seriously. the amount of work previously required to get this data from an image was bonkers. OCR calls, GPT to try to get the OCR data in to something useable, huge computer vision models to identify the object. all replaced by a single call to an openai endpoint.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
8 months
been ~8 months since i've touched @ToolstashApp and so much has changed w/ computer vision + AI that i'm just going to rebuild it from scratch. openai vision API has replaced thousands of lines of code & an image training data set of 50k+ manually annotated/categorized tools. 🤪.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 years
1/ It's fun (or, more specifically, "therapeutic") to reflect on learnings over the years for businessing. 15+ years in to all this, I'm still winging it on just about every level possible, so take these insights/observations for what they're worth.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
2 years
Sooooo @maybe's transaction data is about to get reeeeeal good, thanks to GPT-4.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
4 years
Notion, but where pages load in <30 seconds.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
2 years
. uh oh.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
2 years
The first GPT-4-built iOS game is now available in the App Store!. Zero experience building anything with Swift. All code generated with GPT-4. ✨.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
4 years
Just uninstalled Slack, Word, Excel and Mail, so I'd say unemployment is going well.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
1 year
We're moving @maybe to @rails. We'll be creating a new "rails" branch on the main repo by the start of next week & then move it to main by the end of February. The React codebase will be moved to a new repo then. and you thought things were moving fast before. 🎉
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
9 months
Need recommendations for feel-good, binge-able shows!. In the vein of….The Office.Parks & Rec.Community.New Girl.Brooklyn 99.Schitts Creek.30 Rock.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
9 months
and *this* is why i use virtual cards online. i'll contact exactly zero humans and just cancel the card. but also, not cool @semrush.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
9 months
About to set up a fresh MacBook Pro. What default settings do you always change and what apps do you always install?.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
how do the import statements alone not drive js devs absolutely insane?
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
10 months
Favorite browser extension as of late: DeArrow Replaces sensational YouTube titles and thumbnails with calm versions.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
@bnj Agreed. But fraudulent to keep sending me weekly invoices and implying progress.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
6 months
Cursor + Claude 3.5 Sonnet = Me generating new little mini-tools in ~15 minutes.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
4 years
Stripe analytics app. From execution to exit. IN 7 YEARS!!!!! 🙃.
@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
11 years
Stripe analytics app. From idea to execution TONIGHT!!!!!! Coffee brewed. Game on.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
5 years
1,000 people on your mailing list is not validation. 1,000 people on your free plan is not validation. 1,000 people following you on Twitter is not validation. 1,000 people paying you actual money? Validation.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
2 years
After some 18 months of design, development & regulatory rap battling, @maybe has launched!. The team has worked so hard to build the greatest modern financial planning & wealth management platform w/ tools & resources you can't get anywhere else. 🧵👇
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
8 months
I want to quickly build web scrapers. What's the fastest/easiest tool for that?. Basically I want to create scrapers for all tool brand (dewalt, milwaukee, ryobi, etc) sites to create a database of all of their tools.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
2 years
You’re building a SaaS app and have zero following across social platforms and paid acquisition isn’t an option for you yet. How do you grow it?.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
it's insane how much complexity adding sign-in with google/apple creates for a project. every time i do it, i'm shocked i get it working at all.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
3 years
Hi potential investors! I'm Josh, CEO of @maybe. And this is a pitch thread as we're working on raising a $5m seed round!. Interested? DM, josh@maybe.co or 205-470-4803. 🧵👇🎉
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 years
29/ Everybody is winging it. Every. Single. Person. Nobody actually knows what they’re doing. Sure, they may have hindsight on things that worked in the past, but right now? Nope. They have no idea.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
1 year
the introvert entrepreneur's dilemma:. i want to build products used by 100's of millions of people. i also want to live off the grid in a cabin and never speak to another human again.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
5 years
First market day! My 10 y/o daughter has been working for *months* getting this business off the ground. So proud. Her online shop will launch next week!
