The philosophy of making products.
How do things go viral? Things go viral because people tell other people about them. That's it. Some people share because it makes them look smart, others because they want to appear not virtuous than they are. Some share in person, others retweet or add a review on Google Maps. It doesn't matter. As long as your users tell other people, you are going viral. This means we can optimize for going…
I reread this quote by @jakobgreenfeld every few weeks. It reminds be that I don't need to overly "plan", I just need to try things. "My biggest recent breakthrough was the realization that to move forward, I don’t have to read more books, watch more YouTube videos, or spend more time on Twitter. The only thing that leads to real progress is doing more experiments." But these days I'm getting more…
At the end of every year I do a big yearly review . I go through all my notes, look through all my photos, check my calendar and try to list out everything I did and learned. It takes a while, and it's always hard to finish. But it gives me a sense of control about what I am doing in life. 2025 was a year of Big Change. The changes haven't finished yet, so it's too early to tell if it was amazing…
Every day I read 5 quotes from my readwise library, and today it struck home: "Finish your projects for long enough, and you'll come to know a satisfaction that vanishingly few enjoy: a body of completed work spanning years or decades." — Aaron Francis For the longest time struggled with meaning in work. But around 2015 I realised, while looking back, that I was proud of what I had done. This…
Expertise is real, but fleeting. Expertise means you've done deep work to figure something out, but it's only valid in that specific context, and the thing you've figured out quickly grows stale as others discover new things. Expert is a lifestyle title. Being an expert on the other hand is like a badge of honor. People start believing they have expertise that trancendes contexts, jumping from…
Incentives reliably predict human behavior. Following the classic "Don't ask a barber if you need a haircut", what incentives shape our work in product development? Don't ask a product team if they need to build a new feature. Don't ask a PM if a metric needs to move Don't ask a developer if you need more coding time Don't ask a sales rep if you need more features Don't ask a designer if you need…
I've been lifting weights to look more like the <a href="https://static.vecteezy.com/system/resources/previews/023/175/774/non_2x/statue-of-david-by-michelangelo-florence-tuscany-italy-ai-generative-image-free-photo.jpg" target="_new">statue of David</a> since 2007. A few weeks ago, I came across this post on X. It caught my eye because I know stress hormones counteract recovery, but I had no idea…
We switched to decaf for a week to see how it impacted our stress, and it gave me more energy. My wife struggles with stress, and while I struggle less I have a lot left to learn. So when she suggested we switch our automatic espresso machine to decaf beans, I was excited to try it! I tried living without caffeine once before during covid . Apparently you need 10 days to be completely free of…
I recently came across the idea that taking action, any action , produces more information making it easier to think and make progress. So I wanted to put it to the test. For one week I set up reminders everywhere to be mindful of catching myself thinking about things. Yes, I labelled any thinking at all as "over thinking". My idea was that this approach would increase my offs of catching myself…
My biggest takeaway from Jony Ive talking at the Stripe conference: You can sense carelessness, as a customer. So it's reasonable to assume people can sense care.
Last weekend I read a thread on X asking the question what is the best novel ever , if you can only pick one? I don’t know. But it got me thinking about which books I recommend frequently, so I thought I'd share a list: The Count of Monte christo Only just read this as an adult, and it's an incredible novel. It reads like a historic fiction written today, and it's a wonderful exploration of human…
I catch myself scrolling up and down a piece of code. What was I doing? I'm so restless I can't sit still, I keep tabbing between projects. It was 3h since I was interrupted and I don't know what I've been doing since. Nothing wastes time like being overwhelmed. But there's a way out of this trap that is slowly gaining popularity. This method I first encountered as interstitial journaling , I…
I can't read these quote without getting angry. My skin crawls. My wife reminded me for a year before I dared start reading this book. I knew some of the history, so I knew I would be angry, depressed, even devestated by reading it. It was worse. There's no way to describe the soul crushing description of horror, that it's described so matter-of-factly, so normally, that it starts feeling like a…
Life can be made up of taken risks and crazy stories. Or regrets. Don’t let it be regrets.
