Let’s meet at the end of this piece for a small announcement.

I’ve been busy launching and developing my new venture - Offmarket, together with my cofounder Harold. and I must admit that the past 4 months have been a gold mine of informations about the market and how it evolves.

While I previously wrote extensively about taste, look and feel, secret sauce, it wasn’t really clear how AI would affect all of this. We are now at the front row to witness how fast and deep the market is shifting and it’s no surprise that craft has become a strong if not the strongest differentiator to make a dent out there.

Open the App Store right now.

Scroll through the new releases.

Between the legit indie apps and the big names, there’s a wasteland. Barely functional tools. Recycled templates. AI-generated slop flooding the marketplace at a pace we’ve never seen before.

Let that sink in:

• 299 billion app downloads globally in 2025.

• 819 million installs a day.

• And 46% of them uninstalled within 30 days.

• That’s 378 million uninstalls. Per day.

• More than 1000 AI apps are released every month both the App Store and Google Play.

Welcome to the era of mass production. And mass disposal. Digital edition.

We’ve seen this movie before. In the physical world. For decades.

You have industries of mass consumer goods, producing huge, dull quantities. Fast fashion. Cheap electronics. Disposable everything.

And then you have the artisans. Leveraging their craft to produce higher quality, premium goods. Stuff people actually keep. Stuff people actually love.

I don’t believe the digital world is any different.

The App Store is literally drowning.

Google Play lost 47% of its apps in a single year. Went from 3.4 million to 1.8 million. Google is actively purging low-quality garbage.

Apple is tightening the gates too.

And yet, the flood keeps coming.

GenAI app usage grew 425% in one year. Revenue spiked 254%.

The bar to release has been lowered. Anyone can prompt a GPT to create yet another recipe tracker. Another fitness app. Another calorie counter.

And yes, good news, chances are you don’t need Figma for that.

But you’ll just be another slop out there. And another LinkedIn post to brag about it.

Because while the bar to ship went down, the bar on taste and true craft went way up.

We’re seeing it every day with Harold and our Offmarket companies. It doesn’t matter where you worked before. It’s almost like the playing field has been entirely reset.

Almost every single company that we work with requires exactly three things:

• AI native.

• Taste displayed through powerful craft.

• Drive.

Track record now matters much less than actual craft. And how you recently embraced the new paradigms when it comes to creation.

AI is either a taste multiplier or a crap multiplier.

Simple as that.

If you have taste, AI makes you faster, sharper, more dangerous. It will absolutely accelerate you.

If you don’t, I’m sorry but it just helps you produce garbage at scale.

I’m not saying that you might not be financially successful. After all, there are tons of successful garbage out there.

Actually, it seems the best-selling apps are the ones nailing distribution and growth hacks.

You know what I’m talking about.

The so-called founders claiming they completely replaced Figma with Claude or Cursor. Built an entire app overnight. Shipped it. Got whatever amount of users and downloads. Sometimes even announcing MRR numbers.

Cool story.

Don’t fall into this LinkedIn hook nonsense.

Everybody can ship a tracker app. Sure. You probably don’t need Figma for that anyway.

But you’ll just add to the pile. And earn yourself a round of applause from people who will never use your product.

I’m deeply convinced there is a still a world where delightful and vibrant products can actually become a fruitful business and not a disposable one.

We are entering a new craftsmanship and artisan era.

Where “Human Design” is becoming the new “Organic.” Just as organic redefined how we think about food, human-centric design is redefining the luxury market in tech.

The numbers back it up.

App downloads are declining. Consumer spending is soaring. Users are willing to pay more for fewer, better apps. Spending per download rose 9% year-over-year.

Downloads down. Revenue up.

That’s the textbook definition of a market rewarding quality over quantity.

And it’s only going to accelerate.

Subscription fatigue is real. Users are done paying for mediocre. The apps that win are the ones offering genuine value. Not volume.

We’ve optimized our interfaces into oblivion. Smoothed out every edge. Standardized everything. Lost the weirdness, the texture, the soul.

Craft brings it back.

The market is splitting in two.

Mass AI slop on one side. Premium craft on the other.

The middle is quickly disappearing.

Apps that don’t pick a lane will get buried under the noise. Invisible. Forgotten.

So pick yours.

Build with taste. Build with intention. Build things that feel alive, responsive, personal.

Things that make people feel something when they use them.

And you might even make a decent buck out of it.

Julien.

On Monday March 16, I’ll open up a new round of free 15mn calls on my LinkedIn to celebrate the launch of Offmarket Substack newsletter on March 23.

There are many things that we want to talk about and we cannot wait to meet the community.

Whether you’re a junior designer or a more seasoned one - or even a founder in the industry, Offmarket will absolutely provide valuable insights and content.

Offmarket

Offmarket helps designers and founders find each other.

By Julien Martin

It’s the people.

The ones who make you laugh between (and during) meetings.
The ones who finish your sentences.
The ones that stay with you at night when you’re onto something critical that needs to be tackled before the next day.

You don’t plan these relationships, they just click. And once they do, they change everything: your motivation, your standards, your output.

Call it what it is, a promance.

That mix of friendship, trust, and professional admiration that makes work feel less like work.

And it might be the most underrated growth hack in your career.

I’ve met a few people like that.

Some were the reason I stayed longer in jobs I should’ve left.

Others became lifelong collaborators.

One became the godfather of my daughter.

There are too many friends from my career to name them all, but I’m grateful for every one of them.

Working with them never needed kickoffs, sync rituals, or crazy 8s.
We just jammed. And built.

It felt right, natural and smooth. Like we shared the same brain.
When everything just clicks and you know that together, you’ll do wonders.

Of course, we argued more than necessary. But we still shipped.
And what came out of those partnerships became products that reached millions.

Even now, almost a decade later, when we work together, it still feels like a cheat code.
People who witnessed it from the outside were stunned by how fluid and powerful it was

It made us realize what we had — what we still have — is rare.
And it made me want to write this piece.
An ode to my promances. To my friends.

It’s hard to quantify chemistry, but investors try.
A study of 101 failed startups found that 23% failed because they didn’t have the right team, making poor team composition the third most common cause of failure, ahead of running out of cash.

Track record matters. But have you heard of fit.
Bad fit kills companies.

With my latest project, Offmarket, I use AI for structure and speed, but some things can’t be automated.
Gauging taste, and especially fit, still requires human intuition.
That’s why I spend real time with both founders and designers, to feel the chemistry.
That fit saves everyone countless hours and makes hiring dramatically faster.

Looking back, most of my career choices weren’t shaped by job titles or paychecks (actually didn’t get any in some).
They were shaped by who I’d get to build with.

I can tell within five minutes if I could work with someone for years.
You just know.

That human denominator, shared taste, tempo, and humor, matters infinitely more than mission statements or technical skills.

Skills can be taught.
Chemistry can’t.
If it’s not there on day one, it might never be.

The older you get, the less shiny objects impress you.
At 25, you chase logos and hype.
At 35, you chase fit.

Because you realize success isn’t about joining the right company.
It’s about joining the right people.

Reid Hoffman echoed it:

Because a great promance multiplies outcomes.

You move faster. You dare more. You recover quicker.

And when things get rough, which they always do, you push harder, not because you’re scared of failing, but because you don’t want to let the other person down.

Even freelancers and solo founders can find it.
You don’t need a cofounder to have a promance.

Seth Godin calls it “finding the others”, the small circle that gets what you’re trying to do and keeps you accountable.

Maybe it’s a DM thread with two friends sharing mockups and rejections.
Maybe it’s a late-night Figma jam that keeps you sane.
It’s still your tribe.

I often grab breakfasts and lunchs in Paris with my tribe once in a while, even though we don’t work together these days.

Those are the people who make you sharper.

Who challenge your taste, refine your ideas, and remind you why you build in the first place.

You can fake motivation for a quarter.
You can’t fake chemistry.

If you’re a founder and notice exceptional bonds forming inside your team, don’t try to control them, or worse, split them apart.

Nurture them. Encourage them.

Your company’s trajectory will depend on those relationships more than you think.
Worst case, your company fails, but at least it created lifelong friendships along the way.

Find the people who argue with you because they care.
Who ship alongside you because they believe.
They’ll carry you through pivots, fundraising winters, and cover you when needed.

If you’re an IC or freelancer, seek your circle.
The industry glorifies lone geniuses, but the truth is: even the best work is born out of duos, crews, or cliques.

One great promance can open ten doors and keep you from burning out along the way.

The best career insurance isn’t a perfect résumé.

It’s people who’d vouch for you, build with you, and text you “let’s start something” five years later.

At the end of every success story, there’s always that same sentence hiding between the lines:

We built it together.

So next time you meet someone who makes you better, lean in.

That might be your next cofounder.
Or your lifelong best friend.

Julien.

Quick note: you might have noticed that The Playbook now ships bi-weekly on Sundays. Thanks for being a reader 🫰

Subscribe now

The idea of launching side projects that aren’t purely consumer apps but that is actually content, community and services “gravitating” in the design and startup space really excites me.

I’m not stepping out of design. I’m just nurturing new skills.

Why Offmarket

Hiring is broken.

The market is chaotic.

And right in the middle of it, we’re going through a massive technological shift.

Paradoxically, this is also the best moment in history to be a designer.

There’s never been more great companies hiring, building, and experimenting.

But finding each other, that’s the problem.

As a founder, it’s getting harder to navigate through the noise, to filter talent, and to make time for thoughtful hiring.

As a designer, it’s just as hard to find the right people, the right context, the right fit.

Over the years, countless friends have whispered that they were “open for new adventures.”

And on the other side, I’ve met founders, through advising, investing, mentoring, who struggled to find the right design partner.

I started quietly bridging those worlds. One intro at a time.

It worked. More than I expected.

That’s how Offmarket was born.

And yes, I could’ve folded this under The Playbook.

But I want The Playbook to stay personal, about stories, hot takes, and craft.

Offmarket will be its sister project: practical, educational, and actionable.

What’s Offmarket

In short:

Offmarket helps designers land dream jobs, and founders find great designers.

No job boards. No noise. Just high-signal intros between people who build things.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve met 60+ designers through short, intense Office Hours calls, 15 to 20 minutes each.

It’s been eye-opening. Direct, unfiltered, and high-impact.

I’ve also talked to 40+ founders and companies, from early-stage stealth startups to mature scale-ups.

Some of them are so good I wish I could take the job myself.

What I learned is clear: both sides are eager for a better system.

That’s what Offmarket is about. Two audiences, one shared mission:

1. Designers → to land better roles, negotiate stronger, or even start their own company.

2. Founders → to meet and hire design talent that actually fits their stage, culture, and ambition.

To make that happen, I’m building three layers:

• The Offmarket Newsletter: a Substack publication with short, useful articles for the design and startup crowd. Expect practical advice, interviews, and curated signals from the market.

• The Offmarket Club: a private Slack space with Office Hours and mentorship, accessible through a small Substack subscription. I’ll host sessions there, lives, Q&As, and soon bring in other mentors.

• A Matching Service: direct, hand-picked intros between founders and designers. No listings, no algorithm. Just curated, human matches.

This is not a job board.

It’s a signal amplifier.

Think by the awesome but exclusively for design.

What’s next

I’m kicking off the first Offmarket batch today.

Four companies I’ve personally signed and believe in.

It was tempting to go big right away and onboard everyone interested.
But that would’ve meant sacrificing quality for quantity.

And that’s never been my playbook.

Each batch will be small, focused, and personal.

Once this first one wraps, I’ll open new slots.

More announcements about those companies soon. Both here and on Offmarket’s and personal’s LinkedIns.

In the meantime, here’s what’s next:

➡️ The first Offmarket articles drop next week.

