Affordable and beautiful shouldn't be a trade-off

October 22, 2026

Think about the things you buy. Usually you get to pick one: a cheap version that does the job, or a well-designed one priced for someone else. Rarely both.

Why? Cheap products tend to treat design as a cost that eats into profit. Premium products often stay expensive on purpose, because being out of reach is part of what they're selling. Both sides have a reason to keep the choice in place.

Software is different. Once an app is built, giving it to one more person costs almost nothing. So the old logic stops applying. A company can charge a fair price and still make something beautifully designed, because each extra customer barely adds to its costs.

You can already see this. Many of the apps on your phone are used by millions of people, free or almost free, and some are better designed than things that cost far more.

But it only happens if someone cares enough. Cheap software can still be ugly and clumsy. Beautiful software can still sit behind a price few people can justify. Making something people enjoy using, and keeping it within reach, is a choice.

AI is pushing this further. Building good software used to take a large team and a large budget, which is a big part of why good design was expensive. Today, AI makes it faster and cheaper for a small team, or even one person, to build something polished and well made.

That doesn't guarantee quality. AI can produce forgettable software just as easily. But it removes one of the oldest excuses for the trade-off: that making something beautiful has to cost a lot.

What I find interesting isn't that this is possible, but how long we assumed it wasn't. A trade-off that feels like a law of nature is often just a habit nobody questioned.

For a long time, affordable and beautiful meant choosing one. With software, and now with AI, we don't have to.

Why the simplest AI might be the most useful

January 18, 2026

Most of the AI industry is racing towards automation: AI that does things for you, like booking the trip, writing the email or running a task in the background. It's impressive, and it's where most of the money is going.

But one thing is getting skipped: AI that simply helps you understand. You ask a question, it explains, and you come away knowing something you didn't before.

Right now, learning mostly happens in two ways. Traditional education can be slow, expensive and a poor fit for how people actually learn. Automated AI gets things done for you, but you never find out how it was done. Between the two there's a lot of open space.

That space is where most of us live. We don't want a degree to learn one thing, and we don't want a machine taking over. We just want to understand something, today, in a way that makes sense to us.

It's also where AI is unusually good. It never tires of a question. It can explain the same idea five different ways until one clicks. It won't judge you for asking something basic. For anyone who ever felt left behind in a classroom, that patience matters.

Compare that with how most of us learn now: a course on someone else's timetable, a tutor who charges by the hour, a search that takes half an hour of filler to find one clear answer. A good explanation, whenever you need it and as many times as you need it, is a different kind of thing.

That's why I think simple is a feature, not a limit. More features don't make you understand more. Fewer, better ones often do.

Curiosity is a habit, not a trait

February 20, 2024

We tend to talk about curiosity as if people are born with it or without it. Some are the curious type, the rest are not. I don't think that's true.

Watch any young child and you'll see it in full flow. Why is the sky that colour? Where does the rain go? Every answer opens three more questions. Nobody taught them to do it. What happens is that, somewhere along the way, most of us get taught to stop.

School rewards the right answer, handed in on time. Work rewards getting on with it. Social life rewards looking like you already know. Slowly, asking starts to feel like admitting a gap, and a gap feels like a risk.

But curiosity doesn't disappear. It goes quiet, like a muscle that hasn't been used for a while. And like a muscle, it comes back with use.

It usually starts small. You notice something you can't explain and, instead of moving on, you stay with it for a minute. How does that actually work? Why is it done this way and not another? Most of the time the answer is more interesting than you expected. That's the part that pulls you into the next question.

The people I find most interesting are rarely the ones with the most knowledge. They're the ones who are comfortable saying they don't know yet. There's a lightness to that. They aren't defending a position, so they're free to follow an idea wherever it goes.

It also compounds. Every thing you understand becomes something else to connect to. A little knowledge about one subject makes the next one easier to grasp, and before long you're seeing links between things that looked unrelated.

None of this needs a qualification, a particular background or a lot of time. It needs permission, mostly from yourself, to be a beginner again.

