Josh Wilcott @figjeti

Had a user email me yesterday asking why InvoBee doesn't have a "late fee" feature, and I almost replied with a generic "great idea, added to the roadmap!" before actually reading his message twice. He runs a two-person drywall crew. Said he's never once charged a late fee because he feels too awkward asking for the money he's already owed, let alone extra. He just wanted the software to do it automatically so it wasn't "his fault." I sat with that for way longer than I'd like to admit. Because that's not a feature request. That's a guy who's been burned enough times that he needs a piece of software to be the bad guy for him. I built this thing to make invoicing less painful, and here's a dude basically saying the hardest part isn't the invoice, it's having an awkward conversation about money with someone he probably likes. I built the feature. Took maybe two hours. The hard part was realizing how much of this job is actually just quietly fixing problems people don't say out loud. Also, unrelated but related: I spent the first hour of my day yesterday convinced I'd broken production because a chart wasn't loading. Checked everything. Logs, deploys, the works. Turns out I had an ad blocker extension eating the chart library. Forty-five minutes of panic, one browser extension to blame. Nobody warns you that half of solo building is just detective work on fires you started yourself. Anyone else have a user tell you something that quietly changed how you thought about your own product?

unpopular gym opinion: if you're loading plates onto a bar and you walk away between EVERY single plate like you're on a leisurely stroll, we cannot be friends some of y'all treat the walk back to the rack as the actual workout

Talked to a landscaper buddy who said half his late payments weren't clients being flaky — his invoices just didn't make it easy to pay. No clear due date, payment link buried, scope of work vague enough that people second-guessed what they owed. Fixed the template, cut his payment time almost in half. Wrote up exactly what to include: invobee.com/blog/landscapi…

what's the setup you had as a kid that you'd kill to have back right now, broke college budget and all mine was a hand-me-down CRT with Goldeneye permanently in the N64, controller cord juuust long enough to lean back on the couch. zero ergonomics. perfect system

the amount of mental prep i need before calling to schedule a doctor's appointment is genuinely insane. i will rehearse a 10 second phone call like i'm testifying in court

guy at my gym re-racks his weights so aggressively it sounds like he's mad at the barbell specifically. respect it though. unpopular opinion time: is it weirder to make eye contact with yourself in the mirror mid-set, or to actively avoid it? asking for science

Every AI company is racing to build a "personal assistant" that knows everything about you. Meanwhile I still can't get my actual assistant (me, to myself) to remember why I walked into the kitchen. Maybe the bar for AI shouldn't be "smarter than humans" it should be "smarter than me at 9pm." Much lower bar. Someone build that first.

Putting your phone on silent instead of just turning the ringer off is social anxiety dressed up as a personality trait. Let it buzz, you're not that important.

So I'm at the grocery store last week, 10pm, buying an absurd amount of ground beef and eggs because that's apparently my life now, and the cashier just stops scanning and goes "are you okay?" Not like concerned-okay. Like suspicious-okay. Like she's seen my cart and is building a case. I laugh and say "oh it's a diet thing" and she just stares at me, dead serious, and says "my uncle did that. he's in jail now." I did not have a follow up question prepared for that sentence. I just stood there holding a rotisserie chicken like it was evidence. She let it hang for a solid five seconds before she cracked and said "not because of the diet, he just also started telling everyone about it nonstop and it turns out he was also doing crimes the whole time, unrelated." So now I don't know what to do with this information. Is she saying I talk about this too much? Is this a warning? Is her uncle fine? Is HE on carnivore right now, in prison, finally getting enough protein? I paid for my eggs and left without asking a single follow-up question because I was too afraid of the answer. Still thinking about this guy. Hope he's doing okay. Hope the crimes were, like, tax stuff and not anything scary.

My cat watched me fail a deadlift for the third time in a row and just... blinked. Like he's seen enough disappointment in this house to not even react anymore.

Went to the grocery store for 4 things. Bought 23 things. Still don't have the 4 things.

