Let me filter and alert based on a distance, not just sort. e.g. "Lathe" within 100 miles of Baltimore. GovDeals lets you do this, but their distance filter is very inaccurate.

They will think you’re insolvent and start looking for alternatives.

It’s better to just be persistent about “reminders” and for saas set up a clear, well communicated cutoff time for unpaid accounts.

We tried for years with OpenStates to run a free legislative tracking product before eventually having it partner with a commercial provider who was willing to contribute the resources to keep it alive and help out with the open source pieces (shout out to Plural, nice folks).

Believe me when I say that this space is a classic nerd tar pit. It looks like a relatively easy problem, a few hundred scrapers, search, and some basic CRM functionality and you're off to the races.

The problem is that behind the scenes the data is very complicated, and the sources constantly change and break in goofy ways. You need to be running hundreds of scrapers constantly (many of them against akamai or cloudflare), and working around new source website bugs or procedural edge cases every week. It doesn't scale like something like product or web search where you can just ignore broken pages, the penalty for missing things is too high. Tuning your workflow so people find what they need without getting buried is tough, because there are tens of thousands of bills a session about things people think they care about like "AI" or "taxes". On top of that, the low or zero budget clientele is often that mix of high-expectation and low domain knowledge that makes them a big support burden.

Fiscalnote burned 750 million dollars in VC money on this and just went under this week, granted with a series of spectacular own-goals.

I wish this author the best of luck, and if you want to team up on scrapers please give us a shout. But please be aware that you're promising the moon, and try to build a model that will be financially and effort-sustainable. Keeping this stuff going is a _slog_. I'm really hoping that someone can bring the professional level tools to normal people.

Being able to live car free is pretty much limited to (expensive) major cities and some (expensive) mid-sized college towns.

The city of about 50,000 I'm from not only has no public transit and limited sidewalks, it doesn't even have crosswalks across the two main 6-lane roads that divide the city, so you can't safely walk more than about a mile even if you wanted to.

So the jump from the former to the latter is... significant.

If you have thousands of career employees with houses and kids in school and you tell them to move to Ogden Utah or lose their jobs, they're going to react as you'd expect.

For greenfield projects though, or things like the FBI building that mix prime real estate with an outdated campus, spread the love.

Given the teeny tiny endmill the author was using, I suspect they were using a small mill with a very fast spindle. Maybe something like a Taig or a Sherline.

Edit -- I see on another post the author has a Sherline 5400 mini mill.

The software has taken a nose dive, but I don't think it's related. If anything, you'd think that selling lower spec machines would drive software improvements.

If you have a product that:

1. Solves a real problem people would pay for

2. Is not trivially replicable by your potential customers or competitors

3. Does not have a natural discovery mechanism by potential customers

Then you need the marketing budget.

That is not most people's problem.

The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.

Americans have worse health outcomes (including lifespan), travel far less and have less time off, and retire later. That said, you do get much more space, nicer housing stock, (arguably) better access to education, and generally more 'stuff', so it's a tradeoff.

It takes about an hour to get breakfasted, dressed, and ready which we would be doing anyway. Counting the walk both ways it's about 30 minutes of extra time for 8 hours of childcare.

Unless your commute is just huge I can't see that math being true.