I'm using this Grok prompt to stop playing mental games and switch from hobbyist to founder mindset. I haven't tried it with other models, but should work fine with all flagship models today. Act as my personal strategic advisor with the following context:You have an IQ of 180 You're brutally honest and direct You've built multiple billion-dollar companies You have deep expertise in psychology,…
How many push-ups could you do right now? <br /> But how many could you do if you took a ten-minute break between each set? <br /> Many more. <br /> That's the secret. <br /> Take tiny breaks when working, to go longer than most. <br /> — Derek Sivers I used to love Derek's writing. Not just his books but his blog too. At some point though, I think he ventured too far into the role of being a…
On international women’s day I was talking with my wife and realised there is no Patriarchy. Hear me out: The patriarchy is the idea that men hold all the power, and this has a bunch of limiting downstream effects. This is an insidious idea, that causes a lot of harm. Let’s dig into why. Marx had a lot of controversial ideas. One of his foundations is that politics always revolves around the…
I've been taking action poorly for a long time, and I didn't know why. This weekend I saw this clip on X where Charlie Morgan explains that copying others is a great way to learn and move faster. He believes we learn in school that we shouldn't copy others, we should figure out our own way of doing it. <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-media-max-width="560"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I literally…
I'm using this Grok prompt to stop playing mental games and switch from hobbyist to founder mindset. I haven't tried it with other models, but should work fine with all flagship models today. Act as my personal strategic advisor with the following context:You have an IQ of 180 You're brutally honest and direct You've built multiple billion-dollar companies You have deep expertise in psychology,…
I’ve had this theory that museums are made for other curators, not for visitors. And I found a way to test it! Think about it, when you last visited a museum or exhibit was it really a well made presentation of some aspect of art or history? Or was it a random collection of stuff, poorly explained with little placards that said very little but using many words? I’ve visited many exhibitions over…
I was invited to Aspiring Founders meetup #4 to talk about how I did rapid research at n8n and Volocopter. Only aobut a hundred people came to my talk, but it was fun to share! I shared my main learnings from a decade of research. Which can be boiled down to: Talk to the right people Ask good research questions Disprove your hypothesis Do NOT validate Download presentation
I actually read this book in 2024, it just took this long to come around to posting my notes. There's nothing like this book in the world. The Durant's spent decades creating a history of civilisation. This summary is a 100 page distillation of the patterns they discovered. Get the book yourself here (affiliate link) Notes We need privacy, because we're all struggling to be better than our nature:…
At the end of every year I do a big yearly review. I go through all my notes, look through all my photos, check my calendar and try to list out everything I did and learned. It takes a while, and it's always hard to finish. But it gives me a sense of control about what I am doing in life. Like so many other important things, I don't love doing it, but I love to have done it . 2024 was not a great…
I was thinking about why I was so terrible at doing work in my twenties. I spent them partying, reading, and arguing, but rarely very productively. And I think I realised something. In my twenties I would hang out with several different groups of friends. Often talking about creating something. But we never did. Because we didn’t know how. Learning how to make something requires you to learn at…
I've been listening to Founders podcast a lot, and the host recently mentioned a thought he's learned from Naval that made me think about specialization vs generalization. “Economic development specializes functions, differentiates ability, and makes men unequally valuable to their group. Remember, the more complex a civilization gets, the more you'll see inequality, so economic inequality, right?…
Learning from Dicke Bush: Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest. Progress comes from ruthless protection of momentum. The best way to keep momentum is to avoid things that kill it. Momentum is addicting and leads to more momentum. Lack of momentum is stagnating and leads to more stagnation. It takes way less effort to keep momentum than you think. It takes…
I've recently started listening to founders podcast. It's a good walkthrough of biographies of great founders. This last week I heard to separate ideas I think are related by two of my intellectual heroes, Charlie Munger and Steve Jobs. The Munger idea goes something like this: Problems are inevitable, solving problems is what business does. But avoiding problems that can be foreseen is wise,…
This tweet by Nat got me thinking: “Hard to say where the line is, but there's undeniably a degree of narcissism to the "self-improvement" "self-care" "self-work" arena. Maybe instead of obsessing over yourself so much you should be raising a kid or volunteering in an old folks home.” — Nat Eliason There is something true about this. We all need to work on ourselves, to improve. But often the same…
My basic stance can be summed up as: Who cares? If god exists, it wants you to live morally and well. If god does not exist, you should strive to live morally and well. God is an answer to a question that is useless. You should just go about living as best as you can. You don’t need a god for that. If you want to take part of a religious community, go ahead and enjoy it. Don’t make any claims…
I keep returning to a false belief that I can "will myself" to turn off distractions. But that's not how it works. Distractions, like all bad habits, bounce back whenever I'm emotional, or just tired. Stop fooling yourself. Make it harder to be distracted. Delete the app. Install a site blocker. Don't buy sweets. You will be uncomfortable at first. But you will feel better soon, because you won't…
I'm always thinking about agency . Ever since I learned that we all start out helpless, and we can learn to have more agency, I keep thinking about this topic. I recently read this screenshot essay by David Perell: "Lately I've caught myself spewing increasingly abstract definitions of what it means to be "high agency": one who has the belief and means to change their circumstances; one who takes…
This is something I keep rediscovering. I guess I need to be reminded every few months. So maybe this will help you too: Whatever you are doing in life, that thing needs time. You need time to do the thing, you also need time to think about it. You even need time to think about what you want to do next. If you cram every day full of tasks and obligations. When would you have these thoughts? First…
