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Marc Astbury

Marc Astbury
Annual Review 2024 Last year I was grateful to write my review whilst sitting outside a cafe in Dali, embracing the...
2 months ago
22
2 months ago
Last year I was grateful to write my review whilst sitting outside a cafe in Dali, embracing the cool 15 degree climate. This year, I’m in freezing cold Sapporo drinking a carton of the delicious local milk. For simplicity, I’m largely sticking to the format from my 2023 annual...
Marc Astbury
The Continuum of Design Where do we go from here? User centricity helped us build software, but what comes next? The past:...
3 months ago
20
3 months ago
Where do we go from here? User centricity helped us build software, but what comes next? The past: the genius designer design through ideology Vignelli, Da Vinci, Le Corbusier etc. master designer will intuit problems and find solutions, a moment of genius designing with atoms...
Marc Astbury
The Exodus Curve The concept of Product-Market Fit (PMF) collapse has gained renewed attention with the rise of large...
a month ago
19
a month ago
The concept of Product-Market Fit (PMF) collapse has gained renewed attention with the rise of large language models (LLMs), as highlighted in a recent Reforge article. The article argues we’re witnessing unprecedented market disruption, in this post, I propose we’re experiencing...
Marc Astbury
Place Your Bets Startups are a sequence of nested bets. Like poker, you’ve got a limited bankroll and imperfect...
3 months ago
19
3 months ago
Startups are a sequence of nested bets. Like poker, you’ve got a limited bankroll and imperfect information. The Market Bet Your foundational bet isn’t just picking a market, it’s betting that you understand how that market will evolve. This bet shapes everything downstream: If...
Marc Astbury
End user programming – my experience building an iOS app Update: Sticky was approved on the App Store, you can download it here. The void between users and...
4 months ago
17
4 months ago
Update: Sticky was approved on the App Store, you can download it here. The void between users and builders of software is seldom considered. A software builder sits in San Francisco and hopefully talks to and observes user needs and behaviors in order to build a product that has...
Marc Astbury
Notes on Improving Churn Ask any B2C SaaS founder what metric they’d like to improve and most will say reducing churn....
2 weeks ago
14
2 weeks ago
Ask any B2C SaaS founder what metric they’d like to improve and most will say reducing churn. However, proactively reducing churn is a difficult task. I’ll outline the approach we’ve taken at Jenni AI to go from ~17% to 9% churn over the past year. We are still a work in progress...
Marc Astbury
Building a Simple Chrome Extension with ChatGPT I’ve casually been learning some JS via Mimo and Udemy for the past couple of months. It is fun and...
a year ago
12
a year ago
I’ve casually been learning some JS via Mimo and Udemy for the past couple of months. It is fun and I get some dopamine seeing a nice animation when completing a lesson on Mimo, however, it is pretty abstracted from a real environment. I learn things best under two conditions:...
Marc Astbury
A quick summary one of the benefits of LLMs is the ability to summarize things one of the dangers of LLMs is the...
5 months ago
11
5 months ago
one of the benefits of LLMs is the ability to summarize things one of the dangers of LLMs is the ability to summarize things read any AI product’s value prop and it will say a variation of “it frees you up to do higher order/ value tasks” nobody knows what these higher order...
Marc Astbury
Retaining an MVP mindset A short guide on how we tested team plans at Jenni and closed $10k in revenue. Hypothesis statements...
11 months ago
11
11 months ago
A short guide on how we tested team plans at Jenni and closed $10k in revenue. Hypothesis statements Team plans are a way to increase retention Team plans move upmarket toward users with more purchasing power Team plans are targeted at full-time researchers who have an ongoing...
Marc Astbury
Mini Programs v.s. Native Apps After spending a few weeks in China, the most notable behavioural difference is the usage of...
8 months ago
10
8 months ago
After spending a few weeks in China, the most notable behavioural difference is the usage of mini-programs. Every restaurant has a menu mini-program sitting on top of WeChat or Meituan. Hello Ride the bike-sharing startup is a mini program on top of Alipay. Here is a diagram...
Marc Astbury
Intervention ≠ good Michel de Montaigne, in his ‘Essays,’ recounts the story of a friend who fell sick. Despite...
a year ago
10
a year ago
Michel de Montaigne, in his ‘Essays,’ recounts the story of a friend who fell sick. Despite consulting doctors and trying different treatments, nothing worked. Resigned to his fate, the friend finally gave up all treatments and stopped eating. Surprisingly, this led to an...
Marc Astbury
The Gnarly Bits of Product Design As designers, we focus on the core interaction and forget the bits and pieces around it. The stuff...
10 months ago
9
10 months ago
As designers, we focus on the core interaction and forget the bits and pieces around it. The stuff that some people refer to as ‘polish’. Here is a brain dump of my top easy to forget but important design stuff. defining which events should be tracked did we consider loading...