➡️ The Offmarket Club opens right after.

➡️ And if you’re a designer looking for your next chapter, subscribe and reach out.

➡️ If you’re a founder looking for design talent, let’s talk.

Offmarket

Helping designers & founders starting Oct. 2025

By Julien Martin

The Playbook isn’t going anywhere and what will be what it’s always been: personal, opinionated, a bit raw.

Offmarket is a new side project, a bridge between everything I’ve built, learned, and wished existed when I was starting out.

Thanks for letting me announce it here.

See you in two weeks with the next Playbook issue.

Julien.

As designers, we have a duty to try new tools.
To explore, to poke around, to see how others build.

It sharpens your taste. Keeps your instincts fresh. Makes you a better builder.

But I very rarely stick to these new products.

Not because I’ve lost curiosity, but because I’m scared to fall in love again.

We’ve all been there.

You find a new app. It’s fast, thoughtful, beautifully designed.
You start using it every day. It sneaks into your muscle memory.

And then one morning, you wake up to a LinkedIn post titled:

“We’re thrilled to announce we’ve been acquired by [insert Big Tech name here].”

You know the drill.

A few weeks or months later, the servers go dark.

🪦 Sunrise → Microsoft

🪦 Wunderlist → Microsoft

🪦 Mailbox → Dropbox

🪦 Vine → Twitter

🪦 Sparrow → Google (a small drop in a sea of dead products)

🪦 Zenly → Snap

🪦 Visual Electric → Perplexity

Enter the cool apps graveyard®.

An ironically beautiful, depressing list.

It’s inspiring to watch entire teams live the dream of being acquired, with hopefully life-changing consequences. It’s part of the startup thrill.

But what a weird paradox, watching dozens, if not hundreds, of great products get axed along the way.

Great products, with millions of users, hardcore fans, and years of sweat behind them.

Killed.

I still remember vividly this unofficial meeting amo’s design team had with Josh, The Browser Company of New York’s founder.

A couple of weeks earlier, The Browser Company of New York became for a little while, The Browser Company of Paris. We would welcome Josh, and sometimes, the extended team, at our office.

The meeting goal was to brainstorm on a few Arc features (yes, some of them shipped), and it started by a simple question from Josh:

“Who here is using Arc browser?”

Everyone in the room but me raised a hand.

Arc was installed. But I wouldn’t use it.

He asked why.

Of course, I was embarrassed, but I owed him the truth.

I just didn’t want to get attached to such a cool product.

Because I always do.

When a product is that well made, when you can feel the care in every pixel, every transition, you start rooting for it.

You invite friends. You evangelize it.
You start to forget how bad and dull the previous apps were.

And when it dies, you now have to go back to whatever you were using before, or use a subpar competitor instead.

It’s not just losing an app.
It’s losing a routine.
It’s losing a tiny piece of joy from your daily workflow.

Switching apps sounds trivial, but it’s not.

It’s a mental cost.

New habits, new shortcuts, new friction.
Every switch demands effort and faith.

That’s why I barely use new stuff anymore.

I’m back to OG calendar. Default mail. Default browser(s).

Not because they’re great, but because they’re just good enough.

In a world where everything can disappear overnight, I value my routine more than the new shiny thing.

This isn’t just nostalgia.
It’s a weird exhaustion many of us share.

The “cool apps” we love rarely die of bad design, of lack of traction.
They literally die of acquisition and acquihires.

A founder takes a deal, the team gets integrated, the vision gets diluted, and the product becomes an internal tool until someone finally pulls the plug.

And what dies with it isn’t just a brand. It’s raw taste.

Each one of those apps raised the bar for craft, for motion, for delight.

They reminded us that software could have personality.

And every time one vanishes, the internet becomes a bit more boring.

It’s a bit of a paradox for me, as I’ve been in this situation. First rank.

It’s not just about nostalgia and about “cool” apps though.

In our craft, there’s another risk we can’t ignore: our everyday tools could also be impacted.

Everything we build now lives inside closed systems.

Maybe that’s why I’ve become so conservative with tools.

I still install everything worth trying and testing for the sake of learning, of discovering new trends, new habits.

It’s part of the job after all.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still in awe every time I discover a great new piece of software.

But I just rarely stick to it.
Falling in love with new software has become risky.

You can’t trust that anything will last.

And it’s sad, because that excitement, that “holy shit, this is so cool” feeling is what pushed so many of us into this industry in the first place.

If I ever build another startup, I’d call it Encore.
A place where dead apps get a second act. (Not Zenly though, we’ve done that with amo already.)
Where the products that once made us dream could live again, maintained by the people who loved them most.

In the meantime, I’ll keep using my boring defaults.

Without the slightest fomo.

Call me old school. Or stubborn. Or stupid.

But every time a new app shows up, part of me still wants to believe.

That maybe this one will survive.
That maybe this one will make it past the graveyard.

Which app would you resurrect tomorrow if you could?

Julien.

Nobody agrees.

Skeuo vs flat. iOS 7 and iOS 26. Minimalism vs maximalism.

These debates are as old as “should designers code”.

That’s the game. Taste feels subjective and random. But it’s not. It’s one of those invisible denominators that decide if your product flies or dies.

And right now, with AI flooding the world with slop and the best time to create new ventures, taste is one of the strongest edge you can have.

Not just as a designer. As a builder. As a generalist.

Here’s a short essay about taste in our industry. Don’t @ me.

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Most products work. Very few are actually loved.

The difference is taste.

Taste is what makes something timeless instead of trendy.

It’s what gives a product soul instead of utility.

Jony Ive’s “less but better” turned Dieter Rams’ philosophy into hardware that still feels clean decades later.

Not sure how long I will keep talking about Zenly (tell me if you’ve had enough) but for this topic, I guess it kind of makes sense.

On paper it was just dots on a map. In reality it was alive. Playful sounds. Quirky animations. Custom emojis that didn’t “need” to exist. Those touches made people care. Competitors copied features, even cloned the look, but they couldn’t copy the taste. Alongside strong tech innovation, that definitely was our moat.

Building amo from scratch pushed this further.

Endless discussions on how to position it in an “absolutely tasteful” way, by our definition.

We leaned into a specific mix: craftsmanship x pop culture x fashion.

The result was polarizing by design. Early versions felt too clean and too elite.

Lacking the warmth, the fun.

It was great, but not great enough for our taste.

Funny enough, very few people know this, but we had already started iterating in that direction with Zenly’s last design. The anti-chamber of amo’s vibe.

Our set of app icons was an attempt to break out into the artsy world by getting inspired by Arsham, Mondrian or Koons.

Taste isn’t just reflected through a big vision or fancy visuals though.

It sweats in the typography. The way a notification lands. The brand voice. The restraint to cut what doesn’t fit. It’s judgment. What should be done, not just what can.

This is why AI put taste back in the spotlight.

AI can generate anything. Logos, screens, whole websites in minutes. But it has no judgment. It doesn’t feel what’s right. It just spits out options.

Someone with taste uses AI like a jetpack. They iterate faster, explore more, and still land on something coherent. Someone without taste will most likely just multiplies the garbage with AI.

The gap gets bigger every day. AI doesn’t reduce the need for taste. It amplifies it.

Anyway, fancy words to basically say that AI taste is basically crap as of today.

What is taste anyway?

OG Meta designer turned investor Soleio, explains his definition:

Taste is Selection.

He compares it to a museum director walking her gallery, deciding which paintings deserve the prime wall. Her eye shapes what thousands will remember as beautiful. But she can only choose from what donors gave her, or what her budget allows. Donors buy what dealers offer. Dealers represent the artists the market deems viable. Those artists create within the limits of their training, materials, and cultural moment.

At every link, someone exercised taste. At every link, someone’s selection constrained the next.

Visitors praise the director’s exquisite eye. But whose taste are they really experiencing?

That’s taste. Not just instinct. Chains of decisions stacked on each other.

And now with AI, every designer is suddenly the museum director, except instead of 100 canvases, you’re offered a billion. Most are trash. Your taste decides what gets the wall.

The frustrating part is that you can’t download taste.

But you can sharpen it.

By marinating in great work. By noticing details. By forcing yourself to explain why something feels off. By absorbing art, film, architecture, and culture until your instincts get sharper. By learning form “taste makers” too.

You don’t sprint to taste. It’s slow. Painful. A lifetime process.

Every project, every iteration, every rejected option builds the compass.

Taste isn’t chaos. It’s discipline. It needs to be nurtured. Cultivated.

And once you build that layer, it shows. Your products reflect it. People start seeing you as a taste beacon in a noisy world.

Over time, your work gets dimmed as tasteful.

And that’s why products built on taste outlast the noise.

Remember Instagram’s 2016 redesign and logo freakout. Internet lost its mind.

Almost a decade later, who dares questioning this bold move.

Same story today, in 2025 by the time I’m writing this, with iOS 26.

Taste is subjective, sure. But time always reveals the difference between outrage and coherence.

My bet is: live with iOS 26 for a month then go back to iOS 18 to embrace the cringe.

Meanwhile, the world is drowning in AI wrappers and half-baked MVPs. Most won’t survive. Not because they don’t function, but because they don’t feel. They lack taste.

They lack emotion.

Taste isn’t decoration. It’s the secret sauce. It separates survival from irrelevance. You can’t teach it in a course. You can only cultivate it, through exposure, iteration, and ruthless editing.

AI will make the gap wider. Slop everywhere. A few gems that shine. Your taste decides which side you’re on.

Cultivate it. Apply it. Ruthlessly.

Julien.

I’m currently ramping up on my project.

• If you’re a designer looking for new opportunities. Freelance or full-time.

• If you’re a designer struggling to land your dream job and looking for tips ang guidance.

• If you’re a founder/cofounder looking to hire great talents and just want to get perfect qualified intros, without the cringe and the noise.

Subscribe and reach out here on Substack or on my LinkedIn.

Soft launching in October 2025.

Offmarket

Helping designers & founders starting Oct. 2025

By Julien Martin

I wish I had done this move sooner.

Glad to finally be here.. Reach out to hello@julien.design or send me a DM on Substack if you have questions.

This issue is a bit special because it also serves as a small announcement.

Let’s start strong.

Hiring is broken. And I don’t mean that lightly.

It’s slow. Soul-draining. Unpredictable.
You can spend weeks chasing, only to lose your best candidate overnight.
Or worse, hire wrong and spend months undoing the damage.

Ask anyone who’s done it well.
They’ll tell you: hiring is not just hard. It’s insane.

At amo, it took me 3.5 weeks or 600 hours, for 2 exceptional hires.

That’s what great hiring actually costs. Focus, persuasion, and a stamina most teams can’t afford.

And you’re supposed to do that while also… still doing your job.

Designing, shipping, leading.

Hiring becomes your “side project.”
Except it’s the side project that makes or breaks the main one.

I’ve come to hate hiring.

But I’ve also seen what happens when it works.

When you finally find that one person who gets it.
Who pushes you.
Who rewires the team’s chemistry.
That’s not just a hire. That’s a multiplier.

You don’t get many of those.
They’re rare. Like golden tickets.

Hiring is like buying lottery tickets blindfolded. Each one costs 30 hours of work, and you burn through dozens hoping just one is a winner.

You read between the lines of portfolios.
You bet on potential.
You lobby your team to trust your gut.

But they just scored your fav candidate 2/5 on Ashby. RIP.

Even today, I’m not leading a team.
But I keep getting pulled back into hiring.

Designers reaching out telling me that they are looking for new adventures, but can’t announce it publicly.
Founders DMing: “Do you know someone great?”

The same story keeps repeating:

• Talented people, invisible in the noise and chaos.

• Founders with no time to search, sifting through piles of irrelevant applications.

