Articles by Andy Budd
Except they usually don’t. The problem is that your prospective customers are busy doing their actual jobs. Most of them don’t know your product exists, and even if somebody sends them a link, investigating a new piece of software is just another thing on an already long list. Their existing software might be annoying, but it probably works. Maybe your product genuinely is 10–20% better. But is it…
Designers tend to prefer System 2. We want to slow things down, look at the problem from several angles, do some research and test a few models before committing. We often wait until we feel 90 per cent sure before pulling the trigger. Partly because we know that, despite all the talk of agile development and continuous iteration, many decisions are effectively permanent. The team moves on, the…
We might ask whether there’s any research behind the claim. We might suggest treating it as a hypothesis and testing it. We might point out that confidence and correctness are not the same thing. The problem is that words like research , hypothesis and testing do not sound decisive. They sound slow. They sound like someone has interrupted a moment of agreement to reopen the question. From the…
Founders often labor under the belief that once their product is ready, beta customers will come flooding in. This is often described as The Field of Dreams fallacy from the movie of the same name. In the movie, our hero—Kevin Costner—is woken with a vision; If he builds a baseball diamond in his corn field, “they will come”. While founders are rarely visited by apparitions, they often have a…
But when done right, PR can be a game-changer. A well-placed article can lead to new customers, potential hires, strategic partners, and even investors. The trick? Stop thinking about press as a one-time event and start treating it as a long-term relationship. Here’s how to get journalists to actually care about your startup. Step 1: Stop Cold Emailing. Start Building Relationships. Imagine you…
Getting External Help One way around this is to spend some time in the company of a good designer. Get them to explain what good looks like to them; so what should you look for in a portfolio; what questions should you ask at the interview; and what characteristics and attributes should you be trying to ascertain? Maybe ask them to walk through a couple of CVs or portfolios and tell you what they…
I’m not entirely sure I deserved to be in such esteemed company, but I was lucky to blag a spot from my friend and event organiser Jeff Veen. The gathering brought to life that old, slightly overused William Gibson line: “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.” It gets quoted so often that it can feel a bit tired, but sitting in that room, it felt unusually apt. Not because…
Most digital product teams have been running some version of the same process for years. A problem gets shaped somewhere between product, design and leadership. Research may or may not happen. Designers explore a few flows, tidy them into something presentable, turn them into a Figma prototype, run them through critique, package them up for engineering and then spend the next few weeks explaining…
There is a lot of low-quality content kicking around at the moment, especially on LinkedIn. Much of it feels inauthentic and poorly considered. Like somebody asked their LLM to “write me a thought piece about leadership” and then published the first response without reading it properly. Nobody needs more of that. But I think there’s much more to AI-assisted writing than this comment suggests. I’ve…
That world has largely disappeared. Today, if you want to start a business and you do not already have assets, the options get thin very quickly. Banks are not generally queueing up to fund unproven new businesses with no collateral. Younger founders are less likely to own property, and if they do, they tend to own it later in life, with more debt attached. The old mechanism of “borrow against the…