I’ve been in a thoughtful mood lately—bordering on something like mild anxiety—so I decided
to do what I normally do to work through these things: write!
I’ll first set the stage.
Today marks the end of the SaaS Pegasus Black Friday sale—which is historically the most profitable
period of the year.
This year the sale went well—at least in absolute terms.
It wasn’t as good as last year, which was disappointing, but I still earned a nice profit.
I try to remind myself how grateful I should be for achieving what five-year-ago me could only have dreamed of:
working independently, full-time, on my own projects.
And I should add that Pegasus is having a solid year overall—it will probably end up making about 20% more than it did last year.
You’d think this would be a reasonable signal that what I’m doing is working and I should be optimistic about the future.
And yet, I find myself feeling quite the opposite.
Here are—I think—the main reasons:
- There’s more competition now. Ever since this guy named Marc Lou
started making crazy amounts of money selling a similar type of product in the JavaScript world,
there has been a mad rush to copy him and sell boilerplates / starter projects. So now there’s tons of
other products that look a lot like Pegasus out there, and another one seems to pop up every day.
These products—many of which are coded up very quickly and use sleazy marketing tactics to get customers—make it
harder for people to figure out what starter kit to buy. They also kind of make the whole industry look bad,
and make me feel like a grifter selling Pegasus, even though I have worked my ass off on it for 5+ years
and think it’s great.
Maybe a corollary to this point is that I kind of don’t like marketing in my industry anymore?
- Django might be dying. I have become increasingly worried about the future of Django (the web framework that Pegasus is built on).
Nearly every other major web framework—Rails, Laravel, React, Next.js, and so on—is built and backed by a large,
well-funded entity, and so puts a lot of effort into marketing, staying modern and relevant, and so on.
Django, on the other hand, is run by a committee of volunteers and so struggles to have a centralized vision or prioritize
efforts to make itself appealing.
There are lots of great things about Django’s model, and I still love the framework and its community, but on its current trajectory
I worry it won’t be able to bring in young, new developers, and could eventually fade into irrelevance.
And—to state the obvious—the less people use Django, the less people will need Pegasus.
- AI may kill boilerplates. This is certainly not true today, but with AI-based tools getting better and
better at spinning up new products, it’s possible that the need for a well-crafted starter project will go away.
The future of coding remains hard to predict, and good programmers are still as valuable today as they’ve ever been,
but if the AIs continue to get better, more and more human-created code will become irrelevant.
Anyway, all of that to say that things are simultaneously going well and also I’m kind of internally freaking out about the future.
It’s a weird situation.
Also, untangling all of that feels more like an end-of-year type of reflection for me,
not something I’m going to figure out in a quick little retro here.
For now, I think the right thing for me going into the holidays is to try to get my mind off these existential questions.
So after the commercial orgy (and stress) of Black Friday, I think I’ll make December the month where I try not to think about money.
Which is good, because after the sale there’s usually very little of it coming in!
Here’s what I have planned instead:
- Giving back. Pegasus—and my entire career really—has been built off the back of open-source projects.
I’d like to give back to some of those projects, and figure out a plan for how to make that happen in a sustainable way.
I think I will try to get Pegasus into the Open Source Pledge, which means allocating
at least $2,000 across some of the tools Pegasus uses.
I’m also thinking of other open source initiatives I can work on, as well as how to improve accessibility in Pegasus.
- Building for myself. For the last couple years I’ve had a very product-oriented mindset.
That is—I’ll only start working on something if I feel like it could become a product.
And often, not just a product, but a paid product.
This might be strategic, but it also basically sucks the joy out of everything.
I’ve got a number of little tools I’m interested in building that don’t seem like they have a path to productization,
and I’m hoping to give myself permission to work on them anyways.
I did this recently with bluesky comments and it’s been
both fun and rewarding.
- Rest and relaxation. One of the biggest selling points of this whole “work for myself” thing was freedom
to do whatever I want. But—apart from big family vacations—I basically never take any time off.
This month, I’ll try to make rest and self-care a bit more of a priority and not feel guilty
taking time off work to do things like get outside, surf, or even play video games.
Maybe I’ll even try and get back into meditation.
Somehow it feels like having the right mindset will be important to figuring out the bigger questions.
So that’s the plan for the month.
Do a bit of good, have a bit of fun, take care of myself, and try not to worry about money or these scary existential
questions till the New Year.
Hopefully, it’s just what I need to get back on track.
Notes