I created an issue tracker for home use. It just displays list of issues with due date. You can filter by this week, month or all. You can edit the issues. That's all it does. No auth. No fancy frameworks. I have been more productive with this than any other todo or issue tracker app I've tried to use.
Seriously people just build something up for yourself. With AI to help we can come up with fully working prototype in no time. Maggie has term for this and she articulated far better than me in this post https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software
> My favorite example is expense-tracking software.
> some angel investor . . . said, "what if we issued our own credit cards and then kept all the swipe fees for ourselves?" [in lieu of a monthly fee]
> employees were strong-armed into . . . those corporate cards . . . even if it meant losing out on literal thousands of dollars in cash back and rewards from their personal cards
So the employee should be able to benefit from allocating the company's spending to their card's swipe fees (where said rewards come from), but it's wrong when the company itself wants to benefit from the swipe fees on the transactions that they are actually paying for (via discounted expense software)?
> So the employee should be able to benefit from allocating the company's spending to their card's swipe fees (where said rewards come from), but it's wrong when the company itself wants to benefit from the swipe fees on their own transactions (via discounted expense software)?
Yes, absolutely. There isn't a single profitable corporation on earth that has employees that don't deserve to be compensated more.
What do you think this means? Companies shouldn't be able to reinvest money into themselves because every extra dollar needs to go to employees? Have you invented some way of determining the correct amount to grow each year as a business? I can't even begin to imagine how this would work in the real world. This makes no sense.
The comments on HN are turning into reddit comments with the massive drop in quality lately. The fact that you're on a throwaway reinforces my point quite a bit.
> Companies shouldn't be able to reinvest money into themselves because every extra dollar needs to go to employees
This wouldn't be called "profit", now would it?
Regardless, letting the market dictate as much as it does also doesn't make sense. Neither does trusting investors/shareholders to determine what's best for society. It's all just kind of broken.
If I was building a competing expense system, the pricing slider would show how $5/user/month compared to how many dollars in rewards you (as the business owner) would be giving away by using a card issued by a "free" SaaS app based on total spend.
If a company decided to sign up for corporate cards directly such that _they_ were reaping all those rewards, that'd be perfectly fine and reasonable and it happens all the time. But as it is, employers are giving away the store by singing up for cards issued by these apps—and the software landscape is such that they don't have a ton of other options.
If your company is worrying about whether they or the employees are getting the credit card rewards for spending, instead of focusing on whether they are delivering a useful, valuable product or service that their customers will happily pay for, then they have lost their way.
As a consultant, the points and miles and status is the grease that makes a hundred plane trips a year tolerable. I would seriously reconsider my workplace if they moved away from the reimbursement model.
It would be one thing if they were paying for the transactions directly. Companies with this arrangement make you get a "corporate card" under your own name which shows up on your personal credit report. I've had to pay off the card myself (and get reimbursed later) because the company was nearing 30 days late processing expense reports due to turnover/incompetence.
The company gets the float until the reimbursement is paid. If there is fraud on the card or a chargeback needs to be made, the employee has to deal with that. Seems fair that the employee gets the rewards.
i thought about doing something similar when i tried to find a simple solitaire game in the apple app store.
i want a simple game that i can use to kill 15 minutes while i'm waiting in line, but all the version in the app store have been gamified to the point that the game barely exists. so many notifications about daily quests, several different in game currencies, unlockable skins and trophies, accumulating XP to level up ... something.
i'd gladly pay the $0.99 for a version that stripped all that growth-hacking shit out of it.
This is great! What this page doesn't explain, though, is why the author will resist the urge to make more money when one of the products becomes popular.
The other products he talks about didn't turn shitty because the founders just hate babies, but because they like money. The author doesn't go into enough detail on why he doesn't like money.
As the author, I can answer this: because I believe there is such a thing as "enough money." And I'm personally at a point where the decision in my mind is not between "build a great product that makes less money" vs "release a compromised product that makes more money". Instead, the decision is "build this app for my own private use" vs "release it and put up with dealing with users so that others can use too". And I'm genuinely on the fence about the latter most of the time.
Also, I have a proven track record of stopping doing things once they've run their course, so I'm pretty confident I'll be able to resist the temptation. Recent evidence: announcing my latest conference talk would be my final one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loTaZAkIZP0
There should be a platform like the opposite of what it is today. No wants to be featured there. Something people would want to not be there in that list or platform. Like imdb or but for those of worst products.
