My wife joined UA (Underearners Anonymous) meetings and I've been reading the book by Mundis and we've been systematically working through the things that kept us in a poverty mindset. She grew up poor, I was just born in the USSR that had a similar impact on my realtionship with money. It's a life long process, sort of like alcoholism or drug addiction, in the sense that the risk of being dragged down into old behaviors is always there, but it's also possible to heal and stay clean. I'm on the mend. I stopped incurring debt, started living within my means, and now, still within those means, have some funds for joy too. Spending money on deliberately joyful things turned out to be a big part of it. Something simple like buying a few good pairs of socks and a jacket a couple of weeks ago a big change. I could never comfortably buy clothes for myself even back when I was making a good tech salary - having money and being free from its grip are two very different things. And now that I'm feeling a bit better about how I manage money I am going to start going to meetings too, because this is just the beginning.

To be fair, this isn't new but the result of about 10 months of sporadic work and two restarts from scratch. I just never thought it would be worth sharing. Among other things, I needed to manage accounts in 4 currencies (USD, CAD, ILS and EUR), track transactions from ILS to USD to USDC (!) to CAD to EUR (don't ask), figure out all the fees I paid for this madness (please do ask), deal with a dip so low that I only had 2 weeks of runway left 😬, Canadian banks that randomly break Plaid imports, and Israeli banks that export XML (no even XMLX) as the only export format. There is no way in hell an off the shelf budgeting app could handle any of that, and a bunch of vibe coded shell scripts can't tell me at a grocery store if I can afford beef or just chicken today. A lot has gone into my financial recovery, but this app was one my most important tools. The other one is an emotional processing and stress relief tool that helped me deal with the series of shit storms, but that's for another day.

And of course when I say I'll teach marketing, I mean I'll teach positioning. Because once you have the right positioning, marketing becomes obvious. Not easy, but obvious.

The itch is intensifying.

💫 NEW PROJECT 💫 Open Accountant This is my own very opinionated take on personal accounting / budgeting for freelancers and small business owners operating in multiple currencies. A lot of this is influenced by my circumstances: - consultant / freelancer / business owner with multiple revenue streams - revenue fluctuates a lot and changes month to month - we're nomad, so currencies and shops change a lot, but categories stay stable - mobile and agentic first (PWA and MCP) with good desktop support on top - import from Wise, Plaid (so most banks), CSV, + screenshots and PDFs from mobile apps when all else fails - automatic categorization that does the right thing 90% of the time and learns for your corrections - deployed on a CloudFlare account (free account is usually enough) Think of this as a template - just hand the repo URL to your agent and go wild. This is built to be infinitely malleable and extendable because accounting setups and needs differ so much between people. May we all take control of our funds, each in our unique way. 🙏 github.com/finereli/open-acc…

The top thing I learned about sales is that people only buy what they want to buy. Not what you want to sell them, not what you think they need, and not what you think they should buy. Only what they already want to buy, from their own perspective.

I don't feel poor anymore. For the first time in maybe a decades I don't feel poor. I still have considerable debt from previous business adventures and from the first two years of nomading, I have only about 3 months of runway, but something fundamental shifted in my realtionship with money. It seems way more fluid, way more available, way more malleable than it has ever been.

I just cancelled YNAB after more than 10 years. Budgeting software is complex and hard to get right, but I built my own, to my needs, and I'm happy to maintain it. There is probably room for paid software or SaaS still, but using anything I can't change with a prompt and that I can't even connect with MCP to for analysis or bulk updates feels incredibly anachronistic. And the sense of ownership I get from something as key as my money is significant too.

10 years ago I worked through the Canadian immigration system to first get us a work permit, then permanent residency, and then citizenship. These days we want to apply for residency in Macedonia or Bulgaria and I freeze. I started wondering why and then I realized - the Canadian system is complex but extensively documented and works according to very specific rules. It's understandable, like code. I never had to have an actual conversation to get any of this done - it was just me, my computer, and my brain. The Balkans are completely different. It's all human connections here - who you know, who refers you, which office you apply at. There are rules but they are barely documented, somewhat flexible and shift constantly. So while my ~autistic brain now has a good grasp on how to close sales because I've analyzed and practiced it ad nauseam, this other kind of "networking" feels completely foreign. On the other hand, it's a new challenge, which that same brain thieves on.

This will happen more and more often.

Holy shit. You guys have to try this.

Kids are finally old enough for us to book a night at a hotel by ourselves and leave them by themselves. First time in ~12 years. I don't even remember how this works 🤣.

Itching to launch a free in public marketing course right on X for people building things right now. Building is easy now, but marketing is still an unsolved problem, especially for devs who aren't used to this kind of thinking. It'll be something like a daily question or task that you need to complete, over maybe a couple of weeks. I can't promise you paying users by the end (depends on too many factors we don't control) but I can promise that "I know king fu" experience once you're done.

Quite a bit like sex, actually.

Sales doesn't have to be adversarial. It's not a fight between you and the prospect where you are trying to push onto him something he'd rather not buy, for money he'd rather not spent, with him resisting all the way. Good sales is collaborative. You and your prospect are trying to find out of there's a profitable deal to be made here that leaves both of you better off than you were before. You, with more money and a client. Him, with a product or service he desperately needs.

There is an upper limit on what you can charge a person. It's not unlimited. That "raise your prices" advice has an upper bound. Most sales advice ingores that because most people hearing that advice chronically undercharge. I myself usually tell people to quote as high as they can bear quoting while looking them in the eye. But there's another side to it. Quoting too high for the market or the person will just end up with rejection or buyers remorse or a significantly smaller project that is possible. But don't listen to me. There's a 99% chance you're charging too little. Charge more please.

Imagine 100 dominoes all set up a row. Each dominoe has a tiny hole in it, right in the middle. And you goal is to align them so precisely that a beam of light you shine on one end shines out of the other end, through all the pinprick holes. That's what it is like to build a successful business. That what it is like to figure out marketing, sales, product, your own emotional makeup, the market you're in, the words to use, the pivots to do. And that's why, for a very long time there's no sense of progress. You move one dominoe, and the light still doesn't shine through. You move another one and it still doesn't. So you move the first one a bit back. And so it goes. But when things finally do align, and the light does shine, it's glorious. I probably don't have all the dominoes fully aligned yet. But I have enough of them in a line to see a glimpse and for things from here on out to require incremental, as opposed to radical, adjustments.

Recoloring old black and white children's books is so incredible. This is (left to right) the original, Nano Banana Pro with a faithful recoloring, GPT Image 2.5 with a modernization. Costs about $5 to $10 per book, depending on the model you use.

It's going well but we need to redraw all the images in color and with a proper aspect ration to fit the app. Used to be impossible, now it's a breeze. Wouldn't be able to publish this unfortunately since it's copywrited, but I could publish the script or approach that does it - could be used for any children's book. Actually, going to put it in the YaraReads open source repo, so anyone who would be able to do it to books they own! github.com/finereli/yararead…