Instance Master @InstanceMaster

I'll be tracking every conversation from tomorrow in ThreadIQ, the #CRM I built for my own business. Each deal keeps the event it came from, so in three months I'll know if this day paid off. Happy to show anyone how it works over coffee. devinstance.net/products/threa…

Heading to this one. Two things I'm looking for: partners to work with, and small business owners whose software doesn't fit how they actually work. That second one is what I do for a living. Come say hi. #SanDiego

Small Business Expo @SmallBizExpos

7 days ago

24 hours until #SanDiego’s biggest business connections begin. Tomorrow, entrepreneurs, founders, and business leaders come together at Small Business Expo for a day of conversations, connections, and opportunities🙌 Grab your FREE tickets today@ thesmallbusinessexpo.com/city/san-diego/

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We put every ThreadIQ feature on one page, including the ones still in development. Each has a like button. The most-liked ones get built first. Deal assignment, Google Workspace sync, a mobile conference app, more reports. Which would you pick? devinstance.net/products/threa…

I'd rather build the feature five people asked for than the one I guessed they wanted. So the roadmap is public now, with a like button on each item. My own vote is deal assignment, because a #CRM for a team needs more than one owner.

devInstance 🇺🇸 @DevInstance

a week ago

We put every ThreadIQ feature on one page, including the ones still in development. Each has a like button. The most-liked ones get built first. Deal assignment, Google Workspace sync, a mobile conference app, more reports. Which would you pick? devinstance.net/products/threa…

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ThreadIQ, the CRM we run devInstance on, now has a full product page. Kanban pipeline. Microsoft 365 email sync. An AI assistant that reads the deal history before it drafts anything. Deployed on your domain, in your own database. No per-seat pricing. devinstance.net/products/threa…

At Small Business Expo San Diego this Friday, 9/18, Sheraton San Diego Resort. Most of the workshop track is AI now. My read: AI multiplies whatever process you already have. Good one, real leverage. Broken one, broken faster. That's why I build it into custom software rather than bolting it on. Find me at the software meet-up at 11:40. thesmallbusinessexpo.com/city/san-diego/

So this is not a hit piece. SharePoint is the right answer for document management, intranets, anything shaped like one flat table. It is the wrong answer for a system of record. The useful part is knowing which limits mark the border. devinstance.net/blog/the-share…

None of these are bugs. They are the correct trade-offs for a multi-tenant platform serving hundreds of millions of users. They are the wrong trade-offs for a system of record.

Spent last week fact-checking my own complaints about SharePoint and had to throw two of them out. The criticism turned out to be narrower, and harder to fix, than the popular one.

The mistake I made for years was treating every project as if it were unprecedented. It almost never is. Two companies in completely different industries need the same permission model and the same audit trail; what differs is the handful of things that make them competitive. Build the common part once, well, and you can afford to spend real time on the part that's actually theirs.

devInstance 🇺🇸 @DevInstance

4 weeks ago

Custom software has a reputation for being slow, and usually it earns it. Six weeks of discovery, three months of build, and the first screen anyone can actually click on shows up in month five. That timeline exists because most projects start from nothing. Ours don't. We keep

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Too many SMBs sign multi-year contracts for tools they outgrow in 18 months. The alternative isn't cheaper software. It's software you own.

30 years building software. The thing that changed the math wasn't a new framework, it was refusing to start from scratch every time.

devInstance 🇺🇸 @DevInstance

a month ago

Small businesses get two options: 1. Spreadsheets nobody wants to touch 2. SaaS you pay per seat forever and use 15% of There's a 3rd. Software built for how you actually work, running in your cloud, on your database. Support because you want it, not because it breaks without

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The most expensive sentence in software: "Let's just rewrite it." It sounds clean. Fresh start, modern stack, no legacy baggage. But here's what the rewrite pitch never mentions: - The old system encodes 10+ years of business rules nobody wrote down - The business doesn't stop while you rebuild, so you maintain two systems - Rewrites are estimated against the happy path, and legacy systems are nothing but edge cases - Somewhere around month 8, the new system does 60% of what the old one did We've seen companies burn a year and six figures to end up with less than they started with. There's a different way: modernize incrementally. Keep what works, because it works. Improve usability, performance, and maintainability piece by piece, with the system running in production the whole time. It's less dramatic than a rewrite. Nobody gets to announce a shiny new platform. But your team gets a better system every month instead of a promise that's always two quarters away. Old doesn't mean broken. Most legacy systems earned their age by actually working. Learn more: devinstance.net/services/moder…

The story behind this service: at a local business event, a company demoed their website as live and open to the public. Out of professional curiosity I took a look and found 5 issues in the first pass. So I kept digging. And the deeper I went, the clearer it got: the whole thing was vibe-coded. It looked finished, it mostly worked, but underneath there was no structure, no error handling, nothing that would let anyone fix it safely. That's when it clicked that this isn't a one-off. There's a whole wave of software like this going live right now, and it needs a different kind of help than a normal dev project. To be clear, no judgment toward that team. Shipping fast enough to demo at an event is an achievement. It just can't be the final state.

devInstance 🇺🇸 @DevInstance

2 months ago

"I built it myself with AI tools. It actually works! But last month it broke, and I realized I have no idea how to fix it." Different paths, same destination: software that runs your business but that nobody can safely change. Too valuable to throw away, too fragile to build on.

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There's a job at almost every SMB that nobody was ever hired to do. Copying data from emails into a spreadsheet. Re-typing orders from one system into another. Chasing people for status updates. Building the same report every Monday morning. Nobody applied for that job. It just accumulated. We call it "how things work here." But really, it's automation debt. Every hour a skilled person spends moving data between systems is an hour the business paid for twice: once in salary, once in the opportunity they didn't have time for. The good news is that this is the easiest problem in software to fix: - Invoices that generate and send themselves - Data that flows between systems without a human in the middle - Reports that are just... there, every morning - Follow-ups that never get forgotten You don't need to replace your systems to get this. Most automation projects connect what you already have. If your team spends more time feeding your tools than using them, that's usually a 2-4 week fix, not a year-long project. What's the most repetitive task eating your team's week? I'm genuinely curious what shows up in the comments. devinstance.net/services/autom…

Happy Friday !!!

"AI makes developers 10x faster." We tested that claim the honest way: by building real software and measuring what happened. Our founder built a full CRM using Claude Code as a controlled experiment. The verdict? The productivity gains are real. The 10x hype is not. What we learned: - The first two weeks feel like magic. Working features in days, real velocity. - Then the debt shows up. Skip code review and you get concurrency bugs, broken contracts, and quiet technical rot that compounds. - AI shines at boilerplate, CRUD scaffolding, and well-scoped features. It struggles with architecture, state, and long-lived systems. - You are not freed from the work. You are redirected within it. Someone still has to be the tech lead, even on a team of one. The honest math: somewhat faster, somewhat cheaper. Not 10x. Probably not even 3x on complex projects. The upside for SMBs is real, though. Custom software that fits your business is now within reach for companies that could never justify it before. It just still takes engineering judgment to get there. Full breakdown, including where AI genuinely helps and where it falls apart: devinstance.net/blog/why-ai-ca… #AIDevelopment #SoftwareDevelopment #SMB #CustomSoftware #ClaudeCode