I've been working on Draft.dev for 9 months now, but I haven't really written much about what I've learned yet. Honestly, I've been so slammed with new business that it's been really hard to pick my head up and reflect, but I'm trying to do more of it lately.

One thing I have internalized is that scaling a service business is hard.

We've done pretty well - we have around 50 writers and an editor now - but there are still so many rough edges that I personally have to handle. Still, I'm learning to extract myself from some of the day-to-day work while keeping the business growing steadily.

So, the next article I'm working on is a step-by-step process outlining how I've started getting out of the execution part of my service business.

While the idea is still germinating, I have seven steps outlined so far:

1. Niche down
2. Track your time by tasks
3. Break down one task
4. Find a trailblazer to do that task for you
5. Dumb the task down
6. Watch your margins
7. Repeat

If you've successfully grown a service business, hit reply. I'd love to chat about it.

- Karl Hughes

"Their goal is to become entrepreneurs. But instead of building products, they create content. Or even worse, they do research and take courses on how to create content."

The two fastest ways to kill your startup are:
1) Having no business model.
2) Having an overly complicated business model.

"I want to putter about, feel connected to the process, and have fun doing so. I want to make things that don’t scale. To see people tuck into them and enjoy them as people, not as stats."

I have been a guest lecturer, instructor, and mock interviewer at half a dozen Chicago coding bootcamps over the past several years, so students frequently ask me what they should do after they finish their bootcamp. While I enjoy talking with graduates about their specific goals and challenges, I figured I would compile a starting point of all the advice I typically share with new coding bootcamp graduates.

"We scrape 50,000 articles every month from 500 blogs and magazines, at a cost of only $50 a month for us. In this article, I would like to share the decisions that made our articles pipeline cost-friendly, elastic, and ops-free."

"Gab’s security breach and behind-the-scenes handling of code before and after the incident provide a case study for developers on how not to maintain the security and code transparency of a website. The lesson is all the more weighty given that the submission used the account of Gab’s CTO, who among all people should have known better."

"We feel increasingly overwhelmed and frustrated by the sheer number of hours we now spend engaging in this streamlined back-and-forth messaging...In 2005, we were sending and receiving 50 emails a day. In 2006 this jumped to 69. By 2011 it was 90. Today we send and receive an estimated 126 messages, checking our inboxes once every 6 minutes on average."

"When it comes to defining a manager’s role, I encourage people to start with a simple baseline: Look for someone who is effective at performance management...The baseline for an effective manager is that they can lead their teams in getting from “why” to 'what' to 'how'."