ten steps · the sequence, without the camera

1. 01one personone person, one thing to do. a trip. a move. a wedding.
2. 02every pain pointinside one trip, lots of separate things go wrong. we list them all.
3. 03what already existseach problem already has something on it: an app, a service, a person you pay. usually it solves only a piece. we map everything the person actually uses.
4. 04read it by handwe read all of it ourselves. every product, every review, every complaint. why people pay, why they leave, and who actually makes money.
5. 05first principleswe keep asking why until the answers are reasons, not opinions. everything we build is only as good as this step.
6. 06tastewe polish it until it feels right. that takes longer than building it. taste is choosing the few things that reach the screen.
7. 07one roofthen every answer goes into one product. one place to go instead of ten.
8. 08a tenth of the pricebetter on every piece, at a tenth of the total price.
9. 09latent demandwe build it so people can use it in ways we did not plan — and we watch. the product tells us what it should become. “You can never get people to do something they do not yet do. You can find the intent that they have, and then you can steer it.” Boris Cherny, Anthropic · on Ryan Peterman's podcast · clip published 2026-08-05 · machine transcription of the 49-second excerpt, 2026-08-09
10. 10a hundred who love itat the start we want a hundred people who love it, not a million who quite like it. we write to every user. we call them. we spend a day with them.

we study all of them by hand, take them down to first principles, and build the one product that replaces the lot.