My Writing

Quickstart Guide to Being a Digital Nomad

Have you ever considered becoming a digital nomad? Here’s everything you need to know to make it happen.

Commoditize Your Complements

This is a cornerstone of our strategy and the strategies of many other companies.

We decreased prices 50%. Revenue went up 4x.

Everything we’ve learned so far about optimizing pricing at Arno

How to Get Paid to Advertise YOUR Product

How YouTube became our #1 acquisition channel (and I became a micro-influencer)

Product Management in 10 Lessons

A crash course in product management I put together for one of our new hires

Why it’s okay to not register for the CrossFit Open

CrossFit, LLC treats CrossFitters as consumers to make money from, which means we have the right to vote with our dollars.

How we used user interviews to finally find a startup idea that worked

User interviews allowed us to pivot away from a “nice to have” solution to a “must have” solution and reach profitability.

I profiled 80 companies for Indie Hackers. Here’s what I learned.

These were the 10 biggest lessons I came away with.

Ideas Reports for Indie Hackers

These reports are essentially profiles of successful companies, most of them bootstrapped.

How our app went viral in Afghanistan (and how I found motivation as a founder)

I’ve discovered that the best way to stay motivated as a founder is to constantly remind myself of how our product is helping real people.

What we would’ve done differently in the first year of bootstrapping our company

Reflections on our first year building Arno

Love your grumpy customers

Don’t ignore grumpy customers. Engage with them because they can give you a lot of useful feedback.

Why we have a freemium model

Our freemium model has enabled us to serve over 200,000 users.

How we got 60,000 users with SEO

A comprehensive guide to getting started with SEO for your startup.

Generative AI and the New Unit Economics for Startups

What is like to build a startup with substantial marginal costs?

A Perhaps-Too-Simple Guide to Git

Git always confused me, so in this guide I try to provide a primer that allows people to understand Git at a more intuitive level.

A Brief History of JavaScript

A history of the world’s popular programming language for non-technical readers.

Horizons Speaker Series: Pete Koomen, Co-Founder and CTO of Optimizely

I wrote summaries of talks given at the Horizons School of Technology, the coding bootcamp I did in 2017.