Hi, I'm Ian.
I'm currently building Aida.
My personal mission is to build tools that help millions to move faster toward theirs. I love taking messy, zero-to-one problems and turning them into scalable products people can't live without.
I do the same thing offline, too. I love building real-world environments and experiences, from launching a natural wine and grilled cheese pop-up bar in Portugal, curating music for art exhibitions, to creating micro journaling tools for creating better relationships.
Catches the follow-ups, updates the CRM, and preps the meeting so reps can spend their time selling.
It watches calls, Slack, email, and the CRM for the commitments a deal depends on, then does the follow-through that usually slips.
As founding product lead I decide what gets built, and I'm judged by whether reps keep using it.
Case study. The sales meeting, end to end →Lasso AI
Creator-economy matching
Bootstrapped matchmaking between brands and creators. The engine matched 1M+ creator profiles a week at 97% accuracy.
Case study. Lasso, the problem we solved for →Flow
Commerce infrastructure
I ran growth, experimentation, merchant-of-record, and checkout on $250M a week of cross-border volume. Flow ran white-label behind Shopify Markets.
Showtime Analytics
Customer data foundations
We helped cinemas understand who their customers were, growing from 2 cinemas to 80+ chains in 26 countries and taking customer identification from 3% to 78%.
Ask why now
Customer inertia kills most new products. An inflection point, new technology or a rule change, is what makes a 10x solution possible where it wasn't before. If an idea has no answer to why now, it can wait.
From the idea shortlisting scorecard →Watch what customers do, not what they say
The real problem is usually different from the one people describe. If you can shadow someone in their actual workflow, you'll learn more than any interview will tell you.
Learned at Lasso →Ask for money early
LOIs and verbal commitments mean nothing. If someone won't put down payment details in some form, the problem probably isn't painful enough to build for.
Learned at Lasso, the hard way →Build with the sales motion, not ahead of it
How something gets sold shapes what should get built. The products I've seen work were designed alongside the people selling them, from the start.
How Artifax closed $1,000 sales with a Notion page →
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Pain Points from 100 Product Launches
Surveying builders across 100 Product Hunt launches to test whether selling shovels in the LLM gold rush is a real market.
Lasso: The Problem We Solved For
A post-mortem of building and selling Lasso. Why LOIs mean nothing, and what platform dependence did to us.
Unleashing the Potential of Creators
Why new platforms, generative AI, and fractional work make this the best time to build for creators. Based on research with 150+ of them.
Product Frameworks for Ideation
The PM frameworks I use to vet new ideas. Viability quadrants, problem briefs, job stories, and hill charts.
Pivot #1: AI User Interview Parsing
A postmortem of the Syncd pivot into AI interview analysis. Ten pilots, metrics that looked good, and why I killed it anyway.
Using Customer Research to Find Your First 10 Users
Defining a research question, screening participants, and finding interviewees in communities, so those conversations become your first users.
Artifax (AI ghostwriter) · Syncd (AI cross-interview analysis) · Wildfire (creator analytics) · BiG Deal (dynamic couponing) · Venice
THIQUE, a grilled cheese and natural wine bar · One.Six1, specialty coffee · Soundcellar, a wine and podcast club with 200+ members