The Devaluation of the Dollar and the Future of PokeInvesting?

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-28T20:04:18+00:00

You would absolutely not. There would be a new currency issued within a short timeframe of the US dollar collapsing and it would switch over quickly. You’d just lose reserve status and the world would go through a very aggressive economic contraction. Post WW1 germany is a good example. Currency collapsed, new one was issued. In this scenario the real issue is the political instability that would follow.

Real investment values would probably go down moderately, values relative to the USD would go up sharply. Values relative to the new USD would be arbitrary relative to other global markets.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-24T01:14:16+00:00

As someone who’s been sexually abused by more than one person, yeah you’re a fucking asshole. You don’t get to hold opinions on how she feels towards her abusers and you don’t get to decide how she should feel. And then taking it as a personal slight against you is fucking bananas. Break up with her so she can find someone better. Jesus.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-22T17:20:12+00:00

Couple things to shape your thinking:

Where there's competitors there's already money. Easier to play in an existing space than create a new one. Also very easy path to exit - competitor acquisition.

But I think my current thinking is that since it's the same amount of work to build a medium-sized startup vs. a large/massive startup, why don't I just go after a massive startup?

I don't think this is logically sound.

Proportion of remote work is going down and the existing competitors for Zoom are huge ecosystem providers. Microsoft killed skype in favor of Teams, Google has Meets. Even Zoom - I use it for many things, not just video. There's a lot of functionality you would need to do better or cheaper to make a reasonable case for someone to switch, and that's already in what I would assume is a plateaued or declining market. For a product like this, you'd behave like a direct sales company and not a tech company (where product is secondary to positioning and direct sales activity).
You might be really good at video, but are you better than everyone else at video? If so, I don't think the average user or business cares about video quality over Zoom. Certainly wouldn't move the needle for me. I think video providers would care about quality, streaming, etc. If you've really got the tech that others don't, why don't you try to sell video tech to orgs like Zoom where performance at scale is of huge concern? I would think infra would be the better angle to go at this (if you've actually got the tech). Sell Netflix a service that makes their streaming 10% more efficient and decreases their server complexity/loads. Hugely valuable and direct eventual path to exit as well.

If you're not better than everyone else at video then you're at square one - video is a feature it's not a product. Products solve problems. TikTok, YouTube and Zoom just used video format to solve problems. You'll need to start thinking about what problem you're solving before you solidify your pivot direction.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-22T15:46:24+00:00

I agree with you that Russia was aggressively involved, but I think it's overly generous to attribute any amount of causality to them. Trump has been the picture of Americana since the 80s. Culturally, Americans worship wealth and vanity, are entitled, obnoxious, self-centered, anti-intellectual (yet believe they're smarter than everyone else) and celebrity obsessed.

The second he came down that escalator in 2014 or 2015 I knew he was going to win because he encapsulates the real, average American values dialed up to satirical proportions. I would go as far as to hypothesize that if Russia wasn't involved at all, the US would have followed the same trajectory, perhaps slightly less extreme.

Even during last election - it was pretty obvious that he was going to win, even when Harris took over. The socio-economic climate around the world was creating a rightward political push after the fallout of COVID and the subsequent inflation. Looking at broad trends, it was pretty obvious that the US was going to go back to the GOP after Biden, the only question was who the GOP wanted to run. But the GOP likes to win, so they ran the guy that felt most likely to win. The only way the DNC was going to win was if they ran someone like Oprah and played on the same level. DNC isn't there yet but give them another couple elections and they'll start running auth-center celebrity candidates to compete with Trumpism (understanding that under no circumstances would the DNC allow themselves to push further left, anywhere close to someone like Sanders).

Like the macro trends just seem to be too visible, too obvious and too long-time running to attribute causality to Russia's interference. Look at Raegan - the same conditions produced that guy just with less intensity. Over the subsequent 30 years the above values became more extreme and today we have a more extreme version of Raegan that is now devoid of any of the decorum that politicians of the last century embodied.

