What Being a Founder Changed About How I Build Products

When I started designing and building digital products in 2017, I spent a lot of time thinking about the experience on the screen. Could someone understand what to do? Was the flow unnecessarily complicated? Could we make it easier?

I still care about those questions. But building Pensil, a white-label community platform, gave me a much longer list.

Who needs this enough to pay for it? How will they discover it? Can they get started without a call? What happens when something breaks? How much of our time will this take after we ship it?

As a founder, all those questions eventually land on your desk.

You can build a thoughtful product and still struggle to turn it into a business. That is an uncomfortable thing to learn when making products is the part you enjoy most.

A feature comes with more work than you think

It is easy to estimate a feature by thinking about the design and development effort. A few screens, some backend work, testing, and then it is done.

Except now someone needs to explain it on the website. A customer needs help setting it up. Another customer uses it differently from how you expected. The settings need updating. An edge case turns into a support conversation.

The feature becomes a permanent part of the business.

Building Pensil made me more careful about what I was willing to add. I started thinking beyond whether we could build something and asking whether we could keep supporting it properly.

Sometimes the answer was yes. Sometimes a smaller version made more sense. And sometimes the responsible decision was to leave it alone.

That last one can be surprisingly difficult when you already have an idea for how the screen should look.

Customer conversations are part of building

When you are close to a product every day, you start taking its logic for granted. You know why the settings are there. You know what each label means. You know which step comes next.

A customer has none of that context.

For a community platform, creating the community is only one part of the job. Someone still has to give people a reason to join, help them participate, and keep the space useful.

That changes the product questions considerably. A setup flow might work perfectly while leaving the customer unsure what to do afterwards.

It also changes how I think about support. If people repeatedly need an explanation, that conversation is telling us something about the product. We might need better wording, a better default, or a different approach altogether.

Writing a help article can be useful. So can noticing that the same article keeps being needed.

Prioritisation becomes personal

There is a particular kind of pressure that comes with owning the business. A potential customer asks for something, and you can immediately see the revenue attached to saying yes.

At the same time, your existing customers need improvements. There are bugs to fix. The team has limited time.

Every decision takes time away from something else.

I became more interested in whether a request would help several customers with the same underlying problem. That gave me a better basis for deciding than how exciting the idea sounded or how recently someone had asked for it.

It did not remove the difficult calls. It helped me explain them.

I still enjoy the details

I have not stopped caring about a confusing button or an awkward interaction. Those details affect whether people can use what we build.

What changed is the frame around them.

Today, when I look at a product decision, I think about the person using it, the person buying it, and the people who will have to maintain it.

Building Pensil gave me a closer view of how those needs depend on each other. A good experience matters much more when we can also keep delivering it.