The Curious Engineer

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Karl Hughes

karllhughes.com

Buying and Scaling Digital Service Businesses

GeneralEngineering management / careers

’15’20’25
Posts
183 from 5 Dec 2013 to 21 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (10 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://www.karllhughes.com/feed.xml

2026 10

  1. SEO for Startups: A Practical Guide for Lean Teams
  2. Scaling to $1 million: What You Need to Do to Beat 91% of Businesses
  3. Prioritizing Small Business Employee Benefits for Entrepreneurs
  4. What a $1 Million Podcast Production Company Looks Like
  5. Why We’re Buying Multiple Podcast Production Companies This Year
  6. Service Fulfillment: How Agencies Deliver Work Without Losing Margin
  7. Founder Burnout: How to Build a Business You Can Sustain
  8. What’s the Deal with All These Linkedin Marketing Agencies?
  9. Growing an AI SEO Agency in 2026
  10. The Three Phases of Transitioning Post-Acquisition

2025 8

  1. Rebuilding Our Content Business for 2026 and Beyond
  2. Using the Airtable API
  3. How to Sell Your Digital Marketing Agency
  4. Building a Business Without Slack
  5. Best Remote Job Boards for Agencies to Find Talent
  6. Entrepreneurial Leadership: Inspiring, Aligning, and Managing Your Team
  7. The Role of Fear in Entrepreneurship
  8. Agency Finance 101: Insights from the CFOs

2024 7

  1. Belief => Actions => Results
  2. 15 Alternatives to Google Forms
  3. Security Tips for Early Stage Startups
  4. Setting up a Remote Development Environment with Google Chrome and DigitalOcean
  5. Sayers vs. Showers
  6. Should You Build a SaaS for Agencies?
  7. The Cold Sales Trap

2023 8

  1. Decision Fear and Decision Fatigue
  2. How Do Open Source Companies Make Money?
  3. Why 2023 Was My Hardest Year So Far
  4. Defining a Big Vision
  5. Delegation 101
  6. How Generative AI Will Change Content Marketing
  7. 15 Things I've Learned About Founder Sales
  8. Buying a Business: Acquiring The Podcast Consultant

2022 12

  1. Empathetic Leadership: Finding the Problem Under the Problem
  2. Parenting While Entrepreneuring
  3. On Taking Breaks
  4. Startup Leadership: Setting Goals and Getting Buy-in
  5. 24 Startup CTO Interview Questions
  6. Paths Up the Mountain
  7. How to Hire at a Startup
  8. You Want to Start a Business, but do You Really Want to be a CEO?
  9. The 8 Types of Entrepreneurship
  10. Creating Your First Affiliate Marketing Website [Checklist]
  11. Startup Funding Without Giving Up Equity
  12. Productivity for Entrepreneurs

2021 32

  1. How Niching Down Can Help Your Business Grow
  2. 10 Years of Indie Hacking to an Overnight Success
  3. Best Books to Read in Your 20s to Advance Your Career
  4. Becoming a Senior Software Engineer
  5. Why Marketing Management is so Hard in Startups
  6. Using Trello for Project Management
  7. 20 Questions to Ask an Entrepreneur Before Joining Their Startup
  8. Q&A: Decreasing Risk as an Entrepreneur
  9. What Does It Take to Become a Serial Entrepreneur?
  10. API Development: The Complete Guide for Building APIs Without Code
  11. Q&A: Common Mistakes Growing Small Business Owners Make
  12. The Startup Tools I Can't Live Without
  13. Managing Direct Reports at a Startup
  14. JotForm vs. Wufoo: Comparing Two of the Top Form Builders
  15. How We Found Our First 30 Clients
  16. Wufoo vs. Google Forms for Business
  17. The Entrepreneur's Salary Guide
  18. Sprint Planning and Agile Metrics
  19. Finding a Great Business Advisor
  20. Alternatives to Basecamp for Project Management
  21. The 15 Best Books for New Managers
  22. The Best Startup Project Management Tools
  23. Starting a Software Startup the Lean Way
  24. The Best Software Engineering Books
  25. The Startup Website List: 25 Inspirational Examples
  26. What to do After Your Coding Bootcamp
  27. In Defense of Simple Business Models
  28. The Best Project Management Books
  29. What to Expect from a Coding Bootcamp
  30. Using the Bubble App Builder to Launch Your Startup Faster
  31. What it's Really Like Working for a Startup
  32. High Tech vs. Tech-Enabled Startups

