Use the goddamn product

Being customer obsessed is easy to say, but extremely hard to consistently do.

Whether you run a five star hotel or a SaaS business, the best way to understand how to make your product or service better is to experience it as a customer would.

Yes, it's crucial to gather customer feedback, to actively seek their feedback, and to execute on improvements based on what they tell you.

And as a software business you can instrument your app with metrics and tracking so you have every datapoint you could ever dream of.

But I'm convinced that customer feedback and metrics can only take you so far. No matter how direct and open your customers are with you, they likely will never tell you everything that could make your offering better.

And, the act of responding to customer feedback inherently means building something and waiting for feedback to improve.

You can make your offering better without a single piece of user feedback by doing something simple: use your service yourself.

For a software business, you should sign up for your own product. And you should use it on a regular basis.

And I don't mean "use" it in the sense of testing. Of course you want to make sure a few common workflows always work. I mean really use it like a user would — to carry out an objective, under realistic conditions.

In EcoSend, we've fixed hundreds of things that users have never (and I suspect would never have) told us about. Does that mean those issues don't matter? I believe they do — they all add up to an experience, whether vocalised or not. They're not show-stopping issues, and they're not necessarily bugs. They're quirks, things that could be more obvious, flows where we can save the user a click, or guardrails that help the user avoid a mistake.

I love making these kinds of improvements — they often go unnoticed, but they add up to an experience that feels more robust and reassuring, and at times delightful.

It's this approach that leads to good software. No matter how much AI is used in software creation, the process of using your own product cannot be outsourced.

The best software will always come from countless iterations based on feedback and refinement. When you are a user, you can run so many more of these cycles without users ever needing to tell you.

Do nothing

It’s amazing how intelligent it is just to spend some time sitting. A lot of people are way too active.

– Charlie Munger (American investor and philanthropist, business partner of Warren Buffet)

Some people call it meditation.

But that term can conjure up all manner of associations that don't help.

It's not about becoming a Buddhist, or tending a zen garden.

What I need more than anything every now and then is some time and space to just shut everything out. To do absolutely nothing.

I'm not talking about making time to read. Or write. Or run. Or podcast. Or catch up with a friend.

I'm talking about truly doing nothing (except breathing).

The modern world makes this close to impossible.

If you take your phone away, perhaps you still have a smart watch. You take that away and your iPad or laptop might be in close reach. You take that away and you may have a smart speaker or a TV on in the background.

And if you take all of those away, then your brain might be so accustomed to stimulation that you immediately reach for something — anything! — to distract. A book, an old magazine, a newspaper. Heck, even a cereal box will do.

And then, even if you remove ALL of that, if you live with someone else, or work with others, you might just find that your attempt to do nothing is interrupted again. On the basis that "you didn't seem to be doing anything so..."!

Doing nothing in modern society is not easy.

But I think it's more important to try than ever.

So many products don’t need to exist

So many, if not most of the products that surround us in modern society don’t need to exist.

But they do — they offer us choice, efficiency, fun, value for money, convenience, and many other attributes.

But what is the cost of that convenience?

The price tag is what the consumer sees. That's the cost, surely?

But that price tag doesn't account for everything. As an economist would say, there are many externalities that are not priced in.

When the option of a cheap bag or item of clothing is presented to us, it can be immediately more tempting to even the most conscientious of consumers.

I feel this more so now at this time of year — with Halloween and Christmas approaching.

Shops full of plastic, cheaply produced tat. Labels with AI-generated imagery to suck you in. Carelessly designed products that are designed for a single use, and then to be binned.

It's easier and cheaper to buy, throw it away, and then buy again than to buy and keep.

It's also often so cheap that people are encouraged to buy what they don't need. People start to think "Why not just buy that? It's only £2!"

"I can just use it and if it's no good I'll just chuck it."

This kind of consumer behaviour is frowned upon by some, but it is legal.

But really, the consumer is not the primary issue here. While there are many ways we, as consumers, can buy better, there's only so much one can expect every consumer to act in the interests of the planet.

Really, the attention would be better placed on the companies, their incentives, and the regulations that they operate within.

And (perhaps this is a little lofty...) we could collectively establish how we evolve our thinking as a society. Rather than rely on rules, wouldn't it be great if we shared our purpose as humans to look after each other and our planet?

Is it not quite obvious that we cannot continue to consume like we are today indefinitely?

