Correct me if I'm wrong

It has been almost one and a half years since I quit my full-time job. Let’s reflect. Founding a bootstrapped startup. A friend and I have founded a company that helps merchants to save money on Google Shopping ads. There were good learnings in there. Sales In the beginning, I was completely lost, as I have never done something like that before. Thanks to corporate specialisation. Fortunately, I came across an early version of the Sales For Founders course by Louis Nicholls.

This is a more personal post that will act as a diary entry. I will return to it in some years and compare what I know now with what I will have learnt. Having worked for several years in companies of different sizes, there were important life questions about financial growth and security in the long-term. Eventually this lead to me exploring new paths of entrepreneurship and freelancing.

Having worked the past five years a good bit on the command line, the time was ripe to go back to what I failed to do in high school: use and get comfortable with Linux as my laptop OS. And I even took Linux classes back then. Now, I was ready to try again. In short, once everything is set up it runs super fast and smooth. But the way there is very tedious.

Growth Hacking sounds like another buzzword to add to your resume on LinkedIn. Isn’t everyone a hacker nowadays? Despite this unfortunate naming, it is a really useful concept to know about and to have it: You bring marketers, engineers, data-, product- and business-people together on a team to run data-driven experiments to improve your product, customer acquisition, activation and retention. There are many of things I like about this concept. First, growth hacking is not about pulling dirty tricks (or hacks) on people to get them onto your product or to magically make some crappy thing go viral.

Having been familiar with stock markets only from movies such as the Wolf of Wall Street or friends who visited a stockbroker’s house to find it full of TVs that are showing Bloomberg in every room, I thought that it wasn’t for me as I did not want to follow the news 24/7 and frantically buy or sell stocks when there is a development. Luckily, there is a way how to invest in the stock market where I don’t have to do that.

Static website hosting on S3 is great. However, I did not find a way how to set up SSL there. Further, I wanted to have multiple urls (e.g. example.org and example.com) point to this one bucket without much manual effort. All this can be done with CloudFront (Amazon’s content delivery network). This posts describes how to set up with CloudFormation the following: an S3 bucket, an S3 bucket policy that restricts access to this bucket just to CloudFront, a CloudFront Distribution that points to the S3 bucket, and finally, DNS entries in Route53 that point the real domains to the CloudFront URL.

This post touches on a few learnings I had: First, that our intuition about where the performance bottlenecks are is not always right. Second, third party libraries are not always the best solution for your problem, no matter how convenient it feels and how much you want to trust them. Corollary: Measure performance before and after using them to identify bottlenecks. Third, sometimes your own naive and inefficient solutions are just good enough and no optimisation is required.

Updated on Dec. 3rd 2017. Having recently started to use GitLab and their automated pipelines (GitLab CI) for hosting this website on GitLab Pages, I wanted to also learn how I can use their service to upload artifacts to S3. There are tutorials out there that do a good job in explaining how to do it and in more detail (e.g this or this), but I think that my solution has some valuable ideas points too.

I always think about how to make conversations deeper. In college, it was super easy to get to know people well. When I was a visiting student in Harvard, all first-year undergraduates were dining in the same hall. It was for many of them a safe place where they spent three times per day an hour sheltered from stress and worries that come with being a student. People open up, make connections and friendships form, everyone is looking for new people.

Businesses are often perceived as a only shareholder-value-oriented, people at work and customers have lost any (positive) emotional connection. Especially big corporations seem always to be in a race to the bottom in customer service (honorary mention is O2/Telefonica in Germany, which has the absolute worst customer service known to me). Authors Mackey (founder of WholeFoods supermarket in the US) and Sisodia offer another approach to capitalism that has more sides to it than just short term shareholder value - conscious capitalism.