I’m a big fan of this as a SaaS person, because manually creating invoices is the “missing link” for a lot of SaaS companies which service web signups but also have more bespoke arrangements available.

It was no fun managing these separately at my companies.
The bespoke things include everything from “Call us for enterprise pricing” to “You want our $500 a month account but for a year with a pre-pay discount and also want us to train you at a day rate? Uh, yes, we can do that, now I just have to figure out what buttons to push.”
“When’s the last time you actually made an invoice, Patrick?”

Two hours ago, to get a donation for Vaccinate The States through a supplier qualification process.

Founders never ever get away from this sort of quotidian stuff, and the more software eats it, the more...
... they can spend brainsweat on hiring, fundraising, product, operations, and the other things that actually matter versus trying to keep PDF files and an Excel sheet synchronized with the bank account.

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More from @patio11

10 May
A popular misconception about herd immunity is that it's a binary thing.

The goal is achieving broad *exponential decay* of the pool of coronavirus infections and then limiting the spread of further flareups.

The vaccination effort is like building firebreaks.
"We may never achieve herd immunity" is often written from the perspective of people who think that is akin to creating a solution to the problem of fire.

That isn't the goal; the goal is containing small fires such that they're tractable to standard firefighting techniques.
The *alternative* to this is that we spend the next several years watching for smoke and then Shut Down Everything if we detect a sudden increase in it locally.

We should urgently, urgently, urgently prefer accelerating the vaccination campaign.
Read 4 tweets
7 May
"This is the most satisfying cow clicker I've ever played." -- @obra , our COO, on the UI which we use to dedupe locations, after we added e.g. a leaderboard to it.
I'm reminded a wee bit of that Neal Stephenson (?) book where you'd grind up experience hunting sneaky goblins trying to blend into the stream of visitors to a city except the goblins were actually fraudsters and the visitors were actual IRL e-commerce transactions.
Read 5 tweets
5 May
No UI choice I have ever seen is as user-hostile as this interaction.
1) Why would you even ask me that if you are capable of calculating it, like freaking any computer is. Just derive it from the birthday if you can.

2) If you calculate it, by all that is holy, you had better actually get your math right.
I hate you so much right now, web application.
Read 6 tweets
4 May
After hearing some of Dad’s war stories (commercial real estate) over the weekend for the millionth time I think I should probably have a podcast with him sometime.

They’re entertaining and would be useful for software people.
Dad and a younger colleague are trying to put together an assemblage, which will require convincing an irascible old man to sell a house that has been in his family for several decades:

Colleague: these meetings are a waste of time. He’ll never sell. He ends every meeting w/ it.
Dad: “When a man tells you he will never sell at his first meeting with you, it can mean many things, but when he tells it to you at his fifth, it means ‘You just haven’t said right words yet.’ He *keeps taking the meetings.*”
Read 5 tweets
28 Apr
I get asked reasonably frequently about international comparisons in the vaccination rollout.

With proviso that I'm much more informed about US and Japan than any other healthcare system and my only expertise is from working on this during the pandemic:
People know that the U.S. "does healthcare a bit differently" but almost everyone underestimates the degree to which this is true. In particular it leads to *massive* structural differences with regards to the distribution and physical location of where and when care provided.
The choice in the U.S. to allocate a very large percentage of all doses to the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program is a choice that I would predict less than 20% of nations will make. This is, again, heavily coupled with the structural setup of how healthcare is accessed in the U.S.
Read 10 tweets
27 Apr
"The name of our register agent's LLC is causing many questions already answered by the name of our registered agent's LLC."
Seriously though from a marketing perspective I sort of like it.

Registered agents are a commodity; the service is (literally, in the literal sense of literally) being alive in a consistent location daily to perform a largely outmoded function the government mandates.
You'd expect there to be as much marketing differentiation for registered agents as you'd expect for soap, because the job to be done for soap has been a solved problem for hundreds of years, high margins, and a stupidly high LTV.
Read 6 tweets

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