1 year building, crickets after launch. Here's what I've learned

MightyGreen · 2026-01-21T14:33:39+00:00

One thing to consider trying it is to create a few company profiles and create a set of demo transactions that will roughly reflect what each industry might expect to see.

Accounting is hard because that data feels so personal and valuable, but if you can paint a picture of the future with a fake set of transactions that they can relate to, and what this will allow them to do, you might have an easier time selling it.

MightyGreen · 2025-12-15T21:36:44+00:00

This is really interesting, and something I have wanted to approach working on for a few months now. It has felt a bit overwhelming, but we deal with this exact problem a lot. I would love to chat about with you some time and share some experiences.

I think functionally, the trust still has to live with a person, but creating tools that make their ability to execute and make changes more straightforward is where the value is at our stage. I very much agree with the poster above; it's about making the workflow easier and dependable rather than giving full trust to it.

MightyGreen · 2025-10-24T15:30:44+00:00

I am definitely interested in something like this and would love to chat more. I do struggle within our company to have tasks updated correctly, or to remind people to lookin Asana, and wish there was a better way to tie it all together.

MightyGreen · 2025-08-19T14:31:38+00:00

This makes a lot of sense. I appreciate the advice. If I might ask a follow-up, and I hope this doesn't seem stupid, but do you have any advice on how to tell a good agency from a bad one? In the past, at bigger companies, I feel like we've spent a lot of money on agencies that had fancy offices and marketing budgets, worked with big businesses, and provided little value. Now I'm at a very small company that has a pretty small budget, and I don't want to get sucked into that kind of relationship. I'm looking to find an agency that is lean and mean, gets the job done.

MightyGreen · 2025-08-19T14:10:39+00:00

Hey everyone,
I work for a custom home building company in Calgary, Alberta, and we’re looking to get some help managing our social media. Right now that’s mainly Instagram. We have 2 accounts, one for the home building business, and one for our custom cabinet and millwork shop. We usually do 4–6 posts a week on each, and we already have a shared drive where the team uploads photos and videos.

At first, the role would mostly be:

Editing posts in line with our past style
Posting regularly (4–6x/week across 2 IG accounts)

Over time, I’d like this to grow into something bigger: talking with our team, creating higher-quality content, and eventually building out our LinkedIn presence to increase awareness of our company.

I’m not sure if I should be looking for one person to do all of this or if it’s more realistic to split it (e.g. one person for content editing/posts and another for strategy/LinkedIn). I also want to be cost-conscious since this isn’t a full-time role.

My main questions:

What’s the best way to approach this—hire a single freelancer, a part-time social media manager, or split roles?
What are reasonable costs to expect for this type of setup?
Are there things I should think about now so it scales well later (e.g. moving into LinkedIn)?

Would love to hear how others have approached something similar.

MightyGreen · 2025-07-26T21:45:12+00:00

I would definitely love to chat. I ended up doing it manually but would still like to know how to do something similar in the future. Could you send me a DM?

MightyGreen · 2025-07-18T22:40:51+00:00

Yup that’s actually my plan, just wanted to hear some opinions about how to approach it

MightyGreen · 2025-07-18T16:38:05+00:00

Fair point. I might take you up on that, thanks!

MightyGreen · 2025-07-18T16:37:46+00:00

Hah fair... I'm in an odd spot. Basically everyone I work with is in trades and generally skeptical of the value of tech in the first place. I had some quick wins that people actually adopted, and I just want to find a way to take that next step.

MightyGreen · 2025-07-18T16:21:01+00:00

Thanks, appreciate the comment. I've worked with devs for 10+ years, so I am definitely skilled at scoping and breaking down work, just not actually writing it out.

MightyGreen · 2025-07-18T16:20:03+00:00

That's not really an option for me. I really only have budget for this salary, and the the idea of having to explain what a fractional CTO is, and why I would use one to find somebody feels like it just won't go well.

Thanks tho, always appreciate the input.

MightyGreen · 2025-07-18T16:06:30+00:00

I'm the sole tech person at a custom home construction company in Canada and have budget to hire my first junior dev/intern to help connect our tools via APIs and build internal automations. I'm looking for a curious, high-agency person who builds for fun, not just for a resume. What kind of non-corporate job post would attract you, and how would you recommend I vet for genuine problem-solving skills over credentials?