The best book or article I've read on how to ask better questions, and how to do research. This book will guide you through the common pitfalls and biases you fall into while doing customer research. These are some of my favourite tips from the book, but I recommed reading it, and trying each idea by itself in your next user/customer interaction. There's a lot of subtle detail to learn here. "Rule…
Had to cut the title down, because it broke my layout. The full title is: Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It <br/> This is my second time reading it. I recommended it to my book club, remember it as a really practical guide to how to work with market positioning. Second read through didn't really help me much. But I think it's because of how…
Our incentives are often not easy to understand. But I think they are predictable by Cognitive Load. We start every day with X amount of cognitive energy, and we spend and earn cognitive energy depending on what we do with it. In this study Carly Robinson and Jana Gallus showed that awarding students for perfect attendence backfired completely . Resulting in students on average attending less.…
This post is a present on Matt's birthday , you should give one too. I recently saw this summary of Y Combinator advice on X. And I thought it was too good not to share. Went straight into my review folder. Launch now Build something people want Do things that don't scale Find the 90 / 10 solution Find 10-100 customers who love your product All startups are badly broken at some point Write code -…
Writing your thoughts down makes it much easier to think clearly. By making yourself pick out words to describe your thoughts, you also shape what you are thinking. There's not a lot of room for fuzzy emotional logic when the words are down in black and white. It is still easy to get caught up making the same mistakes over and over. Something I've noticed when reviewing my journals much later.…
This week I almost fooled myself into believing I can hack fitness. Over the last month I’ve travelled and attended several conferences. Naturally I ate too much and drank too much. As a result my fitness has suffered. Only this time I caught myself thinking I could get away with it . This sounds silly. And it’s painful to admit out loud. I had the thought that I could somehow hack the system .…
Every time I create an animation for the web I'm struck by the contrast between web technologies and game engines. Animations scream out for state machines. Not just keyframes but states with hooks and triggers. The web1.0 document model is amazing for documents. But I'm convinced animations need state machines.
Today I learned I need to be deliberately strategic I’m proud of the times I’ve been strategic in life. But I also feel it doesn’t happen often enough. Yesterday I learned the reason why. I read an article by Anna Salomon over on LessWrong where she explains that humans are not naturally strategic . What that means is that strategy is not a “mechanical skill” we learn and then use at will. It’s…
You probably create for a living, code, design, articles or all sorts of other things. Even more likely you consume quite a bit of content daily. Instagram, Netlix, Podcasts, articles like this one.. I was reading Manuel's thoughts about consumption vs creation and I realised this was a really important question to ask. What is a good ratio of consumption vs creation? Is this similar to working…
Having been interested in creating better tools for research for a long time, I end up visiting Fibery every now and then. It's a very interesting product. Close to my imagined ideal. Today I found this lovely hover effect: Blurring the background seems to lift the icon. Creating a sense of presence for my mouse pointer. It felt a lot similar to highlighting text, which I constantly see users to…
Fantastic reminder by Paul Jarvis (one of the founders of fathom) on the Above Board podcast: "You can't sit down to write a book" If your goal is too big, there's no way to take direct action. Which leads to procrastination. Whenever you are starting work, think about the goal, and then think about what is a concrete step you can do in the time you have that will make it easier to reach the goal.…
There’s a concept from economics called the Blue Ocean Strategy (affiliate link) . The basic idea is really simple: don’t do what others are doing, and you’ll have less competition. One famous example of this is people selling selfie sticks. Clustered around any tourist site you will find roving hordes of mostly young men selling selfie sticks (or whatever is the local equivalent). Some sales are…
Yesterday I stumbled over a short clip from this interview by Chris Williamson , and he said something that resonated deeply with me. When you’re explaining a concept, start with a meme. A shareable name for that thing. Then go into explaining it. I think this is part of the success behind movements like e/acc or even Black Lives Matter. The name becomes a brand. Something easy to remember, even…
I used to hang out with body builders. And they would repeat "progress is progress". Building a huge physique takes years. The changes are not really noticeable. So you have to trust the process, your job is to make a little progress, consistently. Don't compare today with perfect. If it was better than yesterday, it was progress.
import ParallaxCards from '../../components/design/ParallaxCards.astro'; I say this beautiful animated card design on X a few weeks ago and wanted to see if I could recreate it. The blurring effect is not quite right, and the paralax is much harder than it looks. Then again the original was made in framer, while mine was hand coded. I cut out the foreground element from photos I found from the…
Make stronger buttons by animating backgrounds with radial gradients. I needed a stronger CTA button for my newsletter, and I wanted to look closer at how radial gradients could be animated. Turns out this is one of those areas where browsers don't quite support it yet. Which is probably why this has become popular. Here's what the end result looks like at the time of writing: Below you can see…
A dumb phrase has become popular in the indie hacker scene over the last year: "It's just a 'wrapper'" It refers to apps that "just" wrap ChatGPT in a specialied UI. The argument is true ofc, but what irks me is that some people seem to think that matters. It doesn't. Interfaces ultimately commoditize everything underneath. Your tech stack, code quality and organsiational mission statement simply…
Today I'm 40 years old. It's strange being officially middle aged. I thought I'd be a different person by now. If male lifespan does not increase significantly in the next decades, I'm exactly half way to the grave. It's good to take the opportunities to think about what I've spend my time on, and how I'd like to invest the time ahead. These are the most notable things I could remember from my…