22 years ago, a close friend called me to ask if I wanted to go to a local trade show with him. I didn’t have anything better to do, so I went. I came home from the trade show with a 12 foot boat. I was 18, and I had…

Everyone wants to decouple time from money. The problem? It’s an extremely unpredictable way to make a living. For every successful creator, there are thousands who make nothing or almost nothing. So, how do you make the unpredictable, predictable? Here’s what I learned: See, there are two very distinct worlds…

December 2020 turned out to be a very good month, with $31,962 in revenue and $25,385 in profit. But it didn’t start that well. …

I have two info products on the market: The Good Parts of AWS — A 173 page PDF, released on Dec 25, 2019 (with pre-orders since Oct 3, 2019). Everyone Can Build a Twitter Audience — A 100 minute video, released on Apr 22, 2020 (with no pre-orders). These two…

What’s my Twitter audience worth? Someone asked me this question recently. Let’s see if we can get to a rough valuation. On Christmas day of 2019, I released my first info product (a technical ebook). Earlier this week, I released my second product (a short video course). I announced both on Twitter (here and here)…

Amazon describes DynamoDB as a database, but it’s best seen as a highly-durable data structure in the cloud. A partitioned B-tree data structure, to be precise. DynamoDB is much more similar to a Redis than it is to a MySQL. But, unlike Redis, it is immediately consistent and highly-durable, centered…

How I Prepared my Finances Before Bootstrapping — Earlier this month I left my cushy developer job at Amazon to work for myself. I am 35, living in Seattle with my wife and two small kids, ages 2 and 4. I’m starting this quest for an independent lifestyle with no business and household income yet, and my target…