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How to get your email noticed to a partner who has no reason to care
There’s an email sitting in your drafts folder. You’ve rewritten it four times. You’ll rewrite it again tomorrow. It’s the one to the vendor, the co-packer, the agency, the data partner, the integration team. Someone who has the thing you need and zero reason to care that you exist. You keep stalling because you feel
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Why Excitement Doesn’t Equal Habit: The Missing Link Between AI Discovery and Customer Loyalty
I was reading a piece from Adaline Labs about growth and retention in an AI-first world, and they wrote: “Excitement doesn’t equal habit.” I must have read it three times. Last week, I wrote about the three-layer framework for AI-era product design: machine-readable identity, human-discoverable story, tactile signature. That framework explains what you need to
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When AI Shops For Your Customer: The Algorithm Gets You Discovered—The Human Touch Makes You Unforgettable
This has been happening to me more and more. I suspect we have probably all been exposed to this same phenomenon recently. Let’s say I’m searching for a shoe rack. Instead of opening Amazon and scrolling through seventeen pages of options, I describe what I need to ChatGPT. Something compact, fits in a closet, holds
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What If The Screen You’re Designing Is Already Obsolete?
I have already violated my own rule about great ideas that I posted about last week. But that is how it goes! Although I haven’t told the team, they probably have already noticed this and wonder, is this the next item on the Kanban board? So I need to be careful. After playing around with
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The Idea You Mention Is the Priority You Set
Let me tell you about the moment I realized I’d burned two weeks of my team’s time with a single sentence. We were heads-down on the core bet for Trevean Spice—getting NFC-enabled packaging to actually work. Clear goal. Clear timeline. Whole team aligned. Or so I thought. Then I had lunch with a friend who
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What Deserves the Next 12 Months of Your Startup’s Life?
Happy New Year, a few weeks late. Let me tell you about the moment I realized I was about to waste an entire year. It was late November, and I had just finished a “strategic planning session” for Trevean Spice. I had a beautiful Notion board. Color-coded priorities. Quarterly milestones. Revenue projections that curved upward
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The DNA of Everything: What Soap, Spices, and Dinner Plans Taught Me About Building Things That Last
Part 5 of the Product Onion Series (Final) Three weeks ago, I had one of those weird moments where everything clicks. I was bouncing between reviewing Trevean Living’s quarterly metrics, sketching out strategy docs for Trevean Spice, and—I kid you not—updating our family meal planning whiteboard. All in the same afternoon. And I kept seeing
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The Product Onion at Home: Why I Stopped Making To-Do Lists (And Started Solving Problems)
Part 4 of the Product Onion Series My wife found me at 11 PM on a Tuesday, staring at three different apps on my phone, a notebook open on the kitchen counter, and a whiteboard covered in arrows connecting random tasks. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Trying to figure out why we never have
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Building Trevean Spice From Scratch: Watching the Product Onion Framework in Real-Time (No Logo Yet)
Part 3 of the Product Onion Series I still don’t have a logo for Trevean Spice. And it’s driving some people crazy. Last week, a well-meaning friend asked: “So when are you launching? I could help you design a website!” Another said: “Have you thought about your Instagram strategy? You need to build buzz early!”
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From “Pretty Soaps” to Purpose: How Trevean Living Found Its Core (And Why We Almost Didn’t)
Part 2 of the Product Onion Series Let me tell you about the moment Trevean Living almost became just another soap company. We were at a farmer’s market—our third one that month. Sales were… fine. People would pick up our bars, smell them, nod appreciatively, and say: “These are nice.” Then they’d put them down
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The Product Onion Framework: Why Most Businesses Build from the Outside In (And Why That’s Backwards)
Let me tell you about the moment I realized I was building my business completely backwards. I was sitting at my kitchen table, surrounded by product samples, market research, and a beautiful brand guide. I had spent weeks perfecting the logo for what would eventually become Trevean Living. The colors were perfect. The packaging looked
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Why Feedback Hits Different at Startups: A Tale of Two Companies
What’s the Difference Between Corporate and Startup Feedback? Let me tell you about two feedback experiences that couldn’t be more different. TL;DR: At a Fortune 500, a single piece of customer feedback took six months and four countries to act on. At Trevean Spice, the same kind of insight became a product change in a