Hi Reader - Before I scaled an app from $30K a month in ad spend to $1.5M(profitably), first I cut it to zero. I've told the zero part before. What I didn't tell you is what happened in the two months after. Because turning the spend off turned out to be the easy half. Zero spend fixes exactly one thing: it stops you paying to pour users into a leaky bucket. It does not fix the bucket. And in a five-person company, zero spend isn't a strategy. It's a countdown. Or a ticking time bomb. Pick...

Hi Reader - Most companies run a hackathon once a year. You know the yearly kind. Forty-eight hours, matching hoodies, a demo that gets a standing ovation, and a LinkedIn post about "our culture of innovation." The non-engineers come for the beer. And by March, nobody remembers where the repo lives. That made sense when the tools changed once a year. AI changes them every few weeks. A yearly hackathon is out of date before the pizza gets cold. A couple of weeks ago, in my typewriter email, I...

Hi Reader - Last week I made fun of typewriters. This week, a confession: I once got misty-eyed over a steam engine. I was maybe 6 when the last steam engine came through my ancestral village of Nanjangud in 1990 or so. My uncle took me to see it. I remember the smoke first. It should have felt dirty and loud. Instead it felt oddly restful. The technical term, I would learn later in life, was 'wistful.' Then I heard the chugging, which I was sure would live rent-free in my head for the rest...