– https://postpov.com AI-powered content machine for professionals with AI content simulation.
if you’re also in that “smart but tired” phase, DM me or reply. maybe we can get out of it together.
here’s the pattern:
i sprint hard. i get it live. i stall.
not because I’m lazy. b/c promotion/selling burns me out way more than building.
i’m not some weekend hacker. i’ve been a Chief of Staff, a founder, a fixer, a builder. i’ve managed up, down, and sideways in a real company. i’ve coached teams. i’ve been coached. it’s helped friends escape the corporate treadmill.
i still don’t know what my next thing is.
i’m not writing this for pity. i’m writing it because i see myself in this post, and maybe someone else sees themselves in mine.
is the author writing this article from the future? Peter Thiel is 57 years old (2025).
‘Peter Thiel famously bought his Paypal shares (which were valued at a few cents when he founded the company) into his Roth IRA account. When he turned 65, he was able to access the billions that the Paypal equity was worth with 0 tax on it.’
The entirety of my blog was written pre-chatgpt and pre-scheduled. You can even check the images I use for all blog posts which were the first generation of ai images from 2021 which are quite bad looking now. LLMs were too awful to use nor would I use them.
"No more doomscrolling. Your attention span needs you." —
i’ve been using TRMNL
(https://usetrmnl.com/) to fight screen time habits. simple eink display which you can connect to 100s of apps to showcase information, so you can actually uninstall certain apps from your phone.
TRMNL https://usetrmnl.com/ is an e-ink display that offers many plugins, called ‘recipes’ — and you can build your own. price is ~ $150 and you can opt-in for a ‘jailbreak’ version, too. all open-source.
I don't trust the founder, and I don't want to do business with him.
His previous company was called fomo, which added popups to ecommerce stores to manipulate users into buying by claiming that others had recently bought the same product. I haven't dug into it to prove that the data was fake, but it's highly likely it's fake.
He sells marketing courses where he boasts about techniques like exploiting a website vulnerability to spam 20k people who never engaged with him at all.[0] He also proudly shares how he lied to 78k inactive users to trick them into responding to an email.[1]
jumping in to defend myself (thanks f5bot). you are not a serious person.
1. i'm very proud of Fomo. for 6 years we fought against fake data. i said "no" to many lucrative opportunities that were not ethical. our vision was "to given entrepreneurs the credit they deserve," and our mission was "to help consumers make better buying decisions online." your comment is libelous. [1, 2]
2. as of yesterday, all 11 of my courses are free. i've helped over 10,000 people learn to code and learn to sell. [3]
3. on the side i do a bit of pen-testing. i help stop* scammers, and i help non technical folks protect their brand. that's why Bubble added me to their home pages and dozens of cash bounties have been sent my way. [4, 5, 6]
Since you're accusing me of libel, I just checked the fomo website, and I can see that right now, it's presenting fake data. It shows a live updating counter of the number of fomo's impressions and clicks, but these numbers are updating every 200ms based on client-side JS, not real data. From the HTML source:
setInterval(function() {
var serverTimestamp = 1743654982;
// impressions
var imprCountWhenChecked = 19546526366;
var imprFrequence = 80;
var freshImprCount = Math.ceil(imprCountWhenChecked + (Date.now()/1000 - serverTimestamp) * imprFrequence);
document.getElementById('statisticsTotalImprCount').innerHTML = freshImprCount.toLocaleString('en-US');
// clicks
var clickCountWhenChecked = 43316684;
var clickFrequence = 0.15;
var freshClickCount = Math.ceil(clickCountWhenChecked + (Date.now()/1000 - serverTimestamp) * clickFrequence);
document.getElementById('statisticsTotalClickCount').innerHTML = freshClickCount.toLocaleString('en-US');
}, 200);
I don't have a clean copy of the HTML source when you were running fomo, but I can see on an archive.org snapshot[0] that the customer count increases by exactly 7 every few hundred milliseconds, so it looks like this functionality was introduced while you were running fomo.
If the site fakes that data and you've publicly admitted to lying to your users in other cases, it increases the odds that other data you presented was inauthentic.
ok back up - you claimed we used fake data. obviously you are referring to "John bought X, Y mins ago" notifications. the actual product.
for our homepage counter, this is not customers. this is notification count. with thousands of connected websites, each showing multiple notifications per page load, we quick racked up billions of notifications shown.
running `select count(*) from events` on every landing page load is untenable. instead, every N period we'd check on our avg daily notification count, then update the landing page JS to give users a sense of scale. this number was perpetually under-reporting our actual metrics.
and for the core product notifications, "John bought X, Y mins ago" we only allowed data from native integrations. if we saw someone pinging webhooks to us with fake data, we deleted their account. if someone asked for a CSV upload feature, we deleted their account. i cannot say the same for our competitors, who welcomed these use cases with open arms.
bottom line - you're a hater. you don't like Fomo (fine), so you're trying to sabotage the sale of another, completely unrelated product. think about where this bitterness comes from and do better next time.
That particular display that they use is around $40, and then there's a $3 ESP32.
I bought one because I think the software and the ecosystem is worth the price, but it's not terribly hard to make one of these for much less than $150.
i know how to start. i know how to ship. i don’t know how to pick what’s worth staying with.
and i still don’t know what my next thing is.
i’ve shipped real SaaS apps.
– https://truereviews.co // OAuth-based verified customer reviews.
– https://refersend.com // Referral tracking via email for non-digital industries.
– https://postpov.com AI-powered content machine for professionals with AI content simulation.
if you’re also in that “smart but tired” phase, DM me or reply. maybe we can get out of it together.
here’s the pattern: i sprint hard. i get it live. i stall.
not because I’m lazy. b/c promotion/selling burns me out way more than building.
i’m not some weekend hacker. i’ve been a Chief of Staff, a founder, a fixer, a builder. i’ve managed up, down, and sideways in a real company. i’ve coached teams. i’ve been coached. it’s helped friends escape the corporate treadmill.
i still don’t know what my next thing is.
i’m not writing this for pity. i’m writing it because i see myself in this post, and maybe someone else sees themselves in mine.
niklasbabel.com