And they’re not asking for links to a résumé.
They’re asking for intros.

For signal.

A few months ago, a high-profile founder called me.

They needed a founding designer.
Not junior, not just “good.”
Someone exceptional.

Money wasn’t the problem.
Time was.

They didn’t want a stack of cold CVs. They wanted one name.
The right name.
I said no.

Not because I didn’t want to help.
But because I knew how much focus and energy it takes to do it right.

So yeah. I’m building something new.

It’s called Offmarket.
It launches in October.

It’s not a job board.
Not a résumé dump.
Not another inbox full of cold applications.

It’s a curated service.

Built for signal, not noise.
Designed for speed, not spam.

Human taste for the curation.
AI muscle for the heavy lifting.

And I’m not doing this alone.

I’m teaming up with someone I trust deeply, arguably the best design recruiter I know.

Together, here’s the promise:

→ Designers: Land the right role without shouting into the void.

→ Founders: Get intros, not applications.

→ Engineers, PMs, Marketers: You won’t be forgotten. Stay tuned.

Let us filter the chaos for you.

No more playing the hiring lottery.

We’ll send you golden tickets only.

More soon.

In the meantime, you can subscribe to Offmarket right here:

Offmarket

Helping designers & founders starting Oct. 25

By Julien Martin

Julien.

It’s not the kind that makes headlines.
Or gets you a bonus.

It’s the kind you feel years later when you hear that a 30-minute jam you had with a founder (or a student) helped them land a job, unlock a direction, or see something they couldn’t see before.

When I first started advising on the side, I didn’t think much of it.

A few calls here and there.
Feedback on features.
Some design guidance.
Hiring tips.
The occasional warm intro.

But something unexpected happened.

The more I deep-dived into other people’s products, the sharper I became at my own craft.

Advising and investing isn’t just philanthropy with time or money.

It’s a career accelerant.

Creative reps you can’t get at your desk.
A permanent zoom-out on your perspective.
A key to doors you didn’t even know existed.

And yes, sometimes it pays back 100x.

Just not in the way you think.

There are plenty of ways to lose your touch as a designer or builder.

One of them is keeping your head buried in your own hole for too long.

When you’re knee-deep in your own product, there’s no mystery left.

You know the flows.
You know what’s coming and you anticipate everything.
You know all the metrics.

But you’ve stopped stepping back.

Advising forces you out of that hole.

One week you’re talking to a founder building the next Gen-Z social consumer gem.
The next, that same founder asks you to invest and officially join as an advisor.

Different product.
Different vision.
Different team dynamics.

That cross-pollination rewires you.

You start spotting patterns in how different teams attack the same problems.

You learn faster because the context keeps shifting.

You stay plugged into emerging tools and trends outside your lane — often before they hit the mainstream.

I’ve felt that first-hand.

When I started advising and (modestly) investing, the payback was instant.
I walked away from those calls feeling refreshed, re-energized, and galvanized by perspectives I’d never see inside my day-to-day.

And the value went both ways.

What felt obvious and instinctive to me was exactly what the founders and teams I met with couldn’t see.

Even with years of experience, it’s not always easy to put words to what comes naturally.
I’m still learning how to deliver the sharpest advice in those sessions.

If you want to learn something, teach it.

The same is true in design and product.

When you advise, you have to explain your thinking.
Why a certain flow works.
Why a wow moment matters.
Why calling your users isn’t a waste of time.

That process forces you to confront your own blind spots.

Sometimes you realize you’ve been making decisions on autopilot.
And a founder’s fresh challenge makes you rethink everything.

Because you’re not stuck in their day-to-day politics, you have the luxury of objectivity.
You can push bolder ideas without worrying too much of some consequences.

And in turn, their context can spark creative solutions you’d never encounter in your own environment.

I’ve had advising sessions where I walked away with as many notes for my own projects as the founder had for theirs.

It’s not a one-way street.
It’s a feedback loop.

The more teams you work with, the faster your instincts get.

VCs call it pattern recognition.

See enough pitches.
Enough launches.
Enough post-mortems.

And you start to pick up on early signals. Both good and bad.

Founder traits that correlate with success.
Business models that scale cleanly versus those that burn out.
UX choices that delight versus those that quietly kill retention.

Advising lets you run dozens of mini-experiments through other companies.

You see what works in practice, not just in theory.

And when you’re back in your own work, you’ve got a library of reference points to draw from.

I can now spot certain pitfalls in minutes that would’ve taken me weeks to notice a few years ago.

That kind of instinct doesn’t come from staying in one company for a decade.
It comes from seeing many different games played on many different fields.

The benefits aren’t just intellectual.

They’re personal.

When you help someone win, you’re building a relationship.

Sometimes those relationships pay back in obvious ways.

But more often, the return is serendipitous.

A founder you helped years ago calls you out of the blue with an opportunity.
Someone in your network recommends you for a dream project.
A conversation over coffee sparks a side project that changes your trajectory.

It’s the compounding effect of goodwill.

You can’t engineer it.
You can only plant seeds and let time do its thing.

And the more you give, the more those returns, financial, professional, or purely human, show up when you least expect them.

Sometimes you get the first chance to invest.
Sometimes you get the first chance to join.
Sometimes you just get a front-row seat to watch a market shift before the headlines catch up.

That proximity isn’t just exciting, it’s valuable.

It keeps you from falling behind.
It sharpens your perspective.
It reminds you that while you’re building your own thing, the rest of the ecosystem is in constant motion.

You don’t have to be a prolific angel investor to get these benefits.
You don’t even have to write six-figure checks.

Start by advising one founder whose product you believe in or that you like.

Here is what my process on how I got started:

1. Asked around to colleagues, friends and VCs to send me some company names that would be willing to get some product design feedback from me.

2. Started capturing ideas, and sometimes mockups and prototypes in a Notion doc. Because I was lacking context and didn’t have any “big picture” history of vision of what I was providing feedback to, it was very naive. Which is the whole important, and which is also why it’s very valuable.

3. I mainly focused on where my core skills were. Providing feedback on a key feature. Suggesting new ones. Giving feedback on the look and feel.

4. I sent those Notion docs to the company founders. Without any expectations.

Some replied, thrilled to jump on a call.
I’m still talking to some of them, four years later.

Others ghosted me.

Either way, it was practice.

But your time is also very valuable.

If you say yes to everyone, your calendar fills with lunches, calls, and endless “advisor” slots.

That’s when you realize you should have said no more often.

At one point, more than half my week was swallowed by advisory calls.
It was addictive. And unsustainable.

Now I keep only a handful of slots open each week.

For my sanity, and for the quality of my feedback.

It’s also one of the reasons I write this newsletter. To create something evergreen that can help people without filling my calendar.

So get outside your own walls.
Reach out to a company you admire.
Send unsolicited feedback on what you love, and what you’d fix.

It’s also a great way to get hired.
But that’s another issue.

Happy Summer.

Julien.

"Titles don't matter."

Your favorite founder or VC.

That line gets thrown around a lot in tech. Especially by people who've never had to fight for one.

Titles do matter. A lot.

If you've ever come through the backdoor, no school logos, no referrals, no bigco pedigree, your track record, your title might be the only signal you've got.

It's the story you tell when nobody's listening. It's your story. It's your medal.

It's also your comp band, your leverage in a negotiation, your entry ticket to the next gig.

I've seen what happens when you have the right title, and I've seen what happens when you don't.

You might think it’s just semantics or that “I’m mistaking the forest for the trees” as a famous tier 1 VC once claimed, but wait until that title equals 6 more months of salary.

I come from far in my career.

No prestigious university or college, no family connections, no safety net. Just raw hustle and whatever credibility I could scrape together.

In that world, your title is your armor.

It's what gets you in the room. It's what makes people listen when you speak. It's the difference between being dismissed as "just another junior" and being seen as someone worth taking seriously.

A notorious french investor once dropped this bomb:

And that's exactly where titles make sense to ignore.

When your company is 5 people. When the org is flat. When everyone is building, shipping, on repeat.

It's real. It works. No fluff. No status games. Just output.

But then what?

You grow.

You hire 10, 20, 50 people. Suddenly, people want structure. Scope. Accountability.

Internally, they want to know: who's in charge of what?

Externally, partners and clients might ask: who's your CPO? Investors want a clear team slide. They want to negotiate with a VP.

And your own team starts wondering: what's next for me? How do I grow here?

You realize that titles are not just labels. They're maps. They're how people navigate the org. And how people outside read the org.

Without clear titles, the loudest person wins. Unluckily, the loudest person is often the one that carries a lot of BS.

The politically savvy ones get recognition while the builders stay invisible. That's not meritocracy, that's chaos with a flat structure chrome.

In public companies, your title literally determines your compensation.

Stock grants, bonus eligibility, severance packages — they're all tied to your level.

There are glitches of course. If you’re part of this batch, chances are you’re far from a VP level but still get a Fortune 500 salary.

When layoffs hit, the difference between a "Senior" and "Staff" level isn't just semantic and for the shiny badge, it can mean 5x to 6x difference in severance.

Trust me, I've been there not so long ago.

That gap can be the difference between landing on your feet and scrambling for months.

In public companies or big ones that might soon become public as well, it's structured, and it's the structure that determines your pay, your bonus, your equity refresh, your severance, your responsibilities.

And when the layoff email hits, your exit check depends on what the system thinks you are.

Fight for it early. Because when it matters, it's too late to change it.

I did fight for some titles. I had mixed feelings about this.

Too much ego? Too greedy? Who cares about titles?

I wish I fought harder.

Your title is your very own snowball.

It's personal branding compressed into two or three words.

It signals growth, expertise, and trajectory without me having to explain my entire career arc in every conversation.

The best titles attached to great companies or products are true lead magnets, they attract the right people and opportunities while filtering out the wrong ones.

A strategic title change can shift your entire network's perception and unlock doors that were previously closed.

Titles are how you get sourced by recruiters. How people intro you on stage. How podcasts invite you, how partners reach out, how people search for you.

They're SEO for your career. They're how your brand travels when you're not in the room.

But titles cut both ways.

Overinflate your role, and you set yourself up for a painful reality check.

I've watched talented people hurt their careers by accepting titles that sounded impressive but didn't match their actual experience or skills.

Or getting titles that are bit too creative.

Here's what happens: You get invited into the wrong room. You get grilled by people who expect you to be what you claim to be.

And if you're not, you burn the opportunity and the reputation.

The market is brutal about this.

Recruiters at established companies can spot startup title inflation from miles away. They know the difference between someone who earned their stripes at scale and someone who got a fancy title by being employee #3.

When you oversell yourself, you don't just risk the immediate role, you risk your long-term narrative.

Better to grow into a title authentically than to fake it and get exposed.

Your title has to reflect the truth. Not your ambition.

This is where the "titles don't matter" takes fall apart completely.

They're almost always written by people who've never had to claw their way up from the bottom.

When you come from a very small backdoor, your portfolio and titles are all you have.

They're medals of honor you earned in the trenches.

Every promotion represents months or years of grinding, proving yourself, and fighting for recognition.

That "Senior" in your title isn't just a word, it's proof that you belonged, that you contributed, that you made it one step further than where you started.

To dismiss that as meaningless corporate theater is to ignore the reality of how most careers actually work.

Not everyone gets to start at the top or skip the game entirely.

I cherish every title I've earned, even the ones that don’t sound fancy, because I know what it took to get there.

The crunches, the late nights, the difficult conversations, the political BS, the times I had to prove myself over and over.

Some in the industry love to say titles don't matter. It's easy and lame to dismiss titles when you've already won the game. Or when you're watching it unfold from the benches.

For the rest of us bleeding in the arena, titles are how we keep score.

Julien.

The startup world is obsessed with exits.

