Welcome to r/SharpHaw. What this community is for, and who is running it.

I am Gabs. I spent years as a Senior Software Engineer inside large companies, working on products used by thousands of businesses across Europe, and I now run SharpHaw on my own from Lisbon. This is the first post here, so it is the one that says what the community is for and who is running it.

Start with the obvious disclosure. I created this subreddit, I moderate it, and SharpHaw is my company. Everything I post here is a founder talking about his own work. If that is going to bother you, better to know it in the first paragraph than to work it out three posts in.

SharpHaw is a growth subscription for owner-operated European businesses. Website, ads, content and automations run as one monthly thing rather than four separate hires, by one senior engineer instead of an account manager and a team you never meet. Month to month, no annual contract, and ownership of the code and content transfers to the client. That is the whole model.

SharpOS is the workspace it all runs in, and it is the thing I actually spend my build time on. Fourteen surfaces covering the plan, the work, the docs, the files, the brand, the customers and the numbers, in one place with a login for the client. I built it because I got tired of the client having no way to see the week except asking me.

Here is the idea for this community.

I wanted somewhere to show the work rather than describe it. Not a changelog and not a feed of my own marketing, but the actual decisions: what I built, why I built it that way, what it cost, and the parts I got wrong. I have spent a lot of years reading other people's build-in-public writing and the posts that taught me anything were always the ones where somebody admitted the tradeoff. So that is the bar I am setting for myself here.

Six things I want us to talk about.

AI, specifically where it removes real work and where it is theatre. Marketing, argued from what moved a number rather than from received wisdom. Ads, read honestly, including what the dashboard hid. Websites, and the conversion problems that actually leak enquiries. Content creation, run in public, failures included. And building software as a solopreneur, which is the one I have the most to say about and the fewest people to say it to.

What this is not. It is not a support channel, there is a widget on the site for that. It is not a place where I will post ads. And it is not a one-way broadcast. If it turns into a feed of my own promotion with nobody talking back, then it has failed and I would rather know that early.

One commitment, since I hold the mod tools and you do not. I will not remove criticism of me, SharpHaw, or SharpOS. Disagreement is the entire reason a community is worth more than a blog. The only things I will remove are spam and abuse.

I am going to start by writing up each surface of SharpOS on its own, one per weekday, including the part where the tool it stands in for is genuinely better at the job. After that the direction depends on what people actually want to talk about.

If you are here early: what are you building, and which of those six things is currently causing you the most trouble? I will answer everything in this thread.

TL;DR: I am a senior engineer who left large companies to run a growth subscription for European business owners on my own, and SharpOS is the workspace I build to run it. This community is for showing that work honestly, including the tradeoffs, and for talking about AI, marketing, ads, websites, content and building software solo. I moderate it and I will not delete criticism.