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Articles on operating a small company that survives: finding customers from public signals, pricing your product with confidence, defending against chargebacks, and the operating decisions that separate businesses from projects.
Sahil Lavingia built Gumroad over a weekend in 2011 and 52,000 people used it on day one. The launch was the easy part. What he published about the eight years that followed is the more useful story.
Amazon told sellers this week to add metadata to images and A+ content showing photorealistic AI-generated people. The New York law behind it carries $1,000 and $5,000 penalties and reaches any seller whose listings are visible in the state.
Federal disaster help for a business is a loan, not a grant: up to $2 million, capped at 4% if you cannot borrow elsewhere, 30 years, first payment deferred a year. The trap is that every declaration carries two deadlines for two different loans.
Plausible Analytics crossed $1 million in annual recurring revenue on June 2, 2022, three years after its first $64 month. The engine was written content aimed at a problem, not a product.
Google's spam policies never mention AI writing as a violation on its own. The test is scale, purpose and value, and the neighbouring policies on thin affiliation and site reputation abuse catch small sites too.
eBay International Shipping replaces GSP for UK sellers from August, automatically. Reach goes from 105 countries to 195+, and your payout is protected once the parcel is scanned at the UK hub.
Search Console gives you no AI Overviews breakdown, so stop waiting for one. A four-step routine using impressions versus clicks, GA4 referrals and crawler logs, plus what each control costs.
Shopify gave vape merchants 14 days to delist worldwide, legal markets included. Category bans are a different risk class from account bans: you can be fully compliant and still lose the channel. The three layers, an exposure test, and this week's moves.
US marketplace insurers filed their largest increases since 2018 and the enhanced credits are gone. What self-employed founders control: income estimates, HSA pairing, QSEHRA vs SHOP, and enrollment prep.
Meta shipped a dedicated app for Facebook Marketplace sellers: AI-drafted listings, a buyer-only inbox, bulk inventory tools and performance data. What's in it, and a day-one plan.
Cursor and Replit tore up flat pricing within weeks of each other, for the same reason: per-user costs vary by an order of magnitude. The math behind the pattern, and four structures that survive it.
Google publishes exactly how local ranking works - relevance, distance, prominence - and the profile is free. A 90-minute setup mapped to Google's own factors, plus the review system that compounds it.
BEC cost victims $2.77 billion across 21,442 complaints in 2024 - roughly $129,000 per incident. It isn't a hacking problem; it's a payables-process problem, and the fix costs almost nothing.
Benchmark data says roughly a third of your subscribers open each send - guaranteed reach no algorithm grants. A minimal list-building system for a small business: capture points, one honest lead magnet, and a cadence you can keep.
US retail returns hit a projected $890 billion in 2024, 76% of shoppers pick stores partly on free returns, and 93% of retailers call abuse a significant issue. Your policy sits in that triangle - design it, don't copy it.
Payment processors, marketplaces, search, email - the published policies all reserve the same power: unilateral review, pause, or termination. A worksheet to score your exposure and a mitigation ladder to buy it down.
Three spam complaints per thousand emails is now a compliance line, not a suggestion. Google's published sender requirements, what they mean for small senders, and an outreach structure that survives the arithmetic.
Launching is not distribution. Documented founder accounts point the same way: first customers come from warmth you already have - your network, your communities, and people already complaining in public.
Founders anchor to early adopters, price for friction, then never revisit. Why underpricing compounds, what the evidence says, and a three-part method: cost floor, comparable band, and a scheduled reset.
US card disputes hit 158 million in 2025, and small merchants carry the loss. The card-network thresholds that actually matter, and a three-layer defense: prevent, deter, fight, plus when not to fight.
The best product research is already written, by frustrated people, in public, for free. A practical method for turning complaints into a validated problem list.