How to build a new thing
The startup clone factory | Seeing software | Apple Notes personal website | Steve Jobs calculator | New software products + loads more…
🆕 Personal Updates
Welcome to the first issue of 2025. After a great break, I’m back at it and feeling refreshed and ready to get behind my desk and write again. I’ve got a load of content this month below and an extra juicy bunch of URLs to click in the ‘other links to consume’ section. Enjoy!
Right, let’s get to it - time for this month’s roundup 👇
🔥 Last editions top link: Facebook’s Little Red Book
🔗 Hyperlinks
Technology Brothers
If you’re looking for a new pod to freshen up your stale podcast feed I might have what you're looking for. Despite on the face of it a new podcast with two VCs talking isn’t perhaps the most novel idea, however, I’ve been completely addicted to this podcast for the past two months. These guys have great chemistry, quick humour and some fascinating deepdives and I get the feeling they are going to blow up in 2025 and build a pretty substantial community behind them.
John Coogan is co-founder of both Soylent, the meal replacement choice of Silicon Valley founders and VCs and Lucy, the nicotine consumption alternative for millennials in addition to being a VC for Founders Fund. Then we have Jordi Hays, Co-founder and CEO of Capital - banking services for founders, Co-founder of Branded Native - YouTube advertising agency and angel investor.
If I could sum the show up in a few words it would be, techno-optimism, financial opulence, VC predictions, startup and founder deepdives with some great humour.
How 3 German Brothers Shamelessly Clone Startups
If you read last month’s edition you will notice I’m unapologetically featuring yet more content from Hiten Shah, but this story is too good not to share. This is the fascinating deep-dive of how three brothers built a $2b market cap business by shamelessly cloning products in other countries.
Their thesis was pretty straightforward, take a novel idea which has little competition and export it to another country where it isn’t available. Initially, US companies being cloned in Europe.
Since its founding in 2007, the copy-cat Berlin-based startup incubation clone factory has cloned companies such as Zappos, eBay, Alibaba, Amazon and Airbnb to name just a few.
Starting with eBay, they quickly realised they were onto something. Their clone, Alando was acquired by eBay just two months after launching for $43m. Shortly after the sale they quickly ramped up their velocity and at its peak would launch a new startup clone every 7 days.
Whether you agree or not with such ethics, I’m sure you can agree it’s a fascinating story. Specifically, it’s a case study because it challenges the status quo of building novel tech startups by prioritising execution and operational excellence over original innovation. Additionally, it treats building startups more like a repeatable science than an art. It’s not for me, but an interesting approach nonetheless.
Fun fact: The brother’s first company was a ringtone subscription business called Jamba - they invented the viral song and character Crazy Frog to sell their ringtones, netting them over $400m in sales.
🎁 Bonus content: Rocket Internet: What It’s Like to Work at a Startup Clone Factory.
🎁 Bonus bonus content: The original thesis their business model was following - written by one of the brothers - Oliver Samwer.
Apple Notes-themed personal website
When I first visited this site I generally thought Apple Notes must have launched the ability to host and share pages similar to Notion - I was sadly wrong.
Alana Goyal created it. She took a screenshot of Apple Notes and uploaded it to v0 and in a few seconds, like magic, the React code was provided. Now, there was a lot more to the creation of this site, which you can read here but just check out the level of functionality it has. It includes the ability to write a note, date and time stamps, pinning, fully responsive layouts and identical formatting to Apple Notes. Bravo Alana!
📓 Articles
Seeing software
Have you ever considered the effect software has on you? no, not your horrible social media addiction, but the productivity or project management software you use? If so, have you considered how its design and constraints might influence how you work, the decisions you make and the emotions it invokes? I hadn’t until delved into this post by Tara McMullin.
Tara argues that project management software has a lot of promises, but one perhaps more hidden promise which mostly impacts the users of such software is the promise of conformity.
Do you see how it influences how you run meetings, brainstorm ideas, fulfill your responsibilities, and communicate with others? Do you see how its text boxes, radio buttons, tabs, search results, and menus train you to think? Do you see it, or do you just use it?
The assumption that project management software is a one-size-fits-all solution is obviously not true. No one product will ever meet the specific preferences of its users, however, the users of these tools don’t get the opportunity to select the software they use. When they encounter limitations with the software they simply adapt their process around the software and put up with it.
This brings me to my next point, have you considered if your daily tech stack fits your specific needs and provides the value you hoped for when using it? Ask yourself, does it fit my needs or am I adapting my ideal process and requirements around it? Find software which works for you.
Steve Jobs' Calculator
This is a fantastic little story told by Andy Hertzfeld (ex Apple employee and founder of General Magic) which provides some fascinating insight into what it was like to work with Steve Jobs and his famous attention to detail and ruthless approach to feedback.
Having started work with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at age 14, when Apple was a startup based out of the Jobs’ family garage, Chris Espinosa employee number 8 at the time at Apple back in 1982 set out to build the first "desk ornaments" for the Macintosh - or what we would now called Widgets. His first project was the desktop calculator.
Chris was iterating on the user interface and showed Steve Jobs each iteration. Steve would have some visual feedback, and Chris would continue to show his work over and over again and iterate towards Steve’s feedback. Eventually, Chris tried another approach which he called "the Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set". Each element of the calculators’ graphical attributes were configurable by pull-down menus. You could select line thicknesses, button sizes, background patterns, etc.
