I'm going to tell you something that the tech world doesn't want to hear. I started building products around the age of forty. Not at twenty-two in a university dorm room. Not at twenty-five with venture capital and a co-founder from Stanford. At forty, with a young son, a mortgage in London, and fifteen years of advertising strategy behind me. No coding experience. No technical co-founder. No pitch deck. Just a laptop, Claude Code, and the growing suspicion that I could make things if I stopped believing I wasn't allowed to.
The narrative in technology is relentlessly, sometimes cruelly, young. The founder mythology is built around wunderkids - people who shipped their first product before they could legally drink, who disrupted industries while their peers were still working out what they wanted to be. The implication, rarely stated but always felt, is that if you've not started by thirty, you've missed the window. The train has left. The party is over.
I'm here to tell you that narrative is wrong. Not slightly wrong. Fundamentally, structurally, completely wrong. And I've fourteen live products to prove it.
The advantage of years
Here's what fifteen years of advertising strategy gave me that no bootcamp, no computer science degree, no Y Combinator programme could replicate: I know what people want. Not in the abstract, not in the "user persona" sense, not from reading research reports. I know it in my bones, from years of sitting across tables from real humans, listening to what they say and - more importantly - watching what they do. From years of crafting messages and seeing which ones landed and which ones fell flat. From years of studying why some brands succeed and others fail, why some campaigns move people and others just move budgets.
That knowledge isn't technical. It is human. And it turns out that human knowledge is the thing most products are missing. Not better code. Not better design systems. Not better infrastructure. Better understanding of who the product is for and what they actually need. That's the hard problem. The code is the easy part - especially now, when AI can write most of it for you.
Every product I've built draws on those fifteen years. Modern Retro works because I understand brand identity at a deep level - I spent years thinking about how brands are perceived, how visual identity creates emotional response, how nostalgia functions as a cultural force. I didn't need a research phase. I had the research already, accumulated over a career of thinking about exactly these questions.
Trove works because I understand the difference between what people say they want and what they actually want. People say they want to organise their bookmarks. What they actually want is to understand their own taste - to see their interests reflected back to them in a way that reveals something they hadn't quite articulated. I know this because I spent years in strategy doing exactly that: finding the insight beneath the brief, the real need beneath the stated one.
The insecurity is real
I would be lying if I said the age thing doesn't get to me. It does. Advertising skews young. Technology skews younger. When I look at what people are building and how old they're, there's a voice in my head - and it isn't a quiet one - that says: you're too late. You should have started this a decade ago. The window has closed.
That voice is loud on the days when the analytics show single-digit visitors. It's loud when I see a twenty-four-year-old on Twitter casually mention their Series A. It's loud at three in the morning when I'm lying awake wondering whether building products is a genuine new direction or just an elaborate procrastination from finding a proper job.
But here's the thing about that voice: it has no evidence. It's running on vibes. The actual evidence - the products themselves, the reactions from people who see them, the growing conviction that this work is the most interesting, most satisfying, most authentically "me" work I've ever done - the evidence says something different. The evidence says I'm not late. I'm right on time. I just arrived from a different direction than most people expect.
Experience is the product
Here's the reframe that changed everything for me: your experience is the product. The code is just the delivery mechanism. When I stopped thinking of myself as "a non-technical person trying to learn tech" and started thinking of myself as "a strategist with fifteen years of audience insight who now has access to building tools," everything shifted. I wasn't starting from zero. I was starting from fifteen.
The twenty-two-year-old founder has energy, time, and technical skills. Good for them. But they're also building in the dark. They don't know what resonates with a thirty-five-year-old parent, because they've never been one. They don't know what a brand director is looking for, because they've never sat in that meeting. They don't know which cultural references land and which ones miss, because they've not spent decades absorbing culture across music, design, magazines, advertising, food, and fashion.
I know all of that. That isn't a boast - it's a statement of fact about what happens when you spend fifteen years paying obsessive attention to how culture works and how people respond to it. That knowledge compounds. And when you finally get access to the tools to build things - when AI removes the technical barrier that kept you on the strategy side of the table - all that compounded knowledge becomes immediately, overwhelmingly valuable.
For everyone in their thirties and forties
If you're reading this and you're in your thirties or forties and you've been thinking about building something - a product, a project, a business, anything - and the voice in your head is telling you it's too late, I want to say something directly to you: it isn't too late. It's actually perfect timing.
You have something that younger builders don't have and can't acquire quickly: context. You know your industry. You know your audience. You know what works and what doesn't, not from reading about it but from living it. You have taste that has been developed over decades of consuming, curating, and discriminating. You have professional skills - communication, strategy, project management, stakeholder handling - that most technical founders have to learn painfully on the job.
The tools have caught up to you. That's what has changed. Five years ago, building a product without coding knowledge was essentially impossible - no-code tools were clunky and limited, and AI wasn't capable enough to bridge the gap. Now, with tools like Claude Code, the barrier isn't technical skill. The barrier is knowing what to build and for whom. And that's the barrier you've already spent your career demolishing.
I'm not going to pretend it is easy. It isn't. There are days when the imposter syndrome is crushing. There are days when the gap between what I can imagine and what I can execute feels impossibly wide. There are days when I look at my portfolio and think "who am I kidding?" But those days are outnumbered by the days when I ship something and it works, when someone sees what I've built and says "wait, you made this?", when the products themselves are better proof of what I can do than any CV or LinkedIn profile ever could be.
Forty and building. Not forty and finished. Not forty and comfortable. Not forty and settled. Forty and building, with everything I've learned behind me and everything I want to make ahead of me. The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now. But honestly? The tree I'm planting now - with twenty years of knowing what a good tree looks like - might be the better tree anyway.
Start. Build. Again.
