Pao Ramen

There’s nothing more depressing than building a product with a free tier. Free products attract the worst behaviour: obscure, illegal, and often amoral requests. It makes you lose faith in humanity. I can’t imagine what the safety teams at ChatGPT or any major social network deal with every day.

Today I gave a talk and pissed off some people. In an age of rampant sycophancy, I consider this a success. Just unfiltered strong opinions.

Yesterday I woke up in the middle of the night, sweating, heart racing. I grabbed my phone and immediately bought anthropig.com. Now I have two questions: - What should I build with it? - And will I go to jail if I do?

I wrote a new article, exploring the consequences of pain and pleasure on LLMs. I had a lot of fun writing it, so don't take it too seriously. paoramen.fika.bar/agentic-plea...

Why is everyone talking about 100 eggs developer

I can't believe it... Handinger can play wordle? yeah, and is pretty good at it!

Sports became mainstream when work stopped being physically exhausting. If AI does the same for mental labor (a big if), will we all end up playing more board games?

Agents are like teenage sex: everyone talks about them, but most people aren’t actually having any. We’re building a new product for builders to automate work with agents super easily. No need for hosting, sandboxing, building complex harnesses, nor tools. Just an API. Interesting? let me know!

"If you are not building B2B SaaS when you are young, you have no heart, and if you are not building agents when old, you have no brain" – Definitely not Winston Churchill

This is, by far, the video that has helped me the most in my career as a software engineer youtu.be/DsSoT-MtEKs?...

Wouldn’t it be funny if the only thing AI ended up replacing was developers?

Can’t believe the whole economy depends on these hands

Last month was our best ever at Fika. 1,087 new publications & 564 new articles. We've also shipped: - Paid subscriptions - Reactions - Resizable images - Advanced stats (views, open rates, channels…) - Voice dictation - Embeds - …and polished the product to death.

I’ve written a piece about the early days of the Barcelona tech scene. Back when nobody really knew what they were doing, capital was scarce, ambition wasn’t, and everything felt one step away from either glory or failure. paoramen.fika.bar/hedonism-and...

I have no idea about investing, but I think people overindex on technology displacing incumbents. Sure, once in a while you get a Kodak. But IBM, Oracle, Microsoft are still around. Good companies embrace new technologies and evolve with them. SaaS will prevail.

Numbers from January: # Fika 775 new publications! 355 new subscriptions and 12k visits. # Handinger 19 customers 154eur MRR We have amazing things in the oven, can't wait to launch them!

Men would rather write a blog post than go to therapy, but you can do both. I just wrote the essay I've been wanting to write for a long time. The most personal one I've written. I talk about parent-child relationships and leaving your own company as a founder. paoramen.fika.bar/i-left-my-ow...

Writing tip #18 Opening with a pronoun delays meaning and creates tension. That move is called prolepsis. It’s everywhere in speech, and striking in writing. Use it to land strong first sentences.

A developer can cost you ~$50 an hour. That's... a lot of Opus 4.5 tokens. The real change on the tech industry is going to be when business owners realize how to leverage this effectively.

The only thing a founder should fear is the company dying (most likely). Everything else is a distraction. Seat belts? Sure they are important. Scientifically proven. But you are flying a plane across the ocean, low on fuel, and you don't even know how to fly.

Writing tip #17 Act don't tell. Don't describe a feeling, use an action instead.

Writing tip #16 Juxtapose contrasting ideas in a parallel structure. This is often used to presenting an "obvious" truth in an impactful way.

December wasn’t great at Fika. We had fewer posts and visits than planned. I could blame seasonality (the mother of all excuses), but honestly, we’re still figuring things out: the product, the positioning, the channels... Send hugs.

Writing tip #15 Slice sentences sharply across expectation and payoff. It creates momentum.

Unsolicited life advice: When you travel to a country with a lower cost of living than the US (which is most of them), cancel your SaaS subscriptions and re-subscribe from there.

Writing tip #14 Dialogue is action disguised as talk. Don't describe the scene, let the characters verbalize it.

Writing tip #13 Polyptotons are a neat trick used by Jesus, Shakespeare, and John Lennon, in that order. Repeat a root word in different grammatical forms to make sentences more memorable. PS: The polyptoton chapter in Elements of Eloquence is one of the most hilarious texts I have ever read.

Writing tip #12 Verbs trapped as nouns suck life out of sentences.

Writing tip #11 Even small paragraphs can be stories.

Writing tip #10 Instead of describing, snap a picture. Like in photography, good writing is an act of noticing.

Unique opportunity to win the prestigious “I was once right on the Internet” prize. We just launched an A/B test. Which variant wins? Why?

Writing tip #9 Stop hedging your words. If you want to say something, say it without “sort of”, “kind of”, “maybe”. Hard one for me. I usually write to explore, so I’m never fully sure of my own words.

“Talk to users,” they say. Sure. Nothing can hurt me. Six weeks later, I’m still emotionally recovering.

Writing tip #8 Specific nouns are easier to visualize than abstract ones.

What do people use for b2c drip campaigns? I just want basic email automation based on customer data, that is cheap and simple enough.

Writing tip #7 Surprise the reader to keep them engaged. Never let them know what you will say next.

Writing tip #6 ~Today I would like to talk about~ the warm up cough. Just say what you want to say. Don't foreplay with your readers.

Writing tip #5 Endings are memory points. Weight goes last.

Writing tip #4 Using similar grammatical patterns for similar ideas, creates flow and cohesion.

Writing tip #3 Sharp moments deserve short sentences. Slow moments deserve longer ones. Rhythm reveals meaning.

Writing tip #2 “To be” sentences are boring. Swap them for actions that move.

Writing is a skill you can brute force. While building Fika, I’m teaching myself to write by obsessively reading, listening, and dissecting everything I can. For the next 30 days, I’ll share what I'm learning, one writing tip per day. Writing tip #1 Prefer concrete verbs over abstract summaries.

I've noticed people use AI in two completely different ways: 1. Draw the two circles 2. Draw the rest of the fucking owl I'm fully convinced the first one wins every time. When you draw the circles yourself, you’re forced to think. Otherwise, you just keep pulling the lever hoping for a jackpot.

I've just finished my third and final article about hiring. This one is about scaling recruiting, operationally. Most teams struggle because their process can’t handle volume. So I break down: • interview bandwidth • conversion rates • how to model org charts paoramen.fika.bar/how-to-scale...

One of the hardest parts of building Fika has been letting go. I spent two years shaping a side project, and now I’m throwing most of it away because Fika is becoming something different. It hurts more than I expected. You get irrationally attached to old decisions without noticing.

"Generative AI is so good, you can't tell anymore what images are real or not" I present you, the 4x3 rubik cube.

I've assembled the weirdest founding team: Two engineers and a growth hacker. Why? Because in 2025, building products is cheap but attention is expensive. So my hypothesis is that you need: - one engineer building product - one engineer building growth - one person harnessing the attention markets

I want more human-written content on the Internet. So bad that I hand-drew this entire animation, frame by frame, just to make you click on the damn button.