This week at Try Hard Studios - June 5, 2026

Well, my friends, after about a two-month hiatus, I am back.

So if you have forgotten who I am, this is Aaron Francis from Try Hard Studios. And first, I have to beg a thousand apologies for letting the newsletter slip for so long. The last two months have been kind of insane, and I want to catch you up on a little bit of what's been going on.

First and foremost, I've hired a full-time employee! So things are working pretty well at Try Hard. Solo, the desktop app, is picking up. I'm still doing Database School courses. I am in the process of catching up on faster.dev. I owe those people a lot and feel really guilty about not putting out a new video there for a month or two. I am just finding myself stretched really thin, but mostly in a good way.

My previous part-time employee got an amazing job at a new AI startup (full story on this week's Mostly Technical), which meant I had a decision to make: hire another part-timer, or go full-time? I decided to hire somebody full-time, which is scary for a solopreneur bootstrapper. The person I hired is named Sam. I've worked with her, I think, for a total of five years and known her for almost 10. She is, much like Kelsey, extremely competent, and I trust her completely.

What this is going to allow me to do is focus on the creation side of the business and less on the running of the business. Sam handles the bookkeeping, taxes, strategic planning, operations, contract negotiations. I would show you how many unread emails and DMs I have, but it is mortally embarrassing.

Then, of course, I get a lot of emails from people reaching out wanting to work together. And to my great embarrassment, many of those have gone unresponded to for a while because I have felt too busy to respond, which is a fallacy. I miss something for a day or two, the guilt makes it harder to respond, which makes me miss it longer, which makes the guilt worse.

One of the things that has really been on my mind this week is what a silly and destructive loop it is to, first of all, not respond to things right away. That's where I'm trying to get, but I've never quite been that good at it. Another thing that has really been on my mind is how that stuff snowballs and weighs super heavily on me emotionally.

I start feeling like I've let everyone down by not responding. So then I end up having to hide so they don't see me, you know, tweeting about things when I haven't responded to their emails. It's just not a great way to live. That's something I'm actively trying to combat.

Where I want to spend all my time is working on the products. I want to spend time building Solo, recording videos, making YouTube videos, and trying to, you know, put my dent into the universe. But when you run a business, there are just certain things that you really should be doing, just blocking and tackling.

Sam is already helping me get back on top of everything. Right now we're playing catch-up, which is why I'm able to do this newsletter because I feel like we've already caught up on a bunch of stuff.

In some regards, I hired Sam to be my boss, to be my manager. I think you can only do this with someone that you already know and trust. I don't think I would have hired just a rando off the street to come and have authority over me.

Since I've known Sam for so long, I feel super comfortable with that. I think a big part of me feels inadequate for not being able to do both sides of the business. I'm not sure that that's entirely fair, but it is definitely how I feel.

I feel like there are plenty of super type-A people that can do the bookkeeping, respond to all the emails, and do the work output that actually is the product of the company. So I think there's part of me that has to put down my ego and just say, you know what, you've kind of proven that that's not really in your wheelhouse and that's also okay!

I don't think it's absolutely necessary that I do every little thing. I don't want to call the Texas secretary of state and ask about our LLC status. I would rather be creating the products that people pay for.

So, a lot of soul-searching and kind of emotional turmoil over what am I good at? Why am I bad at certain things? I think the final conclusion I've come to is that I'm going to lean into the things that I'm good at and get help with the things that I'm bad at.

I've always done that with regards to design and stuff. I'm a very good back-end systems architect engineer, and I'm not that great at front-end design. I've known that for a long time, and that part hasn't made me feel guilty. I just feel like, oh well, that's a skill that I don't have.

I think there's some sort of moral valence to the fact that I can't respond to emails on time because of some sort of emotional hang-up. I'm trying to get past that.

If you have sent me an email or a DM that I haven't responded to, I hope that you will forgive me.

If you're not caught up or you don't remember, Solo is the desktop app that I built originally as a sort of marketing effort that has really started to take off. I think I have a couple thousand daily active users at this point. Not all of them are paying because there is a relatively generous free tier.

But I don't think I've built a software product like this that this many people have used before. It's both exciting and terrifying. I mean, the premise of the thing is it's supposed to be your daily driver for software development, which means it just simply has to be good.

I can't have it be terrible and expect people to spend all day in it. That brings with it its own set of pressures, but I'm honored that people are liking it enough to actually use it.

