Blog
Thoughts on building products without code, taste as strategy, what advertising teaches you about making things, and why curation is a creative act.
Gym Is The New Night Out
480 UK nightclubs have closed since 2020. Barry's has a DJ booth. 45% of Gen Z have never had a drink. The night out didn't die. It just got up earlier.
ReadThe Kerosene Lamp Stage
gmoney's Jevons Paradox frame is the clearest explanation I've read of why the market keeps getting AI wrong. Efficiency doesn't reduce demand. It explodes it.
ReadThe New Knowledge Worker
The knowledge economy rewarded knowing things. AI just made knowing things free. What comes next is better: judgement, taste, and the ability to ship.
ReadWhen Strategy Learned to Build
The strategist who can build has an unfair advantage. The prototype is the new deck. Strategy is a verb now, not a document.
ReadThe Command Line Became the Creative Studio
AI turned the blinking cursor into the most powerful creative tool of 2026. The barrier was never skill. It was permission. That permission gap just collapsed.
ReadCulture Is Infrastructure
Who in your company owns where the brand sits in culture? The answer is almost always nobody. Cultural intelligence is operational, not decorative.
ReadHow Creativity Gets Its Value Back
Creative agencies lost 75% of their pricing power in 30 years. Media won because it learned to count. Here's how the creative premium returns.
ReadWhat Happens When You Turn a Bookshelf Into an Experience
A scattered pile of 114 book covers you can drag, shake, scatter, and share. No frameworks. Just vanilla JS doing things it shouldn't be able to do.
ReadBuilders Are the New Influencers
The most powerful position in 2026 isn't creator or builder. It's both. When you make things and share the process, content becomes distribution and the product becomes the proof.
ReadThe Best AI Products Don't Sound Like AI Products
Most AI products talk about themselves the same way: transformative, powerful, seamless. The brands that win will be the ones that sound like themselves, not like the category.
ReadHow I Built the Only Tube App That Understands Buggies
Every tube app tells you IF a station is step-free. None tell you WHERE to stand. Two brands, one engine, 259 stations. Built by a strategist, not a developer.
ReadCase Study: The Pattern
Building a daily culture intelligence briefing. How an automated pipeline scans 140+ sources, synthesises signals with AI, and publishes with a cloned voice.
ReadYou Are What You Save
Why what you save says more about you than what you create. Curation as identity in the algorithmic age.
ReadMedia Tsundoku
The Japanese concept of buying books you never read — applied to the digital age of tabs, bookmarks, and infinite saves.
ReadThe New Flex
The old flex was what you bought. The new flex is what you built, curated, or quit. Status symbols have changed — most people haven't noticed.
ReadThe Link I Sent to Seven People
When you find something so good you have to share it immediately. What that impulse reveals about how your brain works.
ReadThe Tab Hoarder’s Defence
47 open tabs isn’t chaos. It’s a map of your current obsessions. Why browsers should be treated as creative tools.
ReadThe Screenshot Folder
Your camera roll is 40% screenshots of things you saw online. What that collection says about how visual thinkers process the world.
ReadThe Rabbit Hole as Research
Going deep on random topics at 1am isn’t procrastination. It’s how you end up building a Japanese restaurant guide or a 70s retail gallery.
ReadThe Save Is the Signal
You can like, share, comment — but the save is the only honest action online. Nobody performs a save.
ReadThe Taste You Can’t Explain
You know instantly if a website, a restaurant, a brand is right. But try explaining why. The gap between feeling taste and articulating it.
ReadThe Internet Worth Building Again
Peak Twitter, Tumblr, Delicious, StumbleUpon. Not rose-tinted — specific. What was lost and what I’m trying to rebuild.
ReadThe Algorithm Owes Me Nothing
You build because you want to, not because the algorithm rewards it. The antidote to growth hacking and content strategy.
ReadThe Feed Before the Feed
Before algorithmic feeds, you built your own internet. Blogrolls, RSS readers, curated follows. The lost art of assembling your own information diet.
ReadThree Hours Is All You Need
Everything you build has to fit between 9pm and midnight. How the constraint of parenting made you a better, faster builder.
ReadBuilding While the Window Is Open
You’re not a full-time builder. You’re a dad who builds between bedtime and midnight. Why that’s an advantage, not a limitation.
