Building
On shipping products, the craft of making things, and what happens when non-coders start building.
Case 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.
Read BuildingCase 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.
Read BuildingCase Study: CultureTerminal
Building a Techmeme for culture. How I scored 800+ articles weekly across fashion, design, tech, and brands using a 5-factor algorithm.
Read BuildingHow I Built 14 Products Without Writing Code
From advertising Strategy Director to product builder. How AI tools closed the gap between having ideas and shipping them.
Read BuildingWhy 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.
Read BuildingThe 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?
Read BuildingShip It Saturday
Why weekends are my superpower. How compressed time, high energy, and self-imposed deadlines create better products than unlimited time ever could.
Read BuildingThe 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.
Read BuildingWhy 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.
Read BuildingFourteen Products, One Question
Looking at all 14 products and asking: what's the thread? The answer is curation, taste, and making sense of abundance.
Read BuildingThe 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.
Read BuildingThe One-Person Product Team
How to be the PM, designer, developer, marketer, and support team simultaneously. What you gain and what you lose.
Read BuildingThe 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.
Read BuildingThe 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.
Read BuildingThe Good Enough Trap - Why Shipping Beats Perfecting
Perfectionism is procrastination in a nicer outfit. The gap between good enough and perfect is where most projects die.
Read BuildingScreen 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.
Read BuildingBuild 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.
Read BuildingYour 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.
Read BuildingNaming 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.
ReadEnjoyed these?
Get new posts on building, taste, and culture. No spam.