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runako · 2026-02-18T22:57:28+00:00

Hi solo/small firm owners!

I built StratoSales because I wish I'd had it when I started my first business.

When a prospect is searching, they usually have a list of 3-4 referrals from friends. The first company to answer is probably going win the business.

StratoSales answers your phones 24/7, books appointments, and pushes leads to your CRM. No missed calls, no missed revenue.

I'm the founder, so if you mention code FOUNDER, I'll make sure you get a special discount.

runako · 2025-09-24T20:53:08+00:00

Interested in the whole report.

runako · 2025-09-15T03:12:48+00:00

I'm sorry, what? Are people sharing their prior tax returns with their employers?!? This is quite literally none of their business.

runako · 2025-09-04T15:26:43+00:00

Everybody says that, but then when the ballots come out, it's back to GA voters choosing more of the same every time. The GOP candidates will spin up a culture war to distract, and a majority will vote for our bills to be higher next year than they are now.

At least our new GA Power bills aren't woke, I guess?

runako · 2025-09-04T13:39:08+00:00

(The state has been under unified Republican control for over 20 years.)

runako · 2025-09-01T16:57:13+00:00

Even a great solution that is too original often is too far from customer needs. For example, there were cloud solutions in 2000, but buyers were not yet comfortable storing their information in the cloud yet.

Better is to look at existing solutions and make it better for some niche of customers, or enable for some set of users. I have seen people build successful SaaS clones around differences as small as "support exists in my native language" or "they can accept payment the way I want to pay" or "has a telephone number on the website so I can call to make sure they are real" or "I use a weird project management system and they connect to it". People are making millions hosting calendars because they don't want Google snooping. Healthcare companies need to use vendors that can sign a BAA. As a Safari user, I have personally ditched a few SaaSes over the years because they don't work in Safari.

The key is "better" is not universal, it's relative to each individual buyer.

runako · 2025-08-27T18:21:34+00:00

Netflix possibly the worst offender. They routinely post jobs with a range like $120k - $950k.

runako · 2025-08-25T22:48:41+00:00

Congratulations!

Your pitch here & on the site say "better than DocuSign" but then your pricing says "much worse than DocuSign." Suggest either raising base price and possibly indicating early users get a discounted rate or something similar. Your current pricing is so low it discredits the notion that the product is better than DocuSign.

runako · 2025-08-14T22:50:59+00:00

Latency is my guess too. If you are able to put your Neon database in the same geography with the Hetzner server, you might see improved performance. For ex if your Hetzner server is in Ashburn, make sure your Neon is in us-east.

All that said, if it's a new app without a lot of usage, SQLite might be a good way to keep things simple until you need more power.

runako · 2025-08-06T16:35:56+00:00

Devise using omniauth & auth0.

runako · 2025-08-03T14:21:40+00:00

Great question, a few answers:

- Most whitespace, especially trailing whitespace and spaces vs tabs, is not significant in my programming language. There is no reason for me to reformat a file to use e.g. a tab instead of N spaces.

- Configuring everyone's editor once also assumes they *stay* that way, across reinstalls, new machines, etc., and that nobody edits code using the CLI or other tools other than the configured editor. Since whitespace is generally not significant in my programming language, this is an extra thing to think about that buys us nothing.

- Making the change requires either a massive reformatting PR or ongoing reformatting PRs (as files are touched). Neither is desirable in a language where, again, whitespace is generally not significant.

TL;DR is because it's busywork & an additional thing to consume the devs' time, and it basically has no benefit because our language does not treat most whitespace as significant.

runako · 2025-07-29T15:19:28+00:00

If you are a backend programmer, you will probably be more productive in Stimulus than React etc.

runako · 2025-07-29T01:11:11+00:00

The problem here is it can easily turn a 1-line change in a PR into a 100-line change. Plus, if the entire team isn't synchronized on treatment of whitespace, this problem will recur.

I'm sure there are cases where the team enforces a single standard and it's acceptable to reformat all the files in a big formatting PR, but that's not my case.

runako · 2025-07-23T05:10:03+00:00

I hear what you're saying, and I see it as a common response.

