My Philosophy of Product Building

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As a person progresses in their career they often develop one or two “signature moves”—ways of solving problems in specific situations that produce outstanding results.

For Tony Hawk it was the 900º spin.

For Rich Barton—founder of Zillow, Expedia, and Glassdoor—the signature move is “building Data Content Loops to disintermediate incumbents and dominate Search. And then using this traction to own demand in their industries” (according to Kevin Kwok).

For Reese Witherspoon the signature move is to play a strong yet vulnerable protagonist going through a transformative moment in life.

If I had to name my signature move at this point in my career, it would probably be the way I approach building new software products. There’s a lot that I’m not good at, but I’m pretty good at going from zero to one.

Quick braggy bio: Nine years ago, I designed and programmed the first version of Product Hunt. A year before that, I built a fun way to learn to code called Scratchpad that got acquired by General Assembly, and then built another product for GA that still exists today and has been used by hundreds of thousands of people, called Dash. Since then I’ve worked on lots of products: some big successes (Substack), others more low-key successes but still cool in their own way (Chompers, an Alexa skill from Gimlet Media that helps kids brush their teeth, and won a Cannes Lion), and some that never really broke out but a couple thousand people love and still use every week (Wordie Bird, a word game). And last month I launched probably the best v1 product I ever built: Lex.

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My focus now is to get really good at going from 1 to 100 and beyond, but before I do, I wanted to stop and appreciate the 0 to 1 game and write up everything I learned about how to play it.

There are nine components to my approach: