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12 articlesThe Four Fits Model for a $100 Million Business
For Hubspot's freemium and fully automated (touchless) software business, how can one achieve the highest growth in the least amount of time while being VC-backed? Brian Balfour's answer is the Four Fits Model: the four factors of product, market, channel, and model are interlinked and must work together.
Designing Human-Centric Internationalization (i18n) Engineering Solutions
Most products from Silicon Valley companies target the global market, and internationalization is a strategic key for multinational companies venturing into this market. The i18n engineering solution we designed primarily addresses three major issues in the development process of websites and mobile apps: 1. Language, 2. Time and Time Zones, 3. Numbers and Currency. Like all software system development, there is no silver bullet for internationalization; great works are crafted through diligent foundational work.
Designing a Load Balancer
Internet services often need to handle traffic from around the world, but a single server can only serve a limited number of requests at the same time. Therefore, we typically have a server cluster to collectively manage this traffic. The question arises: how can we evenly distribute this traffic across different servers?
The World Is Not Flat — The Economist Special Report: Global Supply Chains
Technology and politics are two forces that influence supply chains. In the context of global industrialization driven by technological change, developed countries provide technology while developing countries offer cheap labor. Companies consider two main points when transforming their supply chains: the risks associated with reducing supply chain costs and the increased availability of products and services due to global trade.
Lyft's Marketing Automation Platform Symphony
How can advertising campaigns achieve higher returns with less money and fewer people? Lyft's answer is automation, which includes an LTV prediction module, a budget allocation module, and a delivery module. When people are freed from tedious delivery tasks and can focus on understanding users, channels, and the messages they need to convey to their audience, they can achieve better campaign results.
Why Side Projects Should Be Stupid
The design lead at Spotify, with decades of experience in side projects, believes that successful side projects must be "stupid" to explore boldly and interestingly. Don't let complex issues like scaling, funding, and competitive analysis slow you down. Doing things is more important than learning.
How to write solid code?
Empathy plays the most important role in writing solid code. Besides, you need to choose a sustainable architecture to decrease human resource costs in total as the project scales. Then, adopt patterns and best practices; avoid anti-patterns. Finally, refactor if necessary.
Metrics for Measuring a Product
There are many metrics to measure the quality of a product: the number of active users, profit, transaction volume, retention rate, and more. To ensure better product development, it is essential to focus on the following metrics: improve retention rate, as high retention means high valuation; assess weekly growth rate, maintaining its level will lead to exponential growth; prioritize iteration speed. When it comes to metrics, we must approach them correctly.
Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
Four main reasons why smart people have bad ideas: bad ideas are products of intuition; bad ideas prioritize being impressive over making money; bad ideas yield to fear of competition; bad ideas are too superficial. Therefore, smart people must clearly understand user needs and conduct user research to unleash endless potential and truly do smart things.
Introduction to Beancount.io
If you want to manage money in a better way, what you need is more understanding of your financial status. Beancount.io is such a tool that assists you by recording your financial transactions in text files and visualizing them into financial statements.
The Company's Technology and Market Quadrant Diagram and Gravitational Directions
The quadrant diagram of market and technology determines the company's market position. With the inflation of technology, excellent technologies tend to become mediocre, and mediocre companies adopt excellent technologies; companies with a market will have a larger market, while those without a market will have a smaller one.
Stratechery: Why Did Amazon Acquire Whole Foods?
Amazon's ambition to gain a share of all economic activities led it to enter the grocery service market. However, based on an analysis of Amazon's existing strategy and the cost disadvantages in fresh produce, it does not currently have a first and best supplier in grocery. Acquiring Whole Foods allowed Amazon to not only buy a retailer but also gain a customer for its existing business.
About Tian Pan
I'm Tian Pan, an engineer-founder focused on agentic engineering — building autonomous AI systems and scaling engineering teams. I write practical guides on system design, technical leadership, and shipping with AI agents. Previously an early engineer at Uber, Brex, and IoTeX.