For the companies that make and sell countless, thoughtless, cheap, throw-away products, this kind of consumer behaviour is exactly what they want. It is encouraged.

Can the market alone really figure this out for us? I don't think so.

When it comes to cheap consumer goods, the current market incentives (in the UK at least) seem to be almost entirely at odds with what our planet — and ultimately, what we — truly want.

I'm desperately keen for us to change that.

Tobi Lütke of Shopify on AI, slop, and responsibility

I really enjoyed this discussion with Tobi Lütke, the founder of Shopify.

I’ve always admired him for leading and building Shopify into the business it is today — one that is both financially successful, strives to build truly great products, and champions entrepreneurship itself.

Tobi shares the ups and downs of how they’ve been using AI as a company of thousands. They appear to have developed an incredibly valuable “team agent” that assists their team members in their daily tasks, and continuously evolves based on feedback.

This talk introduced me to the concept of “slop grenades” — huge and thoughtlessly verbose documents generated by fellow team members that get dumped on your desk to wade through.

Perhaps most interesting to me was Tobi’s remarkably simple answer to whether AI would ever take his job as CEO of Shopify: “no”. Tobi argues that AI cannot lead because it cannot take responsibility for its actions. Only humans can do that, and that’s a huge part of what makes any leader.

This talk seems to have been picked up by a lot of tech community thanks to its discussion around AI, but it’s well worth a watch regardless to get an insight into the brain of someone running a highly successful and large software business in its prime.

Friday finds — tools and links for your weekend

Following on from last week's "tools and links" post which some of you really enjoyed, I thought I'd do another one this week.

As you might know, I am a bit of a geek. I love finding new tools, gadgets, and things on the internet.

I hope you enjoy these, too, and if you have found (or made!) anything decent lately, please let me know.

  • “The computer will allow man to return to the Hellenic concept of leisure”. A wonderful site dedicated to past predictions of how key technologies will transform society. The Techno-optimism archive.
  • Bookpile takes an ISBN and tells you which bookshops, chains and libraries near you could be asked for a copy.
  • Trackables turns the data your Apple Watch already collects — activity, sleep, steps, heart rate — into a clear, friendly, transparent interface. Found this via Gruber — it's free of charge, private, and made by a small team of ex-Apple folks.
  • whoami.wiki looks like Wikipedia but if it was focused around your life. It's a system that turns your digital archives of photos, chats, documents, location history, and different types of data into a living encyclopaedia about your life. Not sure on the background of this and haven't tried it but it seems like a very interesting project.
  • Moment is a timer I've been using lately to help me stay focused. It puts your wellbeing first with Apple Health integration (it asks how you feel after a focus session) and provides on-device insights.

Enjoy the weekend!

Humans vs machines

Are we treating our fellow humans worse and our tech better?

Many people I speak to seem to be working harder, feeling burnt out, and generally exhausted.

We’re so focused on how to speak to AI — how to write the perfect prompt — we seem to be forgetting how to speak to each other.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Be kind. Make eye contact. Listen.

Be human.

First vs only

Earlier this year Elon Musk became "the world's first trillionaire".*

That wording made me pause.

The use of the word "first" inherently implies that there will be more.

More trillionaires?

I would rather write "the world’s only trillionaire".

"Only" does not imply momentum.

"Only" implies uniqueness. Isolation. Loneliness.

It takes the edge off the statement.

"First" suggests we might want more trillionaires.

We don't.

* In desperately sad news, Musk's trillionaire status has fluctuated, and shortly after the IPO he lost it.

Revisiting the agile manifesto in the age of AI

If you’re an engineer I can already hear you letting out a sigh.

As long as I’ve been in the world of building software I’ve heard the term “agile” and I’ve never really dug into it too much.

It’s always had connotations of “work” and project management and, to be honest, Jira.

Yuck!

It was only recently when someone shoved the core principles of the Agile Manifesto under my nose that I thought to take a closer look.

If you haven’t come across the Agile Manifesto before, you can find it on a website that appears to be unchanged since the 90s. It’s gloriously old school.

But the words are as relevant as ever. If anything they feel more relevant and important.

For convenience, here are the principles, with a little interpretation of my own.

Satisfy the customer

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Satisfy the customer. Satisfy the customer.

If nothing else, this is the most important principle of all. If this was the only principle, and every single organisation and individual adopted it, I think software would be perceived in a much more positive light by people. And I think we would perhaps have a lot less, but better, software.

