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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 but hopefully you’ll […] The post Notes on Improving Churn appeared first on Marc Astbury.
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 an acceleration of a familiar pattern rather than a fundamentally new phenomenon. Adoption Curves […] The post The Exodus Curve appeared first on Marc Astbury.
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 review. Life and Work The more […] The post Annual Review 2024 appeared first on Marc Astbury.
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 The present: the user-centric designer designer has a toolkit to […] The post The Continuum of Design appeared first on Marc Astbury.
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 this foundational bet is wrong, you face an existential choice: pivot […] The post Place Your Bets appeared first on Marc Astbury.
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A large part of our civilisation rests on the shoulders of one medieval monk: Thomas Aquinas. Amid the turmoil of life, riddled with wickedness and pain, he would insist that our world is good. And all our success is built on this belief. Note: Before we start, let’s get one thing out of the way: Thomas Aquinas is clearly a Christian thinker, a Saint even. Yet he was also a brilliant philosopher. So even if you consider yourself agnostic or an atheist, stay with me, you will still enjoy his ideas. What is good? Thomas’ argument is rooted in Aristotle’s concept of goodness: Something is good if it fulfills its function. Aristotle had illustrated this idea with a knife. A knife is good to the extent that it cuts well. He made a distinction between an actual knife and its ideal function. That actual thing in your drawer is the existence of a knife. And its ideal function is its essence—what it means to be a knife: to cut well. So everything is separated into its existence and its ideal essence. And this is also true for humans: We have an ideal conception of what the essence of a human […] The post Thomas Aquinas — The world is divine! appeared first on Ralph Ammer.
My April Cools is out! Gaming Games for Non-Gamers is a 3,000 word essay on video games worth playing if you've never enjoyed a video game before. Patreon notes here. (April Cools is a project where we write genuine content on non-normal topics. You can see all the other April Cools posted so far here. There's still time to submit your own!) April Cools' Club
Everyone wants the software they work on to produce quality products, but what does that mean? In addition, how do you know when you have it? This is the longest single blog post I have ever written. I spent four decades writing software used by people (most of the server
The Ware for March 2025 is shown below. I was just taking this thing apart to see what went wrong, and thought it had some merit as a name that ware. But perhaps more interestingly, I was also experimenting with my cross-polarized imaging setup. This is a technique a friend of mine told me about […]