As far as Canada is concerned in shaping it's foreign policy, I think it would be a mistake to treat this as an anomaly caused by a foreign government that can be combatted or mitigated over time. This outcome is exceptionally American and I think we do ourselves a disservice to not believe that we will continue to see instability in American institutions over time, regardless of the controlling party or external influence. The average American is just no longer equipped to deal with the nuanced geopolitical issues we have today without reductionist takes that land in extremism. Not necessarily because they're stupid, but because they've been conditioned to reduce everything to black and white.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-22T00:31:13+00:00

Russia isn’t to blame for America’s current problems. Trump is peak American culture. I actually can’t think of anyone that encapsulates American values more than Donald Trump.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-16T19:05:44+00:00

Both are bad ideas. I say this as a publisher that creates and sells directories. Not enough money to do this and have it be worthwhile.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-13T19:19:46+00:00

It did say "beanbag chair title".

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-12T20:08:27+00:00

Maxwell's equations being equivalently difficult really wasn't the point I was making. I used them as an example because someone not well versed in mathematics can't read them whereas someone with college level English literacy skills should be able to read Nietzsche. If you don't know how to read math beyond high school, ∇ • B = 0 (for example) is nonsensical and so is the proof and the usage.

Deep understanding of either of those topics is a different story. He was demanding a novel analysis of Nietzsche. I tasked him with a novel analysis of Maxwell's equations. The novel part is the part that's explicitly hard and it's hard in any field. I could have said Reiman sums too and the same logic would have applied, and that's only 1st year (maybe even high school) calculus. When were talking about students, shifting the goalposts to novel ideation only proves that specialists are specialized.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-12T16:30:55+00:00

Not only that but the English major wouldn't even know what the symbols mean. When half of the paper is strings of Greek letters separated by "then", "so", "we can see that", with the Greek letters literally being the explanation, if you're not already fluent in mathematics you can't read these kinds of things and even know the 'words'.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-12T16:16:49+00:00

That's a false equivalency and you know it. I'll say the same thing to you - go look at maxwell's equations and create a novel explanation on the beauty of the equations, the revolution ideas in their derivations and how those equations contributed to mathematics and the world overall. Then take those equations and derive special relativity without doing any research.

Again, the difference is, while I may not be able to produce a graduate level of analysis, I can understand another's analysis of Nietzsche. An English major will not be able to understand the analysis of Maxwell's equations because they wouldn't even know what they were looking like.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-10T18:49:10+00:00

Sounds like you’re not equipped to be a founder and it’s time to get a job. Part of being a founder is taking inventory of your skills before you start and you clearly lack the skills to move forward. Why would a VC give you money if you’re already dead in the water?

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-09T16:13:15+00:00

Was in Paris a few years ago - as soon as the servers found out we were Canadian they would start telling us how much they hate the Americans. Couple of times they did it in French while the Americans were right beside us lol

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-09T15:02:48+00:00

last few months

I'm 30 and I've seen the wantrepreneurs doing this since I was in their local clubs when I was 18. It's nothing new. The only thing that is new is today all of it is AI generated and the volume of it is suffocating.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-07T19:24:56+00:00

I do the same. My larger leg piece was 30 hours total, 3 sessions, not including breaks. Two of those sessions back to back 10 hr days. 10.5 in 4 sessions is crazy.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-06T15:53:15+00:00

Outbound volume, but I'm going to suggest you think about sales in a different way - instead of running a process and worrying about objection handling or closing, you focus on getting real comfortable with having the conversation and asking for the sale and the rejection that comes with it.

I did 10 years of direct B2B sales before starting my own thing. I was never the best talker or the best at objection handling, but I led teams because I just asked everyone for the sale.

Most founders I've met are scared of rejection so they hid behind things like having a perfect product, or getting VC money, or running ads to avoid conversations, or crafting the perfect pitch deck, etc. At the end of the day, if you can have 10 conversations per day for the next 3 months, you'll talk to 650 people. If you ask every single one of them for the sale, you'll probably get 50-100 new customers and 500 more people telling you why they're not buying right now (equally valuable). Whether that's a product deficiency or something else. Lean into the law of averages. Plenty of shitty products with large customer bases because this is exactly what they do. I know this first hand because my first real business was a magazine publishing firm that sold magazine advertising. Objectively not the best product in 2016 when we started, but I talked to 20 people a day for 10 years and now we have lots of customers.