ReadThe Month I Started Making Things
One month ago I wasn’t building anything. Now there are 14+ live products. An honest account of what changed.
ReadNobody Asked for Modern Retro
A stupid “what if Supreme existed in 1974” question became my proudest project. No brief, no client, no market. Just taste.
ReadWhen an Idea Won't Let Go
How you go from “huh, interesting” to building an entire product in 48 hours. The specific feeling when an idea grabs you and won’t let go.
ReadReinvention Is the Point
Career pivots aren’t gaps on a CV. They’re compound investments. Why reinvention is the most valuable skill in a changing industry.
ReadThe Skills That Don’t Fit on a CV
The real skills, the real doubts, the real reasons you build. Everything that doesn’t fit the professional performance.
ReadThe 11:47pm Ship
The specific feeling of deploying something late at night when nobody’s watching. The purest moment in building.
ReadThe WHSmith Magazine Aisle
Standing in a newsagent in Nottingham, choosing which magazine to spend pocket money on. That choice shaped everything.
ReadThe Person Who Sends You Things
Everyone has one friend who sends links constantly. I am that person. Why recommending is a love language.
ReadForty Things I Know
Not advice. Just 40 observations from 40 years. Some about building, some about taste, some about life.
ReadThe Prompt Is the Brief
Directing AI is exactly like writing a creative brief. Clarity, taste, knowing what you want. 15 years of advertising was training for this moment.
ReadVersion One Is Supposed to Be Rough
Every product starts embarrassing. The courage to ship something imperfect, learn, and iterate. Perfectionism is the enemy of shipping.
ReadThe Demo Effect
A working product changes the room. One demo beats a hundred decks. When you stop presenting ideas and start showing them, everything shifts.
ReadBuilding in Public Is Overrated
Most building in public is performance art. Real building is messy, private, and unglamorous. Ship the thing, then talk about it.
ReadThe Stack Doesn’t Matter
What did you build it with is the wrong question. What does it do and who is it for is the right one.
ReadWhen Your Tool Becomes Your Obsession
Claude Code started as a means to an end. Now it’s the thing I’m most obsessed with. What happens when the instrument becomes more interesting than the music.
ReadShip, Then Explain
Most people explain forever and never ship. Flip the order. The product is the argument.
ReadThe Fourteen-Product Playbook
Patterns, mistakes, and what actually works after shipping 14 products in under a year. The non-obvious lessons nobody tells you.
ReadThe Generalist’s Revenge
Specialists had their era. AI just handed the future to generalists who see connections across domains. Range is the new unfair advantage.
ReadWhat Innovation Needs From Advertising
Agency innovation labs produce nothing because they separate invention from the people who understand audiences.
ReadThe Invisible Skills
The strategy skills nobody lists on a CV but that transfer perfectly to product building: audience instinct, taste, brief-writing, pattern recognition.
ReadShow the Work, Not the Promise
Companies hire proof. That’s why I build. The portfolio isn’t vanity — it’s the only argument that works.
ReadThe Meeting That Should Have Been a Product
All those strategy meetings, all those brainstorms. What if you just built the thing?
ReadWhat IKEA Taught the World About Taste
IKEA democratised Scandinavian design and accidentally created a generation with specific aesthetic expectations.
ReadThe Aesop Effect
How a soap brand became a global design benchmark. When your store IS the product and your packaging IS the marketing.
ReadThe Bookshop I’ll Never Open
The shop that lives in my head. A bookshop-café with curated shelves, hot chocolate, vinyl, and considered lighting.
ReadThe Detail Nobody Notices
The kerning on a menu. The weight of a door handle. The sound a car door makes when it closes. Nobody consciously notices — but everybody feels it.
ReadTaste Is Geography
Where you grow up shapes what you value aesthetically. Taste isn’t universal — it’s regional. Understanding that makes you better at everything you design.
ReadThe Reference Library
Every creative person has an internal reference library — decades of consumed culture that inform every decision. Your references ARE your taste.
ReadDon’t Design for Everyone
The most tasteful products are deliberately exclusionary. They make choices that some people won’t like. That’s the point.
ReadTaste Ages
Your taste at 25 is different from your taste at 40. That’s not loss — it’s refinement. From more is more to knowing exactly what you want.