We glorify them. We celebrate them.

We treat them like the ultimate badge of honor, proof that we made it.

But outside of TechCrunch headlines and a few polished LinkedIn posts from founders, we rarely talk about how exits actually happen.

And even less about how they feel, especially when you’re not the founder.

Most stories are PR-filtered. Mythologized.

But behind the champagne and the press release, exits are messy. Emotional. Unpredictable.

They can change your life.

But not always in the way you’d expect.

So here’s my take on what a “successful” exit really felt like.

Not from the CEO’s POV.
But from a designer, right in the middle of the team.

When the glitter settled.
When the hangovers wore off.
When the Mallorca company trip was over.

What was left?

I joined Zenly in 2016. A few months later, we were acquired by Snap.

At the time, I was living 100 miles north of Paris. We were deep in a new design cycle, building the version that would shape Zenly for years.

That Monday, I was working remotely when the team had the usual All Hands I couldn’t attend. I pinged a few teammates: “Can someone give me a quick recap?”

No answers.

Annoyed, I nudged Alexy in a Slack DM a few hours later. She replied:

“Ask Antoine about the all hands tomorrow.”

😐

The next day, I came into the office and was immediately pulled into a meeting room.

Alexis and Antoine were there, along with a lawyer.

My first reaction was: what in the world did I do wrong?

But the mood didn’t match the setup. There were smiles, smirks. Nervous energy. And then the sentence I’ll never forget:

“This is strictly confidential. You can’t tell anyone, not even your loved ones.”

Pause.

“We’ve decided to sell Zenly to Snap. And here’s what you’re getting from it.”

They dropped the numbers. It felt surreal. I was grateful. Proud. Confused. Excited.

The hugs were real. But so were the questions.

What followed was strange in the best and weirdest ways.

We kept a rare independence after the acquisition.

We were still Zenly. Same team. Same speed. Same autonomy.

But we were also now part of something bigger. And that came with its own set of compromises.

Layers. Approvals. Politics. Culture. Depending on your team, the shift hit differently.

But the energy changed.

It was a paradox: free, but owned.

You tell yourself it’s the best of both worlds.
And for a while, it is.

But things change. The vibe changes. You start to ask yourself: what now?

I thought about leaving. More than once.
And let’s be honest: anyone still in the same company after 7+ years who says they never did?

It’s a fragile equation: Mission x People x Vesting Plan.

Most of the time, at least one of those variables starts wobbling at some point.
And any of them can hurt.

The Mission: I was still very much driven in by our vision and bullish on the product.

The People: I cared deeply. Didn’t love everyone, of course.

The Vesting: Let’s just say that this deserves a dedicated post.

But for now, let’s call it what it is: golden handcuffs.

That subtle tension, knowing you can leave anytime, but also knowing you’d leave behind something substantial.

It’s freedom wrapped in temptation.

It haunted me at times.

I stayed. I tanked it through the very end.
And in retrospect, I’m glad I did.

Because that post-exit chapter was an accelerator.

The stakes were higher.
The expectations sharper.
I became a better designer, teammate, mentor.

But here’s the thing:
It takes a rare planetary alignment to pull off an exit.
And an even rarer one to make the years after worth it too.

There’s one planet people don’t talk about enough: Luck.

We were lucky.

This wasn’t a forced acquihire.
No last-minute pivot.
No awkward “thrilled to join X” announcement hiding quiet disappointment.
Or worse.

It was real.
And rare.
And I’ll never take that for granted.

Most exits don’t look like ours.

They’re quieter. Softer landings. Especially by the time I’m writing this.

More about lessons learned than life-changing events.

Founders save face, teams stay employed, VCs drool over their liquid prefs, and the wheels keep turning.

So was it worth it?

Yes. And no.

It changed my life, financially, professionally, emotionally.

The money helped, sure. But the real value was the people, the product, the process.

It paid much more dividends than actual cash. Allowing me to earn even more money in the process, for years after.

While I earned some decent cash during these years, it came with hidden costs too.

Costs I can’t wait to talk about in The Playbook.

An exit is just another chapter. Sometimes it’s an end. Sometimes it’s a beginning.

We’ve spent years obsessing over the success stories. IPOs. Acquisitions. Happy endings.

But along the way, we stopped talking about the other side of the coin.

The sad exits. The disillusioned founders. The teams that never saw a cent.

The most infamous is probably Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft.
He sold his company to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, and spiraled into depression.
At one point, he tweeted:

Money doesn’t protect you from meaninglessness.

Because exits are rarely about the money alone.
They’re about identity. Purpose. Control.

And once you sell, you often lose at least one of those. Sometimes all three.

A startup exit isn’t a finish line.
It’s a plot twist.

That depends on more than the press release or the actual payout.

It depends on why you built in the first place.

What you learnt in the adventure.

And who you became along the way.

Julien.

As usual please reach out and let me know what you thought about it.

“In startups, you’re either fast or forgotten.”

“It’s now or never.”

“We need to ship this on [insert unrealistic deadline] or we’re dead.”

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to read this in my career. And I’m already tired knowing that I’ll have to hear this for years to come.

I’m not mad about the fact that, yes, you need to be fast to compete. Especially in Builder Mode, where velocity is an unfair advantage.

I’m just upset there is absolutely no nuance in the industry.

It’s been drilled into our heads since the Facebook early days “Move fast and break things”.

Well, it didn’t age that well.

The work that truly resonates, the icons, the products that change industries, they weren’t microwaved.

They were slow-cooked.

We all love a good dose of rush adrenaline. When you’re in the zone.

Together with my previous design teams, we coined the term BDM “Bouses de Dernière Minute” (last minute craps).Those chaotic, last-minute designs you’re ashamed to put in front of stakeholders for reviews.

We’ve had our fair share of those, yet some of them ended up magical, sometimes shipped overnight to millions.

But most of time, let’s be honest.

Creativity and excellence need time.

The best meals aren’t instant. They marinate, simmer, evolve.

Flavors deepen overnight.

Great design is no different.

Lately, I’ve started taking time again.

Time to design exactly what I want. Time to play tennis at 10 am. A random Thursday off to catch a movie.

Then coming refreshed. Recharged.

It’s not luxury. It’s process.

Something essential I’d forgotten after years in the trenches.

Previous Metalab’s General Manager, Mark Nichols thinks we all deserve a bit more leisure. And I couldn’t agree more.

But taking it slow isn’t procrastination. Quite the opposite.

True creativity rarely happens at your desk.

It happens when your mind relaxes, during mundane activities: cooking dinner, walking your dog, commuting without expectations.

That’s when magic strikes, quietly, almost passively.

Psychologists call it incubation: your brain forming connections subconsciously while you’re doing unrelated tasks.

One study found around 20% of creative breakthroughs among writers and physicists emerged precisely during these everyday moments, freeing the mind from fixations.

In other words, stepping away isn’t wasted time. It’s productive time.

Yet, the tech industry often mistakes these invisible moments of incubation for instant epiphanies, feeding the myth of overnight success.

We romanticize instant hits because they sound epic. But we overlook that resilience, instinct, and taste (the real ingredients basically) take years to cultivate.

Zenly’s 40 million monthly active users didn’t appear overnight. It took years.

Eight, to be precise.

Sure, some rushed projects land beautifully, but even those rely on taste slowly and painfully acquired. You can’t sprint your way to good taste. You have to marinate in it.

I get the appeal of rush mode. I’ve felt it countless times.

When a concept clicks and you’re riding that wave of unstoppable flow, it’s exhilarating.

Pure dopamine.

But truthfully, I’ve always felt torn between moving fast and taking my time.

Even today, I feel ashamed when I speed things up and guilty whenever I slow down.

Navigating between these modes is exhausting.

Unfortunately, our industry still doesn’t get it.

We’re still trapped in endless “creative jams” and the dreaded “let’s run a crazy 8 after lunch”.

Still asked to produce “three bold directions by EOD”.

Still forced to treat creativity like a shiny call-to-action button you can press on demand.

Still forced to commit to unrealistic sprint deadlines.

Candidly, this is also why we need more designers and creatives as founders.

Speed isn’t volume. Volume isn’t quality.

Never has been.

And no, you can’t schedule epiphanies. You can only leave space for them to occur. You can create opportunities for them, and basically provoke them.

I should write soon about how your environment and the people you work with are absolutely critical in how productive you are.

But anyway, I’ve seen teams crushed by technical and design debt because they refused to slow down strategically.

I won’t (can’t) name-drop, but trust me: more companies than you imagine are struggling under mountains of bad tempo calls and rushed decisions.

Rushing piles up debt. And debt eventually kills creativity, preventing those sweet flow modes to happen.

And don’t get me started on the mental toll inflicted by debt on engineering and design teams. This alone deserves a few issues to focus on.

Granted this hardly applies to early-stage companies but Sir Jony Ive’s comment hits hard (yeah, him again, what can I say).

While you can sometimes take a few shortcuts, design is not manufacturing.

It’s not linear, predictable, or instantaneous.

The best work you’ve ever done might have felt fast, but only because something deeper had time to marinate beneath the surface, long before shipping.

The final pixels and bits can ship quickly. But the instincts, the skills, and the taste behind them were cultivated slowly, carefully.

Experienced founders eventually realize the speed-vs-quality trade-off is dynamic.

In the earliest stages, speed matters. You ship fast, learn faster, and survive.

But post-PMF, or whatever you call that next stage, slowing down isn’t getting stuck.

It’s getting ready.

Great design simply can’t be rushed. It can happen in quiet, unexpected moments, those cracks and pauses where ideas breathe.

Deliberate offscreen time, even if it feels like “doing nothing,” compounds far more than speed ever will.

Shift gears. Slow down.

Let yourself cook a bit longer.

Bon appétit.

Julien.

The newsletter recently crossed 1,000 subscribers. Huge milestone, thanks for the support and for being part of the adventure 🫰

There’s so much ahead for the playbook, new ideas, new formats, exclusive content, amongst other things.

You might also notice subtle design and layout changes starting to roll out. I’d love your feedback, so let me know what you think.

Today is the second entry in my How to Design Great Apps series, following the previous popular issue, Look & Feel Is Your Moat.

In today’s design era, and with the multiplication of tools, of technological advancements, it’s easy to forget what got us started in a first place.

My career owes a great deal to iconography.

I became a designer because of icons.

Icons were my first product jobs and fast forward, they shaped and sealed my career.

Every designer I know has a favorite icon set.

Or favorite icons you keep copy and pasting from one project to another, years after years.

Everyone uses them. Few obsess over them.

Icons are probably the most underappreciated part of product design.

Would you randomly choose a font for your product’s typography?

It’s hard to write about iconography and its impact in tech without mentioning Susan Kare pioneering work in the 80s.

For Apple, she designed pixel art representations of familiar objects, like a trash can for “delete” actions. Sounds familiar?

I highly recommend watching this interview of Susan if you want to learn more about her, her inspirations, her creative process.

There’s a strong lasting legacy of iconography in the tech industry and following Susan’s work, there’s been crucial milestones along the way until today.

During the 2000s and early 2010s, customizing the look and feel of Mac OS X was common-place within the Mac community.

Sites like MacThemes were constantly creating new themes, custom icon packs to enhance Mac OS X.

I stumbled upon MacThemes forums by the time I was working at Behance, and was in awe with what I saw there. I kept trying to copy and reproduce my favorite designer icons with millions of layers in Photoshop.

Endless nights of painful trial and error. I wish I had the courage to ask some of them some tips but I don’t regret the hassle.

It kind of trained me in taste (if taste can ever be trained?), precision, technical skills, speed. All these skills later applied to UI design, and eventually, product design as a whole.

One could argue typography is the secret weapon. Well, it’s another one for sure, but more on that later.

