Hello, world!
It’s been a while since I sat behind the wheel of a fresh new website.
The last first blog post I wrote was in 2014 shortly after starting Good Work, the web development agency that I started and ran for over 10 years. Before that was Erskine Design and before that was a web design company I started in college. If you add it all together I’ve spent 18 long years in digital client services.
With my last business, Good Work, I followed the classic maker-to-business-owner trajectory—doing what I loved (making things), then gradually delegating my work to others until, before I knew it, I wasn’t making anything at all!
I spent most of 2024 thinking through my purpose and what I should do next. I considered everything from operations consulting for digital service businesses to riding the silver tsunami and purchasing a 20-30 year old blue collar business. Every few months I came to my wife with a new idea for our future, and she somehow patiently cheered on each one of them. I got pretty far into a few ideas before realizing that I couldn’t see myself doing any of it! Back to the drawing board…
One day I was speaking to Phil about this conundrum and through conversation, I remembered an old known that I had lost sight of: I was born to make stuff on the internet. After about five seconds of back and forth it became incredibly clear that the next step was to start the last business I’ll ever work at; a little software studio called Better Than Good.
Looking back, the best moments of my career were when I was deep in the details: designing, coding, and creating. And that’s what Better than good is all about—meticulously creating software that is fast, simple, and a joy to use.
Our first app will launch sometime this summer, available on the web, iOS, and Mac. I’ll be sharing the journey on this blog along the way.
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More from the blog
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The sorting machine: recruitment’s race to the bottom
> The sorting machine was built to cope with a genuine problem. Where it went wrong was in mistaking efficiency for effectiveness, in assuming that the ability to process resumes fast meant the ability to evaluate candidates well. The fix is not a smarter machine but a more modest one, paired with humans who are given the time, the tools, and the structured information to do what they were always better at.If you've been involved in any part of the recruitment process, the last 18 months have been dispiriting, to say the least. Hiring became a closed loop. Employers adopted applicant tracking…
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Weighing smoke: why GEO dashboards are mostly useless
> The promise of a tool that gives you similar search visibility to the pre-agent world is understandably seductive. But before you eagerly hand over your cash for a platform, consider whether an afternoon's work a month might be a more cost-effective alternative.I recently wrote about [the GEO chimera](https://betterthangood.xyz/blog/geo-practice-versus-snake-oil/), the cottage industry promising to optimise your brand into AI answers. My argument was that the levers being sold mostly did not exist. Another part of the industry is selling gauges rather than levers. Estimates of the spend on …
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Another nice mess
Somewhere in your business right now, someone is assembling a picture that no single app can provide. It may be the project manager pulling hours from Harvest and budget data from the finance tool to assess whether the engagement is still viable. Maybe it's you on a Sunday, because what you need is not any one number from a system, but the pattern across three of them. The cloud gave small businesses access to the best software they had ever had, priced monthly and built for specific purposes. But twenty years of sensibly chosen apps have left the average small business with a patchwork data …
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The state and the machine
> What little we saw of Fable and Mythos offers both cause for excitement and concern. It was widely and credibly seen as a model of a completely different caliber from those that had come before. Perhaps the risks in this instance were overstated or amplified for political ends. What is more profound is that the short time we had with the models offered a clear glimpse of a future in which a single company is making significant progress toward a superintelligence with the potential to rival or exceed the power of nation-states or even massive corporations. That juncture was never going to ar…
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We have ways of making you pay
> The true cost of AI work is hard to measure; the value of AI work is also hard to measure, and metering changes which of those two blindnesses you notice first. It drags the cost into the light, itemised and arriving monthly, while the value stays diffuse, lagging and easy to argue about. That asymmetry is exactly why the panic is showing up now, ahead of any definitive verdict on whether the spending was worth it.Simon Willison did the arithmetic on himself. He pays $200 a month across his Anthropic and OpenAI consumer plans, and when he ran the [ccusage](https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusa…