2020 19

  1. The Best Management Books
  2. Building a Great Startup Culture
  3. How to Find a CTO: Tips for Non Technical Founders
  4. Laravel Forge: Deploy Laravel Applications Fast
  5. The World Needs a Non Profit Search Engine
  6. The Best Startup Books for Founders
  7. Testing Microservices: A Layered Testing Strategy
  8. Defining Trends of the 2020s
  9. The Importance of Software Testing
  10. Recruiting and Hiring Software Engineers
  11. Essential Reading for Startup CTOs
  12. The Danger in Listening to Experts
  13. The One Reason Software Engineers Should Write
  14. Why I Left a Career as a Startup CTO to Become a Writer
  15. Farmers, Pioneers and Software Engineers
  16. How to Start Freelance Technical Blogging
  17. Building a Resilient Career
  18. Managing a Remote Engineering Team
  19. The Evolution of Our Product Management Process

2019 4

  1. Developing New Engineers
  2. PHP Architect 2019 Contributions
  3. On Diversity in Conference Speakers
  4. Essential Reading for Software Engineering Managers

2018 11

  1. The Myths You’ll Hear About Working as an Engineer at a Startup
  2. Using Postman to Access APIs Without Code
  3. The Many Roles of a Startup CTO
  4. Using Medium for Your Startup's Blog
  5. Say No
  6. Stop Working and Let Someone Else Build It
  7. The Bulk of Software Engineering is Just Plumbing
  8. Web Applications: The Guide for Building Webs Apps Without Code
  9. The Age of Cloud Services
  10. Writing Less Software to Accomplish More
  11. Building a Free Website on the GABA Stack - A Spin on JAM Stack

2017 33

  1. API Testing Presentation at API Strategy & Practice Conference
  2. Beginner PHP Resources
  3. Startup Employees Still Need a Financial Plan
  4. The Side Project Marketing Checklist: Making it Go Viral
  5. Prioritization is Always Relative
  6. Knowing Your Startup's Technical Maturity Level
  7. Knowing When Your Business is Ready to Launch
  8. Continuous Integration on a Budget
  9. Five Takeaways from Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
  10. Roadblocks to Project Estimation
  11. Peopleware: All Technology Problems are Really People Problems
  12. Trello as a Reading List
  13. Keeping Goals Manageable
  14. Why the Textbook Industry is Ripe for a Technological Revolution
  15. The Risk in Sending Your Startup's Technology Offshore
  16. The Secret to Staying Employed: Be Indispensable
  17. The Myth of the Hero
  18. Colleges API: A Database and REST API of Accredited Colleges in the United States
  19. Health as a Long Term Investment in Your Success
  20. Dealing with Fear and Uncertainty
  21. Everybody's Got an Idea. Ideas Suck. Action Doesn't.
  22. Marketing isn't about Content Creation, it's about Platform Creation
  23. The Power of Responsiveness - Web Design for Multiple Platforms
  24. How Startups Know When They've Got the Technology Right
  25. Stress a Little, It's Okay
  26. The Key to Success: Never Stop Learning
  27. Placing Blame: Internally or Externally
  28. Determining the Value of Online Data
  29. My Beef With Twitter: Taking the Engagement Out of Social Media
  30. Where Have All the Business Models Gone?
  31. Training for Focus: 4 Ways to Keep Your Eyes on the Big Picture
  32. Community Is About Engagement, Not Size
  33. Business Blogging Without the Lies

2016 9

  1. My PHP Open Source Project Checklist
  2. Messaging as a Platform
  3. Planning for Retirement While Working at a Startup
  4. Joining The Graide Network as Chief Technology Officer
  5. How Microservices Help Enforce Domain Driven Design
  6. Using Docker to Run a Laravel Application in PHP7
  7. 5 Things I Learned at Midwest PHP 2016
  8. Bedrock: Bringing Modern PHP to Wordpress
  9. Sub 1-Second Page Load Time in Wordpress

2015 5

  1. Accessing Job Board APIs in PHP
  2. Textbook Prices: Packback's Open Source Price Comparison Tool
  3. Packbot: Helping our Business Access Data at Packback
  4. Moonclerk Recurring Payments PHP Library
  5. An Update on Engineering at Packback

2013 1

  1. On Leaving Uloop for Packback Books

Undated 24

  1. Working hours
  2. Scaling services
  3. Startup consulting
  4. Maximizing for energy
  5. Ai change agencies
  6. Payroll software tools
  7. Entrepreneur books
  8. Buying product market fit
  9. Why you cant hire your way out of sales
  10. Stealth startup
  11. Side project ideas
  12. Seo software for agencies
  13. What im learning about aeo
  14. Tpc acquires sundial media
  15. Agency profitability
  16. Billable hours productization
  17. Best eor companies 2026
  18. Content creation agency 2026
  19. Ipad entrepreneur
  20. 10 web app builders
  21. The key to networking keeping in touch
  22. What i learned first two years podcasting
  23. Podcast tools
  24. Tpc acquires rise25