There’s nothing more depressing than building a product with a free tier. Free products attract the worst behaviour: obscure, illegal, and often amoral requests. It makes you lose faith in humanity. I can’t imagine what the safety teams at ChatGPT or any major social network deal with every day.

Today I gave a talk and pissed off some people. In an age of rampant sycophancy, I consider this a success. Just unfiltered strong opinions.

Yesterday I woke up in the middle of the night, sweating, heart racing. I grabbed my phone and immediately bought anthropig.com. Now I have two questions: - What should I build with it? - And will I go to jail if I do?

I wrote a new article, exploring the consequences of pain and pleasure on LLMs. I had a lot of fun writing it, so don't take it too seriously. paoramen.fika.bar/agentic-plea...

Why is everyone talking about 100 eggs developer

I can't believe it... Handinger can play wordle? yeah, and is pretty good at it!

Sports became mainstream when work stopped being physically exhausting. If AI does the same for mental labor (a big if), will we all end up playing more board games?

Agents are like teenage sex: everyone talks about them, but most people aren’t actually having any. We’re building a new product for builders to automate work with agents super easily. No need for hosting, sandboxing, building complex harnesses, nor tools. Just an API. Interesting? let me know!

"If you are not building B2B SaaS when you are young, you have no heart, and if you are not building agents when old, you have no brain" – Definitely not Winston Churchill

This is, by far, the video that has helped me the most in my career as a software engineer youtu.be/DsSoT-MtEKs?...

Yoga For Back Pain | Tim Senesi Yoga

30 Minute Yoga Stretches for Back Pain, Sciatica, Low Back, and General Flexibility. https://timsenesiyoga.com/consciousmovement/ Click Here for the Strengthening routines in the Mobility Course.…

youtu.be

Wouldn’t it be funny if the only thing AI ended up replacing was developers?

Can’t believe the whole economy depends on these hands

Last month was our best ever at Fika. 1,087 new publications & 564 new articles. We've also shipped: - Paid subscriptions - Reactions - Resizable images - Advanced stats (views, open rates, channels…) - Voice dictation - Embeds - …and polished the product to death.

I’ve written a piece about the early days of the Barcelona tech scene. Back when nobody really knew what they were doing, capital was scarce, ambition wasn’t, and everything felt one step away from either glory or failure. paoramen.fika.bar/hedonism-and...

Hedonism and Entrepreneurship in Barcelona

Untold stories of an early startup scene

paoramen.fika.bar

I have no idea about investing, but I think people overindex on technology displacing incumbents. Sure, once in a while you get a Kodak. But IBM, Oracle, Microsoft are still around. Good companies embrace new technologies and evolve with them. SaaS will prevail.

Numbers from January: # Fika 775 new publications! 355 new subscriptions and 12k visits. # Handinger 19 customers 154eur MRR We have amazing things in the oven, can't wait to launch them!

Men would rather write a blog post than go to therapy, but you can do both. I just wrote the essay I've been wanting to write for a long time. The most personal one I've written. I talk about parent-child relationships and leaving your own company as a founder. paoramen.fika.bar/i-left-my-ow...

I left my own startup to not become my father.

I failed. I am back at work.

paoramen.fika.bar

Writing tip #18 Opening with a pronoun delays meaning and creates tension. That move is called prolepsis. It’s everywhere in speech, and striking in writing. Use it to land strong first sentences.

A developer can cost you ~$50 an hour. That's... a lot of Opus 4.5 tokens. The real change on the tech industry is going to be when business owners realize how to leverage this effectively.

The only thing a founder should fear is the company dying (most likely). Everything else is a distraction. Seat belts? Sure they are important. Scientifically proven. But you are flying a plane across the ocean, low on fuel, and you don't even know how to fly.

Writing tip #17 Act don't tell. Don't describe a feeling, use an action instead.

Writing tip #16 Juxtapose contrasting ideas in a parallel structure. This is often used to presenting an "obvious" truth in an impactful way.

December wasn’t great at Fika. We had fewer posts and visits than planned. I could blame seasonality (the mother of all excuses), but honestly, we’re still figuring things out: the product, the positioning, the channels... Send hugs.

Writing tip #15 Slice sentences sharply across expectation and payoff. It creates momentum.

Unsolicited life advice: When you travel to a country with a lower cost of living than the US (which is most of them), cancel your SaaS subscriptions and re-subscribe from there.

Writing tip #14 Dialogue is action disguised as talk. Don't describe the scene, let the characters verbalize it.

Writing tip #13 Polyptotons are a neat trick used by Jesus, Shakespeare, and John Lennon, in that order. Repeat a root word in different grammatical forms to make sentences more memorable. PS: The polyptoton chapter in Elements of Eloquence is one of the most hilarious texts I have ever read.

Writing tip #12 Verbs trapped as nouns suck life out of sentences.

Writing tip #11 Even small paragraphs can be stories.

Writing tip #10 Instead of describing, snap a picture. Like in photography, good writing is an act of noticing.