My Mac mini accidentally became an AI server for the whole team.

It runs OpenClaw, connects to Slack, has its own little data warehouse, and answers business questions we used to dig through spreadsheets to answer.

I've been running this setup for 4 months. Here's what I've learned: 1. OpenClaw has gotten dramatically more stable.

The first month it broke on me constantly. Now it mostly just works. Even after updates which used to break.

Looking to switch your app to subscriptions? Here's my advice on how NOT to screw it up

A few years ago we switched our flagship app to a subscription model. Here's what I learned: Lesson 1: Be extra generous with your existing customers.

Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing channel, so don't piss off your customer base!

Grandfather in existing customers, give them an exceptional deal. It will be worth it in the long run.

This is a story of perseverance.

The story of how Big Tech struck a small team with big ideas but they refused to give up. 💪

The team was us 😉

Read on for more: We launched Astropad in 2015, and rapidly bootstrapped the business to just shy of 20 people. In 2017 we launched our first hardware product Luna Display.

Things were going well. Sales were strong. We made more in a month than we made in our first year alone!

If you have an existing product, how do you know when to double down or start building a new product?

This is a question we've struggled with at Astropad and over the years we've come up with some criteria to guide us:

👇 1/ Do you see your existing product topping out?

Be honest, how much room do you have to grow? Is it 2x, 5x, 10x, 100x?

If you have an addressable market of 2x or less, it’s probably time to develop a new product.

After getting sherlocked last year, it became clear cross-platform support for @Astropad was make or break.

16 months later we've nearly completely rewritten our apps to support Mac AND Windows.

Here's what we've learned.

A thread 👇🏻 1/

It's best to avoid a full rewrite of your code. Rewrites are incredibly time-consuming and it will nearly halt improvements for existing customers during that time.

But sometimes it's unavoidable. We tried to use Objective-C on Windows, it didn’t work.

Getting featured by Apple is not a long term marketing strategy. To elaborate on this, Apple can be fickle with featuring, they may love you and then poof, they don't feature you anymore. You need other channels.

And as a new dev you can hope for a feature, but hope is not a strategy.

There are lots of great resources out there on understanding the SaaS business model and the metrics behind it.

However, I was never able to internalize the importance of churn until I came up with a physical analogy…a leaky bucket... seriously. You have a rusty bucket that represents your current subscribers.

You also have a flow of water coming in, that's your funnel of new subscribers.

Finally, you have a small hole with a drip at the bottom, that represents subscribers leaving (churn)

1/ In 4th grade, I was super obsessed with Sim City 2000. I was giant print outs of my cities on my bedroom walls obsessed.

So when my teacher had us write a letter to a "celebrity", I chose Will Wright, the creator of Sim City.

I never thought I'd hear back 2/ One day I was at home and the phone rang... My mom picked it up and the person said:

"This is Will Wright, I'm looking for Matt"

🤯

1/ I'm publicly documenting how we are trying to grow our new podcast at Astropad. This is our first time doing a podcast, and there's ALOT we don't know.

All things start small, and our podcast is no different! We've done 3 episodes so far, and we have a 118 downloads 2/ To record and host the podcast we are using:

• @TransistorFM for hosting
• @SquadCastFM for recording remotely
• @shure Beta 87A mic
• @WeAreFocusrite Scarlett Solo to connect the mic
• @podmelon For podcast editing

1/ Many iOS developers have vented their frustration with Apple's 30% App Store royalty, but I don't believe that's the biggest issue by a long stretch.

I'm most concerned about how Apple uses App Review as a gatekeeper to such an important ecosystem. 2/ Apple is able to arbitrarily change the App Store review rules on a whim and stack the deck in their favor. They can use these rules to push out the competition.

Emails released by the House Judiciary committee prove that they've done it before.

1/ The Mac running ARM is going to allow for some crazy new device form factors.

Why?

• Dramatically better battery life
• Better thermals
• Touch support (if they want it)

Thread 👇🏻 2/ Apple's CPU's draw much less power than their Intel equivalents. So in a new Mac with ARM they could:

• Keep the same size device but have longer battery life

OR

• Keep same battery life but have a much smaller device (what I think they'll do)

1/ From @benthompson this morning 😳

Businesses that are struggling and going virtual due to COVID are now reporting that Apple wants their 30% cut from their apps, even though they only use the apps to set up the engagement.

Thread 👇🏻 2/ "I consult with businesses that have iOS apps in the App Store. These apps allow customers to [make reservations] and pay for them using the business’s own payment processing system."

And @dhh appeared before the House Subcommittee on Antitrust earlier this year to discuss big tech. Now this!

The antitrust watchdogs are coming! It's in Apple's interest to fix this before Congress imposes their own fixes.

Here are 5 things that Apple could do today:

https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1272968382329942017

#1 Enable users to set default app preferences

Giving users the freedom to set their own default apps would force developers (including Apple!) to compete on merit. Not because the platform provider set a default (*cough* Apple Maps *cough*)

I learned a painful lesson in SEO today.

I redirected LunaDisplay.com along with a bunch of pages to shop.Astropad.com and now our organic search traffic has fallen off a cliff.

🤞🏻 traffic comes back. I thought I was careful enough with redirects too... I'm hoping this is part of Google rebuilding its index and things will ramp back up, but I'm nervous.

I changed everything last Wednesday and then again yesterday. Anyone know how long it takes Google to shake out redirects?

I was talking to a friend about what books were helpful last year when our company had a near-death experience...

And the two most helpful books were written by people that have been in even tougher times:

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things
• Only the Paranoid Survive Both authors write about taking a company from the brink of failure and turning the ship around.

Ben Horowitz took a 600 person startup with a failing product that was hemorrhaging cash, turned things around and went public in 2001, in possibly the worst tech IPO market ever

Attention CEOs navigating this crisis!

I was reading the amazing guide from @firstround on how to navigate this recession and I absolutely loved their idea of a “Runway Matrix” to do scenario planning. It visually shows you months of runway across a variety of scenarios. I loved the idea so much, I quickly wiped up something in Google Sheets that lets you input your cash balance, monthly revenue and monthly expenses, it spits out a color coded grid showing you how much runway you have for each scenario.

I love Baremetric, but I'm going to have to hard disagree here.

I'm 100% fine with customers contacting me directly, and in fact, I sprinkle my email address around so that customers can find a way to reach me.

https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/1214962548887474178

To me, it's the equivalent of asking for a manager at a store or restaurant, it doesn't happen often but when it does it's typically something you want to know about.

Now that 2019 is coming to a close, here some of my favorite books I read this year.

#1 Midnight in Chernobyl - If you loved the HBO show Chernobyl you MUST read this, adds so much depth to what happened. The real story is more complex than what they could squeeze into a show #2 The Third Chimpanzee - How and why humans evolved the way we did. Covers the same content but better than Sapiens, and it's the original! This was published in the early 90s!

Alright, I've got to chime in on the Away controversy. No, it's not the worst environment I've ever seen or read about, but it still sounds terrible.

The CEO berating employees on public Slack channels? How does that not create a toxic workplace? She's missing some leadership 101 like... Praise in public, criticize in private.

She needs more Bradley, less Patton (for the history nerds 🤓).