Fourteen products. A tube exit guide. A pub directory. A children's activity finder. A Japanese food guide. A wearable tech news aggregator. A culture news terminal. A taste engine. A personal bookmarking tool. An AI-generated retro brand gallery. A Forest flash cards game. A Japanese language learning app. On the surface, these have nothing in common. They span different categories, serve different audiences, and solve different problems. If you listed them on a CV, a recruiter would ask: "What do you actually do?"
That question haunted me for a while. I couldn't see the thread. I knew there was one - I could feel it - but I couldn't articulate it. Every time I tried to explain the connection between a pub guide and a taste engine, between a tube exit app and a culture terminal, the words felt wrong. Too broad or too narrow. Too abstract or too literal.
Then I found it. The thread is this: every single product I've built is an answer to the same question. What's worth paying attention to?
The attention question
"What's worth paying attention to?" sounds simple. It isn't. It's the fundamental question of modern life. We live in an era of infinite content, infinite options, infinite noise. Every domain - news, food, culture, entertainment, products, places - has been flooded with more options than any person could evaluate. The problem is never "I can't find anything." The problem is always "I can't find the right thing."
My products are all filters. They take a domain - pubs in London, Japanese restaurants, cultural news, tube platform positions, things to do with a kid - and they apply judgment. Not algorithmic judgment, not crowd-sourced judgment, but personal, opinionated, taste-driven judgment. They say: out of everything available, here's what's worth your attention. Trust this or don't, but at least it comes from a human with a point of view.
CultureTerminal answers: what's happening in culture right now that's worth knowing about? The London Pub Guide answers: which pubs are worth going out of your way for? Oishii London answers: where should you eat Japanese food in this city? Little London answers: what should you do with your son this weekend? First Out answers: where should you stand on the platform? Even that - a tube exit guide - is an answer to the attention question. Pay attention to your platform position. It matters more than you think.
The three themes
Within the attention question, three themes emerge across all fourteen products: curation, taste, and making sense of abundance.
Curation is the act itself. Selecting, filtering, arranging. Every product involves taking a large set of options and presenting a smaller, better set. The pub guide curates pubs. CultureTerminal curates news. Modern Retro curates brand identities for reimagining. Trove curates personal bookmarks. The act of curation - of saying "this, not that" - runs through everything.
Taste is the lens. It's what makes my curation different from anyone else's. Two people could build pub guides with access to the same data and end up with completely different products because they've different taste. My taste - shaped by Nottingham, magazines, Japanese culture, advertising, design obsession - is the filter that determines what makes the cut. It isn't objective. It isn't meant to be. It's a point of view, consistently applied.
Making sense of abundance is the purpose. The world doesn't need more information. It needs better filters. It needs someone - or something - to stand between the overwhelming flood and the individual and say: here, start here. This is good. This is worth your time. The products I build are all attempts to create pockets of sense in a sea of noise.
Why range is the point
For a long time, I worried that building across so many different categories made me look unfocused. A "serious" builder would pick one domain and go deep. They would build a pub platform, not a pub guide and a culture terminal and a taste engine and a tube exit app. The advice you hear is always "niche down." Find your lane. Own a category.
I now think that advice is wrong - at least for what I'm building. The range is the point. The fact that I can move from Japanese food to wearable tech to parenting activities to brand aesthetics isn't a lack of focus. It's a demonstration that the skill - curating with taste - is transferable. That taste isn't domain-specific. That the ability to filter and present and opine works in any category, as long as the person doing it genuinely cares about the subject.
If I could only build products about one thing, the products would be narrower but they wouldn't be better. The cross-pollination between domains is what makes each product interesting. My advertising background informs how I think about audience. My design obsession informs how the products look. My Japanese cultural interest informs how I think about craft. My football fandom informs how I think about loyalty and community. Each project benefits from all the others, even when they have nothing obvious in common.
The map of a mind
Taken together, the fourteen products form something unexpected: a map of a mind. Not a strategic portfolio designed to demonstrate competence. A genuine, slightly chaotic, deeply personal map of what one person cares about. Pubs. Japanese food. Tube efficiency. Kid' weekends. Cultural news. Brand aesthetics. Taste itself. Football. Language learning. Wearable technology. The connections between them.
This is, I think, more interesting than a single product would be. A single product demonstrates skill. A portfolio of fourteen demonstrates something harder to fake: a way of seeing the world. A set of interests that, despite their apparent randomness, reveal a consistent sensibility. A person who notices things, cares about quality, and believes that the way you present something is as important as the thing itself.
The question "what do you actually do?" now has an answer. I notice what's worth paying attention to, and I build ways for other people to notice it too. The domain changes. The question doesn't.
Fourteen products. One question. And I'm not done asking it yet.
