At the end of April last year, my wife had Finn on her chest after an impressive 20 minutes of pushing — my brother-in-law later remarked he often has longer bathroom breaks. This seemingly joyous moment was, frankly, terrifying. The doctors and nurses descended on my wife with a focused intensity — I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew it wasn’t good. While I was congratulating her and batting away terrible thoughts, the doctor and nurses saved her life. Looking back, I do remember the joy of meeting my son and how impressed I was with my wife, but mostly, I remember the stress.

The night before, we had come to the hospital to induce labor. Around 1 a.m., a lady visited us to process insurance. I proudly told her we could use my insurance, as my new employer had amazing benefits. She asked my wife if she was employed and had insurance. Between contractions, my wife responded yes, but that she would rather not use her insurance, because the deductible was $10,000. Without emotion, the lady asked for my wife’s insurance card. We thought she was just checking something, but she swiped it, told us to watch the mail for the bill, and left. A nurse then came into the room and let us know we should get some sleep because tomorrow was going to be a long day.

Seeing the worry in my wife’s eyes, I lied. “I’m not worried,” I said. Once the drugs knocked her out, I went to work. We didn’t have $10,000, so I spent the night learning how we had accidentally over-insured ourselves, which apparently is a bad thing. I also researched what our car was worth, whether we could pull out money from retirement, and what the going interest rate was for a personal loan. I was in a full-on spiral when my wife woke up, and the nurses came in and said it’s game time.

While pondering my financial demise, I also enjoyed bonding with my son. Just thinking about his tiny hands grabbing my thumb brings me to tears. Every little squeak, face scrunch, and fart was cherished. Going in, I knew sleep would be difficult, but that knowledge didn’t help much. I distinctly remember telling the audiologist that I was listening despite having my eye mask on while wrapped in a blanket. The days blurred together until we were discharged. On the way home from the hospital, I cried from sheer happiness. We had become parents and had everything under control — sort of.

We arrived home to find our renovation had started. We had been so focused on the baby that I barely remembered we had scheduled a major renovation. It was then I remembered the phone call with my builder, where he said he had the permits and was ready to start pouring concrete. I told him to go right ahead while my wife’s contractions were speeding up. Now, coming back to the house, we had to navigate rocking a baby to sleep with the dulcet tones of workers outside. Our plan was to live as long as possible in our house, since I was trying to minimize the time spent with new landlords. Then the workers found black mold, and we had to immediately move in with my parents.

Granted, living rent-free under my parents' roof was financially helpful — but it came with pedantic reminders about the growing utility bill. When I offered to help offset the costs, my dad refused and let me know he was happy to do it. I look forward to the day I can hold stuff over Finn’s head, continuing a time-honored tradition of fatherhood. The 10% increase in utilities aside, living with my parents was great. There’s something special I didn’t anticipate with fatherhood: seeing the joy of my parents becoming grandparents. I know how much joy they felt because I felt the same thing too. Finn was lucky enough to live most of his first year with more than two parents.

Those summer and fall months with my parents were idyllic — seeing Finn learn new tricks such as babbling, crawling, and not choking on his food. The prized reactions from Finn were smiles and laughs. Looking back on my life before fatherhood, I would get close to this amount of joy maybe once a month. It’s comparable to cherished moments with friends, sports victories, or big life accomplishments. Now, I was getting these endorphin rushes 30 to 40 times a day. Finn saw me as the true comedian I am, one others have yet to discover. Basking in the warmth of fatherhood, I’d share my experiences with other parents, to which they’d say that’s great, but winter is coming.

In the span of two months, my happy family experienced Covid, RSV, flu, strep — and the absolute worst: norovirus. I’d easily trade getting the first four sicknesses two times over to avoid norovirus. Without getting into the shitty details, garments of clothing were discarded. Fluid retention became a constant background thread, with my main focus on Finn’s health. There is nothing worse than seeing your child sick. Riddled with ear infections, I’d squeeze every contact nap that I could. The one silver lining was being there for my son. It’s an amazing feeling to stop your son’s crying after he receives antibiotic shots.