So here's a small thought to leave you with. Think of the last time you wondered about something and let it go. It might be worth going back to.

The first time you use AI

March 2, 2023

Try AI for the first time and you'll probably be a little underwhelmed.

It gets things wrong with total confidence. It waffles. Ask it something specific and you'll sometimes get an answer that sounds right and isn't. That part is real, and worth remembering every time you rely on one.

And yet people keep going back.

Because even when it's rough, it's useful in small ways. Need to word something properly? Get your head round a topic? Stuck on where to start? It's there straight away and it never tires of questions. It feels like having someone to think out loud with, who's happy to have a go at anything.

That's the pull. It isn't that it's brilliant. It's that the gap between having a question and getting a starting point has almost disappeared.

Notice what that does to you. The questions you'd once have let go, because they weren't worth the effort of finding someone to ask, you now ask. Curiosity gets cheaper, and when something gets cheaper, people do more of it.

That's what makes it interesting. Not the answers, which are often flawed, but how it changes what we're willing to ask. Curiosity and scepticism turn out to be good company: the more you ask, the more you learn to question what comes back.

And if this is what it looks like when it's rough, it's worth wondering what it looks like when it's good. Whatever you make of that, the first time is worth paying attention to. It tells you something about how fast this is moving, and about what you were curious about all along.

People don't just buy the product

June 14, 2019

A good product and a good promotion aren't enough. Plenty of businesses find that out the hard way.

Dropshipping is a clear example. You set up an online store and list products. When someone orders, a supplier ships it straight to them. You never hold stock, you don't need a warehouse, and you can test an idea quickly. That's the appeal.

Two things make it hard. First, choosing what to sell: something everyone already seems to want, from a supplier you can trust. Second, getting anyone to see it. A store with no visitors is just a website. Either you have an audience, or you pay to borrow one.

Both of those are solvable. The tools are cheap, suppliers are a message away, and someone else's audience can be rented.

The one that often isn't solvable is time. Orders travel from the other side of the world and can take a couple of weeks to arrive. Meanwhile Amazon has reset what people expect: tap a button, and it's at the door tomorrow. Why would anyone wait two weeks for yours?

Most won't. People don't just buy the thing. They buy how quickly and easily it turns up.

This applies well beyond online shops. A service that's good but slow, or an app that works but makes you fight it, loses to the one that's merely okay and effortless. What happens after the payment is part of the product.

It changes how I think about competition. The real rival isn't the business next to you in your category. It's the best experience your customer has ever had, from anyone, anywhere. That's the standard they quietly measure everything else against.

Speed and ease aren't extras. For a lot of customers, they're the product.

The internet belongs to the people who build on it

February 23, 2016

For a long time, tech has felt like a closed club. It seemed to belong to developers, investors and huge corporations. To build something real online, you needed a computer science degree, deep pockets or a team of engineers.

That has quietly stopped being true. Tools like Shopify and Wix mean anyone can put a professional business online in an afternoon. You don't need to build a payment system or code a website from scratch. You pick a template, connect a social profile, and you're open for business.

Then there's social media. A few years ago it was mostly photos and keeping up with friends. Now it's where people discover things and buy them. One good post can put your work in front of more people than a shop on the high street ever could, and it costs you nothing but the time to make it.

Put those together and something shifts. The tools are free or close to it. The audience is already there, scrolling. What's left is the willingness to build.

The internet isn't something that just happens to us. Every shop, app and channel you use was started by someone who decided to make it instead of waiting to be picked.

So why does it still feel out of reach? Partly because of the old story: get the grades, get the job, climb slowly. It's a fine route for some people. But school mostly taught how to memorise answers, and rarely how to make something, sell it, or learn a skill because you actually wanted it. The internet teaches that for free, to anyone who bothers to look.

Nobody hands out permission, and most people who've built something online will tell you they didn't wait for it. They started before it was perfect, learned as they went, and put it out to see what happened.

The door that looks locked has been open for a while. You have an idea and an internet connection, and that's more than enough to begin.