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
He finally responded and said he'd deliver the icons in two weeks!. Oh wait. only if we sign an NDA, delete all the tweets and never speak of his mistakes again. Cool cool cool.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
5 years
Sending cold email followups is the perfect way to get you and your entire company domain blocked from ever sending me an email again. Yes, I got your previous email. My lack of response is a response.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
Either way. I'm at a point in my life where I just don't put up with this sort of clown activity. Do what you say you're going to do. If you don't, I have zero empathy or patience. We have a problem here, and you can rest assured I will methodically solve the hell out of it.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
So, that's where we're at. In 25+ years of both working with and *being* a freelance designer, this is honestly one of the weirdest things I've encountered. It just doesn't make sense.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
Picked a guy who appeared to have quite a bit of experience, is active on twitter with a decent following, has a design podcast where he's interviewed some notable designers, quickly replied to emails. basically passed the overall gut check of legitimacy.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
2 years
Been working with @GrantRudow to finish out a new office space and I'm kind of giddy about it.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
10 months
I feel like I need to clarify: I'm not complaining about $20 nor am I interested in figuring out how to save a few bucks. It's an observation on YouTube doing a 45%+ price increase and questioning where the line is because they absolutely won't max out at $18.99.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
4 years
Something I’ve realized over the past couple of years is that I don’t want to be an entrepreneur, I want to be an inventor. I don’t want to build companies, I want to build products.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
4 years
"Anyone working at a big tech company could have made $3.7m in 7 years!". That's cute that so many people think any tech company would even hire me. I have almost no marketable skills. Certainly none specialized enough to earn me $500k/year or even half that.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
What's the play here? The dude is here in the US and very easily tracked down. We have *all* of his personal/legal/contact info because he had to give it to us in the payroll system for contractor payments. We're working w/ litigation attorneys now to attempt to recover funds.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
2 years
PEOPLE OF THE EARTH. Figured out how to ask natural language questions of current financial data and get back a natural language response. with correct/relevant numbers! 🤯💰✨. So. Freaking. Cool. 1. Send database schema along with the question and relevant scope/parameters
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
8 years
Truth from @naval.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
Sure, I could have held this guy's hand more and reviewed thousands of icons every week to make sure he wasn't lying? I don't know. I just hate operating that way because, again, I hire people to do things so I *don't* have to think about it.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
4 years
. should I?
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
3 months
@Duderichy Congrats on your new job!.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
5 months
we'd need ~22,000 square miles of solar panels to power the entire US. we have some ~500,000 square miles of desert in the US. what's the limiting factor/reasoning to not build massive solar panel arrays all over the desert?.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
3 years
Hired!
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
At this point I was feeling confident in his work and didn't feel the need to keep checking all of the icons. I hate micromanaging people and generally hire people so that I DON'T have to keep thinking about it.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
10 months
@musaabHQ oh 100%. it's unbearable. but a 46% price increase is, again, ballsy.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
😒.
@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
. just realized he actually created a page on his portfolio about the work he supposedly did for us and that he got "done ahead of schedule". 🙄
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
8 months
I’m convinced anti-AI programmers just haven’t tried the right tools. @cursor_ai Pro plan ($20/mo) is worth $2000/mo.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
4 years
👋 😭
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
1 year
we raised $1.5m for @maybe over the past month. that is all. back to work.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
Back in March I tweeted that I was looking for someone to create these icons for us and paying $5 per icon. Not particularly difficult work but definitely tedious. Got a decent number of inquiries.
@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
11 months
Looking to pay someone to format thousands of logos as icons for use in @maybe and @synth_finance. The VAST majority of these will be finding a given company logo mark and formatting it so it looks nice. All done in Figma. Paying $500 per 100 icons. Interested? josh@maybe.co
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
1 year
@AustinTByrd It’s okay to just say, “this is not for me.”.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
8 years
We did it! $1M run rate! So proud of the whole @Baremetrics team! 🎉🕺📈💥
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
@bertwitt because i'm not out for blood. i just want either my icons or my money back.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
3 years
1/ Despite Baremetrics being the "first-mover" and arguably inventing 1-click SaaS analytics back in 2013, ProfitWell (just sold for $200m!) and ChartMogul (who passed us in revenue early on and will almost certainly sell for 8-9 figures) became much larger. Why? 🧵👇.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
4 years
Homework trains kids to think working an 8 hour day and then coming home to do a few more hours of work is a healthy way to live.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
. just realized he actually created a page on his portfolio about the work he supposedly did for us and that he got "done ahead of schedule". 🙄
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
tl;dr We paid a designer ~$70,000 to create some 14,000 stock market icons for us (think AAPL, VTI, SPY, etc). We've only received ~1,500 of them and he's now ghosting us. Buckle up. here's how that played out and where we're at now. .
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
1 month
absolutely bonkers. 13 years in business, $110m in venture capital. shuts down with zero warning.
@kepano
kepano
1 month
The accounting tool @Bench shut down with no warning 3 days before the end of the year. They had raised $110m in venture capital. The app is no longer accessible. There will be a way to export your data, but it's not available yet. File over app is not just for individuals.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
5 years
After this insanity on @Google's part, last week I switched to @DuckDuckGo and it's been fantastic. A breath of fresh, non-sleazy air.
