Making software
The Ultimate Studio | Wild Company Gifts | AI Horseless Carriages | Obsession over onboarding | AI Native Browser Drop + loads more…
🆕 Personal Updates
I’m back. Trying to stay true to not publishing an issue if I don’t have anything interesting to share, I skipped the last two months.
Right, let’s get to it - time for this month’s roundup 👇
🔥 Last edition’s top clicked link: The Duolingo Handbook
🔗 Hyperlinks
Moving into my dream NYC studio
Second to desktop setup tours, I’m obsessed with studio tours. The penultimate studio has to be Casey Neistat’s. It’s maximalism, it’s functional, and it seems like the perfect place to inspire creativity. You could wander round it for days, discovering new things.
However, I’ve found a new YouTube account from Jordan Studdard and if just by chance, his studio is directly above Casey’s. You need to see it to believe it. The guy even lost a few fingers creating it.
Making software
I haven’t been this excited for some time over a book launch. I’ve been following Dan Hollick on X for some time. He’s an extremely talented front-end designer who has an insatiable curiosity about how things work. He learns, digests, simplifies and shares on X. So when he alluded to writing a book about his technology learnings, I signed up right away for the pre-order.
This book won’t teach you how to actually make software - it’s not a tutorial or a guide but rather something more interesting than that. It’s a manual that explains how the things you use everyday actually work.
To get an idea of just how detail-oriented he is, just check out his landing page for the book. His custom-coded animated illustrations are incredible.
Fortunately, you don’t need to be technical to read this - there are a lot of pictures and diagrams to do all the heavy lifting. You just need to be curious.
Stripe gifts
Despite Stripe being a payment processing API for developers, it’s not as dull as you might think. While typical tech startups might give away some standard swag to power users, such as branded stickers, caps, t-shirts or water bottles, Stripe takes this to another level.
Take the image above for example. To celebrate one of their customers’ milestones (Midjourney), they sent them a real CRT TV custom-built and programmed to show an animated world map which details all of Midjourney’s subscriptions.
And while you might think there’s a big dedicated team working on these projects, you would be wrong. In fact, it’s a small part-time team that meticulously ideates, builds and ships these wonderful gifts.
Other examples include sending a motorcycle-fan founder a helmet with his company’s colours and logo, and a tennis-fan founder some tennis balls with his company’s colours and logo and loads more weird and wacky creations.
🎁 Bonus content: Talking of Stripe. John Collison, co-founder and president of Stripe, just launched a new podcast called ‘Cheeky Pint’ where he interviews some of the most fascinating startup founders in a tiny pub they built in the Stripe offices.
📓 Articles
AI Horseless Carriages
It feels like every company is rushing to integrate AI into their products with little consideration for the user experience and value delivered to customers.
This rush is resulting in janky, sloppy features, which at times create more frustration than before they existed.
One such example is Apple's horrific attempt to bring AI into its native OS. Everything feels rushed, with little thought and finesse considered. I’m all for shipping early and getting feedback, but most of the time, I can’t figure out what problem they are trying to solve in the first place.
From the outside looking in, it seems less like a customer need or desire and more like they feel they need to add AI because a competitor has, an investor has advised or said they would invest, or to get a few additional basis points on the stock market.
Whenever a new technology is invented, the first tools built with it inevitably fail because they mimic the old way of doing things. “Horseless carriage” refers to the early motor car designs that borrowed heavily from the horse-drawn carriages that preceded them.
In this post, Pete Koomen (founder of Optimizely and partner at YC) argues that most AI apps are just old software in a fancy hat, awkward, stiff, and overdoing it. His pitch? Let users teach AI to work their way, so it’s less robot butler, more mind-reading assistant.
Obsessing Over Onboarding for 10+ Years
Does the name Gaurav Vohra mean anything to you? Most likely not, and I mean no disrespect to Gaurav. Should you know him? Well, it depends. Are you a Product Manager, early-stage founder or designer - if yes, then you need to know him and study this guy’s techniques.