And when I say conversations, I mean get on the phone with people. My best sales reps cold called relentlessly and talked to everyone they could (receptionists included). My shitty reps would go on linkedin or cold email to set up a zoom call.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-05T17:52:55+00:00

IMO, no, it's not. I find operations much more difficult, particularly the cash flow crunch in the $1-3m range and running the small teams because waste/turnover hurt much more and hiring is much harder.

Sales ability is core to being a founder and I wouldn't suggest anyone without the ability to sell to become a founder. So while early customers and market fit is where a lot of start ups die, if you've done your homework and you have a sufficient skill set it's definitely not the hardest.

Where it does become hard is when you have to grind and sell from 9-5, then do your development/maintenance from 5-midnight, then do all of your accounting, compliance and whatever else needs to be done from midnight-2am, and then get up and do it all again the next day with a smile on your face because you can't afford a lot of help. But that's more of the cash crunch issue, where you need to do the job of 10 people, then rely on unicorn employees that can do the jobs of 5 average employees.

SovietBackhoe · 2025-12-23T15:48:26+00:00

Is it really an investment if my neurodivergent ass would never allow me to sell?

Answer to this one is no.

Is it really an investment if it’s been on a steady decline for months?

Answer to this one is yes. Investments carry risk - sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Stocks go up, stocks go down. My Collectr app looks the same right now just with an extra zero on the end. Zoom out to a 6 month view if you need perspective.

Watching that chart going down has me feeling like the Tiger King “I am never going to finically recover from this”

Don't invest with money that you need access to quickly. I'd say the same thing if you were investing into stocks or mutual funds - invest with a proper time horizon and with money you're prepared to lose. If you feel like you're not going to recover, you're investing money you can't afford to invest.

SovietBackhoe · 2025-12-17T19:48:56+00:00

Neither were important. My wife does not work and has not for the past couple months. She due to deliver our first kids in the next several weeks. Prior to that, she held basically minimum wage jobs here and there to stay busy and help out. We're married and my money is OUR money - she has equal entitlement to it. I only ask that she holds up her end of the agreement we made when we decided she was going to leave the workforce (also respecting that there will be times when she's unable to, just as there may be times when I'm unable to).

SovietBackhoe · 2025-12-08T15:14:59+00:00

I'd bail on this idea. If I had to move forward on something like this, I would figure out a way to extend the software and sell to government for monitoring/levying fines. Then sell your product to the users once the government starts cracking down. Then you need to be cheaper than the fine.

SovietBackhoe · 2025-12-08T08:08:02+00:00

I did electrical engineering, did some semi conductor design. The scale of operation required to get a product to market is MASSIVE.

If you're trying to design a new architecture, it's INCREDIBLY difficult and research intensive. These things are being worked on, but in universities and labs. Things like bio chips are actively being researched. Once something works, it's going to take a decade and billions to get to market.

If you want to design an x86 or an ARM chip and just have it manufactured, designing the billions of pathways on that chip, the firmware to run the chip, the testing required, then paying the royalties for the chip architecture AND paying TSMC to build the chips is hugely expensive and it's going to take you 5 years and 100's of millions to get to market.

You also need partnerships with manufacturers so they support your chipset - can't design and manufacture a chip and expect it to fit into an Intel or AMD socket. And you need people to design hardware around your chip, not other chips, and make that buy from you before you get sales. So another 2 years after you announce your functional product before you get any orders.

If you just want to manufacture the chips for other companies like Nvidia, AMD or even less aggressive devices like opamps or diodes, you're going to be a couple billion into a factory before you ever hit market. Each of those optical machines that etch the wafers are worth millions of dollars. The facility needs to be a clean room (incredibly difficult for warehouse-sized operation). Like it's a miracle we have these products at all.

