Entering a trade with size is one rookie mistake I’ve learned to stop making. No matter how sure the setup looks, I stick to starting with 5% or less of my stack
one thing I loved building at Hang was a way to help AI agents query big data smartly. We were ingesting data from big restaurant brands and needed a way to chunk data for research.
Our users were able to do stuff like ask our Copilot to analyze orders from new year’s eve, see which ones involved a group of not, predict how many would be online etc
The beauty about it was teaching it how to fetch data. It would start out with one question, fetch data for it, understand results and then decide on the next piece of info to fetch. It also knew to figure out an approach to optimizing, so it wouldn’t blow up costs for our data warehouse.
When it had enough to email results back, it knew the right people in C-suite to email results to, and which ones to text something shorter to.
$10M ARR is the FU MONEY of SaaS.
At $10M ARR bootstrapped, you and your co-founder clear $1M+/year in salary and dividends easily.
You can sell instantly for $30-40M. There are hundreds of EBITDA buyers at this level vs. a handful at $1B valuations.
From here, you can do whatever you want.
Hire a CEO and work 1 hour/week. Grind 100 hours if that's your thing. Raise $50M from a position of strength. Scale to $25M ARR with 25 people and pay yourself $10-15M/year.
Most companies never get here because VCs show up early with decacorn dreams and money you don't need.
That capital interferes with the one thing that makes you great: product-market fit.
Bootstrapping to $10M ARR is easier and less risky than creating a VC-backed unicorn, with a far higher probability-weighted outcome.
If you can find PMF and use customer money to get to $10M, you can do anything you want with your life.
I'm Boris and I created Claude Code. Lots of people have asked how I use Claude Code, so I wanted to show off my setup a bit.
My setup might be surprisingly vanilla! Claude Code works great out of the box, so I personally don't customize it much. There is no one correct way to use Claude Code: we intentionally build it in a way that you can use it, customize it, and hack it however you like. Each person on the Claude Code team uses it very differently.
So, here goes.