All of my long-form thoughts on programming, leadership, product design, and more, collected in chronological order.
A few weeks ago, I made fun of a colleague. He told me he had been listening to AI-generated podcast summaries, and I gave him the kind of look you give someone who says they prefer airport sushi. Not sure what i said exactly but it was something like ' Now that is where i draw the line! '. Fast forward, last weekend. My son had a basketball match and I had a long drive ahead of me. With…
As a responsible consumer, If you want to buy a product or service, where do you do your research? You might ask your friends and family, or check TikTok and Twitter. However, if you're like the majority of people , you'll likely look to a search engine first. As you should, right? Google is, for the time being, the premiere repository of all human knowledge. From a simple search query,…
It’s no shock to anyone that we’re in the age of subscriptions. Our entire world has been Netflixified, with every service wanting a piece of the action. The average person in 2020 had a baffling twelve subscriptions each , with this number only continuing to rise. Gone are the days when you could just buy a video game, rent a movie, or purchase a piece of software. No, instead, you have to…
When print media started making the move to digital, newspapers were cautiously optimistic. The transition was inevitable as the internet became ubiquitous. It’s not like the newspapers could simply opt out of digitising. And who knows, maybe hosting the news online could prove to be a lucrative new revenue stream for the already thin-margined print media industry. Right? Wrong. Text media…
Was watching this @leeerob video on How Vercel builds Vercel and had some thoughts. (shameless plug: I did a How Prezly uses Prezly to run Prezly post a few years back ) Monitoring App Around minute 8 Rob demonstrates a monitoring tab that we don't have in our vercel account. I'm curious on how to access that feature but also how it's built. It looks a lot like the charts we're…
You know the deal: you want to read about the latest horrifying global event, so you click on the first link, and… it’s paywalled. You go back and click on the second link. Also paywalled (and screaming at you about your ad blocker). Onto the third and fourth articles. Eventually, the global conflict has resolved itself before you find out what the hell is going on. This is just one symptom of a…
I was listening to another great episode of Hackers Incorporated where Ben and Adam reviewed 2023 and figured it would be good to clean up my internal notes and do a blog post about it. Hackers Incorporated | Ben and Adam review 2023 Personal/Family As a family and (recently) married couple we're doing great. The short version is that everyone is healthy, happy and content. 2023 was quite…
'Listen to your customers', 'focus on your clients' problems' – recurring advice you'll recognise from pretty much every startup book on the market. It's solid guidance. And for anyone running a tech company? A persistent challenge. The problem is that there are so many different information channels, that trying to make sense of them all requires a near inhuman…
I've been neglecting this blog and the 112 people that subscribed for updates 🙁 But life took over and just couldn't bring myself to sit down and write. A lot has happened though: Decided we're going to stay after the 1 year trial Sold our house in Belgium We're getting married Many of you have visited us (22 visits so far) We have now been in Spain for 16 months and it has…
If you're in a software or product company I'm sure you have heard the advice of "don't deploy on Friday." This is both reasonable and has merit. However, this isn't great advice in 2023. By now you've had plenty of time to invest in tooling around your deployment pipeline. I can hear you now, "But Friday is a good day to deploy because everyone is off and I don't…
Recently I had to answer some data questions around our ideal customer so I needed a way to calculate LTV. In the past I've done my fair share of heavy data lifting to get the most accurate value of Life Time Value. Example formula of LTV Alternatively we've used platforms like Baremetrics or ChartMogul to do the math for us. But reality is that we don't obsess over those numbers…
With all the commotion around Twitter, Mastodon, and the Fediverse ( what is the Fediverse video ) I've been reading into the alternatives to centralised and content silos. Most of my questions were answered by the awesome folks at the indiweb where I was able to update my knowledge about Microformats, syndication, the term ' POSSE ', web mentions and indieAuth. We have a long way…
Adopting Basecamps 'Shape-Up' method at Prezly transformed our company. In an introductory video by Ryan Singer (author of the method) he talked about the three main reasons people are interested in the method We're growing . Help me run multiple, parallel product teams We're slowing down . Help us get back to shipping fast There's got to be a better way. Looking back I…
