Dear founder,
I was reading Brandon Sanderson's latest novel, Wind and Truth, when I came across a sentence that stopped me cold: "A stronger current makes for stronger fish."
That's it. That's what entrepreneurship is.
We're constantly encountering currents that either facilitate what we want to accomplish—the businesses we want to build, the lives we want to create—or they oppose us, trying to sweep us into dangerous waters. These currents change all the time. They vary in strength depending on where you are in your journey. And here's the thing: they're mostly invisible until you learn to feel them.
Someone on Twitter asked me what my top three currents were after I shared this thought. It turned out to be a revealing exercise—assessing what I'm exposed to, what I'm dealing with, and how I'm navigating these forces. So let me share what I've discovered about the currents pulling at me as I build Podscan.
The Technology Rapids
The biggest current I've felt over the last year and a half is the rapidly changing technological landscape. As a software entrepreneur, you're permanently exposed to new technologies. There's always something you might want to learn, something that could give you an advantage if you figure it out—or leave you behind if you don't.
When I was a salaried software engineer, it was so much easier to get really good at the craft. All day long, I was dealing with one particular technology stack, optimizing it, understanding it, implementing everything that needed to be done. But as a founder? The fleeting nature of projects and the volatile nature of early-stage software businesses means that pivoting from one stack to another is not just easy—it's often necessary.
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Think about it: right now, you might need time series data, or some kind of vector database that may not be as established but is perfect for building with new technology—particularly embeddings and vector stores. You need to learn a new language for communicating with your database, new ways of interacting with data that, prior to this, you would have never cared about. You would have just used a regular old database and a regular old approach to building software. But that's just not happening anymore.
And that prevents mastery. When you're constantly incentivized to switch tech, to learn new tech, to implement new technology into your business immediately—because you need to stay on top of what the early adopter crowd is interested in, and that's often new technology, new ways of dealing with technology, new ways of presenting data, new ways of accumulating data—it makes it very hard to become really good at any one thing.
This is particularly hard when you're in the early stages of building a business. You're not only exposed to all the potential fancy technology—and I don't just mean software stacks, I also mean things like AI agentic coding or vibe coding, things that build software for you—but you just don't know. You don't know what this technology is really like, how exactly it works, how you can use it in an optimized, high-efficiency way.
How do I resist this current? By choosing solid fundamentals for my own business adventures. When I built the Podscan Ideas Vault—the software that I recently started on top of Podscan's webhook API, which constantly extracts business ideas from podcasts all over the world—I needed to build a new data storage system. And there I was, thinking: I'm just gonna go with what I know. I'm gonna open up a PostgreSQL database. There's gonna be a Redis cache, and that's it. I'm not gonna go into document-based databases or even vector storage. I'm gonna choose Postgres, because it offers these things built in. But in the end, it's always going to be a relational database.
That was a pretty good choice, because it allows me to just build the thing I want to build and not feel compelled to constantly learn new things all the time.
My recommendation: go with technology that hasn't changed based on hype. It should always be based on the effect. If it's been around, it's a safe choice to make. If you're a Rails developer and you want to build a new business, just default to Rails. Even though you could go into PHP, you could go into JavaScript and have fancy new automated build systems that are highly complicated—great that exists, and that could well be a thing, but you don't have to choose this technology because it's there. You should choose the one that you already understand.
This makes it easier, particularly if you look at how AI coding is such a normal thing for most people now. Even though people don't always use agentic tools, they will use autocomplete—that's always been a thing, IntelliSense and that kind of stuff. But knowing if an autocomplete suggestion is good, if it's something that's going to benefit your project or not—well, that's only possible if you have an understanding of the underlying framework and system. For that, you should always go with the thing you know.
And if you don't know anything, if you're just going to start learning the technology, learning to code while building a business—well, then going with a widely adopted and wildly popular system like Laravel PHP or Ruby on Rails is probably a good idea. The reverse Lindy effect is real here: technology that hasn't been around for a while has a high risk of not sticking around for longer. The Lindy effect says that technology that's been around for a while will likely stick around for a while. So the inverse would be that new technology is volatile. You might run into software that just stops working after a while because it didn't get the traction people thought it needed.
The Commoditization Wave
The second current is both a blessing and a curse: software engineering is being heavily commoditized. It's so much easier to build software now, so much faster to create working, monetizable prototypes. This has been a boon to the indie hacking community—solo founders can start small, niche businesses like never before.
But here's the undertow: it's just as easy for anybody working at a larger company with deeper pockets to build the same thing. Your idea can be copied, duplicated, and out-executed by someone with more time or resources. The red flags in B2B software building are still there—people still need clearance for projects, specifications, integrations—but the barrier to entry has dropped dramatically.
This makes bootstrapping a software business less of a solid defensive moat than it used to be. Unless—and this is crucial—unless you build distribution and a public brand around it. Which leads me directly to the third current.
The Attention Undertow
The ever-growing need for attention in this increasingly crowded ocean—that's a current that both pulls me along and holds me back, depending on where I look.