In this post, Jordan muses on how this configurable interface is something we can expect to see in the not-so-distant future.
🎁 Bonus content: Andy Hertzfeld’s original post titled ‘The calculator construction set’.
How to build a newthing
Do you ever read a post and wish it you that wrote it? well I do, and this is one such case. This poetic portrayal by Yancey Strickler (former Kickstarter co-founder and CEO) delineates the journey of conjuring up an idea to launching it in his typical quirky writing approach.
They are magical. They are more powerful than us. Even when we think we have mastered them, they will remain a mystery.
This is how you build a newthing.
If you’ve ever created and launched a product or worked in a team that has, you will most definitely relate to this process and its associated emotions.
Reading this post reminded me that ideating, creating and launching a new “thing” is an art, despite there being various systematic frameworks. There is more nuance than you might realise.
Bring back the romance of creating something from nothing!
📱 Products
Freeform | AI-enabled real-time forms
Imagine you could create a form and no two are the same. Hear me out. Existing forms are pretty static by default. Sure, you can add some conditional logic and create an element of dynamic functionality, but despite that, you cannot preempt every possible twist and turn in potential responses. As a PM and advisor to startups I’ve often said that forms are great for capturing surface-level information at scale but jumping on a call with someone allows you to quickly adapt your questioning based on their response which allows you to get deeper more valuable insight. But that might not necessarily be the case now. The team from Every and their new Every Studio have launched a preview of a tool called Freeform and from what I understand its an AI-enabled form builder. Imagine forms that adapt in real-time and feel more like an organic and meaningful conversation. Consider the potential step change in response quality and insight gathered.
That’s why I’m working on Freeform, an AI-powered tool I’m building to experiment with creating adaptive, dynamic forms. No two Freeforms will ever be the same. The questions adapt in real time based on your answers, diving deeper into interesting insights or stepping back when engagement fades.
While it’s still in private beta, you can play with an example form here. I’m seriously impressed by the demo and looking forward to testing the beta.
Faces by Notion
This might be old news, so you seasoned Notion nerds can skip past this.
For the longest time, the only way to get a Notion "face" was to work at Notion and get one hand-drawn by their illustrator Roman Muradov.
The minimalist illustrations with gestural lifework stood out among the vector illustrations that most companies were beginning to use,” says Roman. “People started telling me they got into Notion primarily because they loved the illustrations.
Turns out even Notion were struggling to keep up with the backlog of illustrations required for new employees, so they built an internal tool which allows anyone to create a similar-ish personal illustration of themselves.
🎁 Bonus content: The thinking behind our latest brand campaign
Zen browser
Let’s chat about web browsers…again. Long-time readers will know I’m a big Arc browser fan, however, they recently announced they have stopped working on new features and will be effectively running it in maintenance mode to focus their resources on a new product (called Dia) - something which they believe will appeal to the masses and allow them to “cross the chasm”. Despite Arc being adopted by millions of DAUs, they don’t believe the current version of Arc will get them to their goal of billions of users. Personally, I’m excited, despite there being a mixed reaction from power users. In saying that, I did have a dig around and found an interesting Arc alternative.
Zen Browser is an open-sourced, privacy-focussed browser that recently came out of its Alpha phase and entered open beta. To address the elephant in the room - yes, this pretty much a clone of the Arc browser, at least the UI is. As for the underlying infrastructure - unlike Arc which is based on Chromium, Zen Browser uses Firefox (unfortunately). Despite it being in Beta it’s packed with pretty much all the same features as Arc. As for me, I will continue with Arc unless support continues to grind to a halt.
Any other browser you would recommend? Hit reply and let me know.
Discover the latest tech products
Discover this month’s latest early-access beta products before everyone else.
Cora computer: Achieve inbox nirvana.
Cove: A new type of AI collaborator.
Guse: Your multiplayer AI canvas.
🐽 Other links to consume
🔮 Flashback
Studying history to learn the future
This month I’ll leave you with the 1988 Sony Watchman modular portable colour TV. This impressive tiny smallish device had a 2-inch black and white LCD screen and was about the size of a small paperback book, making it one of the smallest TVs ever produced at that time. It ran on 4 AA batteries and could get an impressive 3-4 hours of viewing time. The device retailed for a pretty respectable price of $150-200 in 1988 (equivalent to about $370-490 in 2024) considering the tech that was packed into the device at the time.
If you made it this far, hit reply or jump into the comments and tell me what you thought of this edition. Was this 🔥 or 🗑. I read every response 👀
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Until next the next issue,
Sam | @thisdickie 👨💻
The Samwer brothers’ cloning empire is a masterclass in ‘execution > innovation’...ruthless but undeniably effective. The fact that Crazy Frog was just a ringtone sales gimmick is just insane. Also, Freeform’s AI-powered forms could be great. What do you think?
Packed issue as always. The Freeform AI forms idea really stood out. The story of the Samwer brothers is a wild reminder that execution often beats originality. Do you think this dynamic approach could eventually replace most traditional survey tools or would there always be a place for simpler, static forms?