It’s been an interesting few weeks.

My pelvis is now home to four shiny new titanium screws. 👇

If it looks like a piece of my pelvis is sticking out, that’s because it is. My (incredibly careful and talented) surgeon literally chiseled off my hip socket.

It was like… completely unattached from the rest of my body. 😬

Loosey goosey. Flubbly bubbly. Swimmy whimmy. My whole leg was just sort of… out there.

Then he screwed me back together in a new position.

Surgeons are pretty ballsy. But sometimes, they’re kinda assholes. 🤷

🍻 THE DRUNK BUSINESS ADVICE 

👉 Just because an expert has earned merit, does not mean they deserve trust.

👉 Sometimes the expertise we think we need isn’t the kind of expertise that will truly solve our problems.

👉 The most dangerous advice is the kind that comes wrapped in prestige and indifference.

And now — the story behind why this advice matters. 👇️ 

But first…

Turning problems into wine 🍷

This week’s reader question 👇️ 

“No disrespect, but is it safe to run a real business on a no-code tech stack?”

–Michelle, Detroit

What Jesus has to say 👇️ 

Short answer — absolutely.

Longer answer — no-code is often more secure than hiring some random developer overseas on Fiverr or Upwork.

With those guys, your data and app could be hosted god-knows-where, using god-knows-what kind of tech.

But of course, that’s what you’d expect me to say. So what actually makes it “secure”?

No-code tools fully encrypt your data using state-of-the-art hosting like AWS or Google Cloud Platform. Many go a step further, getting SOC 2 certification, GDPR, HIPAA, and stuff like that. 

It doesn't make sense to start from scratch, hosting your app locally or even on the cloud yourself, when these platforms provide all that and more for less than a hundred bucks a month.

The real risk isn’t no-code — it’s wasting $100k and 9 months on custom development when your business needs to launch, learn, and iterate.

I’d love a chance to prove it to you. Let’s jump on a call.

-Jesus

Have a tech question? Get an answer from Jesus + get featured in an upcoming issue!

Jesus Vargas is the owner of LowCode Agency, a badass software development agency that builds custom apps twice as fast, and for half the cost, of traditional software developers. Each week, Jesus answers your tech questions. His sponsorship of Drunk Business Advice keeps this content free. 🙏 

It should have been the best time of my life

To be fair, it still sort of was.

The crisp New England November was buzzing as I reconnected with my classmates. I hadn’t seen them since we were (literally) the last students to be forced to leave campus in a chaotic Covid craze calm fashion—

A year and a half earlier. 📅

The world had been to hell and back since then, and had taken us with it. Some of my friends weren’t even able to make it back to their home countries, as we all scattered away from Boston in March of 2020. 

Boarders shuttered. Businesses halted. People died. 😔

The indefinite postponement of our upcoming graduation seemed piddly compared to the apocalyptic hellscape that had been set upon us.

But we had somehow managed to make it through all that, and found ourselves back together at Harvard for our final term. It felt impossibly euphoric.

And it didn't matter that we had early classes every morning — we stayed up way too late, and drank way too much. Every. Single. Night. 🍻

We deserved it. We were finally graduating from the most prestigious executive real estate program in the world.

Then, about a week before graduation, I woke up and… couldn’t lift my left leg. 

I used my body weight to swing myself out of bed, stood up, and immediately crippled over. My left hip couldn’t bear weight without paralyzing pain.

But I grimaced and limped to class — for two reasons:

1. I had been dealing with hip pain for 20 years (albeit not this bad for a long time).
   

2. And I wasn’t going to miss a single moment of my final week at Harvard.

Let’s rewind 20 years…

My first career was in competitive figure skating—

A sport that can best be described as “gymnastics on knives”.

I spent my days flinging myself high into the air, rapidly rotating my body at 400 RPMs, and trying to land gracefully on a narrow 3mm blade.

On ice. ⛸️ 

Again. And again. And again. And again.

Sometimes I would land. Sometimes I would crash with the same downforce as a grand piano, splintering onto a frozen sidewalk.

In 2001, two weeks before the first major competition of the season, I fell in practice on a triple salchow — and immediately knew something was wrong.  I was accustomed to taking hard falls, but this was a deep pain that knocked me completely out of focus.

But my music was playing, and my coach was yelling at me to finish my program, so I got up, and skated through the pain.

A couple of weeks later, despite knowing in my heart that I was seriously injured, I boarded a flight to Pittsburgh to compete — gobbling up ibuprofen like jelly beans, and buzzed on teenage bravado.

But when I returned home (with no medals to show for my valiant efforts), my mother was not going to take any more of my shit. She rushed me to the doctor, who took some x-rays.

A few hours later, she received a phone call from the doctor’s office informing her that she could stop by before the end of the day to pick up my wheelchair.

Um. What?

Turns out, the orthopedist who reviewed my x-rays wasn’t the same doctor who had examined me — and based on what the x-rays were showing, he didn’t even believe I was walking.

Because I had broken my goddamn hip. Three weeks earlier. 🤦

In the 20 years since the tumultuous tumble I took as a teen, my hip pain had treated me like a moody ex — generally quiet, but fully prepared to ruin my day with one wrong move.

Until it smashed through my wall like the Kool-Aid man during my last week at Harvard.

Dr. Dismissive

✅ I graduated. 

✅ I celebrated. 