@dhh
DHH
5 years
“At that sort of scale, small changes in ad click-through rates could end up having a huge effect on Alphabet’s bottom line, even if it means tricking users for cheap clicks”, gotta juice that growth yo!
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
Within about 5 days he'd done 500 icons and sent us the first invoice. He'd also sent a Figma link of where he'd be working on them. Fantastic.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
I communicated the details along with a table of all the icons we needed. He agreed to the details and got kicking. He had the first 100 done within 24 hours. Off to a great start.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
We got into a rhythm over the next 4 weeks of him billing us weekly and that Figma file getting updated regularly. On April 11, he mentioned "reorganizing the entire Figma file". Which, I fully understood. It was getting massive & crumbling under the weight of all the layers.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
6 years
$1M ARR doesn’t go nearly as far as you think it will. In my head I imagined having a team of like 25 people and straight swimming in cash. Turns out the math doesn’t really work out. 🤪.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
9 months
@joelrunyon bingo. like, you want to build a dozen completely random things? go for it. but an "everything" app is the perfect way to create a "nothing" app.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
1 year
Frequent advice to indie hackers is “do more marketing.”. That’s vague and impossible to act on. So, what’s one *actionable* marketing item an indie hacker can do today?.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
5 years
Here's my system for intentional focus I've been putting together recently, using @NotionHQ.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
4 years
Folks who've gone through an acquisition: "This is a fantastic outcome!". Folks who've never built anything: "This multiple is stupid and you got taken advantage of.".
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
2 years
🌞🌚
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
5 years
1/ Fun milestone: @Baremetrics had its first fully-profitable year in 2019!. $151k in profit on $1.38m in revenue.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
10 months
But seriously, how did Figma beat Sketch?. Sketch: Buttery smooth. 👍. Figma: Like swimming in molasses wearing a giant cowboy hat. 😭.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
4 years
In the time you spent hacking all your no-code tools together, you could've just learned to actually code.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
5 years
SwiftUI Twitter is my favorite Twitter micro-community I had no idea existed. The amount of creativity and eagerness to help is refreshing.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 years
5/ “Busy” does not equal “productive”. You shouldn’t be doing 1,000 different things. Business isn’t that complicated. Very few things are urgent. Very few things actually even need to get done. As a founder, pick just 1 or 2 “must do” things each day.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
1 year
here's a list of every single project of mine that's either live, in progress and/or actively being worked on. 🫣
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
3 years
web3 is like if the designers of Amazon's AWS user permissions created the internet.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
5 years
25 billion Siri requests.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
4 months
mkbhd wordpress matt wpengine wallpaper openai.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
4 years
I'll give you one guess on which app this is.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
4 years
My wife: Umm did I see on Twitter that you’re starting another business?. Me:
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
He kept up with his weekly cadence of sending invoices and letting us know how many icons he'd completed and we kept paying them. Now, why keep paying when we're not getting the delivered work anymore (remember he was "reorganizing the Figma file")?.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
6 years
Seems like, on some level, Medium contributed quite a bit to the death of the personal blog. Now it seems there's beginning to be a shift *away* from Medium and hopefully *back* to the personal blog. Think we'll see a resurgence in feed readers?.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
2 years
I may or may not be diving deep down a rabbit hole exploring building a small community of tiny homes all optimized for deep work and/or deep relaxation. Places where the destination for 1-2 people is the home itself and not just a place to sleep. Dedicated, comfortable work
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
3 years
You've got 6 months to build up a take-home income of $3000/mo. What do you do?.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
7 months
On June 12 I text him as we now have multiple emails he's just not responding to.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
6 years
February was @Baremetrics best month ever for both revenue and profit!. $135k in revenue & over $30k in profit!. Historically we've tried to operate right at breakeven (putting all profit back in to the business), so having that much profit was nice. Go team!
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
2 years
I want a podcast app that lets you “bookmark” as you listen. Just a single tap that saves the 15 seconds before and after for you to easily reference and find later on.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
4 years
7 years! 🤯.
@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
11 years
Stripe analytics app. From idea to execution TONIGHT!!!!!! Coffee brewed. Game on.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
2 years
Reply with a link to what you’re working on and I’ll say something nice about it. Building things is hard. You deserve a pat on the back.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
9 months
bring back personal blogs and RSS readers. they need rebranding, but having your own space to post for decades is so much better than dumb social networks. then you just have a really great RSS reader to consume from all the sources.
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@Shpigford
Josh Pigford
3 years
1/ We're no longer pursuing building @maybe around part-time/fractional employment. Here's the note I sent to the team last week. While I'm still bullish on the concept, I no longer believe it can work for *new* product/software companies. At least it didn't for us. 🧵👇🏻
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