Embrace change

Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

Changing your mind when new information emerges is a good thing.

Working software in weeks

Deliver working software frequently, from a  couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

I'd argue this should now be hours, or days, in the age of AI.

Don't ignore the business

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

By "business" people I'd include customer service, marketing, sales, and leadership.

Trust motivated people

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

Speak to each other

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Technically Google Meet and Zoom are face to face. But nothing beats being in person.

Actual working software is the priority

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

Yes you can get a fancy dashboard to measure user numbers, activity, and more. In fact, I am inclined to believe analytics can be very helpful! But don't lose sight of the top priority: working software.

In an age of tokenmaxxing, and having witnessed previous phases of optimising for "lines of code written", this feels like a rather important goal to keep in mind.

Sustainable development is sustainable

Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

You can only move fast and break things

Focus means saying no

Ask anyone who's been in business for a while how they got successful, and they'll almost always highlight the importance of focus.

In the famous Apple video called "Intention" that opened one of Tim Cook's first keynotes as CEO — there was the unforgettable line:

There are a thousand no's for every yes.

And as Jony Ive has said many times: people think focus is about saying yes to one thing. In reality, it's about saying no to (sacrificing) many fantastically good ideas. All so you can focus on the one thing that really matters most.

That all sounds rather obvious, perhaps.

But of course, that is all a lot easier to accomplish if you're incredibly sure of what you should focus on.

The challenge, I have often found, is choosing what to focus on.

What is actually most important? And can those other ideas, asks, and requests really be a "no" right now?

Surely there is a balance?

The more you can gain conviction on what is truly important — what truly deserves your time and attention — the more confidently and therefore successfully you can focus.

And with that focus — only with that focus — can greatness be achieved.

A non-exhaustive list of suggestions for a better life and a better world

Shop local.

Shop independent.

Eat less meat.

Eat less processed food.

Drink less coffee.

Get to bed earlier.

Use your phone as little as possible.

When you’re bored, sit with the feeling a little longer. Creativity often comes from boredom.

Make eye contact.

Smile.

Say please and thank you.

Hold the door open for someone else.

When you travel, eat, drink, and live like a local.

Avoid plastic like it’s a disease. It is.

Think more about the second and third-order consequences of your decisions.

Price is not the only metric to make a buying decision.

Discomfort is a signal, you don’t always need to find a quick fix for it.

You tend to learn a lot from mistakes, so don't be afraid to make them every once in a while.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Your true health will never be measurable as a number on your Apple Watch.

Most of what we call "normal" has only been so for at most a hundred years. So it's OK to be "weird" every now and then.

Read more books and fewer tweets.

Pick up litter when you can.

Don't do things to please others, do things out of pride.

Leave the world better than you found it — every day.

Seven and a half hours of scrolling social media

Perhaps related to my recent post on overcoming overwhelm, I realised how much social media has been eating at my attention and time.

I don’t blame social media, I blame myself. And if I blame myself then I know I can take action to address it.

After taking a little time for myself at the weekend I reflected on where my time had been spent over the recent weeks. I looked at Screen Time on my iPhone to assess whether my suspicions were correct.

Yes, I was spending a lot more time than I wanted to on social media.

Mark Zuckerberg and his team have been excelling at pulling me into their world and keeping me there. I counted at least seven and a half hours of time on Instagram and Threads across the week. Even though I have a Screen Time limit of 30 minutes per day on all “social” apps on my phone.

Seven and a half hours… that’s on top of TV and other distractions. That’s time I could be truly resting, or giving my best to a creative pursuit, or exercising.

It’s junk food time.

As anyone who has tried Apple’s Screen Time features knows, “Ignore for fifteen minutes” is an easy button to press when you’re deep down the rabbit hole of your Instagram feed at 10pm.

I struggle with social media on my phone, not because I feel addicted but because I feel there is an aspect that is core to my job — to stay up to date, to post, to keep on the pulse of the industry.

But I realised, I don’t need these apps on the device I carry everywhere.

I deleted Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, and X from my phone. They're gone.

Let’s see how this serves me — perhaps the added friction that I must go to my iPad or my Mac to access any of these social feeds will not starve me of knowledge or make me a social pariah like I think it will.

Perhaps against the rhetoric of AI being a socially destructive technology, there are ways it could be employed to save us time, to shield us from modern day distractions, to be looking out for us, rather than to work against us.