Icons too, can make or break a product.

It’s easier than ever these days to just go on Figma Community or ask ChatGPT to generate an icon set for you.

Don’t get me wrong, with attention to details, proper instructions and iterations you get surprising results.

But don’t be tempted to just "slap that set” into your product without any thought or soul.

Designing your own icons can actually help you tie brand, tone of voice, and product design together.

Michael Flarup, author of the App Icon Books, said that “icons are a window to your product soul”.

To this day, I keep using icon design in every single new project or product I’m working on as a gateway to the look and feel I want to get.

Icons, just like typography, can be used as a very powerful halo effect to the vibe of your app, your website.

What Airbnb did in their Summer 2025 updates demonstrates this perfectly.

Granted these are not just UI icons but beautiful animated illustrations, but they still act as a halo effect.

Designers at OpenAI are also crafting delightful details in their products, such as in ChatGPT or like this cute icon in Codex.

And of course it’s hard to talk about delight in icons without mentioning Duolingo and their consistent work in app icons and brand.

App icons are your work’s window to the world out there.

Especially in a sea of millions.

It might sound like a no-brainer but many studies and industry experiments consistently show that improving an icon can boost user interest.

One A/B test found that simply changing a mobile game’s app icon led to a 100% increase in conversion rate from views to installs.

100%.

In other words, twice as many people decided to download the app when presented with the more appealing icon design.

To be honest, app icons are one of the simplest and most cost-effective ways to build trust and engagement.

Period.

Remember when Instagram hate was all over the place for changing their app UI as well as their iconic app icon?

The New York Times called this: The Great Instagram Logo Freakout of 2016.

If you didn’t watch the whole Instagram redesign story featuring Ian Spalter in the awesome Abstract Netflix Series, please find some time to do so. It’s a bit outdated but still packed with great insights.

I mean, I’m still in love with skeuo icons but this global backlash didn’t age well. The impact and legacy of this redesign in terms of engagement, growth and retention is massive and unprecedented.

Icons and app icons are not decorations. They’re identity.

They signal taste, intent, and care.

And in a sea of homogenized user interfaces, they’re one of the few frontiers left where your product can feel truly unique.

If you lack time or can’t afford designing your own icons because you’re in early stage, use these tools to move fast:

• Apple SF Pro Symbols: simple yet super efficient. It’s crazy how so few designers know about this Apple tool.

• Iconists Central Icon System: probably one of the best icon sets out there by the goats at Iconists.

If you want to learn more about what it takes to design your own icons and dabble with some pixels. Or just want to educate yourself:

• OG Tim Van Damme’s Figma Icon Jam: a free icon design course by one of the best designers in the world.

• The Icon Handbook by Jon Hicks. An oldie but goldie. Still some nuggets there if you can put your hands on a copy. It’s basically my bible.

I could go on for a lot more, or even provide a cool timelapse of an app icon I designed for fun with Spline and Figma. But let’s keep this for another time.

Now it’s your turn.

Time to get those pixels pushed!

Julien.

It’s a longer piece than usual, I get it.

Here are the key lessons for builders:

Embrace Contrast: Lean into unexpected combinations. Like the game’s name itself—to craft memorable experiences.

Sound Matters: Craft 360° experiences. Use haptics, audio, and micro-feedback to make your product feel alive. If you can afford it, invest in signature sounds and music.

Create Emotions: When you create strong emotion ties in your game or product, you are maximizing engagement and retention.

Distinctive Visuals: Bold art direction isn’t just aesthetics, it’s identity. Give your product(s) a soul and a vibe.

Playfulness is Power: Humor, cultural nods, easter eggs and unexpected details build emotional connections with users. Don’t take yourself or your products too seriously.

Small Teams, Big Dreams: Passionate teams often outperform big studios, focus beats headcount. They don’t abide by any rules or playbooks. Indies and small bootstrapped, driven teams don’t have to blush anymore.

Prelude.

My last issue, A Call to Play, was a testament of how insanely valuable games are when it comes to product design.

In a poll I asked you if I should proceed with a Review Series type of article, slightly moving away from my usual writing and topic.

I guess 91.30% was enough to push me to go ahead and just write it, thanks for participating.

It’s quite challenging to write a review in such short format, I could go for thousands of words but I hope I capture the essentials.

So here we go, the first product review series, please let me know if you liked this format or not by voting at the end of this issue 🫰

What Games Taught Software?

If you didn’t read my previous issue, allow me to quickly recap why I think we should embrace games much more in product design, and in the tech industry in general.

Games taught us delight, reward systems, and how to make friction feel good.

They gave us coins, XP, streaks, all designed to keep us engaged.

More importantly, games showed us how every interaction should feel satisfying, with instant feedback: sound, sparkle, points, character reactions.

Game designers call this juice, that extra bit of polish that makes a jump, click, or swipe feel alive.

Games are also showing us the path of building branded, immersive and emotional products.

Days before 2025 WWDC, even Apple is bringing back texture, depth, and physicality in their OS soon. For me, it’s like an old friend returning, but with a twist.

Games are an endless source of inspiration, and this one is an absolute masterclass on many levels.

What is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33?

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is role-playing game (RPG or J-RPG) developed by the French studio Sandfall Interactive and published by Kepler Interactive.

The gameplay innovatively blends traditional turn-based RPG mechanics with real-time action elements (QTE, in jargon).

Released on April 24, 2025, the game is set in a dark fantasy world inspired by french Belle Époque era.

The game introduces players to the city of Lumière, which faces an annual catastrophe known as the “Gommage.” Each year, a mysterious entity called the Paintress paints a number, and all individuals of that age vanish instantly.

As the number reaches 33, a group of volunteers forms Expedition 33, determined to end this cycle of death by confronting the Paintress herself.

Built by a young, hungry team in the city of Montpellier in the South of France, founded by ex-Ubisoft dev Guillaume Broche.

It’s the result of six years of late nights, big bets, and fearless craft.

And it paid off.

By the time I’m writing these words, in less than 2 months, it sold an astounding 3.3 million copies.

A team of mostly juniors, defying the odds and rewriting the rules.

It’s more than a game. It’s a statement piece.

Contrast at the Heart.

Clair Obscur.

Even the title itself speaks of contrast.

Light and dark, hope and despair.

This tension drives the game’s emotional core.

The monolith, which is central in the game embodies that contrast: a beacon of hope, but also a stark reminder that time is running out.

Every year, another number is painted on it, marking humanity’s countdown to potential doom.

In design, contrast isn’t just visual. It’s narrative. It’s the push and pull that keeps users engaged, that makes an experience resonate on a deeper level.

And that sense of contrast extends beyond the narrative itself. Right down to the ways you can dress your characters.

Unique Look and Feel.

Like with the now-iconic marinière, béret, and baguette skin.

Part tribute, part cheeky French cliché.

Imagine fighting those huge bosses and watching emotional scenes with your characters dressed like this.

It’s bold and quirky but 100% assumed and props to them for this.

Humor and easter eggs are fully embraced in the game.

I mean, they literally named one of their character just like their favorite energizing drink.

Another fun detail: the team loved playing pétanque at lunch so much, they named a character “Petank”, because why not?

Such humor and cliché also helps adding a touch of smile in an environment mostly plunged in darkness .

The world feels both familiar and out-of-this-world.

You catch glimpses of Belle Epoque Paris with Haussmannian buildings and the Eiffel Tower, then wander landscapes that echo the Giants Causeway in Ireland — or even Maraudon from World of Warcraft, and all of a sudden you land in a beautiful Art Deco manor.

Clearly, the devs drew inspiration from everywhere.

But while the environment and art direction choices are tasteful, what really staggered me is the attention and craft given to the sound design and soundtrack.

A Legendary Soundtrack.

The game soundtrack, memes and thousands of covers have flooded YouTube, IG and TikTok lately.

It all starts by this simple story:

Guillaume discovered Lorien Testard, the composer, on an indie dev forum where he randomly posted his Soundcloud work. They chatted and it was the start of many years of collaboration.

It’s the first time Laurien, a guitar teacher, works on a game.

He created a 8-hour masterpiece, blending orchestra, digital and live instrumental recordings.

Don’t even get me started on Alice Duport-Percier, the talented vocalist of the soundtrack.

It took 5 years of dedication and craft to created the whole soundtrack.

Simply put, it’s the best game OST I’ve ever heard. I think the last time I was in owe with a game soundtrack, was with Anno 1800 done by Dynamedion, but this one hits so different.

Treat yourself and watch this if you want to hear a few beautiful samples.

Music and sound design is too often underestimated in games and apps.

It’s literally what anchors you the game forever. Years later, chances are, you’ll forgot about how cool a game was but you’ll never forget its music.

In a french interview Guillaume states:

Even you weren’t born in the 80s or never played these games, chances you’ll probably recognize Super Mario and Tetris signature sounds and music immediately.

Some sounds stay with you for life.

The Super Mario coin chime. The Pokémon healing tone. The Sonic ring loss.

Those sounds aren’t just nostalgia. They’re signals. Sonic logos. Micro-memories.

In Look & Feel Is Your Moat, I previously wrote that sound and haptics build trust.

Sound design matters more than people think. I know, most of us keep our phones on vibrate. Still. That satisfying click, that subtle confirmation chime, the quirkiness.

Sound and vibration aren’t gimmicks.

They’re memory glue.

To make sure encounters and fights in Clair Obscur are memorable enough, the team made sure to dynamically shift the music.

It always starts with a climatic intro, then it builds up, to soften a bit more during mid-battle especially if the fights gets longer preventing players to get some music fatigue, to only returns to a climactic pace in the final moments, carefully pared with some slo-mo sequences, providing a satisfying and rewarding feeling of accomplishment.

Stellar UX & Immersion.

The game, while heavily inspired by games like Sekiro, is easy to learn.

I think the team nailed the fact that it’s appealing for both casual players but also try-harders that might want to finish the game without taking a single hit (yes, you could do that).

They also made the game less overwhelming by limiting the amount of “active” spells and powers you can use during a fight, while providing a much more complex and deep “passive” mechanisms, outside of fights, so you have plenty of time to craft your own builds.

The results is that during fights, you don’t have to browse through an endless list of powers, which is often the case in similar games of that genre.

Immersion is at the core.

Outside of fights, there is absolutely no UI or buttons or any texts on screen.

You’re meant to play the game, just like you’re meant to watch a movie. Fully immersed.

The game motion and transitions is also a work of art.

The way the cameras and viewports adjust to unobtrusively let the player know that action either needs to be taken, or happening is very satisfying.

Think of it as tiny movies plan sequences that also reinforce the game immersion.

During those focus modes, contextual menus open as overlays perfectly blending in the environment and characters. This quickly reminded me of Persona 5 game UI as well as some strong visionOS vibes.

Final Words.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is more than a game.

It’s a blueprint for building products that resonate.

From its immersive art direction and narrative to its already iconic sound design, this small team from Montpellier teaches us that creativity often lives in the details.

As product builders, we should embrace that lesson and apply it to our own craft.

If I had to sum up keep one quote about the team behind the game, I’d keep this one, from Guillaume:

This resonates deeply.

It’s never been this true today, especially in our industries that need to think outside the box, to go that extra mile, the attention to details.

This game was created because one single person had an idea and wanted to play it very badly.

If you didn’t play Clair Obscur, or if you didn’t hear about it, I hope you this piece made you want to give it a try, or at least, watch a stream or review about it.

Let’s hope for an encore.

Julien.

People still ask why Zenly felt different, even though it got closed down several years ago.

Why it had that energy, that quirkiness, that sense of delight.

It’s easy to understand it but harder to really grasp it, especially in today’s era, when everything we design and use look so dull, flat, MVP-esque, and almost fully automated.

