We operate products. We don't talk about them.

This is not a portfolio. This is not a pitch deck.
This is where we write about what we believe
and how we build. If that's interesting to you,
keep reading. If not, that's fine too.

The default playbook is broken. Raise money, buy users, figure out retention later. This produces a leaky bucket that looks like growth on a slide but bleeds cash in a spreadsheet.

Retention is a product problem, not a marketing problem. If your D7 retention is below 20%, you don't have a distribution problem. You have a product that people don't want to come back to. No amount of push notifications will fix that.

Build something people open on their own. Then figure out how to get more of those people.

The gap between teams that win and teams that don't is iteration velocity. Not talent. Not funding. Not taste. Velocity.

An A/B test that runs for 3 weeks is a strategy failure. If your sample size requires 3 weeks, your test is too subtle. Run bigger swings. Change the entire screen. Remove the feature entirely. Double the price. These tests converge fast because the delta is real.

The team that runs 50 experiments in a quarter will outperform the team that runs 5 every single time, even if each individual experiment is worse.

Every layer of complexity you add is a user you lose. The settings page is where products go to die. "Customizable" is a feature for the builder, not the user.

The best consumer products make one decision for you, and it's the right one 80% of the time. The remaining 20% is the cost of simplicity, and it's worth paying.

If your onboarding has more than 3 steps, you've already lost the median user.

Teams will A/B test button colors for weeks but won't touch their pricing for years. Pricing is the single highest-leverage experiment you can run. It directly impacts revenue with zero engineering cost.

Most consumer subscriptions are underpriced. The anchoring effect of "it's just an app" has trained an entire generation of builders to charge $4.99/month for products that deliver hundreds of dollars in value. The willingness to pay exists. You're just not testing for it.

Somewhere around 2020, "shipping" became a content strategy instead of a product strategy. The incentive shifted from building things people use to building things people tweet about.

The best products we've encountered were built by people who didn't have time to post about them. They were too busy reading support tickets and staring at dashboards.

We don't share our metrics. We don't share our roadmap. We share our thinking, when we think it's useful. That's it.

LLMs let a team of 3 do what used to require 15. This is real and we use it every day. But the principles haven't changed. You still need product-market fit. You still need retention. You still need a business model that works.

What AI actually changes: the minimum viable team size drops, the iteration cycle compresses, and the cost of being wrong goes down. This means you should be making more bets, faster, with smaller teams. It doesn't mean the bets don't need to be good.

The free tier exists to build a habit, not to generate leads. If your free users never convert, the problem isn't your paywall — it's that your free experience didn't make them need the product enough.

The conversion event should feel like removing friction, not adding a gate. The user should be pulling toward paid, not being pushed.