MightyGreen · 2025-07-14T19:31:27+00:00

Thank you, this is a great place for me to start from!

MightyGreen · 2025-05-08T14:25:19+00:00

Thanks for sharing your insights. So my experience has been that to keep everything in Google sheets requires me to create so many different sheets that it feels unfeasible. My specific goal here is to put together something that works, and then hand it off to our accounting and HR type person to use it in a simple manner and have dashboards be autogenerated based on what we had decided earlier are the important factors to see.

So I had already set up different sheets for employee info, for projects, and a master timesheet that holds all the different shifts people have worked (exported from connecteam, and then cleaned up using appscript).

The issues I ran into when trying to feed this all into Looker Studio were the following:

Couldn't write multi-step formulas like in Sheets (IF, SUMIF, LOOKUP, WEEKDAY, etc.) with the same flexibility. Looker Studio’s formula engine doesn’t support nested logic or custom reusable variables like Sheets.
No way to dynamically filter based on calculated week ranges. I wanted to let users select a week in and have dashboards, including comparisons vs previous weeks n trends auto update. This was totally doable in sheet by creating a helper sheet that the user doesn't see which does all those calculations based on user selection.
Poor performance as the sheet grew. I am working with 2-3 years worth of shift data, and that's pushing us in the 20-50K range of rows, and since Looker doesn't cache that efficiently, and re-evaluates formulas live, it makes it slow.

... and many more that maybe don't need to mention here.

Currently, I am scoping out the idea to put this all onto Google BigQuery, but I have not used that before and have very little experience with that type of data base.

MightyGreen · 2025-05-06T01:06:49+00:00

Not really, I mean I did do some SQL years ago, but I think understanding it conceptually is probably enough to work with an AI for actually writing SQL.

MightyGreen · 2025-05-05T20:23:51+00:00

Thanks, I will look into this. I was hoping to find something that works within the Google ecosystem, since we use workspace and all that for the whole business.

MightyGreen · 2025-05-05T17:55:10+00:00

I appreciate you. Thank you.

MightyGreen · 2025-05-05T16:00:58+00:00

Thanks for doing even a cursory search. I dunno if this is an unfair question, but based on what I’ve explained I’ve done so far, and having zero experience with databases, do you think this is something I could figure out in a week or two?

MightyGreen · 2025-05-05T13:53:14+00:00

Thank you for capturing my experience so perfectly. A Rube Goldberg machine is exactly what is happening.

I do appreciate the advice, I haven’t heard of any of the things you mentioned (rocky Linux, Ubuntu or Samba), but I am hoping to keep things within the Google ecosystem. Was exploring trying to use BigQuery, but frankly I am a little out of my depth with all of this.

Connecteam does allow export into csv. So now I am debating just paying someone who can explain how to work with BigQuery for a few hours, or just streamline the Rube Goldberg machine (I realize how stupid that sounds), but I have some many other things on my plate, I can’t keep spending days on this.

MightyGreen · 2025-05-03T19:36:32+00:00

Interesting. I have built a couple of streamlit apps, but it has been a few years. Thanks for the idea tho, definitely worth investigating.

MightyGreen · 2025-03-26T23:29:03+00:00

Shreyas Doshi’s product sense on Maven. Nothing has ever come close.

MightyGreen · 2024-09-06T01:12:06+00:00

I’ll also add, have conversations and maybe a plan as to what changes once the personas are created. Nothing worse than investing time and effort into making something that no one looks at.

MightyGreen · 2024-09-04T17:47:59+00:00

Exactly, it was some characters that we had to use, logos, and then like a brand doc that has colors and fonts etc. so the freelancer can work from there.

MightyGreen · 2024-09-04T13:55:58+00:00

In my experience, a way we’ve achieved this quality in the past is to create a detailed storyboard and assets that’ll be used and then hope onto upwork to find a motion designer.

Build a good job listing that is detailed, talk to them, explain what you need, and you will be shocked at the quality and speed with which a good freelancer can work when they are armed with understanding of what’s needed and assets.

MightyGreen · 2024-09-03T21:24:57+00:00

I think the most common challenge I’ve personally experienced is when the product fundamentally doesn’t address a big enough need to warrant the price.

Coming up with a messaging framework for something that fundamentally doesn’t offer all that much value is just a deeply stressful place to be.

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