Early Experiments

Before I understood what a startup was, I was running experiments. A food blog that reviewed local restaurants — my first attempt at building an audience around something I loved. Then WeTalks, a platform concept for peer conversations. Then helping restaurants market themselves online.

None of these made significant money. All of them taught me something the business world often takes years to learn: there is a difference between building features and building value.

Features are things you make. Value is what someone's life looks like after they use what you made. I could build a blog with great UX. But what the restaurant owner needed was more customers on Tuesday nights. Those are different problems.

This distinction — user experience vs. user outcome — became foundational to how I think about product. Every feature I've shipped since then has been filtered through this lens: does this make someone's life measurably better?

The experiments failed in the conventional sense. But they succeeded where it mattered most — they built my mental model.