Bloomington, Minnesota.
Not Minneapolis. He'll correct you.
Gary started coding in 2011 after a layoff from a regional insurance company where he'd been doing "light Excel work, mostly." He learned Ruby on Rails from a paperback book his cousin gave him.
The cousin had quit halfway through and moved to Denver.
A partial list.
He keeps the full one in a Google Sheet called projects_final_v3. The first product was a tool that emailed you a haiku every morning. The forty-seventh is a marketing automation platform for solo builders. In between:
- A tool that emailed you a haiku every morning.
- A Chrome extension that translated corporate jargon into plain English.
- A tipping app for podcast hosts.
- A B2B CRM for dog groomers.
- Three separate "Calendly but better" attempts.
- A meditation app.
- A meditation app for developers.
- A meditation app for developers who don't believe in meditation.
- A SaaS that helped you name your SaaS.
None of them got past twelve users.
How Gary works.
He has shipped on Christmas. He has shipped the day his mother had her hip replaced, from the hospital waiting room, on a ThinkPad that's older than most interns.
Ships every Tuesday.
He has shipped on Christmas. He has shipped from a hospital waiting room.
One Old Fashioned. Friday, 6:00 PM.
He drinks it slow. He watches the snow.
No analytics on weekends.
This is his only rule.
Faces a window that looks at another window.
His apartment is very clean.
Has a tattoo of a semicolon.
He got it ironically. Now he just has it.
Doesn't tweet.
Tried once in 2019. Got two likes. One was a bot.
And then.
Gary loves silence the way other people love music.
He finds the quiet of a launch day, the hours after you push to production and refresh the dashboard and see zero, zero, zero, almost spiritually fulfilling.
Other founders panic. Gary makes coffee. He sits with it.
He has come to believe, somewhere deep and unspoken, that the silence is the product. That the crickets are not the problem. That the crickets are friends.
Shipping is the easy part.
Somewhere along the line, after the forty-seventh product hit twelve users and plateaued, after he closed the laptop and poured the Old Fashioned and watched the snow, Gary realized something the rest of the internet had forgotten:
Shipping is the easy part. The hard part is the part Gary never learned. The part nobody taught him in the Rails book. The part his cousin probably figured out in Denver.
Gary built the tool he wished he'd had in 2011. Then, because he's Gary, he made himself the mascot: sunglasses on, drink in hand, leaned all the way back, saying the only thing a man who has shipped forty-seven products and won zero times has earned the right to say:
Git gud, son.
So.
Don't be Gary.
Ship the forty-eighth product. Then send the email. Watch the funnel. Read the replies. Talk to the twelve.
Gary will pour you an Old Fashioned when you make it.