✅ And I got through it all with the help of some incredible friends who pootled me around, arm in arm, never once making me feel like a burden. ♥️

Upon arriving home, I made an appointment with the Chair of Orthopedics at a prominent NYC hospital. This guy was dripping with accolades, having pioneered major advancements in orthopedic surgery throughout his impressive 40+ year career.

I went to my appointment, got some x-rays, then patiently waited in the exam room for the person who (I hoped) would be my savior.

His highness eventually waltzed in, barely made eye contact, and dismissively snorted “you’re too young to be seeing me.”

Um. Ok. Do you want me to… leave?

I tried to tell him about my long history with hip pain, dating back to my old figure skating injury, and he cut me off—

“This has nothing to do with your old injury. You have hip dysplasia, and you’re too young for a hip replacement. You’ve just got to figure out a way to manage the pain.”

Hip dysplasia? What am I—  a golden retriever? I had no idea this condition existed in humans.

The appointment lasted all of five minutes, but at least Dr. Dismissive ordered an MRI to see if there was anything else going on outside of the skeletal dysplasia that my x-ray had picked up.

Then he was suspiciously unavailable to review the results. His office never returned a single phone call.

I questioned myself — when I should have been questioning him

I felt totally ignored. I was totally ignored.

But I also felt like maybe I was making a bigger deal out of the pain than I should be. It had subsided a lot since my flare-up in Boston, but a few months later, one precarious side-squat in the gym threw me right back into perpetual, dizzying pain.

I decided to try physical therapy—

Which turned out to be a $600-per-session-giant-waste-of-time-and-money — and my pain was just amplifying. 

My fitness routine went to shit. My diet went to shit. My mental health went to shit. 

I ballooned 40lbs — and with every pound I gained, and every day of inactivity I endured, my pain and immobility got worse.

I was spiraling. 

At 37, I didn’t want to go on pain meds while I waited a decade (or more) to be old enough for a hip replacement, but I figured there must  be a way to treat the pain without wrecking my liver or risking opioid addiction in the process.

So I began researching top pain management physicians, and found a video of anesthesiologist Dr. Sadiah Siddiqui, discussing how she approaches pain management for her patients. 

Beyond highlighting options like nerve-blockers and trigger-point injections, this woman oozed empathy. ❤️‍🩹

And after getting blown off by Dr. Dismissive, I needed empathy as much as I needed a treatment plan.

The Dream Team

I was able to get an appointment with Dr. Siddiqui, where she attentively listened to everything I had been through, and how it was impacting my life. 

After some diagnostic imaging, she determined:

1. My hip dysplasia was severe, and I also had a femur impingement that was exacerbating it.
   

2. My skeletal conditions had caused all kinds of soft-tissue injuries like a shredded labrum, and a giant ball of scar tissue inside my hip.
   

3. And most importantly – “pain management” would be the worst treatment plan for me… 

Because there was a combination of surgical interventions that might literally cure me of everything that I was suffering from. And none of them were a hip replacement.

Dr. Siddiqui referred me to her surgical colleagues at Hospital for Special Surgery (the #1 rated orthopedic hospital in the country), where I quickly learned that I was a perfect candidate for these procedures, and that HSS was home to the top surgeons who perform them.

JFC. 🤦

It had been two years since I had seen Dr. Dismissive, believing that his 40+ years of experience, and many marks of merit, positioned him as someone I should trust.

👉 Two years of pain, immobility, and weight gain. 

👉 Two years of believing that my pain, immobility, and weight gain weren’t valid symptoms of my medical condition, and that it was all my fault for “letting myself go”. 

👉 Two years of shame. 😔

But now I was in the hands of Dr. Ernest Sink, the Chair of Hip Preservation (not “replacement”) and Dr. Danyal Nawabi, a sports orthopedist who understood the unique needs of athletes (even old, fat ones).

I cannot express how validating it felt when these guys said “Yes, there’s a bunch of shit wrong with you — no wonder you’re in so much pain,” and “Yes, we can fix it.” 

I also got to work with angels like Dr. Theodore Miller, who administered transformative steroid injections in the months before surgery. In response to my tears of joy from the pain relief he provided me, he gave me a giant hug and said “This is what I love to see.” 🥹

Y’all — it’s been a grind and a half. And I have a long recovery ahead.

But this experience has been a profound reminder that just because an expert has earned merit, does not mean they deserve trust.

👉 This is as true in business as it is in medicine. 

While it’s a good start to seek out experts who are bolstered by “social proof”, due diligence shouldn’t end there — especially if the expert is telling you something that just doesn’t feel right.

Sometimes the expertise we think we need isn’t the kind of expertise that will truly solve our problems. And the most dangerous advice is the kind that comes wrapped in prestige and indifference.

So instead of blindly trusting experts, trust people who:

• Listen to understand

• Admit what they don’t know

• And loop in others who are better suited to help

I’m abundantly grateful that I found Dr. Siddiqui, who set the wheels in motion for me to receive the treatment I needed — even though it wasn’t the type of treatment she specialized in. ♥️

Cheers! 🍻

-Kristin :-)

P.S. — I also have to thank my husband so hard, it should count as cardio. He’s been my dutiful caregiver though all of this. And I’m not easy to care for. Love you, babe. ❤️ 

And don’t forget, this newsletter is FREE because of Jesus Vargas, and his team at LowCode Agency — so show ‘em some love!

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Whether you need help building an MVP, creating software to run your business, or even just a badass website, I highly recommend the savvy team over at LowCode!