Articles marked historical record the period of starting HelpSpot in 2005 through 2019. In 2020 I decided to give the blog a fresh start, but have left these here for posterity.

December 30, 2013

Bootstrapped 29, There's always one more year

http://bootstrapped.fm/bootstrapped-episode-29-theres-always-one-more-year/ school lunches, fast food, Ludum Dare, game development, Minecraft, Userscape’s new employee, taking a vacation, 2013...

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December 30, 2013

Best places for bootstrappers to live

http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/t/best-places-for-bootstrappers-to-live/354 Over on our forums there's a great thread on the best places for bootstrappers to live. This is one of our older posts but...

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December 28, 2013

The Carmack

http://blog.wilshipley.com/2013/12/my-doom-20th-anniversary-stories.html And Carmack responded, the way he does, by just sending me all the source code. I don't think there were any other words in...

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December 27, 2013

A look inside a drop shipping ecommerce company

http://www.ecommercefuel.com/selling-an-ecommerce-store/ A rather fascinating look inside the operations of a drop ship ecommerce store. Me and Andrey discussed this on this weeked Bootstrapped.fm...

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December 27, 2013

You would be wiped out

http://swombat.com/2013/12/27/investment-increases-risk For example, building a business worth £20m is a pretty amazing achievement, but if you've raised £10m from a VC to get there, with 2x...

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December 18, 2013

healthcare savings 2014

This is not a debate on Obamacare! Just our experience going through the process as a small company. Your milage may vary, etc etc. Early in the fall we received a notice from our healthcare...

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January 9, 2013

how we built besnappy for 317000

You see a lot of press these days about seed/VC money, 2 million for this and 5 million for that. I thought it would be interesting to add up what it actually cost us to build a sophisticated web...

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November 27, 2012

maximizing your startup dollars through great design

Deciding to build a second product is a very difficult decision. Especially when you’re a small bootstrap company. While we do well with our main product, HelpSpot, we don’t have a lot of...

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November 12, 2012

laravel 4 pre beta primer

With the recent release of sneak peek video’s for Laravel 4 there’s been a lot of talk about it lately. It’s still pre-beta and as such there’s very little documentation, but I know a lot of...

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August 28, 2012

building a better human helper

Help desk software is ugly utilitarian stuff. It’s designed to collect data, to manage, to organize, to control. Formal help desks have a lot of demands placed on them as they sit at the center...

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June 29, 2012

PHP

Jeff Atwood has an interesting piece today about PHP and it's horribleness while acknowledging it's greatness :) Unfortunately Jeff seems to fall into the same trap as many programmers these days....

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May 30, 2012

starting is fun but finishing is rewarding

One of the challenges programmers face when making the transition to entrepreneur is controlling the urges that come 4-6-8 months into the process. You see, the start is fun. The start is exciting, a...

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February 22, 2012

laravel

Last November ('11), I ran across a relatively new PHP framework called Laravel. At the time I was researching the various PHP frameworks in order to get a clear picture on the current state of...

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October 29, 2011

codeigniter license

Recently CodeIgniter changed it's license to a relatively obscure open source license, OSL3. As I'm in the process of researching frameworks for a new project of sorts (more on that someday) and...

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June 24, 2009

its twitter time

Hi All, Sorry for not writing in.... a long time. It's just so busy here that it's hard to find the time, plus the burden of managing the comments makes it all just too much. So I wanted to let you...

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March 9, 2009

your product is free because youre lazy and scared

David over at 37signals had a nice post today about why startups seem to have abandoned charging customers for goods and services: "How did the web lose faith in charging for stuff?. Of course, I...

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January 29, 2009

how to sell more software by adding 12 characters to your homepage

Yes, this is the secret to how to sell more software. I'm the first one to break the sacred oath of profitable software companies and reveal the secret of how just 12 characters can make you...

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January 12, 2009

winter pictures

Here's a few nice winter pictures from the past few days just to change it up. Actually I didn't spend a lot of time framing the pictures nicely, but still I think they're nice. I could do without...

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January 5, 2009

how to start a microisv

Andy with a great quick start guide to starting a MicroISV. This covers all that boring stuff nobody covers in their starting a business articles. Well, maybe not nobody.

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December 28, 2008

how to compete when all you do is solve problems

Scoble has an interesting post today. In many ways I think it sums up or represents some of the frustration I've felt working in the tech software world. Getting publicity, links, mentions, any type...

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