We built it like a game.

Not a game in the sense of badges or daily streaks. Not gamification for the sake of it. But games as inspiration, as a source of rhythm and emotion. We obsessed over pace, motion, discovery, feedback.

We wanted the app to feel alive. Responsive. Personal. Fun.

Fun and function don’t have to opposites. They can be partners in crime. They’re what makes the best products feel timeless, and make people come back.

Over the past decade, I’ve worked on apps that leaned hard into joy.

At Zenly, then at amo, and now with the playbook. The tools might evolve, but the goal is the same: build things that matter, but build them with taste.

If you want to design better software, play more games.

Not just playing games as a hobby, but to study, for curiosity.

Sure studying competitors and obsessing over Sensor Tower will give you invaluable insights.

But games, more than anything, can teach you how to build worlds people want to live in.

They actually taught us more than we admit.

Loot boxes, for better or worse, taught us how to surprise, how to create anticipation—and frustration.

Games taught us how to make every tap feel good. Sound, motion, and timing, all working together to create a loop that rewards interaction.

Games don’t avoid friction. They embrace it.

They turn obstacles into engagement opportunities.

Think about how a grind in a game still feels rewarding because it’s framed as a challenge. A mission. A streak. An arc.

Even the best onboarding flows in software owe a debt to game tutorials. The ones that show you just enough to get started, then let you discover the rest.

You know the drill: 30 onboarding screens, then a 3-day free trial before they charge you and hope you forget.

Somewhere along the way, we traded that playfulness for efficiency.

We optimized flows, minimized taps and discovery, stripped back UI and forgot to leave space for joy. For curiosity. For humor.

Jony Ive recently claimed,

You can disagree with the guy on many things, but this one hits hard.

Ironically he’s one of the main architect of the Great Flattening that got initiated in 2013 with iOS 7 amongst other things.

Andy Allen’s Config talk expands on this beautifully.

It’s 20 minutes on building tactile, joyful software , and a reminder that our products don’t have to be dull.

We’ve flattened our interfaces. Smoothed out every edge. Standardized everything we could.

Lost the weirdness, the texture, the play.

One of many excuses was that we couldn't afford distractions on small smartphone screens so we had to turn into flat design.

Luckily, we adapted a little bit along the way and prove that we didn’t have to sacrifice souls and joy for the sake of optimization and laziness.

We kept looking at video games as safe harbors and infinite labs of creativity and joy.

At Zenly, a proud and assumed oddity in the social consumer space, we were a small few to keep getting inspired by games.

We designed our features like toys.

You’d think we’d be inspired by Google Maps or Apple Maps, since our product was built on maps.

But we weren’t.

Instead, back then, we got inspired by games such as Jurassic World Evolution, SimCity BuildIt, Anno 1800, which are insightful at some degrees when it comes to information hierarchy, contextual actions in a busy environment that can quickly become overwhelming.

At a broader level and unrelated to maps, but as game mechanics and engagement, games like Clash Royale and Brawl Stars, introduced genius progression systems like Trophy Road, and while they didn’t really invent it, they definitely popularized it.

Trophy Road provides a clear and powerful path of where players are going, what they’ll earn, if they commit to the game.

This widely influenced similar mechanics, like Battle Passes, on games like Fortnite of Call of Duty.

So we designed funnels and paths of features and perks getting unlocked based on goals that can be achieved in a short timespan, in the next minutes or hours following the onboarding.

While most of our knowledge and secret sauce came from iterations and video game inspiration, we also had a great deal of book learnings.

Actionable Gamification by Yu-Kai Chou, is one of those. It’s not an easy one to digest all at once, but a good one to have on your shelves or desk.

I have to confess though, over time it’s becoming more and more challenging to find some proper time to play.

It feels like dedicating hours on games is a luxury I can hardly offer to myself.

So I play mobile games as short sessions.

Or I play by proxy.

I watch relatives, Twitch streams, or YouTube reviews. You still get the pacing, the curve, the reward dynamics.

The insights don’t vanish just because you’re not holding the controller.

I never played Persona 5 years ago but it deeply got me inspired. A bit too much.

For better or worse, my entire life has always been intimately connected to video games. The curse, or blessing, started when my father brought an Atari 2600 at home.

I was 5 and I still remember it like it was yesterday.

Fast forward, games taught me priceless skills. Skills I still use on a daily basis.

Games remind us that software can be weird, emotional, obsessive, musical.

They remind us that we can design products that aren’t just usable, but desirable.

If you’re building anything right now, take a quick break.

Play something beautiful.

And come back sharper.

Julien.

Every now and then, I take a step back and reflect on my career. And its milestones.

They usually show up during deep shifts — when something so big hits the industry, you can’t ignore it. The kind that makes you feel like a beginner again. Like you’re about to get replaced… or maybe reborn.

AI is one of those moments.

I didn’t welcome it with open arms.

At first, it felt off like yet another overhyped trendy product. Then came fear. But slowly, like the first time I held an iPhone in 2007, I started to lean in.

While I miss spending eight days straight crafting a single app screen in Photoshop, I’m not chasing the past or being too anchored to it.

I’m just recalibrating. Trying to stay sharp and focused.

When the iPhone came out, I had a visceral reaction.

I previously wrote:

The OG iPhone had just launched. Rushed to the 5th Avenue Apple Store on Day 1 to get one. The App Store didn’t exist yet. I couldn’t afford one and was struggling to pay rent, but I was obsessed. Obsessed with what it meant for design, for the future—and for me

the playbook - How I Went From Jail to Building a Design Career.

I knew something deep was being triggered. It wasn’t just a new device, it was a new canvas. And nobodyknew how to design for it.

Mobile first wasn’t even a term yet. Touch and gesture interactions were experimental. Everything had to be rethought.

Now, almost two decades later, AI is doing it again.

Only this time, I’m older. More experienced. But also more overwhelmed than I’d like to admit.

A few months before we founded amo, I started dabbling with Stable Diffusion in Fall 2022. Within a week, we shipped an AI drawing app with friends.

It felt magical and opened a whole new world of ideas.

Then ChatGPT came out.

Nicolas wouldn’t stop talking about it during our commutes to work.

I just saw this as another clunky chatbot with outdated data. Entertainment at best. Noise at worst.

Obviously, I changed my mind.

I now use it every day. For feedback, deep research (this one still blows my mind), asset generation, revenue modeling, investment analysis, communications. It’s become a real extension of my workflow.

Ironically, I barely use AI for the playbook, except for grammar tweaks clean-up or research on tricky, taboo topics, fact checks.

But for a recent client app I worked on—a consumer AI wrapper launching soon—it felt like I had wings. I used AI to shape the product’s entire vibe and universe.

It felt even better than switching from Photoshop to Sketch or Figma back in the days.

It makes me wonder where’s the line between productivity and creative laziness. I mean, it definitely amplifies my creativity, but it also feels like I’m taking shortcuts somehow.

Perhaps I just need to strengthen the habit muscle again.

The good thing is, I don’t fear losing my job to AI anymore.

What I fear now is something else entirely:

Losing my focus.

The speed at which AI is becoming a commodity is unreal. And so is the wave of new AI tools dropping daily.

I’m drunk on it, and I keep coming back for more.

There’s so much potential. So many ideas. So many playgrounds opening up at once.

And it’s become harder, way harder, to focus on just one thing.

Consequently, I keep sidetracking myself. Getting pulled toward the next shiny thing.

I’ve built an entire graveyard of unlaunched products these past few months.

Stuff I designed, named, scoped in Notion, even vibe-coded into existence. And then dropped.

Games. Tools. Plugins. SaaS. An unreasonable number of single-page landing pages.

Either the thrill wore off. Or the long-term vision was missing. Or something shinier came along.

And I’m not alone in this. A lot of builders I talk to feel the same way. We’re overstimulated. Creatively charged, but scattered.

I wish I could just hit pause. Step back for a full year. Pull a Sagmeister and reboot my brain.

Who can afford taking a one-year sabbatical though. It’s not just about the money I’d miss, it’s also about FOMO.

Blink for a year and the whole industry has shifted again. You didn’t just miss a few updates. You missed a revolution.

After I left amo last April, I actually tried to take a proper break, especially since I didn’t the chance to so between Zenly and amo.

It lasted a month more or less. A few calls and opportunities later, I was back at it.

Maybe next time I’ll try harder.

Maybe two or three months. Not a full year.

It’s true tough. In this industry, a year feels like a decade.

As builders, how do we stay sharp in an industry that keeps erasing its own playbook?

Seth Godin used to say: Stop overthinking. Start shipping.

Maybe I should have shipped my whole product graveyard.

I’ll still stick to quality over quantity, any given day.

In a world that keeps speeding up, I’ve found that the best way to stay grounded, is to give.

David Hoang (yes, him again!), actually just published a kind of similar topic that echoes all this.

He says:

I started mentoring a long time ago, but I’ve found myself doing it more and more lately.

And while part of it is about giving back, it’s also selfish in the best way.

It keeps me sharp. It forces me to reflect. To articulate what I’ve learned. To stay in touch with how newer designers see the world.

There’s something gratifying about hearing, even years later, that your feedback made a difference. That a 30-minute jam helped someone land a job, unlock a direction, a new perspective.

And in those moments, I realize I’m not falling behind. That I’ve evolved.

Sometimes, staying relevant isn’t about shipping faster. It’s about helping others sharpen their craft and grow in their own careers.

The best way to protect your edge isn’t to work harder. It’s to keep recalibrating. Think of it as becoming a swiss knife. Adding new tools and blades along the way.

You don’t need a year off to reboot. Unless you’re retiring.

Sometimes a weekend, a new collab, or helping someone out is enough to feel the spark again.

Recalibrating isn’t slowing down.

It’s momentum.

Just a stop and go.

Julien

But as I piled up topics, I realized the most important ones weren’t about the work itself—but everything around it. The stuff we don’t talk about enough.

The stuff that’s still taboo.

So here’s one: workaholism.

I wasn’t exactly lazy growing up, but I sure wasn’t excited to “go to work.”

I hustled in restaurants for years. Long shifts. Fluorescent lights. Minimum wage. You don’t wake up stoked to do that.

That was my life, until I found design. And New York.

It hit me like a truck. There was no warm-up phase. One week I was floating, the next I was obsessed.

Design made me feel like I could build anything. Learn fast. Earn faster.

And most dangerously: it didn’t feel like work. It felt like a game I never wanted to quit.

At Behance, I was designing by day, working restaurants by night, brunch shifts on weekends. I’d get home at 3am and wake up at 7.

There was a window in the shower where I’d smoke a cigarette while drinking coffee—just to squeeze in 15 more minutes of sleep. I did that for months.

New York didn’t end well for me. But I still loved every bit of what I discovered there.

I was limitless. I couldn’t be stopped.

I was drunk on work.

I was a workaholic.

workaholism

a condition that makes someone work a lot of the time and find it difficult not to work:

Once workaholism sets in, it progresses through stages similar to those in drug addiction.

Cambridge Dictionary

Workaholism doesn’t hit like a wall.

It builds like fog.

At first, you’re thriving. You’re part of the Night Club. The ones who stay late. Push harder. Carry more.

You’re proud of it. You’re praised for it. And you might even get handsomely paid for it.

But then you stop recovering. You don’t sleep well anymore. Your body changes. Your mood shifts. Your creativity and productivity drop.

But the praise, the pride—and the prize—keep you going.

It felt like the juice was finally worth the squeeze.

It’s hard to talk about workaholism without talking about startups.

Startups run on passion. And passion, at first, feels amazing.

You pour your heart into the Thing. You care more than anyone else. You say “yes” too much, because this might be the Thing.