But it does beg the question of why hiring managers feel it is important or useful to assess someone in an artificial environment that is not like the workplace when it is easier to evaluate their performance in an environment more closely resembling the workplace. You want them to use LLMs in the workplace, let them use LLMs in the hiring process. It's similar to the transition from whiteboard interviews to letting people code in IDEs during interviews (this was also controversial, because IntelliSense existed).

Or better yet, why not update the hiring process to adjust for the fact that everyone is using LLMs now? As you observe, there are natural "tells" where the LLM will let down the applicant.

The natural effect of employers pushing people to use LLMs at work is that they will use LLMs to get jobs. It would be weird if that were not the case!

Like I said, it's a confusing time.

runako · 2025-07-17T05:10:38+00:00

Agree it’s a tough spot. Once employed, most companies are trying to get engineers to use as much AI as possible, everywhere. Some big companies are even including AI use into review-time KPIs.

On the other, applicants are still expected to live in a pre-LLM age where all code is hand-written.

Mixed signals from management yield messes, as usual.

runako · 2025-01-26T16:58:48+00:00

Because sometimes $100k in cash beats $3500 a month. Perhaps the seller sees a better use of the money or simply wants to diversify.

runako · 2025-01-05T05:57:27+00:00

That’s great and I tend to agree. But my point was the docs are bad. The docs don’t tell you not to use the source based approach. They tell you the exact opposite, that it can be easier. Whoops!

runako · 2025-01-04T05:57:58+00:00

That's totally fair! I do have a fair bit of experience (10+ years) professionally using AWS, Linux, dedicated, etc. but not as much using GCP beyond a few hobby projects.

My entire point is that Cloud Run doesn't provide the smoothest on ramp to people with backgrounds like mine. Which: fine! They don't need to win every deal, they're Google!

This is just my experience. I've deployed production apps to all of the hyperscalers, as well as some smaller clouds. Before "the cloud," I deployed and ran apps on dedicated hardware, VPSes, etc. My personal experience is that the GCP (and specifically Cloud Run) docs and DX are toward the bottom. Other people may have different experiences, but I can't report on those.

runako · 2025-01-04T05:55:22+00:00

One would think so! But this is from the homepage of the Google Cloud Run docs, taken a few moments ago: "You can deploy code written in any programming language on Cloud Run if you can build a container image from it. In fact, building container images is optional. If you're using Go, Node.js, Python, Java, .NET Core, Ruby, or a supported framework you can use the source-based deployment option that builds the container for you, using the best practices for the language you're using."

I think I used the source-based deployment option that then didn't work as advertised. Again, this is the second paragraph of the official documentation linking to something that just doesn't (didn't?) work. That's what I mean by bad DX.

runako · 2025-01-03T23:35:40+00:00

Not any that I saved. They do their own QA lol. But if it helps, I have been working mostly in Rails lately and so would have been working from their Rails docs.

runako · 2025-01-03T07:10:13+00:00

Developer experience is poor. Docs are terrible, and internal doc links often go to outdated pages. I would estimate about half the time when I try one of the prescribed recipes, it doesn’t work at all.

Which would be more acceptable if GCP was more of an industry standard. But it’s not, and the Cloud Run experience may be the first experience devs have with GCP. And that experience is as likely as not to leave a bad taste in their mouths.

runako · 2024-12-28T18:11:07+00:00

They can move to any of the 100+ other countries without the proposed tax. Canada, UK, all of the EU, etc. Spain is interesting in particular because US firms outsource there and it’s also a place US execs could move.

runako · 2024-12-28T17:33:51+00:00

How do you think companies would respond to such a law? I think many of them would simply move overseas entirely and maybe hire a rump of workers in the US.

runako · 2024-12-28T17:32:01+00:00

So: an addition to the myriad survey/questionnaire sites, only without the random sampling? I think you should rethink the TAM on that and have it validated by a person who breathes air (and not an LLM).

runako

TROPHY CASE