ReadThe Case for Publishing With Intent
Everyone is creating, nobody is consuming. When every person is a content creator, who is the audience? The case for being a great consumer.
ReadWho Curates the Curators?
Curation is having a moment. But when everyone calls themselves a curator, the word loses meaning. The difference between real curation and just making lists.
ReadThe Notification Economy
Every app wants your attention right now. But the most valuable thing in 2026 isn’t content — it’s silence. Notification fatigue is a design problem.
ReadNostalgia Is Getting Faster
Nostalgia cycles used to be 20 years. Now they’re 5. We’re experiencing collective déjà vu at an accelerating rate.
ReadThe Discovery Renaissance
You can’t just walk into the internet anymore. Everything is a feed, a recommendation, a search result. The serendipity is gone.
ReadBeyond Minimalism
Everyone worships clean and simple. But minimalism has become a default, not a choice. When everything looks the same, the brave call is more.
ReadTaste Debt
Like technical debt but for aesthetics. Every time you accept good enough, it compounds. One day you look at your product and it doesn’t feel like yours.
ReadThe Tools Have Taste Too
Notion feels different to Google Docs. Are.na feels different to Pinterest. The curation tool shapes what you curate. Tool choice is a design decision.
ReadThe 30-Second Gut Check
You know within seconds whether something is right. That gut reaction isn’t random — it’s the sum of everything you’ve ever consumed.
ReadTaste in Words
Design gets all the credit, but the best brands have a voice you could recognise blindfolded. Copy is a taste decision, not a content decision.
ReadTwo Tastes, One Product
What happens when two people with strong taste disagree on creative direction? The line between productive tension and design-by-committee.
ReadThe Third Place Is Evolving
Coffee shops, pubs, bookstores — the places where community happened organically are disappearing. What we lost and where we go next.
ReadThe Algorithm Doesn’t Know What You’ll Love Tomorrow
Recommendation engines are mirrors, not windows. They show you more of what you already like. But taste doesn’t grow in an echo chamber.
ReadEverything Is a Subscription Now
Cars, razors, software, fitness, even friendship. When everything becomes a recurring payment, ownership dies. And with it, something about identity.
ReadThe Last Monoculture
Football is the only thing left where millions experience the same thing at the same time. No algorithm, no personalised feed. Just 3pm Saturday.
ReadThe Trader Joe’s Tote Bag
A $2.99 canvas bag became a $500 status symbol. How a cheap grocery tote became the ultimate IYKYK fashion flex worldwide.
ReadCase Study: Modern Retro
How a stupid question about Supreme in 1974 became a 96-brand AI art gallery with a scoring system, print shop, and Wes Anderson aesthetic.
ReadCase Study: Trove
Building a taste engine that turns your saved links into a mirror. How I built a product by ruthlessly cutting features instead of adding them.
ReadCase Study: CultureTerminal
Building a Techmeme for culture. How I scored 800+ articles weekly across fashion, design, tech, and brands using a 5-factor algorithm.
ReadBuilding Without Code
What used to require a team of 5 and 6 months, one person built in weeks. 25+ products. Zero code. The bottleneck was never technical.
ReadWhy Taste Is the Last Unfair Advantage
When everyone can build with AI, what you choose to build and how you design it becomes the differentiator. Taste is pattern recognition, not preference.
ReadWhy I Build Things Nobody Asked For
No market research. No user interviews. No validation. The best products come from scratching your own itch, not chasing someone else's.
ReadThe Non-Coder's Guide to AI Tools
You don't need to know code to build products with AI. You need clarity, taste, and the ability to articulate what you want. Sound familiar?
ReadDesign Is the First Impression That Never Leaves
Typography, spacing, colour, animation - these aren't decoration. They're the product. Why obsessing over design details is the most important work.
ReadLondon Built My Taste
The food, the design, the culture, the pubs. How 15+ years in London shaped the way I see, build, and curate everything.
ReadThe Portfolio Is the New CV
Why showing what you've built matters more than listing where you've worked. Credentials are fading. Craft is forever.
ReadRange Is a Superpower
Pub guide to culture engine to Japanese restaurant finder. Why building across categories isn't scattered - it's strategic. Generalists win.