If you’re struggling with distractions yourself, here are a few resources I have found helpful:

Some more tools and links

I am an eternal geek and I love finding new tools, gadgets, and things on the internet. I hope you enjoy these, too. If you do let me know!

  • Blankie — ambient sounds to help you focus and get into your flow state. Beautifully designed native app for iOS and Mac.
  • Coop — an app and network that makes it easy for you to buy goods (like bread, plants, and other food) from those nearby. Seems to only be in the US right now, but this seems like the sort of thing we need more of in today's over-commercialised world of "bigger is better". No: smaller is better!
  • AppZapper — the return of a classic Mac app. Super nerdy but so fun. It's literally just an app for deleting apps on your Mac. But you use a laser gun to delete them. Proof that software doesn't need to be boring.
  • Clop — a handy Mac app that automatically optimises images and other files you copy to your clipboard. Just like how EcoSend optimises images in your emails, this does it for you on anything you've got on your Mac, even PDFs. And does it all locally so there are no privacy concerns at all.
  • RecipeTables — I can't believe I have reached this age and only just discovered this ingenious way to present recipes. A tabular form that makes it easy to see all ingredients, all of the steps, and the order you prepare them in, for a recipe. Data visualisation and the engineering mindset at its best.

Seen anything cool lately? Found a tool you simply can't live without? Let me know!

Your product is a conversation with the market

Des Traynor and John Collison on Stripe's Cheeky Pint podcast

A while back I watched this talk from two legends of the software world: Des Traynor of Intercom and John Collison of Stripe.

I love these discussions and this series I find to be a relaxing, fun environment. How could you not enjoy watching a couple of smart people sharing a Guinness or two, discussing topics you've always wanted to ask them about?

A few quotes that really stuck with me:

A product is a conversation with the market.
Your launch is your opening bit, and then you have to basically adapt and react to what gets thrown back at you, which might drag you in different directions. And then you need to have, again, the confidence to prune certain things.
People massively underestimate what it means to have a truly happy customer base.
Word of mouth doesn’t have a UTM code.
Don’t afford yourself too much freedom on pricing. You will end up crippling yourself in a quagmire of complexity.

The whole discussion is worth a watch or a listen.

And it's worth noting that since this aired, the company Des co-founded, Intercom (and Fin) sold to Salesforce for $3.6 billion.

Why individuals have an incredible advantage over teams when building software

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

I’ve written about building software (primarily web-based software for small businesses) many times in the past.

It’s pretty much the only thing I’ve ever done.

There has been more change in the last two years than the last twenty combined.

Thanks to AI, the processes and methods and tools have changed unimaginably, and continue to do so.

But what amazes me is that many people — and many businesses — have barely changed at all.

Both in small teams and large ones, I still hear timeframes quoted in months for building features that could be crafted in days.

It’s easy to think everyone is on the cutting edge if you’re someone who enjoys checking the latest releases of each model, seeing what the Hacker News community have to say about every new AI developer tool, or have spent any time building things with AI recently.

But most of the world isn’t yet doing that.

Most people work in teams and many work in teams at bigger businesses. From what I’ve seen, the structures in place at most larger businesses are largely incompatible with — or at least are limiting — how they can truly embrace AI to build software.

The current (old) way

The old way of building software often meant doing something along the lines of the following:

  1. Talk to users.
  2. Digest their feedback and figure out what to build.
  3. Design a prototype (often a wireframe).
  4. Hand over a written document and a wireframe to developers to build out.
  5. Do some more design to polish up what the developers have built.
  6. Get the thing deployed and live on a server somewhere.
  7. Go back to your users and see how they like it.
  8. Depending on what the users say, go back to step 2 and repeat.

Every step of that journey could take hours if not days… if not weeks.

In an early-stage startup, that is time you don’t have. One of the most critical processes to speed up is that loop of feedback > build > ship.

But when the steps in between can take hours or days. Communicating and translating ideas into actual built products is extremely hard. Yes it may take a week to deploy a new database but have we accounted for the days of discussion between product and engineering to make sure its clear why we need that database and what it should do and what it’s strengths and weaknesses are and how much it’ll cost?

The advantage of the individual

I think individuals have a tremendous advantage right now because they don’t need buy-in and they don’t need to agree with anyone but themselves.

