New products, first customers
I do my best work when the customer problem is clear enough to start and the product still needs to be figured out. I work across discovery, the first build, pricing and early adoption. I stay close to what customers actually do after launch.
These three stories show different stages of that work. Pragmatic Leaders began with paying customers. Tushky reached real transactions and exposed a repeat-usage problem. Elsewhere is a public alpha with an initial technical proof. Its external adoption is still to be established.
Pragmatic Leaders
Education · Started in 2018 · YC W21
The first customers
I began with 21 paying students across three countries, without external funding. They wanted to move into product management or grow in their current roles. The first product had to help them make that change.
What I owned
I worked alone in the first year, customized the learning platform, and watched each student’s progress. Where people got stuck became the input to the next product decision. As the program grew, I worked on adapting problem sets and pacing to the learner.
What happened
In my published account of that first cohort, 18 of the 21 students moved into PM roles or were promoted. That is about 86%. The program later expanded across cohorts and programs, and Pragmatic Leaders joined YC W21.
The lesson I carry into new products is to work closely enough with early customers to see whether the promised outcome is happening, then decide what is worth scaling.
Tushky
Experiences marketplace · 2011–2015 · 500 Startups, Batch 6
Getting both sides started
Tushky connected local experience providers with people looking for cooking classes, heritage walks and workshops. It needed both bookable supply and customers willing to transact.
What I built and tested
I built the marketplace with the team. We made supplier onboarding simple enough to create a listing in under ten minutes and reached 150+ experiences in six months. We acquired customers through Facebook ads and search, and tracked acquisition cost, bookings and repeat use.
Where the product hit its limit
Bookings settled around 80–100 a month, with a 12–15% repeat-booking rate in my published account. Providers saw us as another booking channel. Adding supply and improving search did not solve that relationship problem.
I had made the first transaction easier, but had not created enough reason for customers and suppliers to return. That changed how I evaluate a new marketplace: the evidence needs to include repeat use and supplier commitment alongside initial transactions.
Elsewhere
Developer product · Open source · Public alpha
The problem I encountered
Running coding agents alongside builds and tests made my laptop a bottleneck. Cloud compute was available, but choosing where to run work and moving it safely created another operating task.
The first product
I built Elsewhere to decide whether a workload should run locally or move to available cloud compute. The product makes the destination, source movement, cost boundary, job state and cleanup visible.
Those choices are part of the user experience. A developer needs to know what left their machine, where the job is running, and what happens after failure or cancellation.
What is established so far
The public alpha has an initial documented execution example that moved a workload to cloud compute and verified cleanup. This is technical proof from my own use. I am still establishing external adoption and which workflows people will return to.
The next product question is which recurring task makes that handoff valuable enough for another developer to use it regularly.
Current enterprise work
At Zopdev, I work on cloud products for engineering teams. ZopDay helps teams deploy into their own cloud. ZopNight addresses cloud spend and governance. This work brings product decisions into the same conversation as permissions, deployment, budgets and enterprise adoption.
I also work on Ostronaut, which turns conversations on the floor into evidence a business can use, and Pomelo, a voice product in private beta. The complete work index distinguishes companies, products, experiments and current release stages.
What I want to build next
I am exploring a full-time US role owning a new product line, with an engineering and design team and direct access to customers. I want to take responsibility for the first customer segment, the first useful release, and the path to early revenue and repeat adoption.
New York and the Bay Area are both of interest. I would need visa sponsorship and would discuss the transition from my current work as part of an initial conversation.