Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. And it’s that process that is the magic.
How following your gut leads to a product
This story is special for a number of reasons. You’ll notice it is not on TechCrunch or Mashable or a similar blog like that. It is not a story of how X company raised Y million dollars from Z VC. In a world where startups “pivot” every three weeks, this is the story of how an idea which was initially hazy and abstract, went through four prototypes and a year later resulted in a startup which has figured it out.
This is, in my opinion, what a startup story should be like. It is not about funding or about an acquisition within weeks from launch. It is about Ellie giving her passion everything she had for as long as she could - getting rejected by investors plenty of times, breaking up with her then boyfriend, facing eviction notices, and finally relocating across the country without even packing her stuff.
In a world where startups and founders are looking for the path of least resistance to cash out, where it is increasingly hard to filter out signal from noise in all the startup news thrown our way, this is a story you should totally read.
[Disclosure: Ellie is a friend and I owe her a few drinks.]