ReadWhat Football Taught Me About Building
Thirty years of supporting Nottingham Forest - through relegations, near-extinction, and a miraculous return. The parallels with building products are everywhere.
ReadThe Magazine Era Shaped Everything
How print magazines - The Face, i-D, Dazed - built the taste that now drives everything I create. Before algorithms, there were editors.
ReadWhat Advertising Taught Me About Building Products
How 15+ years in ad agencies prepared me for product building. The skills are more transferable than you would think.
ReadThe Curator's Manifesto
Curation as a creative act, not just collecting. The internet has an abundance problem, and curators are the new creators.
ReadRebuilding the Link Economy
Bookmarking is broken. Social sharing is broken. The tools we need to manage links and discover content barely exist. I'm building the replacements.
ReadShip It Saturday
Why weekends are my superpower. How compressed time, high energy, and self-imposed deadlines create better products than unlimited time ever could.
ReadThe Feed We Choose Next
Social feeds are dying. Chronological is back. Why human-curated feeds beat algorithmic ones. The RSS renaissance.
ReadHot Chocolate, Not Coffee: Against Productivity Culture
A manifesto against hustle culture. I don't drink coffee. I drink hot chocolate. And I ship 14 products.
ReadWhat Wes Anderson Taught Me About Product Design
Symmetry, colour palette restrictions, attention to background details. How film aesthetics apply to web design.
ReadThe 15-Year Pivot
From agency strategist to product builder at 40. Not a career change - a career evolution. Why experience IS the advantage.
ReadYour Bookmarks Are Your Autobiography
What you save says more about you than what you share. The case for treating bookmarks as a personal archive, not a junk drawer.
ReadDesigning for Obsessives
Why niche products beat mass market ones. Forest fans, pub enthusiasts, Japanese food nerds. Build for the obsessed.
ReadWhat Print Magazines Got Right About the Internet
Editors, not algorithms. Curation, not aggregation. Finite, not infinite scroll. Everything print did that the web forgot.
ReadWhy Every Strategist Should Build Something
Building products gives strategists real empathy for what they're recommending. Stop advising. Start making.
ReadThe Collector's Instinct
The deep human urge to collect - books, links, records, magazines. How collecting is pattern recognition in disguise.
ReadThe Gap Between Idea and URL
The journey from 'wouldn't it be cool if...' to a live product. What actually happens in between. Why most ideas die and how to keep them alive.
ReadJapan Taught Me to Pay Attention
How Japanese culture - food, design, craft, service - shaped my obsession with detail. The connection between Oishii London and a deeper philosophy.
ReadSide Projects Are the New MBA
Why building 14 products taught more than any business school could. Shipping beats studying. Doing beats debating.
ReadThe Taste Stack
Introducing the concept of a taste stack - the layers of influences, experiences, and obsessions that form your creative identity.
ReadWhy I Chose Ugly Problems Over Pretty Ones
Building a tube exit guide, a pub directory, a children's activity finder. Not sexy. But useful. Why solving mundane problems beats chasing shiny ones.
ReadDigital Spaces Need Interior Design
Websites need the same care as physical spaces - lighting, furniture, atmosphere, personality. The interior design of the internet.
ReadFourteen Products, One Question
Looking at all 14 products and asking: what's the thread? The answer is curation, taste, and making sense of abundance.
ReadLetter to My Future Employer
An open letter to whoever hires Mike next. What you're getting, what you're not, and why this portfolio IS the interview.
ReadYour Best Ideas Deserve Better Than a Deck
15 years writing strategy decks that nobody read. Why building the thing is the best strategy document. Show, don't present.
ReadThe Nottingham-to-London Pipeline
Growing up in Nottingham, moving to London, and how that journey shaped a worldview. Small city hunger meets big city opportunity.
ReadThe Sunday Test
If you wouldn't use your own product on a lazy Sunday, it's not good enough. The personal utility bar every side project should clear.
ReadAdvertising's Next Life
The industry is unrecognisable. But the core skills - storytelling, audience empathy, creative problem-solving - are more valuable than ever. Just in new containers.
ReadBuild the Gallery Before You Make the Art
Why distribution and presentation matter as much as creation. Modern Retro isn't just images - it's a gallery experience. The container shapes the content.
