I had a conversation with a recruiter recently. Friendly person. Knew the industry. Had a role that sounded interesting -- something at the intersection of brand strategy and product. I explained my background: fifteen years in advertising, strategy director at several agencies, and then this recent chapter of building products with AI. Fourteen of them. Live, working, real.

The recruiter paused. "That's really impressive," she said. "But the client is looking for someone with product experience." I asked what she meant. "Like, at a product company. On a product team. With product in the job title." I pointed out that I'd built more products in six months than most product managers ship in three years. She was sympathetic but unmoved. "I hear you, but the brief says product experience. I can't change the brief."

This conversation crystallised something I'd been feeling for months. In the hiring world, potential doesn't exist. Only proof does. And not just any proof -- proof in the exact format the hiring manager recognises. The right job title at the right kind of company doing the right kind of work. Everything else, no matter how impressive, gets filed under "interesting, but..."

The proof problem

Companies say they want people who think differently. Who bring fresh perspectives. Who challenge the status quo. They put these phrases in job descriptions and employer brand campaigns and LinkedIn posts about their culture. And then, when it comes time to actually hire, they look for people who have done the exact same job at the exact same kind of company. Not different thinkers. Same thinkers, from slightly different addresses.

This isn't a complaint. It's a diagnosis. The hiring system is optimised for risk reduction, not value creation. A hiring manager who brings in someone with a traditional background and it doesn't work out can say "They had all the right experience, it just didn't fit." A hiring manager who brings in someone unconventional and it doesn't work out has to explain why they took the risk. The incentives push everyone toward safe choices. The job specs reflect this.

Nobody gets fired for hiring the person with the right job title. But nobody gets ahead either. The best hires I've ever seen -- in agencies, in brands, everywhere -- were people who didn't fit the brief but fit the problem.

That's why I build

Understanding this dynamic changed my approach to everything. If the hiring world doesn't recognise potential, then I need to convert potential into proof. If experience in the wrong format doesn't count, I need to create experience in the right format. If telling people what I can do doesn't work, I need to show them what I've already done.

This is the actual motivation behind every project I've built. Not vanity. Not hobby. Not "side projects." Proof. Tangible, demonstrable, URL-having proof that a strategy director can build products. That audience instinct translates to product decisions. That taste and judgment create real things, not just presentations about real things.

Modern Retro is proof that I understand brand, aesthetics, and cultural insight. CultureTerminal is proof that I can build a content aggregation product. Trove is proof that I can think about data and personalisation. Taste OS is proof that I can create a framework and make it interactive. Little London is proof that I can build for a specific audience with a specific need. Each project isn't just a thing I made. It's evidence.

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The portfolio as argument: "I could build products" is a claim. "I built fourteen products, here are the URLs" is a fact. Facts are harder to dismiss than claims. The portfolio isn't a gallery -- it's a legal brief for why I should be in the room.

The interview you don't have to win

There's a particular kind of magic that happens when you walk into a conversation with proof instead of potential. The conversation changes. Instead of "Tell me about a time when you demonstrated product thinking," the question becomes "How did you decide on the scoring system for Taste OS?" Instead of hypotheticals, you're discussing specifics. Instead of persuading someone that you could do the thing, you're explaining how you already did the thing.

This is a fundamentally different dynamic. In a traditional interview, you're performing competence. You're taking past experiences from different contexts and reshaping them to fit the question. It's an act of translation, and something always gets lost in translation. But when you have the work in front of you -- live, working, with real URLs -- there's nothing to translate. The work speaks. You just fill in the thinking behind it.

I've found that the most interesting conversations I've had since building this portfolio haven't been interviews at all. They've been people reaching out because they saw the work and wanted to understand the thinking. That's the shift. When you have proof, you stop chasing opportunities. Opportunities come to you. Not always, not enough yet, but the direction of travel is different. You're not in the supplicant position anymore. You're in the conversation as an equal.

Fourteen products is a better answer

"Why should we hire you for this role?" In an interview, you'd spend two minutes constructing a narrative about transferable skills and growth mindset and passion for the space. It would be articulate and forgettable, because every candidate gives some version of the same answer.

Or you could say: "I built fourteen products in six months. Without a team, without funding, without a technical background. I used AI tools and fifteen years of strategy experience to ship things that real people use. Here are the URLs. Have a look. That's why you should hire me."

That's a different kind of answer. It's not a story about potential. It's a demonstration of capability. It's proof.

You can talk about what you could do, or you can show what you've already done. Fourteen products built with AI is a better answer than any interview response. Not because the products are perfect, but because they exist.

Building as strategy

I want to be honest about something. Building all these products isn't a casual hobby that happened to produce career benefits. It's a deliberate strategy for a specific problem. The problem is: how does a forty-year-old strategy director from advertising prove that he belongs in the conversation about product, culture, and technology -- without the traditional credentials that gatekeep those conversations?

The answer is: you build the credentials yourself. Not the paper kind. The real kind. You build things. You ship them. You put them in the world. And you let the work argue on your behalf, because the work is harder to dismiss than a CV that doesn't tick the right boxes.

This isn't the advice I'd give to everyone. If you have the right background and the right credentials and the right job titles, the traditional route works fine. But if you're coming from a different lane -- if your experience is valuable but formatted wrong, if your skills are real but invisible, if your potential is obvious to you but unprovable to a recruiter -- then building is the answer. Not because it's easy. Because it's the only argument that actually works.

Nobody hires potential. They hire proof. So I build proof. Every single day.