It's been almost three months since we moved to Spain and I figured it was time for an update as the last one is dated from the beginning of September . We've been busy fixing the house, getting back to our jobs and entertaining guests. In September and October, we had a lot of guests/family over which is awesome but sometimes a little exhausting to try and make sure they have a good…
💡 This article is updated. I now do the same thing using hyperkey.app and an app called Velja which does everything described in this article The two (web) apps I use the most in my day-to-day Prezly work are Notion and Linear . I do prefer their native (Electron based) apps. Using BetterTouchTool and the Hyper-key I have dedicated keys to switch to those apps. In my case Hyper+L opens Linear…
Writing and publishing a blog post or press release is at the core of the Prezly product and we want to make it better, faster, more powerful and easier to use. But building an editor is bloody hard and in a post last year I listed a number of things I find important when it comes to the writing experience. Since then we've been spending a lot of time on improving the Prezly editor. One of…
Another 3 weeks passed by in a heartbeat Took some time to write a quick update. If you haven't read the previous updates yet you can find them linked below: July 2022 Moving to Spain August 2022 First week in Spain August 2022 Settling In So it's been 3 weeks since the last update which I updated to point out that we did find Robbert in the end. Back to school On the 5th of September,…
We've had a free trial form for over a year now and we're constantly fighting people that sign up to abuse our system. What happened? Last weekend someone was able to sign-up for a Prezly trial and send out over 4 million emails unnoticed. I mean, we did notice it after the weekend but then it was too late. This will increase our SendGrid bill but that's not the worst. It also…
It's been three weeks since we moved to Spain and here is a quick update on how it's going. Second Visit This week we welcomed Peter and Ann who were visiting us from the other side of the Pyrenees (Around Toulouse). Although they made a short stop on their way to Tarragona we enjoyed their stay. I helped Peter find a calm/wild camping spot to spend the night after we had a joyful…
Last Thursday the day had come to pack up our stuff and take the 1250km drive to our new home . A new car Because the village is impossible to access with a normal car (max width 180cm) and there was a lot work in the house (getting rid of stuff left by the previous owner, building new floors, ...) I ended up buying a new car in Belgium. The requirements for the car were for it to fit and be able…
Two steps forward, one step back This would be my most accurate one-liner of what it feels like to build a company from a three-person founding team to a few-million revenue/30+ headcount business. And the same is true for the product team where we've evolved from early years of rapid experimentation ("let's try agile", "adopt Jira company-wide", "idea + execution on the same day") to a…
Upgraded the blog. It's like Bea and Tailwind had a baby In the previous blogging theme I hacked away in a few evenings I was lacking quite some functionality like search and paging. Also, the theme didn't score great in SEO and accessibility lighthouse audits. In the last weeks, the team has been helping me rework the blog using our existing/battle-tested tools and packages. Previous…
We bought a house in Catalonia and we're moving this summer We've been contemplating a move abroad for a few years now and we finally did it. In August 2022 we'll be moving to the Spanish Pyrenees where we bought a house. But, why? I've been trying to answer this question for hundreds of times now and I've learned that the best answer is Why not? It switches the…
Disclaimer: I am no expert in product analytics and definitely not claiming to be. I did spend the last 5 years playing with a lot of different analytical tools and made a lot of mistakes. With this post I hope other people can avoid some of those. While most startup books and marketing series talk about being ' data driven ', I've come to understand that it's easier said than…
Because I learned the hard way that my phone usage was messing with my mood I've been trying to limit my phone usage with mixed success. Telling people about what happened most reactions were something like Sounds like a you problem, not a phone problem It feels like you just have a problem regulating your own usage. Which I would agree with. But for me the easy way out would be to not carry…