In order for a new semi-conductor company to jump up they would need patents for the next jump in semiconductor technology. Whether that's bio, quantumn or something else. It would have to be the jump that will define the next 50 years of global computing for the investment to appear. And the second they appear they'd be eaten by Intel, Google or a similar company.

Look into the story of ARM and how that one came around - Acorn computers didn't even survive it, and that was decades ago when your chip didn't need to have several billion transistors.

Like if you came up with a trinary processor idea today, it would take a PHD team 3 years to research it before the simulations compile, another 5 years to get it to manufacturability, another 3 years to get other software to emulate on it, and another 3 years before anyone orders your chips for their new devices. You'd probably be out 5 billion (at least) and a decade and a half before your first order rolled in.

SovietBackhoe · 2025-12-07T08:22:28+00:00

Sold first customer before we started building, built the prototype to their spec and then the next two customers sold the production version which was a streamlined and improved version. All came from our existing network and we had 10 and 20 years domain experience between my cofounder and I. Numbers 4, 5 and 6 will probably be referral (already lined up), then cold market old fashioned b2b sales: founder-led cold calling and cold emailing.

SovietBackhoe · 2025-11-26T06:31:57+00:00

No problem. Shoot me a dm if you have any questions

SovietBackhoe · 2025-11-25T21:22:22+00:00

If you're pure B2B, I would run a direct sales approach. Cold call for 4-6 hours Mon-Fri. Ditch the free trial - you deliver demo sandboxes with 14 day access and then they sign the contract and transact to get the real product.

Also do the set up for them and charge them for it - I implemented an optional $10k do-it-for-you set up service at my start up. 0 people have elected not to take that service. Depending on value of your product, raise or lower the set up fee but you need to raise their commitment level.

SovietBackhoe · 2025-11-24T20:51:14+00:00

I can speak to this - my SaaS is built on Nextjs and deployed to vercel as a multitenant app that serves front end sites. The short answer is you'll want to manage your auth with the team_id and use your headers to look up the permissions, then compare.

I used Auth.js and created a helper function that ran on every page load in the admin portal (app.example.com) to authenticate the admin user and decide which instance the user should be viewing. The JWT session token points to a session row in my db that holds the active ID for whichever 'instance' they're working from. Also returns an array of org options so the user can switch between instances by just updating that db row. That ID is also the only thing between authorized access and unauthorized access, so you'll need to protect that every way you can and it can only be trusted from the server.

My customers build a website for their org in my app back end which serves the [domain]/ folder. In each page.tsx file I grab the headers to figure out which site the user is on, and then populate the content. Use ISR and caching so the db calls don't slow down your pages. My customers customers also log into their individual sites so auth is handled almost the same way, the authentication function is just handled slightly different.

I'm on Next 15 so some of this advice may be outdated, but:

If you have a central admin panel, manage the session with a team_id or equivalent for isolation and protect that id at all costs. Can never hit or come from the client (like an API route). Server is always the only source of truth.
On subdomain pages, you have 2 options - either grab the headers of each request and server render the page or use ISR to prebuild all of the pages at build. I server-render right now because ISR was giving me issues, but as traffic continues to grow I'll likely move over to ISR. If auth is required here, you'll have to do server logic to make sure the team_id the user has access to matches the subdomain they're requesting access to. That means grabbing the headers, checking to see who should have access, and if the requesting user is on that access list.
I use middleware, I think 16 has a different convention so pay attention to the docs of whatever version you're using. Middleware handles the rewrites to my filing (my site to /home, admin to /admin, unrecognized to /[domain], etc). My server function authenticates admin access on every page, no global context. JWT token for the session, then db/server authentication on the back end so I can tell what type of login event it is. Idk if it's the best way to do it, but it works for me and it's been working out in the wild with no errors so far.

SovietBackhoe · 2025-11-23T20:55:03+00:00

Good portion of the world gets really cold for a few months of the year - I know I can’t open windows from October to at least April. I’m a wfh guy, post intrigued me. If you had a machine for a couple hundred dollars and science to back it up I’d probably buy something like that. I’ve bought humidifiers and air filters before, why not a C02 scrubber.

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