Jake Lingwall

Why neutrality in #SoftFurnishings is harder than boldness (And why I’ll always choose it.) 1️⃣ Neutral isn’t minimal. People often confuse neutral palettes with playing safe. But designing a neutral space that feels complete takes far more restraint than going bold. It’s easy to fill a room with colours and patterns. Much harder to know when to stop. 2️⃣ It takes discipline to edit. When clients see an empty corner, their first instinct is: “Let’s add something.” My job is to pause, feel the energy, and ask, “Does the space need more? Or are we avoiding stillness?” #HealingSpaces often breathe through the things we remove. 3️⃣ Quiet choices hold deeper power. A soft textured rug or a muted sheer aren’t background details. They are anchors. They guide the way you feel, move, and think. 4️⃣ Neutrality requires deep listening. Not just to the client, but also to the space. The walls. The light. The emotional weight of what already exists. If you listen carefully, you’ll often realise: The space always says something. You just need to honour it. 5️⃣ Bold is easy, but balance is tricky. Using statement colours is easy.  It takes a calibrated mind to design a space that feels peaceful and subtle. That is what makes neutral spaces feel timeless. Not boring, but deeply human. 💬 Have you ever walked into a room and felt instantly calm, without knowing why? *********** 🏡 Follow Darsha Manek for more on Soft Furnishings. *********** #LuxuryDesign #Entrepreneurship #EnergeticAlignment #Fabrics #Trends #HealingSpaces #SoftFurnishing

13

If you’re a US startup hiring mobile this quarter: screen for release ownership, not Flutter trivia. Senior candidates don’t separate “engineering” from “shipping.” They own releases, hotfixes, and the messy production stuff that actually matters. One question that works: “Tell me about a release that went sideways. What broke, how did you diagnose it, and what did you change so it wouldn’t happen again?” The answer tells you if they’ve actually owned production when it broke.

17

5 Comments

Robinhood lost $500M in 2022. Two years later, they posted $1.4B profit. Vlad Tenev didn't fix marketing. He fixed the product. The problem wasn't aesthetics. Robinhood was already beautiful and simple. The problem was it had become a utility tool. Open app, buy stock, close app. No second act. So Tenev stopped chasing new beginners and started fixing the product for the people with the worst NPS scores — the power users. He launched 11 separate $100M+ revenue lines. Gold subscription with 3.5% yield. Retirement accounts. A credit card. 24-hour trading. Legend desktop platform for active traders. Every product kept the same ruthless simplicity. But now they solved different problems. Net asset flows reversed from negative against every competitor to positive against all of them. Assets under custody went from $65B to $350B. The stock climbed from $8 to $113. Here's the part most enterprise teams miss: Your internal software has the same problem Robinhood had in 2022. Your expense tool, your HR portal, your project management system — they work. They're clean. They do one job. And that's exactly why your power users are miserable. Full breakdown of Tenev's turnaround — and how to apply it to your internal tools — in this week's newsletter. https://lnkd.in/edcS655M What's the internal tool at your company that your heaviest users complain about most?

3

Most contractors are small shops that don't have time to learn a robust estimating software. One of our goals when building Makeoff was to support non-traditional software users. So users can just pick this up on Day 1 and use it.

7

Moltbook was a cautionary tale about the dangers of vibe coding. The moral of that story: Don't do the engineering equivalent of leaving a spare key to your house under the doormat. If you vibe-coded a project that you want to get into production and need some human help, tell us about your project here: https://lnkd.in/gh6k4GvV

4

Poor people optimize for this week's paycheck. Middle-class people optimize for this year's promotion. Rich people optimize for the next decade's compound effect. That's why someone earning $200K annually can be broke while someone earning $60K builds wealth. One spends based on today's income. The other invests based on tomorrow's vision. You see this pattern everywhere: The entrepreneur who won't invest in ads because they're "losing money" for three months, not realizing month four is when pipeline converts. The professional who won't take a pay cut to learn high-value skills, not realising that skill will 10x their income in three years. The business owner who won't hire a $50/hour assistant to free up their $500/hour time, not realizing that delegation is what unlocks scale. They're all thinking in weeks and months. Not decades. Here's the framework: Every decision gets filtered through one question: "Will this matter in 10 years?" Spending time on tasks that make you feel productive today? No. Building systems that free your time for strategic work? Yes. Taking a course that costs $5K but teaches a skill worth $500K? Yes. Buying a luxury car to look successful? No. Investing in ads even when they bleed money for 90 days? Yes. Cutting ad spend the moment it doesn't work in week one? No. The math is simple but uncomfortable: Three months of struggle = nothing in the moment. Three months of struggle = the foundation for three decades of freedom. Most people can't stomach that equation. They need the dopamine hit of immediate results.  The validation of a steady paycheck. The comfort of knowing exactly what next month looks like. Rich people trade that comfort for compounding. The hardest part isn't thinking long-term.  It's acting long-term when everyone around you is optimising short-term. Your family will question you. Your friends will think you're irrational. Your bank account will test your conviction. But here's the truth: The people who think in decades don't just build wealth. They build freedom. They build options. They build lives where they're not trading time for money anymore. So ask yourself: Are you optimizing for this month or the next decade? Because the answer to that question will determine everything. What timeline are you thinking in right now?

