For confidentiality reasons I can’t be too detailed, but here are some general learnings.
Would be nice:
Slack no DMs, just channels to have public group feeling
People should have a Slack channel where they are just constantly chatting instead of going to do their own thing and disappearing. More chat, more community, more teamwork and communication rather than top-down formalization of tasks imo.
Trucks at site are a development of flow. Need flow of trucks coming in and out to build something.
Word Salad of things I learned that I didn’t know before
git flow, git-credential manager (if you have multi-repo packages using npm install, use this and https rather than ssh in package.json). Monorepo fixes external dependencies, allows changes to mobile + web to be reviewed at once.
Witnessed in process Jira WJSF Sprint/Story/Tickets/Bugs, terminology such as “Code Review” or “Acceptance Criteria,” QA, E2E testing w. Cypress, Feature-Sliced Design, Cucumber.io/Behavior Driven Development. Opex vs Capex.
Carta, 409a valuations, Delaware C corp over LLC. Probably some internal accounting for payroll and stuff is done.
Was working with more AI the whole time and getting more familar: Gemini, Firebase MCP servers, Claude Code, Opencode. GLM-4.7, Opus 4.5 and Sonnet 4.5, Cerebras/Morph/Inception.
Customer and software support with FreshDesk. Classification of customer support tickets as a process to reduce incidence of such tickets over time. Document management dashboard.
Some but limited React Native usage. More awareness of Gluestack, React Native, Expo’s deployment methods.
Google Cloud logs, Chrome snippets, console.table
Financially it seems small changes in fee percentages are very important, such as South Korea Apple Pay fee arguments.
Some similarity to Apple Store 30% fees and Epic lawsuits.
Invoices, net 30, net 60.
More Thoughts
Transaction Size
A lot of apps are just wrappers around the first layer of the money system, breaking up large tasks into smaller ones. I think Venmo, Paypal, Substack, X.com are like this. The money isn’t real until the ACH/RTP payment goes through.
Digital apps can formalize previously intra-human personal networks, both creating and siphoning wealth by increasing the tasks that can be done between strangers.
However, layers that catabolize the foundation (AI of blogs, social media of past social networks) lead to self-destruction are not good.
Search
Search is actually quite a big problem, because searching BIG BIG NUMBERS of documents/queries requires indices to be built for it to be not slow. Algolia seems to do this, as does Meilisearch. They’re relatively straightforward once you understand where they’re used, and you start thinking about the backend logic in any website that contains search. Every time I see a ‘search bar’ on a website I understand the logic that goes behind it.
At its basic you can create an endpoint with a simple string comparison.
Firebase, Cloud Functions, Logs
Became more familiar with Firebase Collections, cloud functions/serverless backends, going into logs to debug issues with CFs. Implemented remote-config into the app. Deploying through gcloud CLI. Surprised that gcloud and Slack bots both run on Deno.
Created a Slack bot that automates support to greater degrees, getting Firebase collections for us.
Business Types
In the beginning you are just selling a simple product or service. With complexity increases, it becomes a whole ecosystem that moves money across time. Offering liquidity like banks, turning short-term deposits into long-term assets (loans), working around the government’s rates (SOFR - past was LIBOR, prime rate, 10-yr mortgages based on such rates) allows companies to do interesting things that financially benefit consumers. The next level, it appears, is an international way of doing things managing multiple currencies, jurisdictions, and risk.
Sales is often a process of finding obscure places: niche forums and communities and building on established networks in the industry. Sometimes other places try to do reverse-sales to companies and sell lists of things they may anticipate you need.
Technical Thoughts
Probably would not use React in the future. It is not declarative, you have to do many things manually like memoize thing. useEffect doesn’t really make sense (I understand its use in mounting/inmounting, I mean the terminology and usage and conflation with multiple different things is annoying), what is an effect? Like it is something like A, but we call it B. useState is both global state and component state, versus Vue’s ref and official router/state management Pinia. I don’t like the idea of supporting the React-Netanyahu-Modern Silicon Valley-Rauch gang.
Probably would aim for Postgres over Firebase, but Firebase does give a lot of nice small features that may prove beneficial. Maybe DuckDB, maybe mySQL. Not a fan of Mongo the last time I used it. Google gets you with the financials because you start with Firebase thinking it’s a small thing, you start prototyping the app and it becomes bigger, and suddenly BOOM YOU’RE SPENDING TENS OF THOUSANDS A MONTH ON BIGQUERY.
You really have to fix the technical cruft like random console logs in the app, clean up old patch-packages and go for component-styled CSS. Otherwise you are fighting water and it becomes impossible to develop new features competently enough. Leadership has to have good taste and prioritization.
Not convinced of NX as a good monorepo choice. Seems overly complex. Would explore from basics, such as workspaces (which was originally Lerna) into Turborepo, or maybe even attempting your own thing, before going for NX.
All employees should have similar level of onboarding and setup.