Go-to-Market

There was a time when the golden rule of consumer app development was as simple as ABCD: Always Be Collecting Data. The strategy? 1️⃣ Grow your user base as fast as possible. 2️⃣ Track every interaction, every event, every click. 3️⃣ Figure out how to monetize the data — usually through targeted advertising, if you couldn’t think of anything more creative. But that game is changing. Consumers are more privacy-aware than ever. Regulators — especially in the EU, California, Japan, and a few other regions — have stepped in. And both founders and investors are realizing that data-harvesting at scale is not a sustainable or ethical business model. ...

I use the free version of Monosnap to record short feature videos for poketto.me—the ones I post here, on X, and on Bluesky. It works great, but the default encoding produces videos that are far too large for other contexts—especially email. Rather than fiddling with different encodings, I use the command-line tool ffmpeg to scale down the videos. A typical Mac screen recording often has dimensions well over 2000×1500 pixels—when half (or even a quarter) of that would easily do the job. ...

This one’s a bit more philosophical—but stay with me: There are things in life we can control, and things we can’t. That distinction lies at the heart of Stoic philosophy, most famously articulated by Epictetus in the first century BC. What does that have to do with product development? A lot, actually. When you’re working on a small, independent project like poketto.me, it’s easy to grow frustrated with a lack of resonance. LinkedIn posts don’t get the traction you hoped for. Journalists don’t reply. Mozilla doesn’t respond, even after you’ve tried to nudge them on all imaginable platforms,. It can feel like you’re putting something good into the world—and the world is simply ignoring it. ...

Taking good screenshots of a web or mobile app is an art in itself: 🤨Which screens do you show? 🤨What demo data should appear? 🤨How much (or how little) functionality and complexity do you reveal? For poketto.me (the landing page), I chose a fairly minimal set of screens. But I still wanted them to look polished—whatever that means. Turns out, BrowserFrame.com makes this super easy: ➡️ Upload a raw screenshot of your app ➡️ Pick from a range of realistic browser window styles (Chrome, Safari, Edge, etc.) ➡️ Download a slick, framed version—complete with browser chrome and a subtle drop shadow ...

“Build it and they will come” is allegedly what God told Noah when he wondered how all the animals would find the ark. As builders, we often fall into the same trap — assuming that once the product is done, users will magically appear. And when they don’t, it’s not just disappointing — it’s exhausting and demotivating. Turns out, even launching something small (like poketto.me) requires way more go-to-market work than expected. And honestly? That part’s less fun than building. ...