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We were going to create a brand to serve people, not advertise to them.

Consumer behavior is never done or satisfied. One of the great things about brands is that magical products or platforms or experiences can delight cu

Consumer founders today are solving for abundance. Too much food, pollution, stimulation, and connections leads to obesity, climate change, mental hea

Aggressive growth projects often lead to UX cruft, slowly degrading long-term user engagement and retention. Yes, you can move short-term metrics by t

Founder Mode

Start in the future and work backward

If you pay attention, you’ll see that today’s winning brands understand the customer’s story is the only one that matters. Your most important job as

Solving a problem for your user is great, but easing their cognitive dissonance can have a much greater emotional impact. There is likely something th

The Questions Before the Questions

AUFI: What’s one piece of advice you’d give to a brand in 2026?Dan: Make something genuinely great and tell people about it clearly.

Great positioning takes into account all of the following: The customer’s point of view on the problem you solve and the alternative ways of solving t

Communities = Human Search Engines?

Groups are hard to form in the first place. Think of how many random Discord communities you were invited into the past few years and how many are sti

It’s rare for a member to convert from a lower tier to a higher tier. In most cases, it’s not worth it to have a way for people to pay you $2, $10, $5

To me, a membership is something you pay for to get access to a benefit you’re after. That benefit can be a community of your peers, but it doesn’t ha

We earn trust by stating our business model upfront – instead of ads, we monetize by charging directly. Directly charging creates high expectations fr

Principle 2: Break up the conversation based on how, not whatNow that I’ve told you not to over-complicate your community architecture by introducing

There is often no compelling reason, even in online communities, to suggest people go into different rooms to discuss different topics.

A more sensible way to think about where conversations need to be broken up, that’s not topic, is format. In a physical space, the analogy might be—if

Intro to EGP