The following is a Qwilr company memo sent to the team in 2017 — the original Qwilr page is here: https://pages.qwilr.com/Right-Kind-Of-Wrong-VTLw9IGQRkGP Making a mistake is not a nice feeling. Especially when that mistake is public to some degree. Building a product company the vast majority of our mistakes are out…

“Another Life” has just been released (https://open.spotify.com/album/1oN20fWy70Srr4nbz5Ph8b). And it’s certainly the strangest album I’ve ever worked on, because I have no idea who the wrote the songs. I don’t mean these are folk traditionals, they’re very modern - I just don’t know who wrote them, I’ve never met the author…

Beagle app, one of our strongest competitors has just shut down, and to be honest: it makes me a little sad. A few days ago I got an email from the Beagle team. It went to everyone in their user base. “Every Dog Has Its Day” read the subject line…

Building disruptive technologies, products and businesses is unquestionably about creating something “new”. That newness can come in many forms. It might be fresh thinking applied to an existing problem space, it can be a product for a market segment that has never been serviced before, it can be a product…

Confession. I’m live blogging. Qwilr is on the eve of a big product release. Probably the biggest release since the product made its public debut. The release will mark a turning point in the whole trajectory of the product and the business. The engineering team is flicking between terminal screens, with…

Don’t spend more time strategising than doing. When pursuing a project with minimal resources (a.k.a A Startup) a sense of disorder quickly sets in. A team of three or four fills the roles normally manned by twenty or thirty. Marketing, building, selling, refining, designing etc. The team switches cognitive hats…

If you’re building a business online, whether its a product business, retail, blog or anything else, you’d probably like to take advantage of network effects to grow your audience; i.e. people sharing stuff, to other people, who in turn share that stuff on. These effects are akin to nuclear chain-reactions…

To Degree, or not to Degree? I was recently asked by a young & energetic developer (paraphrasing here, for the sake of brevity): “I’m a little concerned about entering the work-force. …

If you’re building any product with a human interface – be it software, a web-application, mobile-app, even physical hardware: you need a full-time designer. Sum of the parts Take the analogy of evolution: you’d imagine that to win the game of natural-selection an animal would want all advantageous features to be maximised: i.e. smartest…