You could also see that as a disadvantage. Sometimes you need to be told no. But more often than not, you need the market to tell you that, not the developer.

I'm

Don’t devalue instinct

Being data driven is an extremely prevalent theme in the tech world.

Everyone wants to use data to make better decisions, and ensure they’re not being stupid.

But in the rush to be data-driven, it seems many people and many teams frown upon instinct as a method for making decisions.

The smaller you are, and the earlier you are, the more you need to rely on your gut.

As you grow, you gain the privilege of more users, more customers, more feedback, and more data.

Instinct and intuition is a form of data, and I’m convinced that we are still in the early innings of understanding how best to apply it to decision making.

Overcome the overwhelm

From time to time, it all gets a bit much for me.

Life gets on top.

I start to find myself playing catch up. Chasing. Trying to stay afloat.

This is a terrible place to make big decisions from. It’s a terrible place to be for any meaningful length of time.

I’ve started to realise my way of fighting the overwhelm — and it’s to go against my instinct.

It’s simple but it’s often so very hard to do in practice: do absolutely nothing.

Not forever, not even for long, but just for a bit. A day ideally, or maybe even just a morning.

Do nothing. With no one. With no screens. No sounds. No commitments. No chores. Escape everything.

Modern life is filled with deafening noise — every app, every podcast, every TV show, every ad, every crisp packet, every delivery, every email, every WhatsApp, every sign, every thing.

The only way I’ve found to overcome the overwhelm is to stop, and let my mind and my body pause. Just for a little.

The time to overachieve will come soon enough, but not a moment sooner.

Introducing Hotshot: a little app to track your caffeine intake

I drink a lot of tea. There's rarely a moment in the day where I don't have a hot drink in hand.

But at some point in the last year I started to wonder: with all these drinks, how much caffeine am I consuming?

And how does that compare to the recommended amount?

And how much caffeine is in tea anyway?

And how does that differ to a flat white at my local coffee shop?

And what does all of this mean for my sleep?

Is this all related to why I struggle to wake up early every morning and desperately need a lie-in on a Sunday?

After just 19 years of using and loving the iPhone, I finally made an app. An app that answers all of these questions and more. An app that is live on the App Store.

Get Hotshot on the App Store

I'm so excited to have built something that I (and now you!) can use on the devices we hold in our hands — it feels quite profoundly different to building web-based software. The result is something more intimate, that feels more personal, almost like a physical product.

A screenshot of the Hotshot app on an iPhone 17 Pro
A screenshot of the Hotshot app on an iPhone 17 Pro

Just a year ago, this would have been completely impossible for me. For as long as I've been working, I've been able to design — but never build or ultimately ship software.

This is both the final step of a long journey, and the very earliest start of a new one: of ideating, designing, building, and shipping real working software.

If you're interested in how the app works and what it does, I created a dedicated page to learn more about Hotshot for caffeine tracking.

I hope you like it, and I hope you download the app.

If you do, I'd love to hear what you think.

If there's anything I've learned from all my time working in the world of software, it's that you should launch before you're really ready (absolutely true here), and that your work is never, ever done.

Enjoy your next cuppa!

John takes over from Tim

Today is the day John Ternus takes over from Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I thought it was interesting to read Apple’s own biography of Tim now he’s Executive Chair of the Board of Directors — it’s a brief summary of the last 15 years at Apple.

I was pleased to see a few highlights that really go against the grain of the general business narrative in 2026:

Under his leadership, the company reduced its carbon footprint by more than 60 percent below 2015 levels during a period in which revenue nearly doubled.

As well as

He pushed for continued innovation in the accessibility space, believing that Apple products should be made for everyone.

And

He made central to his leadership the notion that Apple should be a place where everyone can feel they belong and where everyone is treated with dignity and respect.

I truly believe Apple’s success has been because of these core beliefs and values, not despite them.

It’s an extremely tough act to follow, but I’m excited to see John Ternus take the lead at Apple.

I’ve never tired of following Apple, from the thrilling and awe-inspiring tenure of Steve Jobs, to the calm yet explosive growth under Tim Cook.

Next week, Apple will hold their first event led by John Ternus as CEO, where they’re set to unveil their first ever foldable iPhone.

What will set it apart? Why would anyone want it? What will make it truly Apple?

It’s the dawn of a new Apple, and all will be revealed soon. I can’t wait!

