This afternoon I did the 10 minutes Y Combinator interview in Paris. It's for entry to the Winter 2020 batch. I'm excited, but also a bit divided. Here are my notes on: The run up (skip this if you hate long stories)Prepping (most useful info)The interview Next stepsThe…
When adding a new feature to Checkly or refactoring some older piece, I tend to pick Heroku for rolling it out. But not always, because sometimes I pick AWS Lambda. The short story: Developer Experience trumps everything.AWS Lambda is cheap. Up to a limit though. This impacts not only…
In a recent post on customer feedback I mentioned being a recent convert to chat widget-driven tools. I thought they sucked, but I was wrong. Since then, I actually switched from Drift to Intercom because Intercom's focus — support & communication — matched my business better than Drift's heavy sales focus. To…
A big part of Checkly runs on AWS Lambda, but I never really discussed it in depth before on this blog. So here we go. Topics are: A little bit on our Lambda setup.Why Lambda is an almost perfect match for SaaS. Especially when you're small.Why I don't…
Ok, not completely true. I also use Stripe, Github, AWS, Heroku, Ghost, AppOptics, Intercom and Mailchimp. And some bookkeeping and tax tools. Don't forget the code editors! But! When I plan my day, I spend most of my time in Trello and Apple's stock Reminders app. I also use Numbers…
Update 14-08-2019: Greenlock is awesome but needs support. If you don't want to code this yourself consider donating $100 or so on their indiegogo page so they can ship Greenlock v3 and stay compatible with the Let's Encrypt API. Recently I pushed a long overdue feature for Checkly: SSL for…
Something different this week. I got an email from an aspiring SaaS bootstrapper. Let's call him John. John explained his working situation at a tech startup and his dream to start a SaaS in the cloud security space by himself. He also had some pretty good questions. I asked John…
update 05-06-19: Digital Ocean has posted their postmortem on this situation as mentioned by their CTO Barry Cooks in the comments. Last Friday May 31, Nicolas Beauvais, CTO and only tech person of small startup raisup.com, took to Twitter with a cry for help. Their cloud hosting company Digital…
Last week I rolled out a simple patch that decimated the response time of a Postgres query crucial to Checkly. It quite literally went from an average of ~100ms with peaks to 1 second to a steady 1ms to 10ms. However, that patch was just the last step of a…
There is a lot of dogma around shipping a product in startup land. Many founders follow strict patterns they got from a book or some influencer's tweet. "Ship Early" is one of the more stubborn ones, and in many cases it is exactly the right thing to do. The earlier…