Essays on privacy,
building,
and the open web.

The playbook we actually use. No newsletter popup.What we've learned shipping our own products and building for founders. No affiliate links. No newsletter popup. Just the playbook we actually use.

featured · PrivacyApr 10, 20266 min read

The web is not free. It's just on someone else's credit card.

You're not the customer. You're not even the product. You're the rent. Here's why we're betting everything on self-hosted, open source tools, and why you should care.

by The Zippytal team·Builders

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Growth·7 min read

How we got trader-lab.com to 2,000 users with €0 in ads

No budget. No paid acquisition. No growth hacks. Just a product people wanted to tell their friends about. Here's what we actually did.

Playbook·8 min read

The AI Code Academy funnel: how we generated €10k from a small cohort

Traffic isn't the bottleneck. Conversion is. Here's the three-tier upsell funnel we built for AI Code Academy, and the one mistake most course creators make.

Engineering·9 min read

Why we built Zippytal Nodes instead of another SaaS

Every modern tool is a front end for someone else's servers. We decided that was the bug, not the feature, and designed a tiny daemon that turns your own hardware into infrastructure.

Security·5 min read

End-to-end encryption, without the math

E2EE isn't magic. It's not a button either. Here's what it actually means, what it doesn't protect, and the three questions to ask before you believe a tool that claims it.

Guides·6 min read

Five questions to ask before picking a communication tool for your team

Zoom, Slack, Discord, Teams. They all look the same on a feature sheet. Here are five questions that actually separate them, and the answers most buyers skip.

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Essays on privacy,building,and the open web.