🗓 05 March 2024
Have you tried asking them?
Last week on a whim, I sent an impromptu and speculative email to the co-founder of a well-known software company. I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me, butI wanted them to make me something.
I’d wondered if writing a book would be a good way to prototype a product company. Byinvesting enough effort to write a book, I thought I might be able to gauge the level of pain I suspect exists when designing AI products, and test whether my solution might be well received.
I couldn’t write the book in one go. I wanted the ideas to evolve. And to do that I’d need to make it publicly available for feedback. I needed a way to incrementally develop a book in the same way that an open source developer incrementally develops an application; small, frequent changes over time, always in public.
I thought “That’s a webpage! You’re describing a webpage!”. And in a sense I was, except that reading a webpage isn’t like reading a book. I needed structure. I needed chapters. I needed the ability for the reader to put the book down and pick it back up later where they left off… like I’d seen with ShapeUp, from the people behind ONCE.
I got a reply1 to my ask, and with it another reminder of how valuable this piece of advice (disguised as a question) has been in my career… “have you tried asking them?”
- Stuck on a problem? Who’s the world expert? Have you tried asking them?
- Someone did something odd? Not sure why they did it? Have you tried asking them?
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“😊 Stay tuned” ↩
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© Jonathan Roberts 2024
I occasionally update articles to fix typos, improve readability or modify content when new information is available to me: view revisions for this article