This guy pioneered human-led onboarding. In the age of AI, the term ‘human-led onboarding’ perhaps sounds dated and unscalable. Gaurav’s obsession with retention led him down a somewhat niche rabbit hole - onboarding. I, too, had a similar obsession in my early product days, building SAAS products and wrote a post which broke down some of the most impressive early access onboarding flows.
… we might have spent more time onboarding customers 1:1 than any other startup in history. I personally onboarded hundreds of customers before hiring our first Onboarding Specialist. At peak, we had dozens of Onboarding Specialists, who onboarded thousands of paying customers per week, and tens of thousands per year.
But there is a method to this seemingly mad approach. He turned “white-glove” onboarding into a growth engine, personally walking new users through setup before scaling those learnings into a slick, self-serve experience. Vohra breaks down why manual onboarding is worth the effort (think: higher retention, faster feedback, and more referrals), when to make the leap to automation, and how to design onboarding that’s opinionated, interruptive, and interactive.
The Hidden Power of Aesthetics in Design
Having worked alongside product designers for over a decade now, sadly, it’s only quite recently have I've realised just how challenging a role they have. The designers in a software development team are consistently forced, time and time again, to justify their decisions to people with no design background — people who say things like, “I don’t like it,” or “have you tried something like this?.” A designer most likely wouldn’t critique the software engineers’ work, nor the PM or most other roles, yet they brunt the end of the subjectivity stick in a team.
However, design isn’t what something looks like. It’s how something works — and how people move through it.
Hierarchy guides the eye. Symmetry creates balance. Composition gives shape to thought. Spacing makes room for meaning. These aren’t subjective whims. These are universal tools. You can argue over style but not over legibility.
In this post, Andrew Coyle argues that perhaps style may be objective, but good design, believe it or not, follows a set of principles which underpin design, which, perhaps unlike many other principles, is a challenge to articulate.
If you work with a design, do me a favour and give this a read and then go give your colleague a well-deserved break from criticism.
📱 Products
Dia | First AI native browser
The Browser Company, creators of the Arc browser, just started rolling out the Beta of their new browser, Dia.
Initially, it was only available to students with valid student email addresses. I’m way past being a student, so I reached out to my cousin and managed to convince him to sign up for me.
I’ll admit I was skeptical at first and passed judgment before even hearing a thing about it. Arc was great, why on earth would you pivot to an entirely new browser? Well, Josh Miller explains here.
Anyway, I’ve been playing with Dia for the last 6 weeks and I’m sold!
Yes, there are some features from Arc I would love to see in Dia, but the new AI native browsing experience is wild! I’ve got a persistent LMM which sees everything I can. I don’t need to jump to my LLM of choice in a separate app. I don’t need to provide it any context about the page, it already knows. I can also reference multiple tabs in the AI chat, which has been a game-changing feature when comparing or bringing in additional context.
I’ve got both ChatGPT and Claude Pro accounts, and since using Dia I’ve hardly used them. I assume they will be charging for this browser at some point, as these LMM tokens aren’t cheap, but for the time being, I’m all in.
Give it a shot, and if you need an invite, I have a few spare. Just hit reply!
🎁 Bonus content: Unlike 99.9% of stiff, corporate, cringy company values, The Browser Company took a different approach and wrote theirs in the form of lessons learned by taking roadtrips. Check it out - it’s fantastic.
🐽 Other links to consume
🔮 Flashback
Studying history to learn the future
This month, we’re going back to 1997 with the Sony Mavica floppy disk camera.
Despite digital cameras having been commercially launched a decade prior, Sony looked to take advantage of the 3.5 floppy disk. Digital storage was super expensive at the time, which drove the price of digital cameras at the time. But floppy disks were super cheap and the common consumer storage solution.
This strategy proved extremely lucrative and became the dominant digital camera of its time before the price and convenience of digital memory cards eventually entered the market.
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 👨💻