It’s now spring and everyone is happy, healthy, and moved into our freshly renovated house. I should be able to pay off the addition just before I start paying for Finn’s college tuition. Navigating fatherhood has been challenging, but I’ve set up an appointment with my dermatologist to learn about hair loss treatment while avoiding the scale lest I suffer its reproach. At the same time, I know the happiest part of life has just started. Each day I wake up early and work through lunch so I can pick up Finn from daycare as soon as possible. We then get some reps in with the Nerf football to work on his (currently hilarious) hand-eye coordination. It’s 10:00 on a Friday night — two hours past my bedtime — and I should probably get to sleep. At 6:30 sharp, my best friend will be waiting.

After some time of being stuck I start to write more. I will sketch diagrams, break the problem into smaller problems, or highlight things I need to research. Doing this often helps me get to a solution. If not, my scratch pad becomes more of a frustration journal littered with expletives. The longer the problem goes unsolved the more liable I am to jump back to the keyboard and type for the sake of typing. Interestingly my handwriting becomes worse as I become more frustrated.

Eventually life will force me to step away, but I’ll fight it because I’m convinced in the next five minutes I’ll solve a problem I’ve been working on for hours. If I’m late to something it’s likely because I just couldn’t leave my work. However, leaving my computer is almost always the smart thing to do. When I come back my mental state has changed - one that is better suited for difficult problems. I will ask big picture questions, attack the problem from different angles, and will be more willing to learn the problem space on a deeper level. Frequently, the answer comes quickly and is painfully obvious. I just couldn’t see it when I had my flow state blinders on.

How can I get better at recognizing when I need to step away? I've identified a couple signs to watch out for, like my increasingly sloppy, profanity-laden handwriting and a decrease in job satisfaction. I also plan to reassess my perception of productivity - while it's easy to feel productive when I'm zipping around in a text editor, it's not always an accurate measure of real progress. To actually become that 10x engineer stepping away is a skill I need to work on.

How do other people know when they are getting stuck? If you have some good tips or tricks please let me know!

Fathom is a popular privacy focused analytics choice and at first glance seemed to fit my requirements. However, it doesn't show where goal converting visitors are coming from. At the bottom of the Fathom dashboard are goals with conversion rates based on all traffic. Unfortunately, there's no way to filter goal conversion by referrer, medium, source, or campaign. In 2020 the Fathom sample dashboard shows a visitor count of 529 and 412 frojm Facebook and Twitter, respectively. But it doesn't show if Facebook or Twitter traffic has more converting visitors because there's no filtering functionality. I did reach out to Fathom and they are working on solving the problem.

Like Fathom, Plausible is privacy friendly, but it also allows you to filter traffic. For example the Plausible sample dashboard for 2020 shows Hacker News as the top source with 67.6K visitors.

Clicking on the "Visit/register" goal at the bottom filters the top sources based on visitors who completed the goal. Now the top sources show Google at 2.4K visitors. Adding the "Google" source as an additional filter shows a conversion rate of 9%, which is some high quality traffic!

Deselecting "Google" and selecting "Hacker News" shows a 1.4% conversion rate.

Although there is more traffic from Hacker News, traffic from Google is higher quality. With Fathom I can't do a similar analysis between its Facebook and Twitter traffic. With Plausible I know where my goal converting traffic is coming from while respecting my visitors privacy! Also Plausible is slightly cheaper for me. Here are the Fathom and Plausible pricing pages for comparison.

Plausible strikes a good balance between privacy and goal tracking with attribution, which works for my current situation. I do wish Plausible had a better way to export data, and I'm excited to see an api is on their roadmap. I'll be keeping an eye on the Fathom changelog to see If I need to reassess my decision. In the future I may need a more granular tool, so I may reach for something like Matomo or roll out my own like Basecamp did. For now, those are overkill. As a solo founder building a simple plugin, Plausible is great and I recommend it to others in my situation.