Jon C. Phillips

Every time I say I am starting a “tiny side project,” I quietly know it will absorb the next 37 months of my life.

Every failed startup: “We're the Uber of [thing nobody needs Uber for]” Every successful startup: “We made this annoying thing less annoying.”

I stand by what I said here. I soft-launched AutoChangelog yesterday and I've been building it every night and weekend since that tweet. This was never a quick weekend hack. The very first version of the landing page looked like something straight out of the worst AI slop https://t.co/rXvBJeyKdz https://t.co/7IoY6NwbAp

I love Claude, it even lets you know when it's time to take a break and grab some lunch. https://t.co/oEDrGOlNfg

The best business model is solving a problem you actually have. The worst is solving a problem VCs think you should have.

“I’m waiting for the perfect time to launch” = “I’m scared people won’t give a shit” Newsflash: They won’t. Launch anyway.

The real danger of vibe coding is that it makes shipping easy, which makes building addictive, which makes launching optional.

Every startup dies the same way. Not from bugs or churn, but from trying to please everyone at once. Be opinionated.

9k followers 👀 Thank you for being here, means more than you know. I created this account in 2007 and grew pretty quickly back then, but then life happened and I disappeared for a while. Back in June I had around 20k followers. But, when I came back I realized that more https://t.co/yOGB5KUhEh

So close fam! 👀 https://t.co/rOLa5zZdpZ

Write your landing page as if it’s the only conversation you’ll ever get to have with a stranger about it.

“Almost ready” is addictive. It lets you feel like you’re making progress without ever crossing the line into real risk. You can tinker, polish, and research. Endlessly. I fall into that trap sometimes too. And from the outside, you still look like you’re doing “something”.

Good products don’t win. Clear products do.

Users have ~7 items they can hold in working memory (Miller’s Law). If your nav has 8 items, your dashboard shows 6 metrics, and you’re asking users to decide between 4 different things when they login… you’ve pushed their cognitive budget past what a new user will comfortably

Everyone wants better documentation until it’s time to write documentation.

The most dangerous thing in tech isn’t bad code. It’s good code solving the wrong problem.

The things that make money are never the ones I think will make money. My photography newsletter I started with a friend “just for fun” is the most profitable thing I run. No product, no app, no Saas, just a daily email. Like… if you ever think that your idea might not have

Complexity is debt. Every extra feature is a future argument with your own codebase.

You’ll ship better work the moment you stop pretending you can do everything perfectly the first time.

SCARE a developer with three WoRdS? 🤷🏻‍♂️ https://t.co/aWpMCKsRys