Little baby is now coming up on 6 months. So how’s distribution going after 5 and a half months? Well unregrettably for first two and half months Inktrail just sat there while my wife and I guided the little one through surviving outside of the womb. Magic time. During this time my aunt who is a professor and the catalyst behind Inktra...

That’s right the SLC popped out first! Hoo-fucking-ray 🍾 I enjoy programming, but this was a slog and I was dreading the possibility of the new baby arriving first and having this hang over my head. So, with the SLC finished and early customers onboard, I can shift my focus to cracking distribution, which unlike programming I think I m...

With my second child 90% done cooking, I find myself scrambling to finish the last 10% of a new product and launch (Inktrail) before he arrives. Unfortunately, I, like most of humankind, am a terrible estimator of anything zero to one. And it seems the last 20% will in reality be the last 80%. I’m not sure how I’m surprised by this yet...

In your account settings change your main language you the target language. That’s it. Get speaking and listening! You’ve now got a pleasant, supportive multilingual tutor that will discuss any topic for as long as you want. Don’t like how it’s behaving? Just ask it to do something different. You can use the custom instructions to defi...

Charlie Munger is quoted in his almanac on how to live a life of misery: “First, be unreliable. Do not faithfully do what you have engaged to do. If you will only master this one habit you will more than counterbalance the combined effect of all your virtues, howsoever great. If you like being distrusted and excluded from the best huma...

It was announced in AFR this week that our first investors, Startmate, cashed out of HappyCo in our latest investment round. They more than 100x’d their investment over the past 10 years. Generating good returns for our early investors wasn’t something I expected to be proud of; but here we are, and I definitely am. I’ve no doubt our s...

I get asked about my names very often – so hopefully this might clear things up a little. I’m professionally known as (PKA) Andrew Mackenzie-Ross, often shortened to Andrew Mackross, or even just Mackross. It’s probably obvious, but Mackross is just the smushed up version of Mackenzie-Ross. It’s usually pronounced Mac-Ross like Mac & C...

- Andrew

My brother recently got me into 3D printing. It’s so much better than I expected. More often than not you throw something together in CAD, put it through the slicer and somewhere between 4 h and 48 h later you have it. It is unreal! I’m printing on a stock Prusa i3 MK3S+ which I built from a kit. This is me starting off the build. Maki...

After 9 long months spent stuck in Australia in transit from the US to NZ (it was meant to be 1-2 months), we have arrived! So far so good! It’s an interesting country, behind in a lot of ways, but ahead in many others. Pay wave is not available in many shops, and, like much of Europe, 10 minutes is an undefined amount of time up to ab...

Almost 10 years after leaving university, I’m all paid up. Unfortunately, I don’t have a degree to show for any of the time or many thousands of dollars I spent at university 😱. That’s maybe not surprising, based on my career, I should have studied computers or business. Instead, I picked mostly science subjects that interested me. For...

I recently moved most of my own (aka not HappyCo) projects to HatchBox.io & Vultr.com. I moved them away from Heroku and self-managed servers (hosted on Digital Ocean, GCP, & Linode). What's special about this new setup? HatchBox is a SaaS product that manages Ruby on Rails apps, think Heroku, but it manages it on your servers (or rent...

It’s interesting to see hey.com branch out into personal blogging. I wonder what drove this product decision. Frustration with the medium pay wall? Is it Nostalgia for the web before it became 90% commercialized? It surely wasn’t the most requested feature when personal emails still don’t have custom domains. It just seems so out of pl...