Three products at three different stages, each one a problem I had before it was a product.
Three DNS records decide whether a stranger can send mail as your company. The reports that tell you whether they are working arrive as machine-readable XML from every mailbox provider on the internet, which is no use to the person who actually owns the domain. Email Watch reads them and answers in a sentence.
Vendor risk lives in a spreadsheet that was accurate on the day somebody filled it in. Vendor Watch takes a vendor domain and returns an assessment that keeps rechecking itself, with the evidence attached to every line so the answer can be argued with.
Vendor Watch list
Get an invitation before it opens to anyone else, and the writeups from building it.
This list only. It is separate from the newsletter and from the other product lists, and one click leaves any of them.
A buyer sends a security questionnaire and the deal stops until somebody answers three hundred questions they have already answered four times this year. The answers exist. They are scattered across old spreadsheets, a policy folder and a trust page nobody maintains, and the person who can assemble them has a different job.
Questionnaire list
Get the first working version when there is one, and an honest note if this gets dropped instead.
This list only. It is separate from the newsletter and from the other product lists, and one click leaves any of them.
01How I pick what to build
Every one of these started as a job I was already doing badly by hand, in a company small enough that nobody else was going to do it for me. That is the entire search. An idea where I am the person with the problem is one I can judge in an afternoon; an idea I read about is one I would be guessing at for six months.
Then the order, which matters more than the idea. A list comes before a build. I write down what the thing would do, put a page in front of the people who have that problem, and watch whether anybody puts an address in the box. Building first is how you spend half a year learning something a fortnight of conversations would have told you.
The method is worth copying and I will keep writing it down. My read on somebody else's market would not transfer to your company anyway. Go have your own afternoon.
02About these lists
Each product has its own list, and you can be on any combination of them. The confirmation email names the list you joined.
Every list is double opt-in. Every message carries a one-click leave, and leaving one list leaves the others untouched. There is no signup count on this site: a signup is a person who was curious on a Tuesday, and treating that as evidence of anything is how founders talk themselves into building the wrong thing.
Charles AIAsk me anythingHi. Ask me anything about Charles, the company, or the products.