So I do kind of feel like I've got the tiger by the tail here, and I'm trying not to let it go. This is an all-out land grab at this point, and I don't want the wave to crush me. I'm trying to ride the wave instead of being totally consumed by it.

All that being said, I'm happy to be writing again. I'm reworking my personal site to finally get it published so I can put more articles there because boy, do I have a lot in my head right now. I want a better home for those things, so that's still forthcoming, but as for now, we've got some good tweets to look at.

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🎬 YouTube

Building a custom browser agent

This tutorial walks you through building a Slack-invokable browser agent that automates tedious manual web tasks. No local infrastructure required. Using Browserbase and a Cloudflare Worker, you get a fully cloud-hosted workflow triggered right from Slack. Check it out on YouTube.

Codex reverse engineered my studio lights

I got tired of controlling my studio lights through an iPad app, so I spent $100 on a Bluetooth sniffer, pointed an AI agent at it for 26 hours, and reverse-engineered the entire mesh network. Now I can turn every light in the studio on and off from the command line and honestly, I'm not totally sure how it works, but it's awesome. Check it out on YouTube.

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Things I found this week

Just a heads up that each Twitter/X screenshot has a link to the original post if you want to go follow the account.

I 100% believe this. None of this is legal advice, but I have started many partnerships or many projects with people with no formal documentation for the first long while, and that's probably a super bad idea.

I only do that with people that I like and trust.

I think even beyond just the legal side of it, you can just trust people. Sometimes things will go wrong, and you will get taken advantage of. But it's a much better way to live to just trust people by default.

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I'm about to move out of my current office and into a new space, so I've been capturing lots of furniture and shelving ideas. Expect to see a lot of those coming up.

I doubt very much that I could afford something this gorgeous just for an office, but hey, a guy can dream!

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I definitely thought this was a Johnny Cash original, so maybe I'm not quite the biggest music aficionado.

Even if you've heard the song, I encourage you to watch the video. There's something really haunting about it. I think particularly because he's so old here and looks so old, and his wife, June, is in the background of this video.

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I feel this deeply, yes with writing, but also with my great project ideas.

When a project idea is just a project, you haven't made any compromises. There's no struggle, you get to just build this artifice in your head.

Then when you put hands to keyboard, or I guess in this case, voice to agents, you have to actually start struggling with the limitations of the thing that was in your head or your ability to express it the way that you wanted.

The thing is, when it's just stuck in your head, it's not real, so it doesn't even matter.

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I grapple less and less these days with the role of a software developer in the age of AI because I've seen software developers use AI, I've seen non-engineers use AI, and I still believe that the best products are going to be created by traditional engineers supplemented by AI.

So, I don't think we're going to be useless. I just think there's so much that these models can't do that still requires humans to have their hands on the wheel.

I do think that this is very true in that if you are a software developer or engineer who does not start using the new tools, there's a chance that you will become decreasingly relevant or decreasingly productive in the next couple of years.

So, lament that if you will. But I would encourage you to embrace the new tools to your advantage.

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I have a blog post called Do Literally Anything. This is sort of a spiritual cousin to that, and that is: do everything.

It's a short article on Twitter, I would encourage you to click through and read it.

The premise is basically that if you do everything, you will win. So at the end of your task, if you ask yourself, "Did you do everything?" the answer to that question is almost always no, and there's always something more that you can do. Usually, you know exactly what that thing is.

So if you're stuck, do literally anything. If you're desperate to win, do everything.

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Unfortunately, this is still in the Kickstarter phase, and so the jury is still out on whether this ever actually ships.

But there are few things I love more than a modular system, and this one is a modular system for a sit-stand desk with lots of different accessories and options and shelving and drawers and all of that.

So I hope they make it to mass production because this is right up my alley.

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Another good option for both storage and room dividers.

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This is similar to the Do Literally Anything concept, which is great.

Ideas are the output of the work, not the input. So if you feel stuck, sit down and do anything. Then once you get moving, progress begets progress, motion begets motion, and soon you'll be on a roll.

And you encounter more ideas when you're moving. It is very hard to sit still and come up with great ideas.

I've always found that trying to solve one problem opens the door to infinitely more problems. There are way too many problems in the world that need solving.

I found the best way to discover those problems is to start with literally any problem. Then you bump into perhaps a more valuable or a more painful or a more resonant problem that you can spend your time on.

All of that comes from work. Very rarely from divine inspiration.

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That’s it for this week! I enjoy reading all of your replies, so if you see something interesting or just have a thought you want to share, please hit reply and let me know.

Talk soon,
Aaron