The biggest problem for any founder is distribution. It's hard to find customers for your projects if you don't have the marketing dollars to just spend on paid advertising or influencer marketing. Once you have that kind of money, it's great. It works. It really works. You get solid leads from spending money. But if you don't have that money, you kind of have to do it organically. You have to build a brand in public, share your business journey in public. Building in public is still the cheapest way of getting attention on yourself and your business, finding your customers, finding partnerships, and all that kind of stuff.
But it's marketing. And here's the strongest tension for me: I want to stay authentically myself as a founder. I want to communicate very authentically what my journey is as I build it in public. But I know that every single post I make has a marketing angle.
Now, let me share how this attention current plays out in my daily routine. Every day before my newsletter goes out, I share one or two ideas from it with commentary. I've been doing this for the last couple of days—if you follow me on Twitter, you've probably seen it. I want people to know that first off, there is a newsletter that might be interesting for them, and this is what they might get. It is a marketing activity to share what the newsletter does every day. I'm quite aware of this.
So it feels performative on occasion to post about this. Every day at 8 AM, my newsletter goes out. I check: okay, what's in there? What's interesting? What could I say about this? And as much as I actually like to see all these ideas and to get some kind of insight into what's being talked about in the world, it's still marketing. Being a creator on social media while trying to remain an authentic person—it's a current that sometimes pulls me toward my goals and sometimes away from them.
The Social Media Mirage
Another current I feel strongly, particularly in our community of founders online, is being a consumer of social media. I suffer a hard time maintaining a firm grasp on my own journey when everybody else's journey seems to be flashing more brightly around me.
Social media is highly selective, right? You share the good stuff, and people rarely share the bad stuff. So what you see is an echo chamber of positivity—not necessarily toxic positivity, but it's selective positivity. People share, "Oh my, MRR went up!" That's wonderful. Here's the screenshot. I don't really see too many people sharing when their MRR goes down with the screenshots that come from that. I don't really get to see them often, because people don't share them.
So what you see is everybody's doing well, and you just don't get to see the struggles. My own reality, where every day the MRR graph goes up and sometimes down—that is not represented in the social media network around me. If it's not represented, I can't perceive it accurately. And if I can't perceive it accurately, my journey is colored by this distortion.
It doesn't even have to be envy or jealousy for this kind of fabricated reality to affect you. It's like Plato's cave—we're looking at shadows on the wall. What we see are mirrors or silhouettes on the wall, and the reality is something behind us that we don't necessarily get to see, because we only get to see the wall—quite literally, the Facebook wall and the Twitter feed.
This is a strong current I feel that often can motivate me, because I see other people doing well and I think, "I want to get that too. What do I need to do?" But it can be disheartening in moments of doubt and moments of failure, moments of perceived lack of success. It's a strong feeling when it seems like everybody else is doing so well.
The Work-Life Whirlpool
The final current—and this is particularly hard—is the pull of work-life balance. I try not to spend all day working. I've been focusing more on balancing my own mental stability, which I derive from being with friends and family, from reading, from having hobbies.
Yet combining the lack of technological stability with the pressure for social media presence makes me want to spend more time working to reach my goals and less time away from work—which is also a goal, but one that isn't as directly perceived.
When I don't work, there's always this nagging thought: you could be spending time working. Even though it wouldn't necessarily be productive or helpful. It might even be distracting—just working for the sake of working.
We all understand now that you don't measure the quality of a software engineer by lines of code written. You measure features implemented, bugs fixed, efficiency gains, maybe sales made. You don't measure output—you measure impact. Yet there's still this output-centric mindset, this current that says more time working equals better results. That's the current I'm trying to swim against.
After 25 years of sitting in front of a computer, it's so easy to check things, try to improve things a little. It's so hard to step outside and not do that.
Navigating, Not Drowning
Your currents are probably going to look different. You might feel pulled in different directions. You might view these forces more benevolently or more malevolently. But here's what I think is important: realizing that these currents exist.
They're often internally validated, but they're mostly external forces acting upon you. People will share their stories with or without you. The rapid developments in AI and frameworks—that's not your fault. The fact that this causes more competition—not your fault. The fact that you picked an industry that now sees so many people trying to build in it—not your fault either.
These are external forces, but we make them internal when we allow them to sweep us away without even knowing we're moving.
The important part is to understand that these currents exist. To make them visible, make them present, so that we recognize them as currents and not as our own failings. We shouldn't despair when we get pulled in a direction a little bit too much. That's just what entrepreneurship is. You're constantly torn from one side to the other, and you have to make different strokes to stay where you want to be.
A stronger current does make for stronger fish. But only if you know you're swimming. Only if you're aware of the water you're in. Once you recognize the currents, you can choose: swim against them, swim with them, or find the calm eddies where you can rest and reassess.
The currents will always be there. They change with the tides of technology, market forces, and social dynamics. But awareness—that's your compass. And deliberate action—that's your stroke.
So take a moment. Feel the currents pulling at you. Name them. Understand them. Then decide how you want to navigate them. Because in the end, you're not just trying to survive these waters. You're trying to get somewhere. And knowing the currents is the first step to charting your course.
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