Update for the week ending on Friday, Mar 10, 2023

TinyPilot

Management

• Re-merged our two offices
  • I moved our computers to a spare office three weeks ago because my landlord wasn’t sure if we’d have to move while I was traveling.
  • We (fortunately) ended up not having to move, so I moved everything back to how it was
• Downgraded office router from OPNSense to TP-Link Omada
  • The OPNSense is fun, but it’s caused some issues to have too unusual a router
  • I think this router will make it easier for nontechnical staff to reset or diagnose issues, since it’s more like routers people have at home
• Had a call with tax lawyer to talk about section 174
  • Their take is that I and every company that does software development has to amortize software development expenses over 15 years (because TinyPilot’s software developers are outside the US)
  • If the devs were US-based, it would still be amortized, but over 5 years
  • I can offset these costs by taking R&D tax credits, but it’s likely going to cost $8-10k for lawyers to do the work of claiming the tax credit, and it’ll get me $25-35k in credits.
• Adjusted my bookkeeping so that I’m tracking software development expenses separately
• Set up our low-volume product with our new 3PL
  • A bit of a rocky start, as they wanted me to hand over my Shopify root credentials for the onboarding
  • Apparently all of their other clients agree to do this, which is bizarre to me
  • We eventually found a workaround where I created a limited account on Shopify for them that had enough permissions for them to link my Shopify account to Shipstation, their order management platform
  • This seems to be either terrible design on the part of Shipstation, or they’re using Shipstation in a way other than it was intended.
• Led monthly dev team meeting
• Led monthly support engineering meeting
• Reached out to Raspberry Pi about late deliveries
  • It seems like orders are about a month behind for the next few weeks, but we should still be okay

Software development

• Reviewed draft instructions for migrating from Buster to Bullseye
• Wrote a Beancount importer for CapitalOne credit card statements

Sales

• Increased base price by $20 ($379 -> $399)
  • I’m trying to slow down sales until the fulfillment team has a chance to catch up and build up a better inventory buffer
  • It’s unclear if this price change actually slows down sales at all
• Paid TinyPilot affiliates

mtlynch.io

• Published February retrospective

ScreenJournal

ScreenJournal is basically Goodreads, but for TV and movies. Or letterboxd, but focused on small communities.

• Fixed encoding for email notifications

Misc

• Caught up on a million emails from when I was traveling
• Returned to the US from a two-week trip in Europe
• Prepped for my NERD Summit 2023 talk
• Met with another founder of a hardware startup
• Booked new flights for Microconf
  • My original flights got canceled
• Cleaned my dishwasher