Talked to a cleaning business owner last week who said she waits 30+ days to get paid half the time. Pulled up her invoices and... yeah, that's the problem right there. Missing payment terms, no clear due date, scope of work was vague. Turns out most late payments aren't a client problem, they're an invoice problem. If there's any room for "wait, what exactly am I paying for" the client will take their time. Found a good breakdown of what actually needs to be on there: invobee.com/blog/plantilla…

nobody warns you about the random Tuesday 2pm where you realize you haven't said a word out loud since Sunday and your own voice sounds weird when you finally talk to the UPS guy working for yourself is 10% freedom and 90% negotiating with your own brain about whether $4k in the bank is "fine" or "we're all going to die" what's the weirdest part of being your own boss that nobody prepared you for

the amount of mental energy it takes to respond to a text that just says "ok" is insane. is it sarcastic? are they mad? do I need to reply to the ok? I've been staring at this for 20 minutes

What's a food you liked as a kid but can't stand now?

the amount of times i've opened the fridge, stared into it for a solid 10 seconds, closed it, and walked away still hungry and no closer to a decision is honestly concerning

My father-in-law asked me yesterday what I eat and when I told him, he looked at me the way you'd look at someone who just said they live in a tent by choice. "So... no bread. No pasta. No fruit?" "Correct." "What do you eat for fun then?" And that question actually stopped me for a second. Because the honest answer is a giant ribeye is fun for me now. Three years ago I would've thought that sentence was unhinged. I used to think fun food meant a bowl of pasta and a glass of wine and a little chaos. Now fun food is a well-cooked steak and I genuinely look forward to it the way I used to look forward to pizza night. That's the part nobody warns you about. It's not the missing bread that gets you, it's realizing your whole definition of pleasure around food can just... shift. Quietly. Without you noticing until someone asks you a simple question and you hear how weird your answer sounds out loud. I still walk past bakeries and the smell hits different, not gonna lie. There's a specific croissant place near me that is basically psychological warfare at 8am. I don't think that urge ever fully disappears and honestly I'm suspicious of anyone who claims it does. I think the reason food fights get so heated is because nobody's actually arguing about macros. They're defending an identity, a memory, a relationship with their mom's cooking, a version of themselves. Mess with someone's diet and you're accidentally messing with their whole personal history. Anyway I'm not trying to convert anyone, I just think it's funny how much food reveals about what we actually value when nobody's watching. What's something about your own eating habits that would've shocked past-you?

If you clean for a living, the thing that gets you paid faster isn't follow-up texts, it's the invoice itself having a due date and payment terms spelled out instead of just "please pay." Found a good breakdown of what actually needs to be on there so you stop chasing people: invobee.com/blog/cleaning-…

everyone's freaking out that AI can now do your job interview for you (literally, there are tools that answer live while you're on the call) but also every company's using AI to screen the resumes in the first place so it's just... robots interviewing robots while we watch? who's actually in the room anymore

Had a customer email me at 1am last year that just said "where is my invoice." No punctuation. No context. Felt like a hostage note. I'd been heads down for weeks shipping a recurring billing feature for InvoBee, feeling pretty good about myself, and completely missed that a cron job silently stopped running three days earlier. No errors. No alerts. It just... stopped. Like it got tired. So I'm sitting there at 1am trying to figure out why a guy in Ohio hasn't been paid, and I start digging through logs, and I find the exact line where it died. A timeout. One single timeout, on one single invoice, three days prior, that crashed the whole worker and nobody noticed because I never built an alert for "hey this thing that runs every night just stopped running every night." The worst part wasn't the bug. It was realizing I'd been checking my analytics dashboard every day that week, feeling proud watching signups tick up, while the actual core function of the product quietly died in the background and nobody told me. I wrote back to the guy, told him exactly what happened, no corporate speak, just "this broke, here's why, it's fixed, I'm sorry." He replied within a minute: "lol it happens, appreciate the honesty." That was it. That was the whole thing. I built out monitoring for that exact failure the next morning like a man possessed. Anyone else had that moment where the thing that breaks isn't even the scary part, it's how long it was broken before you noticed?