Luke Thomas
About
Writing
Contact
Writing
Notes on building products, growing businesses, and life in Tennessee.
Book
The Anywhere Operating System
A free book on how to run your business from anywhere: 22 chapters covering async communication, remote culture, hiring, onboarding, leadership, and more.
I restored McGuffey's First Reader (free download)
A free, restored PDF of McGuffey's First Reader (1879). Clean text, clean illustrations, formatted for modern printing. Made for homeschool families.
Moving to Spring Hill, TN (one year later)
My family moved from Portland, Maine to Spring Hill, Tennessee. Here's what it's actually like to live here, one year in, for anyone considering the same move.
What inputs drive product development?
The three inputs that drive my product decisions (customer feedback, product metrics, gut feel) and how to weigh them so you're not just shipping code for fun.
So you want to start a startup city?
Thoughts on the rise of startup cities from someone who left Boston for a smaller city years before it was cool, and built a company for distributed teams.
Bootstrapping to $10k/month with a day job
How I bootstrapped Friday to $120k ARR while working a full-time job, and what I wish I'd known before choosing between bootstrapping and venture funding.
What's your unfair advantage?
The two ways to build an unfair advantage as an entrepreneur: go absurdly deep on one topic, or stack two or three interests nobody else has combined.
The Counter-Positioning Strategy
Notes on the most useful chapter of Hamilton Helmer's 7 Powers: how a newcomer wins by adopting a business model the incumbent can't afford to copy.
Freemium vs. Free Trial (why not both?)
Dropbox, Slack, Zoom, and other pure-play freemium companies quietly added free trials. What changed, and what it means for how you sell software.
Customer-focused product development
What watching Jeff Bezos interviews taught me about customer-focused product development, and the simple spec format I use to keep the customer in every card.
Career/Role Fit - a key aspect of being a great leader
The best bosses I've had understood career fit. Ability to do the job is table stakes; wanting to do it is what great leaders hire and manage for.
The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
Written in college after watching textbook salesmen work the faculty hallway: how custom editions and access codes squeeze students, and why it keeps getting wo…