Image optimisation in EcoSend

86.7% reduction in file size, overlaid on a photo of Hugo the spaniel.

I've wanted us to build this since the very first day of EcoSend, and I can't quite believe we finally have it: automatic image optimisation.

Almost every email carries an image of some kind, and it's far too easy to send something large enough for a highway billboard to people who'll only ever see it at the size of a post-it note.

Now EcoSend quietly fixes that for you — resizing every image to the size it's actually displayed at, choosing the best format, and compressing it as far as it'll go without losing an ounce of quality. In our own tests we've seen images shrink by over 86%, and it all happens invisibly in the background with zero extra work for users.

What thrills me most is that this took years of wanting before we had the foundations to do it properly. Building on our all-new email builder finally let us solve a problem we've been slightly obsessed with for as long as I can remember.

Every byte we save is a small win for deliverability, for the people opening emails, and for the energy consumed in the whole chain — and when you multiply that across millions of recipients, those wins add up to something quite meaningful.

More than anything, this makes me excited for what's ahead. Not just for EcoSend, where I think we're only getting started, but for software more broadly.

The best tools are the ones that do lots of hard, invisible work so people don't have to think about it. The constantly improving tools and landscape, with lots of help from AI, are enabling us to bring forward a future which once could only be dreamt of.

Dirty business

In February of this year, Channel 4 released Dirty Business an incredibly well produced, and hard-to-watch dramatised series about the dire state of "public" water in England. It's based on true life, real data, and heartbreaking real events .

Since the 1980s, water has been privatised in England, meaning instead of it being in the government's control, it is now under the control of for-profit organisations like Thames Water, Southern Water, and South West Water, who have, for the most part, left their infrastructure to fall apart, while ensuring "customers" (everyone who lives here) pay ever more for the privilege.

A huge focus of the program is the heartbreaking impact that pollution and spills have had on local habitats and environments, leading to countless issues for wildlife, and human illnesses and deaths. Of course, these have all been challenged and questioned by the heavily lawyer-ed up water companies themselves.

The show is beautifully shot, incredibly well written, and brilliantly acted. It deserves all the attention it can get. The issues surfaced deserve to be as big of a story as the British Post Office scandal that has been through a similar cover-up and subsequent exposé conveyed through brilliant storytelling and creative efforts.

If you are running short on things to get you angry, then give this a watch. I share it here because I hope that more visibility and awareness will ultimately drive change.

Playing to win

You can’t just boot the ball from the goalie and hope it’ll land in the back of the net on the other side of the pitch.

But that’s what sales efforts can sometimes feel like. And of course that almost never works.

When watching the World Cup final on Sunday I was rather impressed with how Spain played against Argentina.

I’m not the biggest football obsessive, but I enjoyed the match and I have to admit I enjoyed watching a lot of the World Cup.

There’s something that has grown on me over time about seeing 11 people (and many more behind the scenes) come together to achieve something that none on their own could.

Seeing a team play with hunger, patience, and fluidity can give you a lot to think about in the world of business.

After all while any team, on or off the pitch, may have superstars, they can rarely achieve their potential without working together in a unified passionate way.

What the heck does this have to do with sales? Perhaps not much, but a little thought came to my mind.

When you’re trying to sell a service or an offering, it can feel tempting to do what a junior footballer might do: get the ball and hoof it at the goal and hope it goes in.

This is what I see most people do when they’re just starting in sales. They go for the sale almost immediately — before they’ve made any rapport, and before they’ve even established if the other person is at all interested or even the right person to make a buying decision.

Don’t do this.

If it works, it’s because you got lucky. You may win a sales once or twice but it’s not a robust process that will enable you to win in the long run.

Instead you want to take your time. Build momentum, build control, be patient. Don’t rush, and don’t make unforced errors.

If I’ve learned anything from watching the World Cup, to win you must do more than score lucky goals. You must work together as a team, and have patience.

In football, in sales, in business, and in life, you rarely want to just score a goal. You want to win the championship.

What has the BBC ever done for me?

This aired during the World Cup final last night and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The BBC may have its fair share of problems but there really is nothing like it anywhere else on earth. It’s something that makes me truly proud and fortunate to be British.

It builds on a much older (and arguably more entertaining) sketch that first aired in 1985, featuring John Cleese and many iconic figures that have left their mark on the nation.

Siri is about to become good, but that’s not the problem

What happens when 1.5 billion people suddenly get a good AI assistant in their pocket?