Annelies and I had planned a last-minute four-day road trip through the Spanish Pyrenees to see what it would be like living there. As we lost a lot of time in the airport (instructions on where to go in Charleroi Airport are terrible), we were caught queuing while we heard the last call for passengers to Santander Airport. You know it's not a good sign if they start calling out your name…
The interface in which I am writing this blog post is over 5 years old and has UX issues. A quick write-up of what we're thinking about and what we are struggling with. This project can be broken up in three different components: The writing experience / Editor itself CMS / The story editing interface The publication flow The editing experience Turns out that building a good editor in 2022 is…
I've been thinking for a while that I needed to document the different ways we use Prezly to run Prezly. Browsing twitter today I saw Peter Suhm started a great trend. Peter Suhm on Twitter So figured it was time for me to do the same. Let's go! #1 We send our customer newsletters through Prezly Every month we send out a wrap-up of what's going on with Prezly. The entire content of…
You know how you have one Netflix account shared within your immediate family, a few colleagues, that couple you met on holiday and your family physician? So, that's called account sharing . We've all done it at one point or another, and by and large, most people see it as a victimless crime since the only ones put out by it are big, faceless corporations who make too much money and…
This holiday we spent a month with the family in Sweden 🇸🇪. It was awesome. This is a quick write-up of note-worthy tips, the route of our trip and the experience travelling with a family of 5. Camper/Mobile Home We were in a big mobile home (7.5 meters) that has a sleeping capacity of 6. With everyone sleeping inside it tends to get really crowded and it takes a while to transform the living…
Inspired by a great post on reddit i took some time to go through the costs of running Prezly. Initially, I figured it would be a great read but at the same time, it's a useful exercise for me to see if there are any services we can get rid of or downgrade. Just to give you an idea of scale Prezly is a 18 person SaaS product. Fully bootstrapped (no outside capital) and serving about 500…
I was scoping some changes to the website today and noticed how much better we plan and execute on changes to the website. 2010 This is the first version of the homepage created by Jesse and Frederik. www.prezly.com - 2010 2011 This one I remember more clearly. Frederik had read a book about 'social proof' and was obsessed with adding customer faces and quotes on our marketing materials.…
Text editors are central to most online apps. While text editors used to be important for Content Management Systems (CMS), they are now an important part of many more tools such as Project Management Systems and CRM systems. Customers are rightfully more demanding when it comes to how they create content. But building a good editor is bloody hard . You'd expect that this is a solved problem…
In this article, I am going to break down how this blog works. When I started this project my main requirements were 1) developer experience, 2) performance and 3) simplicity. Update July 2022: New blog theme The stack This blog is a Next.js application that is pulling in content from the Prezly CMS. Using Next, you have a few options when it comes to page rendering: “on-demand” (server-side…
In a previous post I tried to find the best newsroom based on unbiased signals such as search traffic, lighthouse scores, accessibility and page speed. Now I'm interested in the ad stack of those newsrooms: Are they all using Google Analytics? Who is using segment.com and on average how many ad trackers can we detect? Let's dive in. By using a combination of Netcraft Site Report and two…
With help from Prezly colleagues, customers and twitter I now have a list of about 60 newsroom URLs from well-known brands, but which ones are the best? In this post, I will explore different ways to score those newsrooms on their technical foundations. Obviously, a good newsroom is about a lot more than performance and accessibility but let's start with the basics. Here are the criteria I…
While I'm searching for inspiration to design, build and integrate the best possible newsroom in Prezly I wanted to share the plans on how we're want to do this. We want to include our customers and anyone that is interested in building customer newsrooms in the process. I believe this transparency will result in greater overall quality and hey, maybe we'll get the attention of a…
Is 'newsroom expert' a job title? In the last 8 years, I have been involved in planning, designing, building, migrating and hosting a lot of newsrooms. From small startups and NGO's all the way up to large brands like Sennheiser , AXA or Shopify . Within Prezly we offer three newsroom themes that I'm not super proud of. The first one has been there for almost 8 years with…