A few years ago, I learned a handy technique for resolving disputes with uncooperative businesses. It’s simple to understand and easy to implement. You don’t need lawyers or a prominent social media presence. All it requires is for you to behave like an organized professional. This technique recently resolved a problem so effectively that I had to share the story.

The conversation began with a merchant telling me in no uncertain terms that they refused to pay the money they owed me:

Highlights

• This is my highest revenue month ever, at $9.8k across all of my projects.
• Tiny Pilot had the biggest first month of anything I’ve ever launched, at 52 sales and $8.7k in revenue.
• The sudden surge in customers also made it one of my highest-stress months since going full-time to work for myself.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Before reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I thought of it as the canonical cliché self-help book. But as the saying goes, clichés become clichés because they’re true. The book’s insightfulness surprised me, and I found many of its ideas useful in my everyday life.

TinyPilot is my inexpensive, open-source device for controlling computers remotely. It works even before the operating system boots, so I use TinyPilot to install new OSes and debug boot failures on my bare metal homelab servers.

This post details my experience creating TinyPilot and shows how you can build your own for under $100 using a Raspberry Pi.

Highlights

• I sold my first pre-order for KVM Pi.
• Finding new ways to monetize Is It Keto is proving more difficult than I expected.
• I sold an Enterprise plan for Zestful.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Validate ideas for a sister product to Is It Keto

• Result: Tried a few different landing pages, but nothing gained traction
• Grade: B-

I forgot how difficult it is to find potential customers and engage them in thoughtful conversations about what kind of products or features would interest them.