This comes to mind whenever I get screwed over by big corporate (Hi there, Lenovo). Perhaps the website could be just a ranking of products and have people vote/downvote/comment and add additional info. The problem with these platforms is that they are super biased (only angry customers will visit to downvote). I get making a bad-product ranking website to advise potential customers, but how to avoid it becoming an echo chamber?
Expense tracking software has always been a trash fire in my experience, and I’ve never come across one with an associated credit cards (maybe that’s harder to in Europe? Or just less incentivised since transactions fees are much lower)
I always assumed this was because it fell into the space where the people who choose the software (finance teams) differ from the people who will have to use it (everyone claiming expenses) - so any features offering UX improvements are deprioritised relative to features which help the finance teams.
Yes the app typically starts simple, but as people use it, they find that it not exactly fits their use case and they face dilemma. Continue to use and find workarounds or keep asking customer service to get this and that implemented to facilitate their use case. They may even say "I would pay extra for something like this!". Multiple this by thousands of different problems people face and at some point certain asks become recurrent. At which point it triggers board meeting and question what to do? It is not necessarily driven by the eternal chase of profit, but simply to make life easier for everyone. Customer service gets fewer requests and customers can actually use it for what they need.
Problem starts when someone new comes in to use the app and they didn't participate in the growth, so now the plethora of extra features may feel overwhelming.
I'd rather focus on apps where company puts stupid limitations or adds features that didn't seem to be driven by customers, but by marketing people. "WE NEED AI!!! EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT AI!!! PUT AI EVERYWHERE NOW!!!" followed by "We'll see what sticks, now aify everything!" of course lessons were not learned after "blockchain everything!" and "we need the cloud accounts for customers!" and "AJAX everything!!!"
We've forgotten the reason that linux/unix has been such a flexible platform for decades: small, single purpose tools that are composable.
Keep your app simple. If there is a need to slice and dice the data, make it easy to spit out the data in a standard way to some other application that is good at doing that. As soon as you start doing more than that, you run into the problem of "not exactly fits their use case" because every business is different and has different processes that evolved into what they are for unique reasons.
It's a fool's errand to think that you will ever cover even a fraction of a customer's complete needs in one application.
I created an issue tracker for home use. It just displays list of issues with due date. You can filter by this week, month or all. You can edit the issues. That's all it does. No auth. No fancy frameworks. I have been more productive with this than any other todo or issue tracker app I've tried to use.
Seriously people just build something up for yourself. With AI to help we can come up with fully working prototype in no time. Maggie has term for this and she articulated far better than me in this post https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software
The last point of this blog post (not the one you linked) seems to apply here: why build software rather than just use Reminders or whatever todo app?
> My favorite example is expense-tracking software.
> some angel investor . . . said, "what if we issued our own credit cards and then kept all the swipe fees for ourselves?" [in lieu of a monthly fee]
> employees were strong-armed into . . . those corporate cards . . . even if it meant losing out on literal thousands of dollars in cash back and rewards from their personal cards
So the employee should be able to benefit from allocating the company's spending to their card's swipe fees (where said rewards come from), but it's wrong when the company itself wants to benefit from the swipe fees on the transactions that they are actually paying for (via discounted expense software)?
> So the employee should be able to benefit from allocating the company's spending to their card's swipe fees (where said rewards come from), but it's wrong when the company itself wants to benefit from the swipe fees on their own transactions (via discounted expense software)?
Yes, absolutely. There isn't a single profitable corporation on earth that has employees that don't deserve to be compensated more.
What do you think this means? Companies shouldn't be able to reinvest money into themselves because every extra dollar needs to go to employees? Have you invented some way of determining the correct amount to grow each year as a business? I can't even begin to imagine how this would work in the real world. This makes no sense.
The comments on HN are turning into reddit comments with the massive drop in quality lately. The fact that you're on a throwaway reinforces my point quite a bit.
> Companies shouldn't be able to reinvest money into themselves because every extra dollar needs to go to employees
This wouldn't be called "profit", now would it?
Regardless, letting the market dictate as much as it does also doesn't make sense. Neither does trusting investors/shareholders to determine what's best for society. It's all just kind of broken.
If I was building a competing expense system, the pricing slider would show how $5/user/month compared to how many dollars in rewards you (as the business owner) would be giving away by using a card issued by a "free" SaaS app based on total spend.
If a company decided to sign up for corporate cards directly such that _they_ were reaping all those rewards, that'd be perfectly fine and reasonable and it happens all the time. But as it is, employers are giving away the store by singing up for cards issued by these apps—and the software landscape is such that they don't have a ton of other options.
