Week 01 Update

This is more like week 68, but it is my first weekly update. It’s a good week to start, because this week we launched Turboboost internally for the Breadwinner team. Now, the entire Breadwinner team has started using Turboboost to understand Breadwinner’s sales. (Breadwinner is our sister company).

Stats: $0 MRR, 0 Paying Customers, 3 Beta Customers.

The journey to this point has been pretty rough. We started building on the Salesforce platform because we had a lot of existing code written in Salesforce’s Apex, but our vision for pricing was incompatible with Salesforce’s OEM licensing models. We had no choice but to port to another platform. That was a painful rabbit hole that probably cost us six months of delays.

Building on a Django / Ninja backend has been a pleasure, but many of our developers had to learn Python and Django which further slowed us down. The saving grace has been the power of Postgres; Salesforce SOQL statements are limited to 50k results and are much slower than an AWS RDS.

Now comes the supporting tech. Documentation (Archbee), Support (Tidio), Billing (Stripe Billing), all have to be incorprated into the app.

There are some things I’m particularly proud of. The developers have done an amazing job building a project that just works. They’ve mastered AWS and multiple Accounts, so we can move from local through three different AWS environments. Managing an offshore team can be challenging between time zones, not being physically present, and cultural differences, but working with them has been great.

I’m also proud that some of my code is in the app! I vibe-coded a number of early features, including invites, email verification, and an audit log. Of course, after I vibe-coded it, the real developers had to go in and fix much of it!

My take on Vibe coding is that it’s a great start, but he complexity level it can handle is pretty low. That’s why the amazing stories of what one developer vibe coded in a weekend is never about what a team of 20 vibe coded in six months—because they can’t. (An Em-Dash. Yes. I, a human, use them. Not written by ChatGPT)

The features I am focusing on are anything that drives viral marketing. After working on Breadwinner for over ten years, I never want to build an app that doesn’t have, on some level, viral marketing built it. Breadwinner is a great product, but there’s no reason for someone to tell the world they are using a CRM/Accounting integration!

And while Turboboost does not require people to share links to it (like Calendly), it does encourage it. With other analytics tools, you can download a nice PNG that you could share, with a bit of branding. With Turboboost, we take this one step further and allow you to share your charts via URL! And when you share that link socially (Facebook, LinkedIn, X) the OpenGraph metadata appears properly, as does the preview image of the graph. This was not even my idea; someone on X recommended a feature enhancement to ChartMogul’s PNG sharing, telling them to offer ‘share via URL’. If that was you, let us know and we’ll send you merch!

Here’s our chart share working as a PNG, from one of our early Beta Testers. We’ll soon be offering this via URL (but can’t yet as everything’s still on the Dev AWS instance).