Ian Johnson
Ian Johnson

Hi, I'm Ian.

I'm a founder and product lead, currently building Aida.

My mission is to build tools that help millions of people make progress on the things that matter most to them. I love taking ambiguous, 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, to curating music for art exhibitions and building micro journaling tools for better relationships.

Selected work

Aida(current)

2024–now

Agentic-native revenue system

Founding product lead

Aida improves deal velocity and drives more revenue per headcount. It turns each rep's deal history, calls, emails, and CRM activity into a system of action.

It also flags at-risk deals, prioritizes accounts, and tracks signals like MEDDPIC and rep behavior, so best practices hold through the whole quarter, not just the week before a review.

Aida deal view: AI-written deal overview, deal fields, and a drafted follow-up emailCase study. The sales meeting, end to end

Lasso AILasso AI logo

2021–2023

Creator-economy matching

Bootstrapped matchmaking between brands and creators. The engine matched 1M+ creator profiles a week at 97% accuracy.

Founded · Acquired by Yard

Case study. Lasso, the problem we solved for

FlowFlow logo

2018–2021

Commerce infrastructure

I ran growth, experimentation, merchant-of-record, and checkout on $250M a week of cross-border volume. Flow was chosen as Shopify Markets' exclusive white-label partner.

Principal PM · Acquired by Global-e for $500M

Showtime AnalyticsShowtime Analytics logo

2014–2018

Customer data platform

We helped movie theatres and studios understand who their customers were, growing from 2 cinemas to 80+ chains in 26 countries and taking customer identification from 3% to 78%.

VP of Product · Alibaba Pictures JV

How I think

  1. 01

    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
  2. 02

    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
  3. 03

    Talk about price before you build

    Monetizing Innovation says it plainly: design the product around the price. That conversation is standard for founders validating an idea, but product teams skip it far too often. What customers will actually pay for should shape the roadmap, not get discovered after launch.

    Learned at Lasso, the hard way
  4. 04

    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

Writing

The Last Mile of Sales Coaching

Jun 2026

Coaching has always been an event that arrives too late. With AI it becomes an environment that shows up in the moment.

The Pre-Product Sales Sprint

Apr 2024

Closing $1,000-per-user sales with only a Notion page and phone calls. A five-day sprint for validating demand before building anything.

A Concise Guide to Shortlisting Startup Ideas

Dec 2023

A weighted scorecard for deciding what to build next, with a worked example where I score my own idea and it comes up short.

Read 6 moreShow less

Pain Points from 100 Product Launches

Jul 2023

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

Jun 2023

A post-mortem of building and selling Lasso. Why LOIs mean nothing, and what platform dependence did to us.

Unleashing the Potential of Creators

Jan 2023

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

Jun 2022

The PM frameworks I use to vet new ideas. Viability quadrants, problem briefs, job stories, and hill charts.

Pivot #1: AI User Interview Parsing

Apr 2022

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

Mar 2022

Defining a research question, screening participants, and finding interviewees in communities, so those conversations become your first users.

Things I have built for fun

Products

Artifax (AI ghostwriter) · Syncd (AI cross-interview analysis) · Wildfire (creator analytics) · BiG Deal (dynamic couponing) · Venice

Food & drink

THIQUE, a grilled cheese and natural wine bar · One.Six1, specialty coffee · Soundcellar, a wine and podcast club with 200+ members

For business

  • 7 Powers
  • High Output Management
  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things
  • Build
  • Good Strategy Bad Strategy
  • The Culture Map
  • Inspired
  • Competing Against Luck
  • Crossing the Chasm
  • No Rules Rules
  • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
  • The Founder's Dilemmas
  • Sprint
  • The First 90 Days
  • Just Enough Research
  • Monetizing Innovation
  • Predictably Irrational
  • Design Is a Job
  • Mobile First
  • You're My Favorite Client
  • The Design of Everyday Things

For the mind

  • The Republic
  • Meditations on First Philosophy
  • How to Change Your Mind
  • Beyond Good and Evil
  • The Prince
  • The Last Days of Socrates
  • Notes from Underground
  • The Plague
  • At the Existentialist Café
  • On the Suffering of the World
  • Man's Search for Meaning
  • Bad Blood
  • Shoe Dog
  • Empire of Pain
  • Billion Dollar Whale
  • Educated
  • 1984
  • Animal Farm
  • The Alchemist
  • Humankind
  • Why We Sleep
  • A Brief History of Time
  • Kitchen Confidential
  • Everything Everywhere All at Once
  • 12 Angry Men
  • Parasite
  • Interstellar
  • Hamnet
  • Prisoners
  • The Game
  • The Prestige
  • Past Lives
  • Inception
  • The Dark Knight
  • Arrival
  • The Truman Show
  • Fight Club
  • Logan
  • Heat
  • Crazy, Stupid, Love.
  • Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
  • Chef
  • Good Will Hunting
  • About Time
  • Call Me by Your Name
  • Up
  • Moonlight
  • Drive
  • Whiplash
  • The Intouchables
  • Her
  • Sound of Metal
  • Palm Springs
  • Ex Machina
  • Memento
  • Donnie Darko
  • Moon
  • Mad Max: Fury Road
  • One Battle After Another
  • Sinners
  • Project Hail Mary