If your company is worrying about whether they or the employees are getting the credit card rewards for spending, instead of focusing on whether they are delivering a useful, valuable product or service that their customers will happily pay for, then they have lost their way.
As a consultant, the points and miles and status is the grease that makes a hundred plane trips a year tolerable. I would seriously reconsider my workplace if they moved away from the reimbursement model.
It would be one thing if they were paying for the transactions directly. Companies with this arrangement make you get a "corporate card" under your own name which shows up on your personal credit report. I've had to pay off the card myself (and get reimbursed later) because the company was nearing 30 days late processing expense reports due to turnover/incompetence.
The company gets the float until the reimbursement is paid. If there is fraud on the card or a chargeback needs to be made, the employee has to deal with that. Seems fair that the employee gets the rewards.
i thought about doing something similar when i tried to find a simple solitaire game in the apple app store.
i want a simple game that i can use to kill 15 minutes while i'm waiting in line, but all the version in the app store have been gamified to the point that the game barely exists. so many notifications about daily quests, several different in game currencies, unlockable skins and trophies, accumulating XP to level up ... something.
i'd gladly pay the $0.99 for a version that stripped all that growth-hacking shit out of it.
This is great! What this page doesn't explain, though, is why the author will resist the urge to make more money when one of the products becomes popular.
The other products he talks about didn't turn shitty because the founders just hate babies, but because they like money. The author doesn't go into enough detail on why he doesn't like money.
As the author, I can answer this: because I believe there is such a thing as "enough money." And I'm personally at a point where the decision in my mind is not between "build a great product that makes less money" vs "release a compromised product that makes more money". Instead, the decision is "build this app for my own private use" vs "release it and put up with dealing with users so that others can use too". And I'm genuinely on the fence about the latter most of the time.
Also, I have a proven track record of stopping doing things once they've run their course, so I'm pretty confident I'll be able to resist the temptation. Recent evidence: announcing my latest conference talk would be my final one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loTaZAkIZP0
There should be a platform like the opposite of what it is today. No wants to be featured there. Something people would want to not be there in that list or platform. Like imdb or but for those of worst products.
People wont buy it if it is on there.
This comes to mind whenever I get screwed over by big corporate (Hi there, Lenovo). Perhaps the website could be just a ranking of products and have people vote/downvote/comment and add additional info. The problem with these platforms is that they are super biased (only angry customers will visit to downvote). I get making a bad-product ranking website to advise potential customers, but how to avoid it becoming an echo chamber?
Expense tracking software has always been a trash fire in my experience, and I’ve never come across one with an associated credit cards (maybe that’s harder to in Europe? Or just less incentivised since transactions fees are much lower)
I always assumed this was because it fell into the space where the people who choose the software (finance teams) differ from the people who will have to use it (everyone claiming expenses) - so any features offering UX improvements are deprioritised relative to features which help the finance teams.
Not sure if that is entirely valid observation.
Yes the app typically starts simple, but as people use it, they find that it not exactly fits their use case and they face dilemma. Continue to use and find workarounds or keep asking customer service to get this and that implemented to facilitate their use case. They may even say "I would pay extra for something like this!". Multiple this by thousands of different problems people face and at some point certain asks become recurrent. At which point it triggers board meeting and question what to do? It is not necessarily driven by the eternal chase of profit, but simply to make life easier for everyone. Customer service gets fewer requests and customers can actually use it for what they need. Problem starts when someone new comes in to use the app and they didn't participate in the growth, so now the plethora of extra features may feel overwhelming.
I'd rather focus on apps where company puts stupid limitations or adds features that didn't seem to be driven by customers, but by marketing people. "WE NEED AI!!! EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT AI!!! PUT AI EVERYWHERE NOW!!!" followed by "We'll see what sticks, now aify everything!" of course lessons were not learned after "blockchain everything!" and "we need the cloud accounts for customers!" and "AJAX everything!!!"
We've forgotten the reason that linux/unix has been such a flexible platform for decades: small, single purpose tools that are composable.
Keep your app simple. If there is a need to slice and dice the data, make it easy to spit out the data in a standard way to some other application that is good at doing that. As soon as you start doing more than that, you run into the problem of "not exactly fits their use case" because every business is different and has different processes that evolved into what they are for unique reasons.
It's a fool's errand to think that you will ever cover even a fraction of a customer's complete needs in one application.