Insights
Writing clusters into how I think and how I build. Browse by theme or open the tools I use.
Recent
20 posts- Insight: 20 How I think Aug 22, 2026
My blind spots are my solution set
The 35 ideas I had already decided against became the well — discounted, not gone.
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- Insight: 19 How I think Aug 8, 2026
Blindspotting
Why noticing what you are not doing is harder than optimizing what you can see — builder mode, operator mode, and the missing capabilities AI makes easier to ignore.
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- Insight: 18 How I build Jul 24, 2026
My First AI Feature
I use AI constantly — I do not deploy it lightly. After feature lockdown, the first AI slice in Fractional Tools turns invoice dumps into a statement of business value a CEO can take to the board.
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- Insight: 10 How I think Jul 10, 2026
Building a new feature is fun! 😢
Build mode feels like forward progress—but it's often lateral. The two-monkey problem, and how sales dopamine re-educates the builder brain.
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- Insight: 9 How I think Jul 3, 2026
The 30-Minute Rule
You can't freeze your stack—but you can't spend four hours on every pitch either. Give any new tool 30 minutes to make you genuinely wow, or walk away before it costs you a week.
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- Insight: 8 How I think Jun 30, 2026
MCP Discoverability Hack
After the 30-Minute Rule says yes, I wire the MCP into Cursor and run four prompts—stack compare, backlog impact, time-to-market, and revenue wild card—without falling back into build mode.
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- Insight: 16 How I build Jun 24, 2026
How I Secure My MCP Connections
Good and bad MCP experiments taught me this isn't plug-and-play. One config per project in git, clear rules for what the agent can touch, three files to wire keys, and scoped API tokens instead of browser sign-in. Work in progress.
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- Insight: 17 How I build Jun 24, 2026
Stephan's MCP workbench
Late convert to MCPs. Two jobs: deeper context when building features, and digging through logs when production sticks. My Cursor stack and what each connection is for.
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- Insight: 13 How I build Jun 22, 2026
Fractional.tools tech stack
The tools I lean on first—Supabase for data, Fly for the API, Inngest for jobs, Postmark for product email—with links to playbook reviews.
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- Insight: 14 How I build Jun 22, 2026
Snowflake CRM tech stack
Supabase, Postmark, PostHog, Inngest, and Cursor — the tools behind a one-user CRM and newsletter engine, with links to playbook reviews.
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- Insight: 15 How I build Jun 22, 2026
Vibecoding Calendly? Really?
I know it's a terrible idea — $14 a month, battle-tested, multiple event types. I did it anyway. BookTime is a stable thin-slice experiment in building what I really shouldn't have built.
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- Insight: 12 How I build Jun 1, 2026
My Bespoke Snowflake CRM v0.0.1
What I'm learning — and why I broke buy before you build to wire a one-user CRM to how I actually think. This might be a really really bad idea.
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- Insight: 7 In the room May 26, 2026
When Your CFO Doesn't Get Your Token Burn
AI spend is hard to forecast and harder to defend on one P&L line. Why your CFO's pushback is fair, why credit bundles only repackage the bill, and how open vs closed features — plus agents — change burn. A four-step map so token use ties to named features you can budget and cut.
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- Insight: 6 How I think Apr 10, 2026
When Speed Removes the Safeguards
As teams get smaller and execution gets cheaper, the systems that create clarity disappear.
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- Insight: 5 How I think Feb 18, 2026
The “NPR Reporter” Prompt
If you can’t explain your system clearly, you don’t actually understand it.
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- Insight: 4 How I think Aug 15, 2025
End-of-Day Revenue
Revenue shows up—but most teams don’t have clarity on what actually drives it.
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- Insight: 3 How I think Jul 18, 2025
Why Developers Always Want to Build — and How It Costs Us
Every time I asked my team to evaluate SaaS tools, I watched the same thing happen. A predictable resistance. A build-first mindset. And over time, I realized: it wasn’t just bias — it was culture.
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- Insight: 11 How I build Jul 15, 2025
Five users worked. Ten broke us.
Google Calendar webhooks rate-limited us at ten beta users — until we fanned jobs out through Inngest and gated concurrency per user.
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- Insight: 2 How I think Apr 18, 2025
Resource Restriction is Great!
No founder I know doesn't need more funding. In the back of every startup founder's brain is the wish to get the funding problem off their backs and work without distraction. It's unfair to say, stop, and embrace scarcity as a superpower.
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- Insight: 1 In the room Mar 26, 2025
Vegas vs. Berlin: What I Learned About How Clients Want to Engage
I reworked my fractional CTO practice by changing my mindset. I had been operating like a German Casino, and missing the mark, but I needed to be more like Las Vegas. Make it stupid easy for a client to hire and pay.
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The weekly note
Once a week—insights in plain language for founders and CEOs sharpening tech judgment.