JoshuaRowe

Thanks! I'll check it out.

My personal address isn't my business address. They are different. Mixing the two, while seemingly innocuous, actually can mean opening myself up to liability issues or a good argument that the biz that I operate isn't actually different from me the person. This isn't going to matter in 99% of things, but if you are ever sued, can be used as a reasoning to actually be able to retrieve damages from you the person versus just from the LLC. It's one of the reasons to try to have a strong separation early on in the biz, if you can. The IRS also doesn't like the mixing funds and such with bank accounts. It's the same reasoning, just different domains.

This is the perfect reason for having a true separation of personal / biz addresses and the reason I went for the UPS box in the first place. Business is business and home is home. It becomes more clear if I had some sort of public persona based biz too. Youtube etc. or some controversial company, even slightly so.

The separation of personal and biz addresses is an important concept in owning a business. Not only for privacy, but for proving the biz is a separate entity and such. This is probably one of 2 - 3 recent changes that they have imposed on my biz, all without seemingly any lead time. 15 days isn't really a lot of lead time to change your business address when you are over capacity already and have to (or would much prefer to) focus on things that actually make money. The one previously was a change that turned me previously paying $0 a month to over $60 (maybe $80 or more depending on volume) for the same feature set. Once again, without notice. Having a UPS box has for years been recognized as a legitimate way to have a biz address as well. Just not USPS PO boxes. The CTA and BOI legislation doesn't impose restrictions on that as far as I know, but Stripe does? My bank accepts my business address as a UPS box, but Stripe doesn't? That doesn't seem right. The CTA and BOI are more closely aligned with the banking secrecy act, which is just uncle sam wanting to know that a real person with a residential address owns a given bank account to prevent money laundering etc.

Adding a comment here in case anyone else is looking for a solution to save paying the difference. It appears that if you continue to use Stripe, but simply make payment links using the dashboard or programmatically, you will not incur these new fees. For instance, instead of using the Stripe Invoicing product, I might use Toggl Track or something else, then just create an associated payment link. Definitely an okay stop gap to avoid paying surprise mid-tier SaaS prices for something you have been using for free for the past year.

Yeah. I could see that. It isn't dire, but how much is too much to pay over a period of time? How much do they really need to run a solution that has been feature complete forever now? I get inflation and costs, but this increasing cost structure is way beyond that. What do your clients end up doing most of the time when migrating away? I ask because it is a real consideration.

Definitely not. Don't get me wrong. Stripe is a pretty good product, but it isn't "that" good, especially for SasS that is essentially feature complete and for my use case.

They did indeed use those things in their own setup. Whether that is good or bad is a matter of opinion, but I think they were trying to provide a realistic challenge into the work that needed to be done. I think he did realize the “challenges” in the combination, though.

I think it keeps what is good about React and ditches what is bad. It is familiar enough to pick up if you’ve done any component and hook based React. I think it probably serves as a framework that people who know what they are doing to get more performance and predictability out of their front end code and maybe a better mental model than wondering why React has an infinite rerender issue or other weird quirks we’ve grown to not notice / appreciate in React. I think there is probably more out of the box functionality that probably allows you to not then have to bundle React with some other meta framework, such as NextJS or similar.

While SolidJS is good, I really don’t think SolidStart is close to being useful or good. Not sure I really understand the value add on top of SolidJS quite like I understand NextJS on top of React. When I had to use SolidStart, there was a few times, I really just used SolidJS in place of some SolidStart built-ins because I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted and the docs were nearly non-existent. I even think I had to look at its src code to paint a complete picture from where the docs were at the time. In additional, I have no idea why people decide to use things that are so new for apps that are production used as much as they do. SolidStart really just made things more complicated for as simple of an app as I used it on. I couldn’t imagine using it for something that is non trivial at all.

I worked on a simple company idea chatbot style app as a take home test for a startup I was hoping to contract with. They asked me to use LangChain and SolidStart JS. No biggie it seemed as I’ve done a few SolidJS and OpenAI API things in the past. What I found was that I am either very much not a ML / prompt engineer / whatever term this falls under or LangChain is completely useless as an abstraction layer. The examples did not work at the time like mentioned in this thread and after struggling through and getting a few things working with the docs, I then had to add memory to the agent (to reuse the chat context in successive questions), and I really struggled to get that working. Part of it was also dealing with SolidStart, which docs were half baked as well. I eventually got it all working, but with what seemed like twice as much code and maybe three times the effort of maybe just using OpenAI’s API. I think the part that I really thought was off was the classes and the distinction between chains, agent, memory, and the other abstractions. They didn’t seem to add value or make the coding part of it easier. I even did a dry run with just calling OpenAI’s API directly and it just worked way better. It all reminded me sort of the fast fashion of Javascript years past after sitting there with a working solution and some time to reflect. I also feel like I understand the high level usefulness of the chain idea and such, but the solution didn’t really seem very pragmatic in the end, at least with LangChain.

You really don't have to put you or your family at risk to have a profitable business that is a benefit to you and the people around you. You also don't have to work long hours or get no sleep to get there. There is no doubt that you probably won't be the next unicorn trying to go this path, but I honestly don't think those people are really as happy as everyone thinks they are. You can have a sustainable business that is profitable in several different ways that adds true value to the economy and to your customers and clients. You can even create a job or two that can provide a good opportunity down the line for someone else.

Take a look at some ideas that can be done as a solopreneur, parallel entrepreneur, or with a self sustaining small business that doesn't require a ton of capital or reoccurring expenses. Don't overcomplicate things or add a ton of stress to your life and build a product or service that you simply can put out there to see if anyone responds. It's important to note that not all startups have to be technology based or what everyone calls a "startup" here. You can be an urban farmer, or sell simple products that you, yourself have been wanting to find in the market. Talking to your local SBA office doesn't make you less of an entrepreneur than launching on HN either.

If you're unsure if an idea is worth it, put out a landing page to see if anyone cares about the idea or what you already have to offer. Spend a weekend or a few nights here and there and make something you're nearly ashamed of, then go try to sell it. You'll learn along the way what works and what doesn't. You'll also learn who you truly are and what you can do and handle. The only thing you need to know is whether or not people are buying what you're selling, and you can live with what it takes to make that happen.

I'm a huge fan of the advice that is contained in the 37 Signals / Basecamp books, so feel free to check those out to learn more about the themes I've suggested here in a better, more articulated package. There is also a book titled "The Parallel Entrepreneur" by Ryan Buckley that I've found useful too.

Good luck on whatever you find yourself working on!