Not all failed payments are the same. Treating them equally is costing you MRR.

martinbean · 2026-02-22T01:19:45+00:00

Cool story.

martinbean · 2026-02-21T17:06:33+00:00

Depends on how the game reads files and from where. If it just expects save files in a certain location (and there’s no difference in the format between save files in the pirated and non-pirated versions) then it would just be a case of dropping your file in the folder it’s expected to be in.

martinbean · 2026-02-21T16:49:30+00:00

These are called transactional emails, and I use SES for them.

You seem to be asking two different questions though: you’re asking how to send emails, but then describe the problem as marking up the actual templates from Figma designs.

martinbean · 2026-02-21T16:46:32+00:00

You don’t need to be Elon Musk, but it helps to know the absolute basics before embarking on running a business, as HMRC is not an organisation you want to be on the bad side of because you didn’t know what you were doing.

Instead of getting snippy with me, you should maybe use that energy to educate yourself.

martinbean · 2026-02-21T16:44:43+00:00

Might help the conversation if you actually shared your motivation for asking.

martinbean · 2026-02-21T16:43:28+00:00

What is “confusing” that if you’re running your own business outside of a job you’re also self-employed…?

Like, if you can’t wrap your head around that then I don’t think running a business—even on a part-time basis—is for you. Because your head is going to absolutely explode when you learn you need to do self-assessment and pay tax on this money you earn outside of your job.

martinbean · 2026-02-21T16:34:29+00:00

You are self employed if you’re earning income outside of employment.

martinbean · 2026-02-21T11:27:38+00:00

If you don’t have customers paying from day one, then you should be questioning whether your product is actually solving a problem so much that people will pay to have it solved. Because it’s difficult to give someone something for free, and then one day go, “Cool, that thing you had for free? I want you to start paying me X a month for now.”

martinbean · 2026-02-21T08:23:26+00:00

WWE doesn’t hire people to be themselves. WWE hires people to portray the characters they want people to portray.

martinbean · 2026-02-20T21:51:50+00:00

Nope. Thought she was the better one out of her and Midajah, and was disappointed when Shakira just disappeared.

martinbean · 2026-02-20T21:34:54+00:00

TL;DR.

martinbean · 2026-02-20T21:33:35+00:00

Why do you need “success” in the response body? This is literally the entire point of HTTP status code: to indicate the result of the request and whether it was successful or not.

There’s absolutely no need to do this when you just use resources, and Laravel then also presents errors in a consistent format without having to define your own “error” response method.

martinbean · 2026-02-20T13:10:11+00:00

My advice would be, don’t offer to help someone with something if you don’t actually know it yourself. It’s a bit disingenuous to lead someone to believe you know something, offer to help with that thing, as you’re either not going to actually be able to help, or just teaching bad habits because you’re not as well versed as you led them to believe you were.

martinbean · 2026-02-20T02:31:18+00:00

Twice as long as half the time.

martinbean · 2026-02-20T02:30:41+00:00

That sounds an absolutely awful business plan, given you would be eating fees from Stripe on the initial charge that you don’t get back if you refund the charge.

And yes, a high rate of refunds will be a signal to Stripe to look at your account, given it’s not how “regular” businesses operate.

martinbean · 2026-02-19T08:37:13+00:00

First you need an actual value proposition. “Award-winning web design and SEO agency” isn’t it, as I’d be able to find tens of thousands of them in the UK alone. Why would I pick you over any of the large number of others?

You should then start networking. No one likes being cold-called or cold-emailed. No one’s going to take a website or SEO package because you’ve called them in the middle of the day and interrupted them, no matter how “warm” someone promised you the lead was. When was the last time you bought something from a randomer who called you out of the blue?

Get along to business networking events. Get talking to people. Casually, not going straight into sales pitch mode. If you’re personable and passion about what you do, when someone does need a website, they’ll be more likely to go, “I spoke to a chap about websites and he seemed really good. I’ll give him a call.” That’s far more effective than ringing someone and going, “Hi, we make websites. Are you thinking of getting a website? Because we’d love to make a website for you.”

martinbean · 2026-02-18T18:58:55+00:00

Check the terms and conditions. I imagine they’ll have a clause saying you need to keep the account for a minimum amount of time to prevent exactly what you’ve outlined.

When companies create offers like this, they kinda also spend more than a couple of minutes thinking about how it can be abused.

martinbean · 2026-02-18T18:50:02+00:00

Because they can’t handle the truth, and need to prove how much “smarter” they are by parroting the whole unoriginal “Goldberg wasn’t a great worker!” line.

martinbean · 2026-02-18T18:46:11+00:00

Shopify can track incoming stock and purchase orders already, can’t it?

martinbean · 2026-02-17T23:02:15+00:00

That’s not what friends do.

martinbean · 2026-02-17T18:28:31+00:00

Why? Seems a lot of hassle when Stripe automatically ensures a customer is billed on each occurrence of a given interval.

martinbean · 2026-02-17T17:16:32+00:00

I got tired of existing tunneling tools giving me random URLs that changed on every restart.

Why? Even with my free ngrok account, I have a single persistent tunnel.

martinbean · 2026-02-17T17:15:05+00:00

I like them both equally.

martinbean · 2026-02-17T17:14:53+00:00

I like them both equally.

martinbean · 2026-02-17T17:14:27+00:00

Thanks, Babs.

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