For the longest time felt like I didn’t fail at things. I was brought up with the mindset that if something is doable, it cannot be hard. A mindset which compels you to find harder and harder challenges.

That all changed when Flex, the Techstars company I co-founded didn’t work out. It broke me. 

​Is anyone else exhausted by the world yet? The last 4 years have made the news effectively useless as a medium for informing the public, and the populace at large have become so tribally loyal that the main political parties behave like cults.

I keep coming back to the fact that the system (UK/US) is built for cars, and as hard as you try to switch to bikes it ends in tears.

​Upon reading black rednecks and white liberals, and reflecting on the past 4 years of American existence on Independence day, I have started to find signal in my thoughts pointing to some key rules that explain how society works and why it feels so uncomfortable when things are going differently.

Some pointers on how I operate to save us all some time

Last week I had an interaction with a founder looking for advice/feedback on the product he was building, that just threw me.

He was building a new diet/food tracking app and the tagline was "The food tracker for food lovers"

I pushed him on its meaning and how with so many existing competitors he could stand out. I literally had no idea what his product did, what it would do for me and why it is better than the current situation.

I’ve wanted to write down some thoughts for quite a while on the news of the fitbit acquisition by google, the current state of play with the Apple watch and how, in my opinion, with the right set up and investment fit bit can be transformed and put the Apple watch to bed.

This seems quite prescient given that today is the Apple watches 5th birthday and this week my Apple watch app Stretchy reached 3000 downloads (been out for 3 weeks).

Since I wrote Marriage, a 60th Birthday and memories as a product, This idea that we don’t get to say the things we want to or that we don’t get to re-live the best of memories enough has stuck in my head.​

​At the turn of the new year I decided that instead of thinking a product into existence I would hack on an Airtable and try and build my own archive.

​In this post I want to try and organise my thoughts around the idea of “10x” products, how jobs to be done can be applied when looking at 2 different products without heavy research and the levers that can be pulled to change how products going to market compare to incumbents.