Hey, I'm Ian Landsman 👋

I've been building software products for nearly 20 years. My company UserScape makes HelpSpot, customer service software that thousands of companies actually enjoy using.

No VC funding. No growth hacks. Just building good software and charging money for it.

This site is mostly an archive of my writing from the early days of building HelpSpot, with the occasional new post when inspiration strikes. For my current thoughts on software and business, tune into Mostly Technical.

Mostly Technical Podcast

🎙️ Mostly Technical Podcast

Weekly conversations with Aaron Francis about Laravel, business, and the real side of building software. We share unfiltered stories from the trenches, dive into technical challenges, and somehow make database migrations entertaining.

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Things I've Built 🚀

Writings 📝

etech sorrow

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etech

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your software sucks because its ugly

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authorizenet php component

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you can never look back

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helpspot in the wild purple stork

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forta vs the spammer

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the making of mint

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software as a service

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pro php

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php is junk meme

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ajax in your app

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transparency at work

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russ doesnt get myspace

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seth on consumers

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excellent rails rant

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scary rebuilding project

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leaving features out again

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why your knowledge base doesnt work

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time to clean house on my feeds

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mysql fulltext math

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mint piracy encrypting your code

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ipaperback

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bitwise operator encryption

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running an effective software beta

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isv code library

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helpspot in the wild trancreative

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conversational index

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php vs rails

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photoshop with 80 less features

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