A PERSONAL NOTE ABOUT JANUARY

I decided to skip January’s update.

Honestly, on a personal level it wasn’t a great month. First of all I found out that a former colleague of mine died. I only got to work with her for four months, so it wasn’t that long – but it was long enough to know what a good and special person she was. She had only just turned 60, so it feels way too early for that to happen. The world definitely lost a great one with her 💔

Also I had some freelance work I had to finish. So there wasn’t a lot of interesting company news to share last month.

THREADS, NOTION AND A NEW WEBSITE

Let’s get back to the professional things. January was the month I redesigned my website (yes, again.) Mostly it was just because I changed from Squarespace to using Framer. I’ve been using Squarespace for years, but after they changed the editor some while back, I’ve felt the design options became too limited. The thing I like about Framer is that their editor is similar to WeWeb's editor, so it feels natural to use both.

The new design looks like this:

I’ve also started using Threads (tinnalt & formtadk) – so far I’m a fan. Business-wise it’s too early to tell if it’s a good channel for companies to use. It feels more genuine than other social media platforms. People on there are actually interested in interacting with each other and with companies on a deeper level, so it seems like a great platform for building relationships with potential customers.

On other platforms it can easily feel like people care more about building their image and following, and only interact with people who fit their personal brand. Whereas people on Threads just interact when they see an interesting conversation, regardless of their own or others’ status or personal brand. It feels a bit like Reddit, just without all the negativity.

As a new channel I’m definitely curious to see what direction Threads will take.

January was also the month I started creating a collection of business templates for Notion and Google Sheets. It’s really just a way to help support myself a little bit better while building my company.

E.g. templates I’ve designed:

• A master budget for SaaS companies, that automatically calculate things like:

  
  

  Budget and Departments’ financial overview, Cash flow, Churn Rate, Growth Rate, NRR, NRR Rate, ARR, SaaS Quick Ratio, ARPU, CLV, Cost of Revenue per user plan, Gross profit, Gross margin, CAC, CLV:CAC ratio, and CAC payback period

• A complete event management template:

• Also I’ve put together a curated list of +180 design resources, that you can get for free

If you’re curious (or interested in contributing to support me financially😅), you can find the full list of templates at: https://tinnalt.gumroad.com

PICKING THE DATABASE: FIREBASE VS SUPABASE

This month I finally made a decision regarding which database to go with. To me, understanding databases and the cost of them has been the most challenging part so far. A lot of it is trying to guess how much a person will use the software, which is super tricky when you haven’t launched, and also have no experience to base that guess on.

For most startups it probably doesn’t matter that much which database you chose - in the beginning. But if/when you grow that decision made in the beginning can have a huge impact on how big or small your bills will be.

Sure, you can “always just change it later” – but switching the entire back-end takes time, and I don't know if I’ll be able to afford hiring a team to build the new back-end before the need to switch arises. What I know for sure is that when I launch, I have to focus on sales and marketing, which means I personally won’t have time to create a new database later. So it make sense to pick the right database from the beginning.

To me the choice was down to Firebase vs Supabase. Firebase charges for each API calls, while Supabase has unlimited API calls included in the price. That means with Firebase you’d have to make sure you’re not making too many API calls to prevent a huge bill. Since I want to have a large amount of integrations which will be using API calls, Supabase seems like the better choice for my needs.  

Another important difference is that Firebase is a NoSQL database, while Supabase uses a PostgreSQL database. I won’t go into all the technical details of it, but for the kind of data I need to store and the complexity of it, a relational database (SQL) is the better choice. Not to mention data federation seems to work better with SQL than NoSQL databases, which I’ll most likely need in the future for the more complex integrations I’m planning.

TECH STACK SO FAR

Currently the tech stack looks like this:

Front-end: Vue.js (and WeWeb)

Database: Supabase

I still need to make the final decisions on the missing parts.