ReadThe One-Person Product Team
How to be the PM, designer, developer, marketer, and support team simultaneously. What you gain and what you lose.
ReadThe Slack Channel as Crystal Ball
How analysing Slack channels reveals what people actually care about vs what they say they care about. The hidden signal in workplace chat.
ReadThe 3am Wikipedia Rabbit Hole
A love letter to curiosity. How following random threads leads to unexpected connections. The internet's best feature is still the hyperlink.
ReadThe Anti-Portfolio
The projects I didn't build. The ideas I killed. What the graveyard of abandoned concepts reveals about taste, editing, and knowing when to stop.
ReadEvery City Has a Font
London is Gill Sans. New York is Helvetica. Tokyo is something elegant you can't quite read. How typography and cities share personality.
ReadWhat My Son Taught Me About UX
Watching toddlers use iPads is a masterclass in intuitive design. If a 3-year-old can't figure it out, neither can your user.
ReadThe Last Page of the Internet
A thought experiment: if the internet had a final page, what would be on it? A meditation on digital permanence, what survives, and building for the long term.
ReadRSS Is the Quiet Rebellion
While everyone argues about algorithms, RSS quietly does its job. No algorithm, no ads, no engagement tricks. The most punk technology on the internet.
ReadBuilders Don't Wait for Briefs
Why traditional creative briefs fail in a build-first world. When you can go from thought to URL in a day, the brief becomes a relic of a slower era.
ReadLondon Restaurants Are Better Products Than Most Apps
What the best London restaurants teach about product design. The parallels between great dining and great UX are everywhere - if you know where to look.
ReadAI Can Make Anything - But It Can't Want Anything
The paradox at the heart of AI creation. AI tools can generate infinite content, but they have no desire, no taste, no reason to prefer one thing over another.
ReadBuild What You Actually Need
How parenting forced me to build useful things quickly. Limited time, real needs, and the harshest users imaginable - young children.
ReadThe Best Brands Feel Like People You'd Want to Know
Why brands with personality always win. From fifteen years in advertising, the brands that endure are the ones with genuine, human-feeling personality.
ReadAttention Is Currency, And Taste Is How You Spend It
The real economics of what people choose to look at. As an ad person, Mike understands attention deeply - but it's not about capturing it. It's about deserving it.
ReadThe Five-Minute Rule - If I Can't Explain It, I Shouldn't Build It
Simplicity as a product filter. If you can't explain what a product does and why it matters in five minutes, it's too complicated.
ReadDesign Systems for Life - When Product Thinking Escapes the Screen
How design systems thinking applies beyond software. Consistency, reusable patterns, and intentional constraints - for products, decisions, and life.
ReadNostalgia Is Strategy - Looking Backward to Build Forward
Why looking backward is the smartest way to build forward. The past contains design patterns, cultural moments, and aesthetic choices the present has forgotten.
ReadForty and Building - On Starting Late and Starting Right
On starting to build things at an age when you're supposed to have it figured out. Starting later means starting with taste, experience, and audience intuition.
ReadTaste Is Editing - What You Leave Out Matters More
Taste isn't about what you include - it's about what you cut. The best menus, albums, portfolios, and products are defined by what is missing.
ReadThe Pub as Product - What Pubs Teach About Community
The British pub is the original community product. What digital products can learn from a place that has retention without trying.
ReadThe Bookmarks Worth Revisiting
Everyone has hundreds of bookmarks they'll never look at again. But what if the pattern of what you save revealed something about who you are?
ReadWhy Shipping Beats Perfecting
Perfectionism is procrastination in a nicer outfit. The gap between good enough and perfect is where most projects die.
ReadScreen Time Well Spent - Building Things Worth Looking At
The conversation about screen time is always negative. But the same device that wastes your time can be the most powerful creative tool ever made.
ReadYour Font Choice Says More Than Your Copy
Typography is the first thing people feel, before they read a single word. Why your font choice is the most important design decision you'll make.
ReadBuild for an Audience of One - Then See Who Else Shows Up
Every product I built started by solving my own problem. I'm user zero. The most honest product research is scratching your own itch.
ReadColour Is Feeling - The Palette Decisions Nobody Notices
Four accent colours across fourteen products. One background tone that isn't quite white. Every colour choice is a micro-decision about how something feels.
