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- A Guide to Claude Code 2.0, Laravel Deadlocks: Causes and Fixes, 25 Lessons from the first year of Solo Founders, The Real Economics of SaaS versus AI Companies & more
A Guide to Claude Code 2.0, Laravel Deadlocks: Causes and Fixes, 25 Lessons from the first year of Solo Founders, The Real Economics of SaaS versus AI Companies & more
Ahmad
January 04, 2026
Hey Makers 👋🎉
Happy New Year and welcome to 2026! 🎆
A new year means fresh ideas, new products, and another chance to finally ship that SaaS you’ve been thinking about. If you’re building this year, you’re already in the right mindset.
To kick things off, the SaaSykit Holidays discount is still live — but not for long.
This is your last chance to grab SaaSykit at a reduced price before the deal disappears and prices go back to normal.
If 2026 is the year you want to move faster, skip boilerplate work, and focus on what actually makes your product unique, now’s the time.
20% off SaaSykit Complete with the code CHEERS25.
Now let’s dive into the Laravel & SaaS world and catch up on everything the last two weeks have brought us. 👇
From the Community
This post is a follow-up to my post from July'25 - My Experience With Claude Code After 2 Weeks of Adventures. If you are new to Claude Code or just want a quick refresh, I am once again asking you to go through it. It covers some lore, my workflow back then and then 80-90% of the Claude Code standard workflow. You may choose to skip the intro although I recommend you read it. Lore is important man.
Imagine you’re building a new feature for your product.
Nothing huge—just a smarter way to explore property data, something like a lightweight Airbnb browser.
But instead of writing complex queries, you want developers to ask questions in natural language, like:
“Show me apartments in Barcelona under $100.”
“Find places in Porto with WiFi and at least 2 bedrooms.”
No syntax to remember.
No guesswork.
Just intent → result.
Laravel is a powerful and feature-rich PHP web application framework that provides numerous built-in functions, making it easier for developers to build and maintain their applications. While Laravel's official documentation covers many of its features, some lesser-known functions can be incredibly helpful in certain situations. In this article, we'll uncover some of these hidden gems and provide usage examples to help you make the most of Laravel's extensive capabilities.
Deadlocks show up once an app has enough traffic for queries to overlap. They rarely appear in development, which makes them frustrating to understand the first time you see one. Plus, deadlocks are hard to reproduce locally and even harder to diagnose after the fact.
Laravel adds its own twist here. The framework makes parallel work easy with queues, Horizon, scheduled tasks, and event dispatching, but that also means multiple processes start touching the same rows at the same time. A local setup with a single queue worker won’t reveal any of this. Production with 10 Horizon workers running jobs in parallel will.
Ever reach for a simple callback and end up writing a tiny novella—an arrow function stuffed with types, reordered parameters, and boilerplate just to pass one value through?
Laravel includes many built-in Artisan commands for creating Controllers, Models, Views, Seeders, and more. However, if you happen to want to quickly create stubs for patterns like Builders, Collections, Actions, Concerns, or Contracts, these aren’t in Laravel by default. To help with this, Punyapal Shah has put together a small and helpful package that provides commands to do just that.
aravel is a very performant framework, but a standard architecture has one big flaw derived from how PHP works: It has to rebuild the entire framework on every single request.
Even with optimizations, this process still takes 40 to 60 ms on my machine with PHP 8.4. Luckily, for years, the PHP and Laravel worlds have had a solution that dramatically reduces this load time: Laravel Octane and FrankenPHP. The booting time for the Laravel framework can drop to just 4 to 6 ms per request. Incredible, isn't it?
In this guide, you will learn how to pause and resume Laravel queue workers on demand. We will work in the context of long running queue:work processes managed from the CLI. You will see how to target specific connections and queues when pausing workers. You will also see how to pause queues indefinitely or for a fixed amount of time from both Artisan and application code.
All about SaaS
This year we launched the Solo Founders Program. We believed that building solo was more viable than conventional wisdom suggested.
It turned out we were right but off by an order of magnitude. Solo founding is not only viable, it's the future. It will eventually become the default.
Here are some things we learned about solo founding in 2025…
Starting and running early companies requires a series of prioritizations and tradeoffs of how to do a lot with a little bit, both of capital and time. Behind deep product insights are repetitive workflows core to how a business runs: email triage; competitive analysis; customer outreach; CRM updates; content creation; candidate screening. The tasks are consistent but take up an inordinate amount of energy.
So Navan finally went public in Q4’25. After years of confidential filings, pushed timelines, and a rebrand from TripActions, they rang the bell on October 30th, 2025.
And then the stock dropped 20% on Day One.
Today? It’s trading around $17. That’s 32% below the $25 IPO price. The company that was once valued at $9.2 billion in the private markets, that once dreamed of a $12 billion IPO, now sits at roughly a $4 billion market cap — at $800M ARR, growing almost 30%.
This article was born from my frustration with the "vitamin vs painkiller" metaphor, which is a prime example of perfect hindsight, non-actionable startup advice. As in: no founder sets out on the startup journey intending to build a vitamin; yet, it can be very difficult to come up with actionable "tests" of what's what. I try to list here a few very concrete tests that have helped me create more certainty.
Hey - It’s Nico.
Welcome to another Failory edition. Huge thanks to all 35,000+ of you who have been reading Failory this year!
This will be this year’s last edition. We’ll be back next year with more content on building products from scratch and step by step workflows you can copy to validate ideas fast, ship simple products, and automate growth. Our goal is to help you turn ideas into working products without hiring and to automate growth tasks that take a lot of time and budget. Stay tuned!
There is a lot of hype and clickbait out there on SaaS math versus AI math. And that SaaS companies are dead, and SaaS metrics are dead.
The tweet below got me thinking about SaaS economics versus AI economics. It’s a catchy take on AI versus SaaS. But is it true?
“AI companies running at 50–60% margins generate MORE absolute profit per customer. The math changed.”
Most founders think the hardest part of growth is getting to the first $1M. Martin Roth’s story is a reminder that a revenue leader’s job doesn’t get any less challenging as a startup scales—it gets harder in many ways, easier in some, and most importantly, what it takes to win changes radically.
If you read any sales book, you’ll see that the first part of a sales call - or even the whole first call - is supposed to be this very important thing called “discovery.”
In this “discovery” thing, we are supposed to ask questions. The prospect should respond with words. Their words should inform our pitch and demo.
At a high level, this makes sense. But what questions should we ask? What are we trying to learn?
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Keep building, keep rocking! 🤘