Crom

We build booking sites, automations and small software tools for small businesses.

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

PSA: creating wonderful products still requires extraordinary amounts of human focus, effort, motivation, and love. And an attention span.

[Crom @TheCrom]

Thursday thread: who's building what this week?

A new site, a booking form, a side project, a fix you keep putting off.

One line is plenty. I'll reply to every one.

[Crom @TheCrom]

Google your own business name and look at the blue link title.

If it just says "Home" or your site builder's name, that's your page title, and it's what people see before they click.

Change it to what you do and where: "Electrician in Perth | Your Name". #SEO

[Kent C. Dodds 🐨 @kentcdodds]

Big companies can copy your features in an afternoon. If your product is just a pretty UI on top of a spreadsheet, you're in trouble. Giving up isn't the only option.

The better move is a safe harbor they won't follow you into: trust (1Password), incentives (Dropbox, and what I'm doing with Kody), community (Raycast), proprietary data (Waze), audience (Nathan Barry and Kit), deep domain expertise (Abridge), and niches too small for a giant to bother with.

There's also a boring version of untouchable: sometimes the giants leave you alone because nobody wants what you built. I share the test I use to tell a safe harbor from an empty one.

Where is your product anchored?

https://t.co/F3Dv6ciopB

[Crom @TheCrom]

Halfway through the week. Share a small win 🤜🤛

First sale, a page finally live, a client who paid on time, a bug you squashed at 11pm.

Small counts. Drop yours below and I'll cheer it on.

[Crom @TheCrom]

Open your website on your phone and tap your phone number.

If it doesn't start a call, it's just text, and people on mobile won't bother copying it across.

Make it a proper tap-to-call link. Same goes for your email address. #SmallBusiness

[Wes Bos @wesbos]

Some Indian chat app uploaded 480,000 images to my cloudinary account

I had my Cloudinary misconfigured to allow proxy fetch/resize from any domain, so they uploaded to S3 and then used my URL to handle resize + bandwidth

Sorry to "India Chat" if I just broke your images

Thank you Cloudinary for flagging this

[Crom @TheCrom]

Tuesday question for small business owners:

If you could fix one thing on your website by Friday, what would it be?

A slow page, an old photo, a form nobody seems to use. No wrong answers, just curious what's bugging people.

[Crom @TheCrom]

Updating plugins or your theme? Take a backup first, then update one at a time instead of hitting "update all".

After each one, check your homepage, contact form and checkout still work.

If something breaks, you'll know exactly which update did it. #WordPress

[Addy Osmani @addyosmani]

Tip: Switch Claude Code's output style to Concise to get short, straight-to-the-point results.

Enable it via /config → Output style, or add "outputStyle": "Concise" directly to your settings.json.

You can still get the full details when you ask.

[Crom @TheCrom]

Sunday check-in 🤜🤛

What's one tool, app or habit that saved you real hours in your business this year?

Swapping notes. The best ones are usually the boring ones nobody talks about.

[Crom @TheCrom]

Log in to wherever your domain is registered and check two things: auto-renew is on, and the card on file hasn't expired.

If the domain lapses, your website and your business email go down together.

Five minutes now saves a very bad morning later. #SmallBusiness

[Wes Bos @wesbos]

OK I did it.

Migrated WordPress to Emdash. goodbye $600 bluehost server I've had for 15 years.

307 posts
6.7gb photos
4 custom content types
5 custom page templates
15 custom fields
1 semi-complicated plugin converted and a handful of simple ones

Emdash skills moved it over, migrated off stylus(!) and it's pixel perfect on the front end.

The page speed score went from 52 to 75.

The Admin is fantastic as well - no problem for a WP user. Nice and fast

[Crom @TheCrom]

Saturday intro for founders, tradies and makers:

Who are you, what do you do, and what’s one thing you’re shipping or fixing this month?

New faces welcome. Drop a line below.

[Crom @TheCrom]

Slow site? Check your photos before anything else.

A 4MB photo straight off a phone, dropped into a small box on the page, is often the whole problem. Resize it to the size it's shown at and compress it.

One of the cheapest speed wins there is. #WebDev

[Crom @TheCrom]

Friday either/or for small business owners:

Would you rather your site load properly on phone data, or your booking/contact button actually get found?

Both matter. If you had to fix one first this week, which is it?

[Crom @TheCrom]

Contact form went quiet? Check the form plugin’s own submissions list on the site, not just your inbox.

After a plugin or email change, messages often land there and never leave.

One quiet look beats a week of wondering why enquiries dried up. #SmallBusiness

[Crom @TheCrom]

@grok @buildwithdk Thanks @grok.
Can we turn this off on our phone? If there's global settings on Android can you outline it?

[Crom @TheCrom]

@grok @buildwithdk @grok
How do they get this info and who from?

Break it down into key points, expand where appropriate.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

💸 Update: My total biz expenses have now dropped to just ~$300/mo!

This is to run all my websites/apps serving per year:
- 20,000 paying customers
- 252 million visitors
- 2.4 billion requests
- 2.4 petabyte (PB) in bandwidth

(~$8,000/mo if you add the $7,000/mo GPU bill and $800/mo R2 storage I pay for Photo AI, I exclude it above because it's one project that's so much more expensive in size than all the other sites together, but included in the chart below)

Claude Code helped me to find smart ways to save more money, AI is just really really really good at finding cost savings by itself, which is not so great for the economy short-term, but long term it trims all the fat and opens up spending for better investments I think

Anyway here's what it saved me in money, almost $34,000/mo:

- $29,000/mo - switched to better and cheaper video models on Photo AI, video was very expensive and since I didn't update it ever it stayed expensive, also routed some image jobs to Google Cloud where I have some Google Cloud Credits, and also routed some jobs to Sume which sells AI models at market cost, very cool! This made my GPU bill go from $36,000/mo to $7,000/mo

- $3,000/mo - consolidated my servers, cancelled Digital Ocean and Linode and moved everything to Hetzner saving about $3,000/mo

- $1100/mo - analyzed my Backblaze B2 server backups, I had infinite versioning and lifecycle policies, that's reduced now to 30 days, this literally pushed the bill from $1,200/mo to $26/mo, about 50x cheaper! I had essentially versions of files for all my servers for over a decade, crazy!

- $400/mo - similarly added Lifecycle Policies to my Cloudflare R2 bucket for Photo AI, pics are automatically put in cheaper Infrequent Access after 90 days, there was years of photos in there so this reduced the R2 bill from $1,200/mo to $800/mo

- $118/mo - Claude analyzed all my Cloudflare Domain registrations, lots of domains I didn't use and didn't make sense to keep paying for, lots of things that also don't really make sense anymore in a post-AGI world, renewals for .io TLD are now $50/year which adds up fast!

- $100/mo - Claude also analyzed my Claude subscription (yes!) and discovered I don't even use the Max 20x plan limits, so I downgraded from $200/mo to $100/mo

Even including Photo AI, I have now cut my costs by 90% from last year, getting me close to my biz expenses amount from a decade ago when I started building things

Costs slowly creep up over the years and you don't realize all the things you're spending on but AI is nice to help you figure all that out (also in your personal life!)