Strategy Designer + Technologist + Lover of the Outdoors/Coffee/Good Beer/Wine/Travel/Lots More...
San Francisco, CA
Joined April 2009
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Hot take: most design criteria are written after the team already has a favorite. At that point they're not criteria... they're a justification in a trench coat. Decide what 'good' means before you see the options. The order is the whole thing.
ALT How to Use the (New) Design Criteria Canvas
Hot take: AI-generated personas aren't lying to you. They're being helpful. That's the worse failure mode. Helpful was literally the objective they were trained to hit. The Mom Test planned for a tired, kind human. Not this.
ALT Design & AI: Why AI-Generated "Research" Is the New Deception
Hot take: "delightful and on-brand" was never a design criterion. It was compressed team context that only worked when five people shared eighteen months of taste. Forty AI options in ninety seconds just exposed the difference between a vibe and a test.
ALT Design Criteria: Why "Delightful & On-Brand" Isn't Enough
Hot take: the design methods we all trained on were machinery for manufacturing ideas. AI just made that machinery irrelevant. The new scarce skill isn't generating fifty options... it's knowing which one deserves six more weeks.
ALT Design & AI: Why Traditional Design Methods Need an Evolution
AI doesn't make building easier. It makes choosing harder.
When execution was expensive, taste lived in the artifact — the details, the finish. Now anyone can generate a hundred plausible versions of that.
The real constraint now is knowing which problem deserves to exist.
ALT Design & AI: Why Taste Matters More Than Ability to Build
AI didn't make content harder to create. It made it harder to be noticed. Which means anything unmistakably human now stands out more than it used to... the bar actually dropped.
Most founders who need Traction most don't think their voice is worth preserving. They'll say "nobody wants to hear about my week" — then describe three genuinely interesting things in a row. The content isn't missing. The permission is.
The unglamorous part of building an AI voice tool: I'm reading strangers' old posts at 10pm to find the one sentence that sounds most like them. That's the signal. The stuff that almost didn't get posted.
Here's my hot take for the day: consistency is not your content problem. The blank page is. No tool fixes that by sending you a reminder.
A founder told me: "I posted three times in one week and didn't hate any of them." Not viral. Not ten leads. Just... no dread. That's the metric that matters first.
Hot take: your social media problem isn't time. It's that you sit down to post and have nothing to say. A content engine doesn't fix that. A thinking habit does... Traction just handles the rest.
Scheduling your posts consistently is not a strategy. It's a habit. The strategy is having something worth saying. Most tools help you with the first one and ignore the second entirely.
Here's my hot take for the day: AI doesn't replace the human in the room. It just makes the human in the room more necessary. Weird how we got that backwards.
Consistency beats quality on social. Every time. The founder who posts something decent three times a week wins over the one who posts something brilliant once a month... and then disappears.
Here's my hot take for the day: people don't hate AI writing. They hate thin content. The fix isn't a better model... it's a sharper opinion before you touch one.
Here's my hot take for the day: people don't hate AI writing. They hate thin content. The AI is just the latest thing to make thin content faster. Fix the opinion first.
Here's my hot take for the day: the founders who 'don't have a design background' are just designers who never got the label. Empathy, iteration, taste under constraint... that's not art school. That's the job.
Shipped: Traction now picks up on punctuation patterns, not just word choice.
Em-dashes, ellipses, sentence length — (or ... or ; or even : ) all of it.
Voice is mechanics, not just vocabulary. Took me too long to see that.
Hot take: AI traffic is surpassing human traffic online...and most founders are still writing content for humans who aren't even the first ones reading it. Wild timing to go quiet.
Hot take: your content doesn't sound like you because you didn't write it.
And every founder reading this knows exactly what I mean.
gotraction.ai