Long Time No See

Didn’t expect to be back this quickly after killing the 5-year-old richstone.io blog 1-2 weeks ago, but here I am in your inbox! 🦊

In the last few weeks, I had encounters with other Builders that were too inspiring not to share. I’ve been working out of a new co-working space, running into familiar faces and meeting new ones. All builders, like us — but the kind who’ve pushed through the hard parts and are seeing real results.

First up: my buddy Gianmarco. We met at a different co-working space last year. He left his job to go full-time building because he saw what’s possible right now with all the tools and energy in this market. He’s a React guy, shipping apps to the stores and actually getting free traffic from them, people just downloading and subscribing to his apps — something I’ve always envied as a web developer, because on the classic web, you have to work and pay for every visit. He’s shipping his 5th app right now, and his latest one is generating the most revenue yet. If you want proof of what determination and persistence can do, go download HealthyBuddy and see for yourself (I hope to recruit this guy for the Rails.Builders someday, we will pardon him his React background).

Then there’s Todd Dickerson — a name I keep running into in my chat at work. Todd is the ClickFunnels CEO, a $200M+ ARR and 150k+ user base company. What blows my mind is that even at that level, this era gives him the room to build more. He recently shipped DailyDraft, the tool I’m using to write this newsletter right now, (re-)built on vanilla Rails, with lots of features and lots of .ai. I had a blast setting it up — tweaking the styles, the brand, the content, the prompts. Many Builders constantly mention they want to express themselves more through writing, and this product is going to help anyway: Even if you don’t use it in the end, by setting it up and training the AI to write something valuable, it will improve your understanding of what you want to write about, for whom, and why.

One thing I loved watching in the past months was Todd using the latest tech to ship from literally anywhere — adding features from his phone at a car charging station, on a plane, and responding to Slack feedback by having his AI agents address issues within minutes. Side note, it made me think: the future of project management might just be Slack OR Linear (for the deep work organizations). You probably don’t need both.

We all know what’s going on in the tech world right now, coming with uncertainty. Consider this to remove at least some of it: Todd wasn’t born with ClickFunnels in his pocket. He worked toward it for a long time. Gianmarco started unleashing his builder potential recently, during one of the wildest moments of his life — leaving his job right after his first child was born. No matter what anyone says on the Internet, it’s a great time to build software. Growing markets of people wanting to be successful online and with software. Think about it, even if “by the end of 202x all code will be written by robots”, there will still be around 300M-400M (MILLION) businesses in the entire world that need to be set up with these robots and agents! We will have a lot of responsibility and work to keep this all rolling. Things are only going to grow one way or another, so let’s grow with it and be around other Builders. Worst case? You’ll learn skills for life.

Rails.Builders 5 Starting This Week

🚨 The Rails.Builders group is going into its 5th round! Starting this Thursday, February 12th at 11:30 EST, Cohort №5 kicks off and runs through May 7 ‘26. It’s a bi-weekly live call group for anyone serious about building a product with Ruby or Rails — you’ll get feedback on your tech and business efforts and share experiences with other builders. This time it’ll be led by the amazing Pascal Laliberté. Shoot him or me a DM if you’re interested in joining.

Remote Development on Your Mobile

🔥 I’ve realized my dream of being able to fix bugs and ship new features on my walk to my co-working space and back. Check out the stack and a quick demo here: [See it on X].(https://x.com/RichStoneIO/status/2020572383522758884?s=20) Again, powered and inspired by the Builders above and the algorithmic trader guy at my co-working space who takes naps at 8pm to hustle out his last work sprint for the day.

Below are the generated outputs of Todd’s DailyDraft creation. After some fine-tuning and prompting the tool itself, there are some cool bits in there resulting from the tool’s powerful deep research engine. Let me know if you found a useful article or comment in there to learn from!

Builder Bites

🔗 60-70% of SaaS features go completely unused after release. Not because they’re badly built, but because adoption is treated as an afterthought. The fix? Measure task completion instead of vanity metrics and embed features into real workflows from day one. Ship fewer features that work better.

🔗 The rapid prototyping market is exploding — from $1.9B to $15.2B by 2032. Think of AI-assisted development as the software equivalent of 3D printing for hardware. The market rewards speed. If you’re shipping fast and iterating on real feedback, you’re riding a massive wave.

🔗 Lean Startup beats traditional planning for most tech startups. Faster time-to-market (4-8 weeks vs 3-6 months), lower costs ($100-1K vs $10K-50K), and higher success rates. If you’re building with limited capital in uncertain markets — which is most of us — the data says ship fast, validate, then invest.

Links Worth Clicking

🎯 LightningRails — Pre-configured Rails boilerplates with admin dashboards, front-end structures, and legal pages built in. Skip weeks of setup, focus on shipping.

🎯 Product-Market Fit Is Only the Beginning — Finding customers who love your product is step one. Selling profitably at scale is the real game.

🎯 How Mode Analytics Pivoted to PMF — From struggling startup to BI leader by obsessing over customer needs. Proof that PMF isn’t luck, it’s iteration.

Speed wins — but only when paired with customer obsession. Builders keep building, and who knows what platform I will send you the next email from! 😅🚀

Rich Steinmetz

P.S.: DailyDraft isn’t done yet! Below are some features that come out-of-the-box.

Feature: How did you like today’s email?

Feature: You can have your published posts on your custom domain or a DailyDraft domain!

Feature: Unsubscribe and Report as Spam (I guess to catch angry customers early? 🤔🧠)