November recap
November marked a significant milestone - our best revenue month since the beginning! While the numbers are finally moving in the right direction, the journey continues to be full of learning opportunities and interesting observations about the startup ecosystem.
Business Highlights
After months of grinding, November delivered our highest revenue to date. This validates that we’re building something people actually want to pay for. The growth wasn’t accidental - it came from consistently improving our product and doubling down on what our customers value most.
Marketing-wise, we’re still finding our footing. The experiments continue and while not everything sticks, each attempt teaches us something valuable about our audience and channels. The good news? We’re gearing up to try some new approaches that could change the game.
Startup Interview Observations
Had some interesting “vibe interviews” and conversations with other startups this month. A few patterns emerged that I can’t help but share:
Joyful Path
We often find ourselves at crossroads in our careers - one path paved with corporate structures, rules and ladder climbing, the other less certain but potentially more fulfilling. Recently, I faced such a choice and I chose the joyful path.
Reading about the “red and black” paradigm - where red employees follow rules to please their bosses while black ones focus on customer happiness - resonated deeply. For too long, I had been caught in the corporate machine, focusing more on internal politics than on the people I was supposed to serve.
The realization hit me hard: I was spending more energy navigating organizational dynamics than actually creating value for customers. I was becoming one of those rule-followers who serve for internal metrics rather than real-world impact.
Bad way of review
How does your team review the ideas or proposals? Craft a proposal, elucidate the motivation, assess the risks, develop a plan, and then what? Do I need to create a PowerPoint slide, present to my teammates for half an hour, answer their questions for another half hour, hear the honest feedback. After that, we vote & decision is made. Well, if this is how thing is organized within your team, something wrong will be happened.
Show up
After spending nearly 10 years in this industry, I think most of us (developers) don’t expect our managers as highly incompetent. We don’t expect our bosses as cody-savy or Gantt Chart wizard. Instead, what we do to expect from them is ability to gauge our productivity: recognizing and rewarding the best performers while taking action against those who are less motivated.
Definition Of Done
It is a very common problem in project management - how to make team members more responsible and avoid micro management? We start with creating plans, drawing Gantt charts, announcing milestones, define DoD, motivating everybody and promising big bonuses on success.
How to build your own DB queries tracking for Django?
What’s the ORM? It’s layer designed to help OOP developers interact with relational databases. Instead of write raw SQL every day, all you have to do is define a model and interact with the DB by writing code by Python.
- Define a model
class Post(models.Model) id = models.BigAutoField(primary_key=True) slug = models.CharField(max_length=100) created_date = DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
- Query the post that has “abc” slug
p = Post.objects.filter(slug="abc")
Well, writing less code is good. It speeds up development time for teams. But the hidden costs are great. It hides the developers from SQL so developers keep writing code without knowing the performance of their code. So let’s take time to write a simple code to show the hidden SQL :D
Application Boundary
Let’s talk about one of the undecided problems of building software: deciding what the boundaries of a piece of software is.
Advice process
This post follows Coordination, if you haven’t read it, give it a try.
Advice comes in many forms, but the essence is consistent: any people can make the decision after seeking advice from:
- Everyone who will be meaningfully affected
- People with expertise in the matter
Advice received must be taken into consideration but not to create a watered-down compromise that accommodates everybody’s wishes. There is no such thing as silver-bullet for every problem. The purpose of advice process is to gather collective wisdom to pursuit a sound decision. With all the advice and perspectives the decision maker has received, they choose what they believe to be the best course of action.
Safe space
It can feel risky to show up whole in some organizations. Almost everyone has learned that when we expose who we really are, we open ourselves to possible mockery or to have what we shared used against us. And we usually choose to hide behind a professional mask. This safety also comes with costs: we cut ourselves from our passion, creativity and energy. So it’s important to create a safe space where everyone feels that they can safely show up in wholeness.
Code review pyramid
If you read this post, you and I have one same thing. Code review process’s important, right? But how to make this process effective and meaningful?
