I'm a firm believer on non-confrontational sales. A sale isn't a fight with a winner and a loser and neither it is a negotiation where you find a middle ground where everyone is unhappy to a similar degree. A good sale, a good deal, is one where both sides come out ahead. It's encoded in the trite phrase "win-win" but the key here is this: If you pay me $1000 for something, you should feel you're getting a lot more than you paid me, and I should feel like I've put in a lot less effort than my alternatives to get that $1000. This points very directly to something Chris Voss wrote a whole book about - Never Split the Difference. The negotiation may seem like it's about the cost, but it almost never is. Case in point - a negotiation I was having with a client seemed like it hit an impasse with him wanting to pay less than 50% of what I wanted to charge. But then I asked him what he actually wanted to achieve here. He gave me the full list. I asked him if there was anything more. He added a few items. Now we're talking about a significantly bigger project, that would both give him real tangible results (it's a marketing project, so a full strategy and approach with channels, messaging, the works) and it's also big enough for me to be able to work with a significantly lower per hour fee. If this works, we'll both be significantly better off with the deal than without it.

I don't think I need an AI subscriptions anymore. I just post my thoughts on X and a dozen agents that other people are paying for jump in with their observations.

Homeschooling is very hard but I can't imagine sending my kids back to school at this point (unless they want to go, which is different). It's a controversial opinion, so let me explain what I mean. Homeschooling forces me (us) to deal with the kids all day - their boredom, their loneliness, their tantrums, their incessant desire for screens and sweets, their addictive tendencies. We need to make sure they are intellectually, emotionally, relationally and physically challenged enough. We need to figure out what skills they'll need to have for whatever future they'll encounter and help them acquire these skills. This is very difficult because we don't know what the future holds. When they went to school for half a day, it was easy to kind of just let things take their course and be busy with our things. But they grew distant, we understood them less, and the longer they were in "the system" the less involved we got. Maybe it's a self discipline thing. Maybe Yael and I just don't have it in us to be "on it" all the time. But without the forcing function of homeschooling we barely were. In practice, we do about 1 hour of academics per day (Tom does more because he's older at 12, Yara usually does less, because she's only 6 and focus is hard for her). But that 1 hour per day seem to give them more academically than full days at school. Yara is working through reading and basic math for now as well as everything she can find about animals. Tom is.. well, Tom is amazing. He's simultaneously learning Physics, Chemistry, Math, Philosophy, Macro Economics, Jewish History and we even read the Bible together - in Hebrew and English simultaneously. I'm not religious, but it's a foundational cultural text and it's hard reading so it's good on both fronts. The choice of topics is his, the depth too, I just provide the occasional nudging and encouragement to tackle harder things. Honestly, I'd love to be able to learn everything he does with him, but I split my time between him and Yara. We also go for a run some mornings, hike on most weekends, and do strength workouts at home. When it's going well, like today, it's an exhilarating and joyful experience. When I'm tired and I still need to do it, it's terrible and I'm not above giving them their devices, dropping the locks, and having them watch movies and play games until their eyes bleed when I need a break. We're doing this while nomading, working for a living (Yael and I split our days 50/50), and without grandparents or consistent friends in support (some of the places we stay at have more of a community and then it's a bit different). One thing they don't get enough of is social time with friends their age. This is highly location dependent - they were constantly with friends in Bansko, here in Ohrid it's pretty rare, but in general it's not even close to being at school with friends. Of course if you remember your own schooling, it wasn't necessarily all that fun. It's a complex social environment quite unlike anything else in life and some people have a hard time there. In general, Yara seem to need it and enjoy it, Tom seems to not find what he's looking for with peers his age. It's also interesting to note that they aren't "kids" but separate, distinct, and different individuals. But the fact that we're always there, always with them, always helping them through whatever they are going through and involving them in whatever we're going through has created a tight, very loving, and high functioning family. I'm actually feeling very proud of what we've been able to do.

Started working on the positioning course today by having Claude work through all the transcripts of all the calls where I taught parts of it and form a syllabus. It's looking pretty good. Still need to figure out the positioning for the positioning course though, that will have to happen before any recording starts.

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.