Elliot C Smith

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Latest — 14 Mar 2026

Are they software companies or do they just have software problems?

Many of today's software companies just happen to use software as a distribution mechanism. Others are purely software. Knowing the difference is critical to assessing the long term impacts of AI.

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Findings, Feb 2026

Products, Games, Books and Links Books I finished Harrow the Ninth, book two of locked tomb. I'm enjoying the series so far, especially as the world building expands. A large part of this book was written in the second person which took some getting used to. It relates

Reflection on revamping our sales process

Over the last month or so I've been working on updating our sales process. The trigger for this was merging two different sales teams into a single unified team. In this merge I went over our process, our CRM setup and how we were measuring success. Some of

The unbound potential of open tabs

I often go through a loop of visiting sites like hacker news or lobste.rs, opening half a dozen tabs in the background based on their name and then waiting days to read them. They sit in my list of open tabs and trigger a mild pang of guilt when

Findings, Jan 2026

💡Bringing back something I tried a while ago. A once a month round up of little things too small for their own post. Products, Games, Books and Music pynb — Python Notebooks Without the FussPython notebooks without the fuss. Fast, local notebooks for data science and machine learning. Privacy-first.pynb This

How to, mostly, guarantee success in your career

Over my career so far I have done a lot of different things. I've written code, designed PCBs and MRI machines, run Google ads, been out on the road doing sales and managed teams doing all of the above. Overall, regardless of the job at hand, I think

Things I changed my mind about in 2025

It's still the tail end of January so I am going to use this time as an excuse to sneak in a '2025 reflection' type post. This could easily be just about things I've changed my mind on recently but I figure I'

Doing more things just for the hell of it.

One of my 'not written down' goals for this year is to try to do more things just for the hell of it. I have historically fallen into the trap of trying to optimise, maximise or commercialise just about everything I do. It eventually managed to make a

Has AI removed the appeal of vertical SaaS?

Let's put aside for a moment the question of 'is AI bad for humanity' and accept that it is a thing that exists in the world. Particularly in the world of 'tool that writes code'. Right now, for circa $200 a month you can

Playing around with Google Stitch

This week I spent some time using Google Stitch, an AI chat interface for product mock ups. There are a lot of these kind of products, Figma has one, so does Canva. Stitch is the first one I've used that is filling a real need for me. That