And in startups, the Thing could change your life.

But passion and workaholism aren’t the same.

When the late nights become the expectation, not the exception, that’s no longer just passion.

That’s hustle.

Hustle is a weird word now. Say it too loud and you’ll get crucified on social media. But let’s not pretend it didn’t build a generation of great products.

Still. I wonder: When did hustle become synonymous with success? When did commitment mean exhaustion?

There’s a quote from ReWork that stuck with me:

It’s provocative, maybe too clean. But it hits.

Because we’ve confused effort with impact.

At some point it even made me wonder if workaholism was an actual requirement to make it in tech.

Or is it just what happens when you turn passion into your personality?

Being passionate is great. It lights you up. It gets you out of bed. It’s a powerful driver.

But when passion becomes your identity, it becomes dangerous.

Because now, not working feels like failure.

You’re not just tired, you’re ashamed.

You think you’re falling behind. Letting your team down. And you start apologizing for it.

Impostor syndrome creeps in. And for creatives—especially the ones who found design after years of drifting—this is a brutal trap.

I used to think workaholism was just the price of doing what you love.

But then, the thing you love starts breaking your health, your focus, your sleep, your relationships.

That’s not love.

That’s addiction.

Some of the best work I did—some of the best work I’ve seen—didn’t come from 80-hour weeks.

It took me a long time to really understand that.

Yes, speed is everything when it comes to execution. But speed isn’t about doing more hours. It’s about moving with clarity.

It’s not a sprint. It’s a marathon you run like a series of well-timed sprints—recovering, refocusing, and sprinting again when it counts.

From builders who knew when to push, and when to pause. Who knew that energy is a resource to protect, not a badge to burn.

The best people I know don’t brag about chaos. They’re calm. Present. Focused.

They show up. They don’t explode and disappear.

Execution isn’t about intensity. It’s about consistency.

I still work hard.

I mean, my relatives think I do. I probably am, but it’s not even close to the extreme levels of addiction I was on in the past.

They helped me keep my sanity along the way—through the ups and downs.

I’ve stopped envying the Night Club and apologising for not being part of it anymore.

I used to see its members as heroes.

Now I just hope they’re okay.

While writing this issue, I was actually tempted to go all in on burnout.

But I’ll save that for another time.

If you’re in flow and loving it, amazing. Keep cooking.

You don’t have to break.

Just breathe.

The prizes are high.

But the stakes are even higher.

Julien.

This issue is dedicated to one of the most notorious startup career paths.

While I also like to talk about broader topics, I’ll also sometimes deep dive into very specific ones, shaped by my own experiences over the years.

In most companies, becoming a manager feels like the only available path for top performers.

It’s the default. But it doesn’t have to be.

I’ve shifted back and forth between individual contributor (IC) and manager roles my entire career, and I’ve learned something crucial:

Management isn’t for everyone. And that’s completely fine.

Society historically links management to power, status, and success.

And that’s still true in most traditional industries today.

From New York restaurants to tech startups, I carried the belief that “climbing the ladder” meant managing others.

When I first became a restaurant manager at 24, I thought I’d reached my professional peak.

So when I left the restaurant industry to work in tech, I naturally once again pushed myself into management at Zenly, thinking it was the obvious and only next step.

When I finally got promoted, I felt proud. Like it was the validation I’d been chasing.

But reality hit hard.

The setup was awkward. I had to keep executing as an IC while managing a small team. No onboarding. No ramp-up. Just go.

After a few months, it was clear: this wasn’t sustainable. I was burned out and miserable.

Looking back, it was a recipe for failure. I understand why I was asked to “keep the same pace” as we simply couldn’t afford to slow down.

But still, it was a mess. A necessary one, maybe. But a mess nonetheless.

Eventually, I stepped back into my IC role.

It never felt like a demotion to be honest. It was a relief. I was doing what I was best at. I regained confidence shipping new features head down.

And I finally had space to reflect on what I’d actually learned.

A few months later, I became Head of Design. But this time, I had more clarity.

I would still be hands-on but I would try to do my best instilling new ideas, be a little spark that inspires other team members, leading the way.

I would be a leader, not a manager.

That didn’t mean avoiding responsibility. I still had to grow the team and bring in new talent. And fast.

Get this: you’ve never hired anyone in your life and you’re told to hire “better designers than myself” to succeed.

There’s something deeply contrary and unnatural but it makes a lot of sense.

If you manage to bring in people you admire, you’ll level up too. It forces you out of your comfort zone—not just as a designer or engineer, but as a leader.

During hiring calls, I realized telling great ICs they’d “report to me” didn’t really work.

But when I framed it differently, saying I was one of the OG ICs, leading new efforts with a strong vision, it changed everything.

It removed the awkward hierarchy tension and created a sense of shared mission.

As David Hoang puts it in his—highly recommended—Proof of Concept newsletter:

At amo, the early-stage realities reinforced this insight.

With limited resources and huge ambitions, I had to lead AND execute alongside the team.

We hired individuals excited to build and collaborate, and while I’m convinced that titles do matter in a career, early stage is not the place for those inspiring to quick managerial titles.

Early-stage startups thrive when they stay flat and horizontal. Promoting managers too early adds bureaucracy, slows decisions, and kills momentum.

Duolingo’s design team is a great example.

They have VPs who remain individual contributors, proving you can lead through craft, not just hierarchy. They also get that senior ICs still want to grow in title and recognition.

Focus on hiring great ICs first, avoid the dreaded “too many managers, too few builders” scenario.

Because once you start layering too early, you risk ending up like a McDonald’s: 12 managers, 3 crew members, and no one to flip the f*cking burgers anymore. (I’ve worked there too, I’m not even making this up)

Here’s what I wish someone had told me sooner about navigating IC and management roles:

• If managing others doesn’t excite you, don’t feel compelled to take it simply because it’s what’s available “next” in your career grind. You’ll thrive where you naturally feel energized.

• Mentorship through inspiration and hands-on collaboration is often more powerful than traditional management. Don’t underestimate the power of setting a great example daily.

• Stepping back from management isn’t failure. It’s courage not failure. And it’s deeply professional. Companies need engaged, passionate ICs far more than reluctant managers.

• If you step back to IC, frame it strategically. Clearly articulate how your focused impact as an IC benefits the entire company. It’s a strength, not a step back. But obviously, it needs to be aligned with the company’s expectations and goals.

Thankfully, our industry is slowly waking up.

Companies like Stripe and Shopify now proudly elevate senior ICs, matching managerial salaries and providing recognition traditionally reserved for management.

It sends a clear signal: leadership and management are not the same.

Career paths are becoming fluid rather than linear, making it easier and more acceptable to shift between IC and manager roles repeatedly throughout your career.

Every switch enriches your skillset and deepens your understanding.

My experience managing has shaped my IC roles profoundly, and vice versa. That balance has made me sharper on both sides.

You’ll know you’ve done something right, for yourself, your company, and your teammates, when, years later, you get notes like this one:

Julien.

My experience working in restaurants has lasted nearly as long as my career in tech, and the nonlinear paths offered by the latter have always fascinated me.

This issue is an attempt to put into words something that’s been on my mind for a while.

Just like the endless debate between remote and on-site work, freelancing versus joining a company full-time is a nuanced topic.

Over the last 17 years, I’ve split my time exactly 50/50 between freelance and full-time roles.

I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer and this is not a guide by any mean, but I’ve gathered some insights and common misconceptions that might help you navigate your own decisions in your career.

Whether you’re a seasoned designer, an engineer, or a junior starting out, I hope you’ll find something valuable here.

Let’s cut through the clichés straight up.

There’s a lot of romance and idealization around freelancing. But freelance isn’t the freedom you think it is.

I mean, sure there is relative freedom by picking the projects you want to work on, the companies you want to work with, and the spots you want to work at.

But that freedom lasts only as long as you can afford to say no. And few freelancers actually can.

Should I accept this gig for two months?

Or should I just join Cool Company® instead?

Can I drop this trendy client and finally build that app I keep dreaming about?

All legitimate questions, but they slowly become relentless background noise.

Say goodbye to uninterrupted creative flow.

Freelancing is half design and half everything else. Admin, invoices, chasing leads, marketing, networking, client management. All seasoned generously with stress and self-doubt.

But to be honest, the toughest part of freelancing is definitely watching your long-term clients win big. Without you.

It happened four times.

I’ll dive deeper into how it feels to exit (or miss one) in a separate playbook issue, but those were four exits I watched from the bench.

Sure, my design work and expertise played a role, but seeing founders I collaborated with for months, sometimes years, achieve life-changing outcomes while I stayed on the sidelines left me with mixed feelings.

Pride first. Then frustration, and FOMO.

After a year freelancing for Zenly, Antoine and Alexis offered me a spot on the team. Timing was perfect. So was the opportunity.

Honestly, freelancing as a “trojan horse” to test a company’s vibe is smart. You get as close as possible to the company's routine and the people working there. Plus, you completely skip that early cringe phase when you first land in a new company—you know exactly what I mean.

I had a real overview for months and I knew I wanted to be there.

Joining was awesome but it also meant earning less than I did solo that same year: my total comp was 75K€ in 2016. Meanwhile, I’d cleared just over 100K€ freelancing that same year.

But here is what gets interesting: there was no equity upfront. This really wasn’t that common and automatic back then to give equity in french startups.

I fully trusted them that when the time comes—if it comes—I’d not be forgotten. Pure gut instinct of course, but also I’ve had the chance to know them for many months and knew I could actually trust them.

Six months later, Snap Inc. acquired Zenly.

This event completely changed my trajectory.

It wasn’t just about finally cashing in (though that helped). It was about depth, ownership, and compounding my career in ways freelancing never allowed.

Freelancing offers variety and virtually no routine, but full-time unlocks true depth.

Joining Zenly, and later amo, meant becoming part of a team I admired, crafting details I cared about, being listened to, and learning daily.

I was fully part of it and not a spectator.

I guess, deciding if or when to make the jump comes down to where you are in your career, and trusting yourself enough to leap.

Freelancing early in your career is kind of risky. Without a network or solid reputation, you become a commodity stuck on Fiverr or Upwork, grinding for peanuts. For me, it was 99designs contests at night while still working in restaurant shifts during the day.

The hustle was real.

I think what’s truly missing when you're just getting started in your career is true mentorship and business, product thinking. And you can’t really get that when you’re freelancing.

But joining a company that early can lead to being trapped. Because you lack experiences and awareness, it’s easy to accept very bad deals when it comes to salary and stock-options.

Be mindful. Owning a piece of what you’re building is crucial, but I’ve got close friends who’ve spent over a decade in startups, holding stock options from four different companies. All worth nothing today.

Unless the company is already public, turning stock options into real cash takes awareness, trust, and (a lot of) luck. I’ll dedicate an entire issue to this soon.

In the meantime, never hesitate to ask around, ask other founders, seasoned designers and engineers, what they think of the deal.

Freelancing mid-career can be a smart move, but only if you’ve built real leverage: sharp skills, strong credibility, and a network that trusts you. You’ve ramped up and now it’s time to grow steadily.

Without leverage, you’re chasing quick cash instead of compounding your growth inside rocket-ship teams.

Mid-career is exactly when you should be provoking luck, betting on yourself, and grabbing bigger opportunities.

On another hand, freelancing in a more senior stage can be gold. If you have the reputation, skills, and contacts, you can charge premium rates, pick dream projects, and stay fresh.

But here’s the catch: at that stage, you’re flooded with tempting opportunities. Saying yes to everyone is easy. Saying no is the real skill.

Dive too fast and you might end up trapped in golden handcuffs, stuck in a high-paying gig that drains your energy, creativity, or both.

You get it. It’s never black and white.