In just a few days time, when Apple holds the keynote for WWDC 2026, we are likely to finally see (and hear) a Siri that doesn’t suck.

While this has been rumoured in the tech press, I don’t think most people are quite ready for how big of a deal this is.

And even if Siri stops sucking, it’s going to take a long time and a lot of advertising dollars to persuade people it’s actually true.*

Apple is a victim of its own doing. They are the boy who cried wolf on AI.

The lowest barrier to entry for AI


For years, the modern wave of AI has been mostly opt-in.

People have had to:

  • Download ChatGPT
  • Sign up for Claude
  • Try Gemini
  • Learn new habits

A lot of people have, of course, but many (most?) people still haven’t.

And even for those who have downloaded and used any of those apps, I suspect the majority of iPhone users don’t use AI regularly, or benefit from even a slither of its capabilities.

But everybody knows Siri.

Everybody has a button for Siri.

Everybody has a microphone for Siri.

Everybody has already been trained to understand the concept.

The problem was simply that Siri sucked.

If Siri suddenly becomes genuinely useful, Apple will be transforming an existing habit that they’ve spent years training users to be disappointed by.

It’s potentially enormous, but it’s going to take a while for people to catch on.

Learned helplessness

Siri has created a form of technological learned helplessness.

Users stopped asking difficult questions of Siri. In fact, many users stopped asking anything of Siri.

They learned the answer would usually be disappointment.

If Apple has fixed that, the hardest part won’t be improving Siri, but teaching people to try again.

How is Siri suddenly getting better?

Multiple reports suggest Apple is increasingly turning to Google and its Gemini models to power some of their AI ambitions. Google event tweeted about it:

You can look at Google’s latest announcements to get a sense of what’s coming to the iPhone. If you squint, repeat the announcements in a Tim Cook voice, and apply some Liquid Glass to the UIs, you’re on the right track.

Apple is essentially forming their own variant of a multitude of Gemini features and models.

If Apple doesn’t screw this up, then WWDC is sure to be a demonstration of great AI functionality actually coming to iOS and Apple’s other platforms.

You can also look at the recent accessibility features

A few cool tools

There seems to be an explosion of great, useful, and beautifully designed tools popping up lately.

Perhaps this is in part down to the new powers we all have thanks to AI coding tools, but not exclusively. When combined with initiative, passion, and taste, the outcome is a wonderful renaissance of indie software development.

Screen Studio is not new but it’s a tool I find myself using more and more to create engaging screen recordings. It’s the optimum balance between Loom and a full-on video editor. You can create slick “produced” screen recordings and have a link on your clipboard ready to share with your team in minutes.

Quiche Browser is delightful Safari replacement for iOS. I have never seen an app balance this level of beauty, craft, and simplicity, while allowing for such extensive customisation. What a delicious treat.

Bevel is an “all in one” health tracking app that gives an unbelievable amount of value for free. If you wear an Apple Watch and want to track your health a little more intensely, this is worth a look. It’s worth it alone if you want to geek out on some cool data visualisation.

MacNotch is essentially the iPhone’s Dynamic Island but for your Mac. It makes great use of your MacBook’s “notch” and offers an extensive array of options and customisations.

Blank Page is a delightfully minimal Notion-like editor you can use without any need to sign up, pay, or install anything. It’s just a beautifully minimal writing experience through and through.

Clearly is a markdown editor for the Mac. It also offers “knowledge base” functionality allowing you to link notes together. It’s beautifully implemented and truly Mac-assed Mac app. And it’s free. If you use Obsidian on a Mac then this is worth a look. Pink Floyd fans might like the icon too.

Sofa has existed for a while but the new version is a big update. It’s a beautiful iOS app to keep track of all the TV shows, movies, podcasts, and books you’re consuming.

Granola is a meeting note-taker I have previously written about, but continues to "just work" for me. It's just so good at staying in the background and being a silent helper to my daily meetings, giving me genuinely helpful notes and nothing I don't want.

Dato is a menubar-based calendar app for the Mac that makes it easy to see your upcoming events and pop new meetings in with a few clicks. It is reminiscent of the original Fantastical — before it offered to replace your whole calendar experience. I use it with the built-in Apple Calendar app to manage my schedule.

Let me know if you've recently discovered a new favourite little app or tool — I'd love to hear about it.