The short version: I started by analyzing problems, learned to build products, met AI halfway, and decided to build companies. Here’s the longer one.
CH. 01 — THE PROBLEM HABIT
I started my career as a Business Analyst — the person who writes down what everyone else will build. It didn’t take long to notice I cared less about documenting requirements and more about the puzzle underneath them: why the process broke, what the person on the other end was actually trying to do.
The job title said “analyst.” The habit that formed was “solver.”
CH. 02 — SEEING THE WHOLE SYSTEM
Features are easy to ship and easy to forget. At some point I stopped thinking in features and started thinking in products — whole systems where user needs, business goals, and technical constraints have to hold together at once. That shift changed the questions I ask before anything gets built.
A feature answers a ticket. A product answers a need.
CH. 03 — AI CHANGED HOW I BUILD
I didn’t adopt AI as a faster autocomplete. I adopted it as a collaborator — in design, engineering, documentation, decision-making. The bottleneck in building software quietly moved from how do we make this to do we know what’s worth making. That’s a shift that rewards exactly the muscles I’d been training.
AI didn’t shrink my job. It removed the ceiling on it.
CH. 04 — FINTRACK
FinTrack is the personal finance product I always wanted and could never find: simple on the surface, deep underneath, honest about how people actually behave with money. It’s a personal financial operating system — and it’s also my proving ground for everything I believe about building with AI.
The best way to test your convictions is to build with them.
CH. 05 — THE NEXT IDENTITY
Delivering products for others taught me the craft. Now I’m working toward the other side of the table: building businesses, making products people keep, and sharing what I learn in the open. This site exists because the becoming is worth documenting — not just the arrival.
Builder is the current title. Founder is the trajectory.
WHAT I BELIEVE
01
Software should reduce thinking, not increase it.
Every screen that asks a question the system could answer is a tax on the user. Great software collects fewer taxes every release.
02
Good design isn't decoration. It's clarity.
If a product needs a tooltip to explain itself, the design failed before the copywriter arrived. Beauty that doesn’t clarify is just noise with taste.
03
AI doesn't replace builders. It amplifies the ones who know what they’re building.
The cost of making software is collapsing. The cost of knowing what’s worth making is not. That gap is where the next generation of builders wins.
04
The best products disappear into daily life.
Nobody celebrates their calendar app. That’s the highest compliment software can earn — being trusted enough to become invisible.
05
Complexity is conserved. Someone always pays for it.
It should be the builder, not the user. Every hour I spend absorbing complexity into the system is an hour thousands of users don’t spend confused.