39

41 Comments

Stop wasting months on perfect automations. Build, launch, and learn in under a week: You want fast feedback. You need practical skills. The secret? Low-code automation. Most people overcomplicate this. They get stuck picking the “best” tool. They worry about custom code versus low-code platforms. Then months pass. No clients. No progress. Today’s coaching call with my client hammered this home: Both had strong software backgrounds. Both wanted to build AI automations. Both debated custom builds versus platforms like n8n or Make. They had a long list of ideas—receipt processors, email classifiers, language assistants. Instead of starting, they compared tool features, worried about hosting, and got lost in tech details. Here’s what worked: - Pick one low-code platform (n8n is my go-to for devs). - Use Airtable as your flexible data layer. Learn the basics, skip the headaches of Google Sheets. - Build direct—work left to right, node by node. Don’t plan every step. Don’t drop dozens of placeholders. - Test every node as you go. Manual triggers keep things real. - Launch ASAP to real users (even if it’s basic). - Learn from actual feedback—not guesswork. Why take this path? Because the longer you stay stuck comparing tools, the longer you wait for critical input from users and clients. Every day spent tweaking is a day you aren’t earning or improving. You avoid the classic stall-out that kills momentum for most automation agencies and solopreneurs. Start now: - Pick ONE idea on your list today. - Choose n8n and Airtable. - Build a basic flow in two hours. Don’t overthink. You’ll have something live—usable, testable, and ready for honest critique. Want faster progress? Stop optimizing and start executing. Feedback beats feature lists.

4

Architect at insurance co told me they lost an internal pricing tool because the person who built it left and nobody could figure out how to redeploy it. It was a Next.js app running on the guy's personal Vercel account. Whole team had been using it daily for 4 months.

5

Picking a dev shop shouldn’t leave the success of your startup to chance. But let’s be real: one wrong hire and you’re stuck: → Scope creep burning $50k/month while they "figure it out"… → Missed deadlines pushing your launch into next year… → "Scalable" code that faceplants at 1,000 users… You’re not crazy... 74% of startups blow their dev budget 2X–3X over (thanks, Gartner). Why? Most shops: ❌ Stuff your MVP with "nice-to-haves" (that users ignore). ❌ Lock you into tech that can’t grow with you. ❌ Smother you in jargon while your cash evaporates. We got tired of the BS. So we built a dev shop for founders, by founders: Tight-Fisted MVP Sprints Ship in 90 days with ONLY what makes you money. Live performance dashboards → see exactly how healthy your tech is. Skin-in-the-Game Pricing... Fixed monthly fees. Zero surprise invoices. We don’t "exit" ’til you’re winning. Why this works when others flop: While rivals drown in tech debt, you’ll: → Deploy 3X faster (clean code ≠ rocket science). → Pivot over coffee – not corporate Zoom marathons. → Scale profitably while others beg for "just 6 more weeks!" Stop rolling dice with your company. 👉 "DM" us for a free tech autopsy : We’ll dissect your stack + show you 3 cash leaks bleeding you dry. PS: Choose the perfect dev partner and watch your startup soar. #NoMoreTechRegrets #MVPThatDoesntSuck #RealTalkDevs #SaaSFounders #ScaleWithoutTears #DevShopRehab #StartupTruths

2

Developers weren’t just builders. They were gatekeepers. If you couldn’t code, you didn’t create. You waited. On engineering bandwidth. On roadmaps. On someone else’s priorities. Syntax was the wall. Know where the semicolon went? You shipped. Didn’t? You stood outside. That divide shaped more than workflows. It shaped status. Developers got the leverage. The scarcity gave them the power to decide what shipped and when. Everyone else adapted around them. It wasn’t about being smarter. It was about access — and access wasn’t evenly distributed. Some people were in the right rooms early, tripped into syntax, and built from there. Others never got the chance. That was the difference. But syntax was only the first kind of alpha. The second was quieter. Harder to see. More enduring. System knowledge. Knowing which database could survive Black Friday traffic. When to debounce vs. throttle. How to shard writes across regions. Not just writing code — architecting it. That’s the tacit layer. Built from war stories. Outages. Scaling pain. Years in the trenches. It’s still here. And it still matters. For now. I remember the first time I tried to shortcut it. I’d tell Claude what I wanted. It would spit out code. I’d paste it. It would break. I’d send back the error. It would try again. Loop by loop, something shifted. Reddit called it “copy-paste monkey.” They saw a hack. I saw a door opening. People who’d been locked out started building demos. Then products. Then real companies. The wall between “technical” and “non-technical” was never about intelligence. It was about translation. And now, translation is free. What matters now isn’t syntax. It’s clarity. How well you can think. Break things down. Iterate. That’s what the agent understands. And that’s what it rewards. The syntax advantage is gone. Developer privilege is flattening. System knowledge is next. Today, the agent can’t always choose the perfect database. But if you tell it the trade-offs, it will. If you give it context, it will architect with precision. That tacit edge still holds. But only for now. Soon, even that will be embedded. And leverage will shift again — to anyone who can think clearly enough to guide the machine. That shift isn’t coming. It’s here. And it’s not going away.

18

2 Comments

Curiosity is an underrated trait in engineers. In my experience, the best engineers are curious about problems and new tech. They lean in, read up, and ask questions. They don't prematurely conclude something isn't worth their time. Mediocre engineers aren't curious and default to a defensive posture: "this is dumb", "why should I care", "it's just hype", etc. Be a curious engineer.

71

5 Comments