In the last five years they have released more than 100 products.

There’s an activity that the Barrel partners have been doing for a while: reaching out to a couple of contacts per week. These have typically been former clients, industry acquaintances, other agency operators, investor types, old friends and classmates, etc. It’s been a practice we’ve kept up weekly since 2017.

It's a simple way to sustain an ongoing always-on outreach to nurture your network. This is the lifeblood of generating consulting work.

Clients usually find me directly through something I've written, rather than through a referral.

Every weekday, Trent Reznor makes his way from his house, a cottagey sprawl behind a white wall in a canyon on Los Angeles’s Westside, to a studio he’s built in his backyard. There he meets his best friend, bandmate, and business partner, Atticus Ross, and they get to work. Reznor and Ross observe the same hours, Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 7... See more

But he and Ross still come to work, daily, in search of transcendence.

Along those lines, I believe that mechanics design is a distinct discipline separate from both interface design and product management. I believe it deserves its own terminology, principles, processes, deliverables, and bodies of knowledge.

They are more like the rules of the product, conscious choices towards a desired behavioral end.

The site feels like a chaotic newsroom with the cutting room floor exposed. I think that’s part of the excitement — and good design.