Simon Willison’s Weblog

(Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup (via) Absolutely fascinating post by Jack Lindamood talking about services, tools and processes used by his startup and which ones turned out to work well v.s. which ones are now regretted.

I’d love to see more companies produce lists like this. # 10th February 2024, 5:51 am

ChatGPT plugins. ChatGPT is getting a plugins mechanism, which will allow developers to provide extra capabilities to ChatGPT, like looking up restaurants on OpenTable or fetching data from APIs. This feels like the kind of feature that could obsolete—or launch—a thousand startups. It also makes ChatGPT much more interesting as a general purpose tool, as opposed to something that only works as an interface to a language model. # 23rd March 2023, 8:56 pm

Retrospection and Learnings from Dgraph Labs (via) I was excited about Dgraph as an interesting option in the graph database space. It didn’t work out, and founder Manish Rai Jain provides a thoughtful retrospective as to why, full of useful insights for other startup founders considering projects in a similar space. # 16th September 2022, 6:43 pm

Django for Startup Founders: A better software architecture for SaaS startups and consumer apps (via) The opening section of this article has very little to do with Django: it’s an insightful description of the technical challenges faced by a startup that is still seeking product-market fit. Alex then extends that into his own architectural recommendations for startups building with Django to help waste as little time as possible on problems that aren’t core to the product they are building. # 24th June 2021, 8:43 pm

The SOC2 Starting Seven (via) "So, you plan to sell your startup’s product to big companies one day. Congratu-dolences! [...] Here’s how we’ll try to help: with Seven Things you can do now that will simplify SOC2 for you down the road while making your life, or at least your security posture, materially better in the immediacy. # 5th March 2021, 7:50 pm

How the Digg team was acquihired. (via) Useful insight into how a talent acquisition can play out from Will Larson, who was an engineering leader at Digg when they negotiated their acquihire exit. # 3rd January 2020, 2:27 am

Advice for a new executive, by Chad Dickerson (via) Lara Hogan shares the advice she was given by Chad Dickerson (CTO and then CEO of Etsy) when she first became VP Engineering at Kickstarter. There is so much good material in here. I can vouch for the “peer support group” recommendation: Natalie and I benefited from that through Y Combinator and ended up building our own founder peer support group when we moved our startup back to London. Having a confidential trusted group with which to discuss the challenges of growing a company was invaluable. # 31st August 2018, 1:45 pm

Getting Your First 10 Customers (via) There is so much good advice embedded in this article by Patrick McKenzie, and it constantly comes back to the theme of doing whatever it takes to get to your first ten paying customers. # 23rd October 2017, 5:36 pm

It’s Not a Feature Problem—Avoiding Startup Tarpits (via) “When we turned on paid advertising for the first time the increase we had a sizable increase in signups. We always feared that a new user would just churn because of what we perceived as deficiencies in the product. While there were users who churned for that reason, it was never the nightmare scenario that we imagined.” # 22nd October 2017, 12:53 pm

Balsamiq: A look back at 2009. Peldi Guilizzoni from Balsamiq shares some numbers from 2009—$1.1 million profit on $1.6 million revenue, with a team of three people. # 3rd January 2010, 12:13 pm

StartupBoeing—Starting an Airline (via) Boeing’s guide to starting your own airline. # 15th December 2009, 10:38 pm

Document startups in chaos as Adobe’s Flashpaper discontinues. Don’t be a sharecropper. # 5th September 2008, 1:57 pm

Silicon Swings and Silicon Roundabouts. Matt Locke’s advice for anyone hoping to build a “Tech Hub” for startups, based on personal experience gained running a media centre in Yorkshire in the 90s. # 1st August 2008, 8:20 pm

Silicon Roundabout. Matt Biddulph maps the abundance of interesting startups and tech companies that have popped up around Old Street in London. # 28th July 2008, 1:36 am

How to sell your software for $20,000 (via) The best article I’ve read on software entrepreneurship in ages. # 28th June 2008, 9:21 am

Hello Revver.com 2.0. Revver, one of the more established video startups, have launched their new version which is powered by Django. # 2nd November 2007, 7:03 am

Top 10 dotcoms to watch. From the Guardian—Dopplr and Moo both get a mention. # 30th July 2007, 2:19 pm