Notes
Things I learned the expensive way, written down so you do not have to.
Ranking and getting cited are different jobs
At Elya I built the inbound engine off 60+ long-form pieces engineered for AEO, GEO and search. Those are three jobs, not one, and treating them as one is why a page can rank and never get cited.
Read itA social app with no users is dead on arrival
The app launched on top of an 11,700-person community that already existed. That did not solve the product. It removed the problem everyone obsesses over and exposed the one that actually mattered.
Read itWhen the prompt becomes a safety problem
Every other product I have built fails by being unhelpful. ReliefAI can fail by saying the wrong thing to someone in real distress, and that changes what prompt engineering even is.
Read itThree weeks from idea to a stranger paying
FutureSelf went from an idea to a stranger paying money in under three weeks, run by one person. The interesting number there is the clock.
Read itThree user types who would each rather have their own app
FitIL has a trainee, a trainer and a gym owner inside one product. Each of them would happily be a separate app, and keeping them a single coherent thing is the design problem, not a detail of it.
Read itThe free tier is where you disqualify people
On BiroClick the analysis is free and the document is paid. That split is the only honest way to sell something that might not apply to you.
Read itThe same child, twelve times
Generating one good image is a solved problem. Generating the same child twelve times in a row is the entire business, and it is a different problem.
Read it