Thoughts — Building Products [Mischa Sigtermans](https://mischa.sigtermans.me) [ Thoughts ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thoughts) [ Books ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/books) [ About ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/about) [← Index](https://mischa.sigtermans.me)Thoughts ======== On vertical software, AI tooling, the music industry, and what I got wrong along the way. From a decade of building products and selling two companies before 30. 2026 ---- [ I gave frustrated Tesla owners a place to go, 1.250 showed up in 24 hours I built the HW3 Claim website over a weekend, posted one tweet, and 1.250 Tesla owners from 21 countries signed up in a day. Over a million euros in documented FSD purchases. Zero budget. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/hw3claim-1250-owners-in-24-hours) [ Every setting in my Claude Code config, explained My full settings.json, every environment variable, every hook, every plugin. The setup I use across six projects and what each line actually does. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/my-claude-code-settings) [ Opus 4.6 is the best model I've ever used In February I said Opus would come back. It did. The squeeze you felt in March wasn't Opus 4.6. It was Claude Code bugs, a popularity spike, and Mythos pulling compute. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/opus-4-6-is-the-best-model-ive-ever-used) [ Generic AI is a commodity, expert AI isn't Everyone has access to the same models. That's not a moat. The moat is domain expertise, proprietary workflow, and the context that only an insider can encode. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/generic-ai-is-a-commodity) [ How I saved 4.7 billion tokens with a Claude Code hook A Claude Code hook routes my bash commands through rtk, a CLI proxy that strips token waste before it hits the model. 4.7 billion tokens saved across 9,343 commands. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/how-i-saved-billions-of-tokens-with-a-claude-code-hook) [ What I learned when our joint venture fell apart The Stagent and Artwin joint venture didn't work. Two solopreneurs, one ship, and the hard lesson that shared passion doesn't make a shared company. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/what-i-learned-when-our-joint-venture-fell-apart) [ Opus didn't get worse, you're watching economics in real-time Everyone's saying Opus got worse since Christmas. It didn't. Anthropic is tuning the parameters around the model to survive subsidized subscriptions. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/opus-didnt-get-worse) [ My simplified Ralph loop setup for Claude Code Three files to autonomous coding. A simplified Ralph loop setup that works across any project with Claude Code. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/my-simplified-ralph-loop-setup-for-claude-code) [ How I set up my Claude Code status line I built a custom Claude Code status line that shows git info, context usage, and turns red at 80%. Here's my setup and why each piece matters. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/how-i-set-up-my-claude-code-status-line) [ Everyone's giving Cowork everything, and thanking it after Within 24 hours, people handed Claude Cowork their tax documents, emails, and files. Then they posted about it. Here's what nobody's asking. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/everyones-giving-cowork-everything) [ Taylor Otwell is immortal and costs $200/month I built a Claude Code agent that channels Taylor Otwell's Laravel philosophy. Here's how it catches over-engineering and teaches me to write better code. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/taylor-otwell-is-immortal-and-costs-200-month) 2025 ---- [ The most skeptical about AI haven't shipped with it AI skepticism correlates with consumption vs creation. People who read about AI see failures. People who build with it see both, and that changes everything. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/ai-skeptics-havent-shipped-anything) [ Launching Onoma alpha: building AI memory that actually works We're launching Onoma, an AI memory layer that works across every model. Why we built it, why it's European-only, and what's next for Ryde's first venture. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/launching-onoma-alpha) [ Stagent Wrapped: a year of shows, airports, and cities in one page Spotify Wrapped shows you how much music you listened to. Stagent Wrapped shows you how much music you made. Here's how we built it, and why the data was already waiting. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/building-stagent-wrapped) [ Why I built Laravel TOON (and how it saves 60% on LLM tokens) I was burning tokens on nested JSON in Stagent. Existing TOON packages didn't flatten nested objects. So I built Laravel TOON. Here's how it saves 40-60%. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/why-i-built-laravel-toon) [ Joining Ryde Ventures as partner and chief product officer After a decade of building agencies, SaaS products, and learning from failures, I'm joining Ryde Ventures as Partner and CPO. The relationship behind the decision goes back to 2014. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/joining-ryde-ventures-as-partner-and-chief-product-officer) [ Nightshift: why Friday's gig is on Saturday Every generic calendar tool thinks in calendar days. The music industry thinks in nights. Here's why we built a Stagent feature called Nightshift. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/nightshift-why-fridays-gig-is-on-saturday) 2024 ---- [ Why I built True Identity (and why I sold it) Years before Stagent existed, I ran a booking agency and needed software nobody had built. Years after that, I needed a real test case for Stagent. True Identity was both. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/why-i-built-and-sold-true-identity) [ What a 12-year-old taught me about success I rewatched Big and recognized myself in the wrong character. One question from a 12-year-old is the sharpest product test I know. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/what-a-12-year-old-taught-me-about-success) [ The painkiller test: how I decide what to build next Every feature is either a painkiller or a vitamin. Painkillers solve problems users must solve. Vitamins make life a little better. The ratio is the roadmap. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/the-painkiller-test) 2023 ---- [ Stagent and Artwin join forces for the future of bookings After years of building Stagent, we're joining forces with Artwin to create the leading booking platform in the Netherlands. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/stagent-artwin-joint-venture) [ How I secured funding for my startup From a €10k angel check with no paperwork to €240k in convertible notes. Every euro I raised for Stagent came through people who already knew me. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/how-i-secured-funding-for-my-startup) 2022 ---- [ How working out 5 times a week changed my life I stopped chasing fitness goals and made going to the gym the goal itself. The shift from outcomes to systems changed everything about how I work, eat, and build. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/how-working-out-5-times-a-week-has-changed-my-life) [ Why perfectionism was my worst enemy Perfectionism looked like quality from the outside. From the inside it was missed deadlines, impossible delegation, and a web agency that couldn't scale past one person. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/why-perfectionism-was-my-worst-enemy) [ Why I decided to sell my web agency I built Pixelstart from a hobby into a one-person web agency with 100+ sites, $10k MRR, and clients like Headhunterz and Enzo Knol. Then I realized I was building a job, not a business. ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/why-i-decided-to-sell-my-web-agency) Connect ------- [X](https://x.com/mischamartijn) [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/in/mischasigtermans) [GitHub](https://github.com/mischasigtermans) © 2026 · [RSS](feed:https://mischa.sigtermans.me/feed)