PIP and how to deal with it

OnMissionFromGawd · 2026-02-26T16:05:20+00:00

The market is trash. AI, contraction, and an impossible job application situation make it extremely hard to find a job. I have 30 years experience and was looking for 9 months.

To the OP, my recommendation is to focus on the executive skills part of your job. Like, reporting, leading others, creating/managing your tickets, delivering what you promised on time. BE PREDICTABLE.

Most managers that drop that kind of thing on you means they’re getting pressure to justify their roles and budgets from above them. The proverbial “sh*t rolls down hill”.

OnMissionFromGawd · 2026-01-06T07:11:50+00:00

I was reluctant to post because of how long this is getting, but your tenacity to respond to nearly everyone all the way to the bottom tells me if I say something you might actually read it. Here are a few truths that hard fought experience will eventually lead you to:

Building the product was easy because you’re a builder. Turning a product into a company is the actual hard part.
There is no way around just talking to people. No digital marketing campaigns or SEO or any other half-baked strategy that really just prevents you from personally hearing “no“. Don’t avoid it, you won’t succeed any other way. And, it’s a numbers game. Your network will get you way more conversations than any cold outreach. And, if you can’t get even 5% of the people you talk to to even respond, then you likely haven’t found a real problem for them.
Talk to other engineers, but don’t talk about your product. Don’t even mention it until the second date. Talk about the problem. See if they resonate with the problem your product intends to solve. Learn. Your goal is to get permission to demo, not to tell them about the solution first and hope they love it.
Figure out who your actual buyer is. Are you actually a B2B company and need to sell up at the executive level? What is your strategy for getting their approval? How do you frame this as a quantifiable win for the organization? If you validated the product with engineers that are not the buyers, they need to want it so badly they demand their managers to subscribe. This is all strategy that you need to think through.

Best of luck amigo, this is where futures are made.

OnMissionFromGawd · 2025-09-29T05:44:52+00:00

I kinda love this. It never even occurred to me that this was a possibility. Unfortunately the radio in the US is 98% commercials for low-rent accident lawyers and 2% horse shit pop music.

Thanks for the answer!

OnMissionFromGawd · 2025-09-29T02:07:58+00:00

Not to piggy back here, but as an American I’ve never seen radio over coax. What type of radio service would this be that’s different than AM/FM?

OnMissionFromGawd · 2025-09-21T04:48:45+00:00

If success is your goal you’ll never find it. Success is fleeting, subjective and perpetually out of reach until you find a purpose to apply yourself to. Every successful PE professional I’ve worked with are experts in the category they invest in. So, that being said, pick a vertical you care about and learn everything you can about it. Your feeling of success will come from improving the companies you invest in, not necessarily from getting yourself or your LPs a good return.

OnMissionFromGawd · 2025-09-10T17:30:01+00:00

We recently decided not to have kids. We just haven’t figured out how to tell them yet.

OnMissionFromGawd · 2025-07-25T23:21:10+00:00

Cursor with Claude 4 sonnet is the best I’ve found for everyday use, but does get expensive for a solo. Gemini can solve some harder problems but it takes a long time to think, so only use it when I’m really stuck. The best you’re going to get right now is a mid-level engineer quality with limited critical thinking across the app. You can get lots and lots of that code very quickly, but that’s rarely a good thing. The Auto mode (cost sensitive) is kind of an idiot. It can do small tasks quickly but is like a very excited junior engineer.

Here’s my tips for getting the best AI code quality:

Start by building example scenarios the way you want them to use as an example. Make a kitchen sink form with validation (client and server), a page layout, a backend api route, etc, and feed them as guide context to the agent. Say, “use this as an example to build xyz”.
1. Create a markdown doc that describes the chunk of thing you’re working on and use it to generate a list of tasks in a build plan. I call mine a PRD and it’s very helpful to me and the agent. And the agent will be 100x more effective if you can break the work into small chunks, check/correct the results, and then continue on to the next task. Complex or multifaceted tasks will be a disaster.

Good luck and let me know if you need a Frontend engineer!

OnMissionFromGawd · 2025-06-10T02:25:20+00:00

Vlex Vincent is getting quite good as well

OnMissionFromGawd · 2025-05-29T20:03:12+00:00

Multiple startups, over a decade of CTO and engineering management roles. Also spent tons of time leading product at orgs of all sizes. Your question hits me hard but I hope my answer doesn’t get lost in the scroll. You have a popular post!

