I'm a founder and product lead, currently building Aida.
Hi, I'm Ian.
My mission is to build tools that help millions of people make progress on what matters most to them. I believe the next generation of technology will make our ambitions less constrained by the time, resources, and expertise we have. I love taking ambiguous, zero-to-one problems and turning them into products people rely on.
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.
Aida
(current)
(current)Agentic-native revenue system
Aida’s vision is to give sellers more time, better judgment, and greater capacity to act, while helping organizations decouple revenue growth from headcount growth.
Its system of intelligent action gives revenue teams AI agents that understand their business, execute company playbooks, and learn from customer interactions and outcomes. That learning improves how agents work across people and accounts, so lessons from one deal can inform decisions and actions across the team.
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 was chosen as Shopify Markets' exclusive white-label partner.
Showtime Analytics
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%.
What becomes possible when an old constraint disappears?
I look for products built around something that used to be impossible, expensive, or slow. The interesting part of a technology shift is how it changes what people can expect. “Why now?” is the starting point. The next question is which assumptions we no longer have to accept.
Which parts of the workflow should stop existing?
A workflow is a record of past constraints: what the tools couldn’t do, where information got lost, what someone had to check manually. When I watch people work, I look for those inherited compromises. Sometimes the biggest product opportunity is removing the reason a task exists.
What would make someone comfortable giving up control?
As software takes on more responsibility, trust becomes part of the product’s core design. People need to understand what it can handle, when it needs their judgment, and how to recover when it gets something wrong. I’m interested in how products earn greater responsibility through use.
When capability becomes abundant, what stays valuable?
As more teams gain access to similar technology, where will a product’s lasting value come from? It might be context that deepens over time, a place in a critical workflow, or trust earned through reliable outcomes. This question shapes what I build and what I'd expect someone to pay for.
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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 (micro journaling for singles and couples)
THIQUE, a grilled cheese and natural wine bar · One.Six1, specialty coffee · Soundcellar, a wine and podcast club with 200+ members
For business
For the mind
