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Articles on operating a small company that survives: finding customers from public signals, pricing your product with confidence, defending against chargebacks, and the operating decisions that separate businesses from projects.
CBP's interim final rule took effect on 24 July 2026: no more $800 de minimis for postal shipments, a new informal entry process for parcels under $2,500, and a bond requirement that keeps goods in CBP custody until it is met. The dates, the 14 required fields, and who is allowed to file.
The browser-signal provision came out of the Council's text on 18 June 2026 and the Parliament has not decided. The route to a banner-free site never ran through Brussels: it runs through your tag list, and CNIL wrote down the test.
Published pricing for both tools, worked arithmetic on two commission structures at a $50 product, and the exact affiliate disclosure phrases the FTC calls adequate and inadequate.
Three states have now written personalised pricing into statute, and New Jersey signed on 23 July. The scope differences, the exemptions that keep loyalty discounts legal, and an afternoon inventory of every field that touches your price.
Article 50 of the EU AI Act applies from 2 August 2026. Which of the four duties attaches to you, the editorial-review exemption that takes most publishers out of scope, and why the headline 3% fine is the wrong number for a small company.
The Commission did not object to Google charging a steering fee. It objected to the level and the length, both of which are published on Google's own help pages. The three routes out of Play billing, priced, with the enrolment steps.
Three former Morning Brew employees launched beehiiv in October 2021. By April 2024 the platform was sending a billion emails a month, and its customers were earning about $1.2 million monthly through it.
Sara Blakely started Spanx with $5,000 in savings, wrote her own patent application to save the legal fees, and reported $4 million of revenue in the first year. Each early decision was a substitution of effort for money.
Two engineers put in $3,000 each in 2012 and built a mattress company to $170 million in revenue. Their competitors raised hundreds of millions. The difference was what they did instead of raising.
John O'Nolan funded Ghost with a 2013 Kickstarter for software that barely existed, then structured it as a non-profit so it could never be sold. The public dashboard now shows eight figures of recurring revenue.
Gymshark was incorporated on 5 July 2012 by a 19-year-old printing garments by hand. By 2021 it reported $608 million in revenue. The mechanism was mailing free product to people with cameras.
In September 2014, ConvertKit was making $1,337 a month and looked finished. Thirteen months later it passed $30,000. The turnaround came from four decisions, none of them about the product.
Buffer launched on November 30, 2010 and had a paying customer within days. The famous landing page test that preceded it is widely imitated and almost always copied wrong.
Sahil Lavingia built Gumroad over a weekend in 2011 and 52,000 people used it on day one. The launch was the easy part. What he published about the eight years that followed is the more useful story.
Amazon told sellers this week to add metadata to images and A+ content showing photorealistic AI-generated people. The New York law behind it carries $1,000 and $5,000 penalties and reaches any seller whose listings are visible in the state.
Federal disaster help for a business is a loan, not a grant: up to $2 million, capped at 4% if you cannot borrow elsewhere, 30 years, first payment deferred a year. The trap is that every declaration carries two deadlines for two different loans.
Plausible Analytics crossed $1 million in annual recurring revenue on June 2, 2022, three years after its first $64 month. The engine was written content aimed at a problem, not a product.
Google's spam policies never mention AI writing as a violation on its own. The test is scale, purpose and value, and the neighbouring policies on thin affiliation and site reputation abuse catch small sites too.
eBay International Shipping replaces GSP for UK sellers from August, automatically. Reach goes from 105 countries to 195+, and your payout is protected once the parcel is scanned at the UK hub.
Search Console gives you no AI Overviews breakdown, so stop waiting for one. A four-step routine using impressions versus clicks, GA4 referrals and crawler logs, plus what each control costs.
Shopify gave vape merchants 14 days to delist worldwide, legal markets included. Category bans are a different risk class from account bans: you can be fully compliant and still lose the channel. The three layers, an exposure test, and this week's moves.
US marketplace insurers filed their largest increases since 2018 and the enhanced credits are gone. What self-employed founders control: income estimates, HSA pairing, QSEHRA vs SHOP, and enrollment prep.
Meta shipped a dedicated app for Facebook Marketplace sellers: AI-drafted listings, a buyer-only inbox, bulk inventory tools and performance data. What's in it, and a day-one plan.
Cursor and Replit tore up flat pricing within weeks of each other, for the same reason: per-user costs vary by an order of magnitude. The math behind the pattern, and four structures that survive it.