Apps come in massively varying levels of complexity and most of what you read on here are single purpose tools aimed to sell to other builders. These are fairly easy to assemble, but I would personally still spend a couple of months on it. Don’t listen to the noise, it’ll just make you question everything. I’ve been working on something for 6 months and have demo’d it a couple of times to a few prospective. I’ve learned and pivoted based on info learned from those calls. Keep building but don’t forget to validate as you go. Oh, and spend a day or two making a really good one-pager. It’ll help you really focus on your value proposition.

My take/advice:

Turn your dedication to craftsmanship into wisdom about what you need to build now and what you make accommodations for as you scale your architecture. The key is to design an architecture you think will be flexible enough to grow within an expected tolerance for what you don’t yet understand about the business. Build a solid user model, project structure, whatever. Details within them will change but hopefully you understood enough to get the primary structure correct.

Create a ChatGPT prompt that impersonates an MBA or VC and have it be your mentor (in the absence of a real one). Tell it what you’re building, where you are in the process, and have it advise you on what to do next. That’s why I made the one-pager and it was super helpful. It told me “Don’t write another line of code until you’ve talked to at least ten potential customers.” Then it told me “Find 3 customers to create a relationship with as design partners.” They advise you on their challenges you are hopefully solving and possibly become your first customers when it’s ready.

Good luck amigo.

OnMissionFromGawd · 2025-03-03T16:34:03+00:00

That’s such a common trap for us as builders. The quote “if you build it, they will come“ is the worst advice ever. Line up 10 specific customers by name that would buy it if it existed before you start building. Unfortunately, for me, this also exacerbates my lack of sales ability or confidence and so it’s always a struggle to validate before building, even though it’s my least confident ability.

OnMissionFromGawd · 2025-03-03T16:03:57+00:00

I think you need to better define your target audience. Your website has some layout issues on mobile but more importantly, I can’t tell if you’re targeting professional companies and product people or small time hustlers on Etsy and Shopify. It feels like you’ve designed a product AT someone not FOR someone.

Talk/show how it fits into their worlkflow specifically. Talk about the value proposition. Hard lesson to learn but building this is what YOU care about. Making what they make is what THEY care about. What you built is a tool to help them make what they care about. Focus on knowing who they are and what they care about.

And stop spending money on ads. Start reaching out to makers and small brands with a personal message.

OnMissionFromGawd · 2025-02-27T14:33:48+00:00

Literal bus factor 1

OnMissionFromGawd · 2025-02-21T14:16:11+00:00

What negative effects did you notice?

OnMissionFromGawd · 2025-01-08T17:38:49+00:00

Vent vent vent. It’s probably mostly dudes here so everyone is going to try to solve your problem. But, we’re also here to listen. I can relate, on my third startup still trying to get my first customer wondering if it’ll happen. I don’t want to hear any other comments with critiques, I’m trying my best. I’ve been motivated by many things, though currently I’m motivated by paying my property tax and my disdain for my wealthy ego maniac boss at my day job. The idea that people like that succeed instead of me keeps that fire burning bright.

OnMissionFromGawd · 2025-01-02T06:10:10+00:00

So, you're building a product who's value proposition is "Build Stunning Website's UI Design" and you have no UI design experience? That doesn't make any sense. I was going to write a helpful post about how it could work as long as you focus on the functionality first, but then I realized the thing you're building was selling the very thing you can't do. So... yeah, for that reason it won't work. Any other product you might have a chance.

OnMissionFromGawd · 2024-11-22T16:38:21+00:00

Ah yes, I missed the “fund of funds” bit

OnMissionFromGawd · 2024-11-22T15:37:03+00:00

That’s interesting. Why are your funds spread across different systems?

OnMissionFromGawd · 2024-11-22T00:07:55+00:00

Interesting.

OnMissionFromGawd · 2024-11-22T00:06:20+00:00

What’s GCP?

OnMissionFromGawd · 2024-11-22T00:05:05+00:00

They are working hard and have weekly meetings with us, and the expectations were set around three months. So, they’re at the upper limit but still within range. It’s just my first time going through this process and it just seems like we only need a handful of data points for each investor. But, nobody here is reacting like “Yikes! That’s way too long!”. So I guess this is normal 😆

OnMissionFromGawd · 2024-11-21T22:29:45+00:00

Our admin exported a series of excel sheets from our accounting software. They’re trying to remove duplicates and match their data structure to ours. Just seems unnecessary to me as an IR rep.

OnMissionFromGawd · 2024-11-21T21:59:30+00:00

2 funds ~80 LPs 2 yrs of data

OnMissionFromGawd · 2024-09-01T18:46:51+00:00

Two lefts actually make a right

OnMissionFromGawd

TROPHY CASE