Alexander Frota

Last night I burned $600 on a dumb one-line bug.

I was tweaking and updating my system late at night. Tired, not paying the attention I should have, and that's exactly where it went wrong: I took down my own service and impacted my clients.

The worst part wasn't the money. It was knowing the mistake was completely avoidable, and that there were people on the other side counting on my system being up.

Two lessons the hard way: never push to production late and tired, and always have a fast way to roll back when something breaks.

I want to hear from you: who's taken down their own service with a silly mistake? How did you handle it in the moment, and what did you change so it wouldn't happen again?

Build in Public
bluen.io/, month 1. Numbers in the open.

I built a checkout for course creators and e-commerce running on top of Stripe. The idea came from a simple pain: creators and store owners lose sales to bad checkout and low approval rates.

Launched with 2 beta clients 30 days ago. First month result:

$3,044 processed $2,817 completed $141 in revenue 3 connected accounts

All of this with no ads and just 2 clients testing.

And what didn't work: $1,302 in failed payments and $227 refunded. Almost 1 in every 3 dollars attempted didn't go through. Card declines were our biggest hole this month.

What I learned: approval rate isn't a technical detail, it's revenue. Every declined payment is one of my client's customers walking away. The prettiest checkout means nothing if the money doesn't land.

Month 2 is all about lifting the approval rate. Declared goal: $60K in processed volume, $3,600 in revenue. 20x month 1.

I also opened referrals for creators: 1% recurring for anyone who refers through their link.

I'll post this result every month, win or miss. Want me to keep going? Drop a comment.