ReadYour Tools Shape Your Thinking - Choose Carefully
Claude Code changed how I think about building. Before AI tools, ideas stayed as ideas. Now the gap between concept and execution is a conversation.
ReadThe Ten-Year Taste Test - What Survives and What Does Not
What would you still recommend from ten years ago? The books, albums, restaurants, websites that have aged well - and the ones that have not. A reflection on what lasts.
ReadThe Walk Test - Why the Best Ideas Happen Away From Screens
How walking unlocks creative thinking. The best product ideas, strategy frameworks, and design solutions come when you close the laptop and go outside.
ReadYour Work Is Your Best Introduction
The difference between networking and genuine connection. Why showing your work beats collecting business cards every time.
ReadRetail Is Theatre - Why the Best Shops Are Designed Experiences
Physical retail spaces as curated experiences - from Supreme's drop culture to Aesop's store design. Why great retail is closer to art direction than commerce.
ReadPlaylists Are Portfolios - What Your Music Says About Your Taste
How music playlists are really taste statements. The curation involved in a good playlist mirrors the curation involved in a good portfolio.
ReadSecond Screen Culture - We Never Just Watch Anything Anymore
The death of single-screen attention. We watch football with Twitter open. We watch films while checking Letterboxd. What this means for how products should be designed.
ReadNaming Things Is Hard - And It Matters More Than You Think
The obsessive process of naming products and projects. Why naming is the first design decision you make, and it shapes everything that follows.
ReadHow Instagram Reshaped Our Taste
How Instagram flattened aesthetics. The millennial grey, the avocado toast, the matching everything. But also how it democratised design taste and gave everyone a visual education.
ReadThe Morning Scroll - My Daily Information Ritual
The first thing I do each morning: Twitter/X. A love letter to the morning scroll and a defence of being Very Online.
ReadCollecting vs Hoarding - When Does Saving Everything Become a Problem
The digital magpie problem. When does thoughtful collection become mindless hoarding? The difference between a library and a landfill.
ReadThe Small Internet - Why Building Tiny Things Online Still Matters
Against scale. Against virality. For building small, personal, considered internet things. The beauty of things that serve ten people brilliantly rather than ten million people adequately.
ReadProof I Am Not Just Talk - Why Strategists Need to Build
After 15 years of writing decks and presenting strategies, I needed to prove I could actually make something. The gap between recommending and doing.
ReadThe Observer Who Started Building - On Watching vs Making
I've always been the person in the room noticing things - the fonts, the lighting, the vibe. But observing isn't enough anymore. The vulnerability of putting your taste on display.
ReadWhen Taste Is the Only Input - Building With AI as a Non-Coder
When AI does the making, all that's left is your judgement. That's both the power and the terror. Your taste is fully exposed.
ReadThe Silent Builder Economy
The hours after my son goes to bed. When the house goes quiet and the laptop opens. The magic of shipping something at 11:47pm that didn't exist at 9:15pm.
ReadHead of Culture - The Role That Should Exist Everywhere
Why every brand with physical products needs a Head of Culture. Not a CMO, not a brand manager - someone who connects brand, product, and culture into one coherent thing.
ReadWhen Taste Needs a Business Model
Magma bookshop closed. Design books, indie magazines, zines - curated not stocked. What happens when the places that shape culture can't survive commercially.
ReadSeeing What Matters - The Skill Nobody Teaches
Scanning 100 things and knowing which 3 matter. This is what I'm actually good at. Where the skill comes from, and why it's impossible to put on a CV.
ReadThe Recommender in Chief - Why I Cannot Stop Sending Links
The most Mike thing ever: always recommending things. Sending articles, products, albums to anyone who will listen. Why recommending is a love language.
ReadCoherence - The Quality That Separates Good From Great
The most important quality in any product: coherence. Everything fits together - name, design, tone, experience. Nothing jars. Why most products fail this test.
ReadThe Optimist's Operating System
Belief, creativity and optimism are amongst our most powerful technologies. We can use them to reboot Britain. Originally published on Digital Frontier.
ReadThe Internet Lost Curation — And That’s the Opportunity
Algorithms replaced human curation. Now the pendulum is swinging back. Why the curator is the most valuable person on the internet.
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