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51 posts tagged.
A composite founder diary. At 70K MRR a nine-page demand letter said an analytics script made me a wiretapper. California's civil remedy is 5,000 dollars per violation, double the criminal fine the State itself could impose, and the bill that would remove one of the three counts was sitting unsigned on the Governor's desk.
A composite founder diary. The July 2026 suspension of CMMC Phase II cancelled the certification a third party performs on you and left the self-assessment you sign yourself, along with a contract clause whose own deadline had passed 3,116 days earlier.
A composite founder diary. Hiring one engineer moved our retirement plan from a capped IRS filing penalty into Title I of ERISA, where the daily meter has no ceiling and the liability is personal. The arithmetic between the correction programme and the exposure is about a thousand to one.
A composite founder diary. Four contractors, one policy bought only to satisfy a customer's insurance rider, and a premium audit that asked for certificates of insurance rather than contracts. What I found reading the California Labor Code.
A composite founder diary. My Stripe 1099-K reported $561,300.00 in a year my bank received $528,217.80. The form was right: 26 CFR 1.6050W-1(a)(6) defines the reportable amount as gross 'without regard to any adjustments for ... fees, refunded amounts or any other amounts.' Here is the $33,082.20 reconciliation, why the $20,000 threshold everyone quotes does not apply to direct card payments, and what typing Box 1a straight onto a return would have cost.
A composite founder diary (2026): at $49K MRR a letter of intent valued my company at four times ARR, and eleven weeks later a quality of earnings report put the price at $1,162,960 instead of $2,352,000. Why ARR overstated my trailing twelve month revenue by $70,700, why the two year recurrence test killed most of my add-back list, and the line I had never once thought about: the market salary I never paid myself, which cost more than the revenue restatement, the add-back fight and the deferred revenue combined.
A composite founder diary (2026): at $48K MRR a competitor cloned eleven of the fourteen sentences on my landing page, comma splice included. A DMCA takedown notice got the page down in six days, and a counter notification put it back on the table on day nineteen. Why the CDN was the wrong recipient, why copying expression is actionable when copying features is not, and the arithmetic nobody publishes: ten to fourteen business days to file a lawsuit against a copyright registration that was averaging about four months.
A composite founder diary (2026): at $47K MRR an enterprise customer's procurement team invoked section 8.2 and claimed a service credit for 47 minutes of downtime. Why their number and my number were different lengths and theirs was the one that counted, why the same 42 minute outage breaches in February and clears in July, why the $240 credit was a seventeenth of what the month cost, and the three clauses the large published SLAs carry that mine did not.
A composite founder diary (2026): at $45K MRR a twelve page ADA demand letter arrived by certified mail alleging eleven barriers and giving fourteen days to respond. Why a demand letter is not a website accessibility lawsuit and what that changes, why the published filing counts of 3,117 and 4,928 describe a category I was not in, the overlay widget I nearly bought at 11pm, the nine defects behind the eleven allegations, and what the whole month actually cost.
A composite founder diary (2026): at $43K MRR a sixteen-word email asking for "everything you have on me" turned out to be a valid data subject access request with a one month deadline that had already been running for nine days. What Article 15 actually requires, the eleven systems holding the data, why nine of the fourteen hours went on redaction rather than export, and the one scoping lever in Recital 63 that halved the work.
A composite founder diary (2026): at $39K MRR my password resets, receipts and failed-payment notices quietly started landing in spam. The cause was one launch email sent to 6,240 people in a single afternoon, which pushed me over the 5,000-messages-per-day line where Gmail and Outlook both apply strict bulk sender rules. Why 22 complaints was enough, why Google Postmaster Tools shows a solo operator nothing until the day they break something, and what the fix actually cost.
A composite founder diary (2026): at $41K MRR I found out I had crossed sales tax registration thresholds in five US states without noticing, because a monthly subscription bills each customer twelve times a year and the 200-transaction test counts invoices, not dollars. What economic nexus is, why subscriptions trip it at a third of the revenue you would expect, why uncollected tax comes out of your margin instead of your customers' pockets, how a voluntary disclosure agreement capped the damage, and why January 1, 2027 is on the calendar for anyone selling into California.