My intimate conviction is that your career should never be linear. Especially in the tech industry.

Bet on people and timing to help you choose the right direction.

Not freelance OR full-time. But freelance AND full-time.

Forget the binary freelance vs. full-time narrative. Master the art of career timing instead.

Zenly was my right place, right time moment.

Had I stayed freelance, I’d have missed it all.

Until the next moment.

Julien.

I pushed it back several times because I wasn’t happy with it.

Wide topic.

So many angles. I rewrote it from scratch three times, even made edits a few hours before hitting send.

Hope it resonates. Always open to discuss it 🫰

We’ve heard a ton about Founder Mode lately.

I’ve been wanting to write about Builders for a while.

The ones in the front lines, who cook, whose work actually makes or breaks entire products.

There’s a difference between talking about building and actually executing.

A difference between inspiration and perspiration, between ideas and execution.

I have a Notion folder bursting with hundreds of ideas collected over the last five years. Some are simple bullet points. Others include research, inspiration, even mockups.

Yet, they're all equally worthless.

How many times have you seen a new startup launch and thought: "I had that idea three years ago"?

Who cares. Ideas don't win. Execution does.

Steve Jobs (finally managed to quote SJ in my newsletter 😮‍💨) used to say that thinking a great idea is 90% of the work is a disease.

“The magic is the craftsmanship that transforms a cool idea into a great product.”

The past six months, before officializing the playbook, I kept telling myself that I should build in public with any projects that I’m working on.

I’ve also worked on countless side projects, vibe coded figma plugins, saas products, recorded design sessions of apps, icons.

I mean, I even wrote a piece about how impactful side projects can be.

Except for this actual newsletter, none of the above actually shipped. I’m not even sure they will eventually, and I think it’s okay.

Sometimes you just want to build stuff and you don’t know why. It’s both an urge and a curse.

And then you end up hating it.

I’ve shared a few words recently with friend Xavier (Jack), one the most creative designer I know, and something he said felt on point:

lately i stop myself from trying to achieve perfection

i found out that that is an impossible mission,

and through the process of trying to achieve it, i end up hating what i am building

and sometimes i even lose the essence

The essence.

It seems it doesn’t matter much these days.

Marketing overshadowing execution.

Slick communication, fancy videos, stunning brands, perfect landing pages. Hype to the max.

And then the product just sucks.

Customers end up disappointed, rarely connecting emotionally with the brand.

The gap between expectation and reality has never been wider, with companies spending more effort crafting compelling narratives than actually building great products.

Sure, it’s a great way to advertise and tease your work in advance. It’s a clever way to gauge interest and build hype.

But I'm tempted to think the best builders out there are actually the ones cooking relentlessly in their own kitchens, keeping their mouths shut and being discreet about it.

Sometimes, keeping both your ideas and executions secret is the only viable strategy.

To stay under the radar in our first year at amo, we tested our apps under ghost brands, iterating in stealth mode.

But hiding isn’t enough.

When you’re operating in a space where giants can execute your idea in weeks or even days, speed isn’t just an advantage. It’s crucial.

We knew this all too well from the start.

Big tech companies have infinite resources—brains and cash. But they also have layers of process, risk aversion, and internal politics. We knew it because we’ve been through it.

That’s where velocity becomes an unfair advantage.

Speed is everything.

But speed isn’t just about moving fast. It’s about removing everything that slows you down—endless meetings, unlimited processes.

At some point, if you’re not building fast, you’re falling behind.

You need to get in the trenches, get your hands dirty.

Hovering leaders are becoming a thing of the past. They need to lead by exemple, listening closely to their team’s expertise without falling in the consensus trap.

The minute you start designing by committee, shifting from infusing vision to trying to please everyone, you end up with a Frankenstein product.

It doesn’t happen only in digital products of course. One of the most blatant and known case of Frankenstein’d product out there is the Pontiac Aztek.

The Aztek’s core concept (a sporty crossover) was diluted by cost-cutting and trying to please multiple internal factions, resulting in a Frankenstein product that flopped.

In hindsight, it would have been better to trust a small team with a clear vision for the car.

Big corps kill creativity because they’re afraid of ownership and politics.

John Carmack famously left Meta frustrated by slow decisions and bloated processes while working on VR. Too many cooks in the kitchen kept changing the recipe.

The saying "a camel is a horse designed by committee" perfectly captures how consensus dilutes bold ideas into safe, boring compromises.

Great products aren't democratic. They emerge from clarity of vision, decisiveness, and daring execution.

That’s why small, elite teams who own their work and move fast with conviction are making headlines again. Less process, more action.

Telegram, undoubtedly one of the best product teams in the world, operates with just 30 people.

Far from treating collaborators as mere executants, this can be achieved by giving all the autonomy and space builders need to thrive—skin in the game, ownership, trust.

If you're a founder, learn to build. Stop outsourcing your vision. Understand basic design and the essentials of your tech stack if you’re not technical. Sit with your team, shape the product, own the vision.

I wasn’t a Zenly founder, but I vividly remember having to quickly understand what was happening in engineering to run a beast like Zenly. It never felt like it was a chore—it made me a much better product designer moving forward.

If you're a product designer or product manager, whether you’re in a startup or freelancing, the tools available in 2025 to express and execute your ideas and show them to the world are truly unprecedented. Make the most of it.

If you're in a startup, stop waiting for permission. Explore and ship constantly. Out-execute. Work on those details, on this extra little thing. Go that extra mile. It compounds more than you think for both your company and your career.

Hard to talk about building without mentioning AI in 2025. Sure, it makes execution faster and easier. But speed without quality is pointless. Skip the half-baked MVPs—remember: Look & Feel Is Your Moat.

The winners of 2025 won't be those who talk loudest. They'll be those who execute relentlessly.

Builder Mode feels good.

But once you've built, it only gets started.

Ever heard of Distribution Mode?

Julien.

Hey, it’s been two weeks already since the last issue. Thanks for still being around🫰.

This time, I’m diving into a topic that’s been heating up lately. One that is as polarizing as it is personal.

No debates, just real insights from years of experience. I hope it adds some nuance to the conversation.

Remote vs. on-site has been one of the biggest debates of the last decade. And like every debate, it’s loaded with drama.

I won’t pretend to have a definitive answer. This debate is endless and flawed by essence.

However, I’ve lived both sides intensely for more than 15 years. I’ve got a damn good aerial view of how they really work.

I’ve done on-site at the highest levels. I’ve worked remotely, at length, even before it was mainstream.

I’ve seen them drive incredible focus. I’ve seen them literally break people—myself included.

It’s all about balance. The way we work shapes the way we build. For better or worse.

In 2025, it’s time to ditch the old remote clichés.

David Hoang, former VP of Design at Replit, put it best in The Office is a Productivity Tool:

For a lot of people, remote work is still tied to COVID-19.

Most of us spent weeks, if not months, working from home during the pandemic. For the unprepared, it was a disaster.

But for some others, like myself, it was just business as usual, after having spent 8 years remotely as a freelancer.

Working fully remote at Zenly during lockdown was a game-changer. No commute, no office distractions.

Fair enough, Slack notifications tripled and Zoom meetings dragged for hours.

Remote unlocks a level of deep work that’s almost impossible in an office. If you have the right setup.

Not everyone does.

Parents juggling work and kids in a 50m² Parisian apartment got crushed. Some of my coworkers barely made it through and struggled with anxiety.

The expectation vs. reality gap is massive.

We all dream of OG iPhone designer Mike Matas’s workplace or Isaac French’s setup. But as far as I’m concerned, my setup was a scratched IKEA dining table for over a decade. I only upgraded to a real workstation after the pandemic.

I mean, look at this beautiful studio/personal office Isaac built.

So, you’re working from home, cozy af. Freedom. No $27 salads. A bathroom that’s actually clean.

At least, that’s the expectation.

In reality, remote blurs the line between work and life until there’s nothing left to separate them. You grind harder, push longer, and before you know it, burnout is knocking at the door.

That’s the double-edged sword of remote.

The best remote companies get this. They don’t just allow remote work; they’ve mastered it. Airbnb, Life360, Deel, Linear—each proving you don’t need an office to build something world-class.

Even at multi-billion valuations, some teams have ditched HQs entirely.

Most of them didn’t start that way though.

Airbnb’s founders were in the trenches together, hacking their way through survival mode selling cereals to keep the lights on. They went back and forth between remote and on-site policies before finally committing.

Life360 had a physical office for years before transitioning to remote-first.

Deel scaled fast, but its core team was tight-knit in person before embracing a fully distributed model.

Remote just works.

But those companies aren’t startups anymore.

Early-stage teams need every bit of synergy and energy they can get.

Sure, on-site has serious downsides.

Commutes, for one, are soul-draining. One of my main commute hubs, for 9 years, was Paris Gare du Nord. It’s a warzone. Close to a 1 million travellers per day.

Costs. It goes without saying but renting an office in cities like SF, NY, Paris, London isn’t far from cheap.

Meetings & Politics. This deserves its own article one day. Let’s just say that inefficiency is a universal problem, remote or not.

Environment. Noise, distractions, interruptions, and let’s not forget my all time favorite, temperature wars.

I’ll admit, I wasn’t exactly the easiest to work with on that last one.

My toxic trait is complaining on Slack about our office overheating all year long.

At one point, they even bought me a Dyson fan just to shut me up. Didn’t work. I kept complaining.

Here’s what on-site does have though: insane energy.

When you feel good in a space, when you start to own it, that’s when the magic happens.

Years ago, I almost joined an app studio two engineering friends co-founded in my hometown. They had two office options.

One was in the historical downtown, a beautiful old building full of character.

The other was a modern, soulless office park in the middle of nowhere.

They picked the office park.

I never joined them.

At amo, right from the start, all the cofounders signed up to be on-site because we knew we had to move fast. A handful of us crammed into a Pigalle apartment, figuring things out together.

But I won’t lie. The actual office we built is a whole different beast. It fuels creativity. It makes hiring easier. It’s a space that pulls people in.

Yes, you can build great things fully remote. No doubt about it.

But if I’m being honest, the most career impactful work I did were side projects but some of the best work I’ve ever done happened on-site.

Especially that last 10%, the part where a good feature becomes truly great.

There’s something different about sitting next to your team, fine-tuning details in real-time. No lag. No async back-and-forth. Just pure momentum.

That’s exactly how it was with Charly in the early days of Zenly. We’d sit in front of a big TV screen at our desk bench, designing, tweaking, and iterating live.

Those defining and impactful moments? This can barely happen over Slack.

Some of the best ideas don’t happen in meetings. They happen in between the work—over lunch, in random hallway chats with people who aren’t even on your team, during those unplanned five-minute brainstorms that turn into something bigger.

You can’t force that. It just happens. Face to face.

On Slack, too much gets lost in translation. Plenty of people still don’t understand the unspoken rules of online communication.

Remote also makes mentorship much harder. Not impossible, but far less organic.

Junior hires need real-time feedback, quick iteration loops, and the kind of hands-on attention that builds confidence fast. It’s how they get quick wins, earn trust, and evolve into A-players. A recipe we applied for years. Successfully.

There’s no definitive answer to remote vs. on-site. Only trade-offs.

You can build incredible things remotely. You can do the same on-site.

The real question is which stage you are in your journey, as a company, as a team, as a builder.

It’s about common sense and adaptability.

Not about control and metrics.

Maybe it’s about knowing when to blend both.

Have you heard of hybrid?

Julien.

How do you design a delightful app?

Why does it matter?

Where do you start?

I could write an infinite series of posts trying to answer these questions.

So let’s do exactly that.

This is an intro, the first in a series of deep dives into how to design great apps—from crafting experiences people love, to the tiny details that set great products apart.

It’ll be a mix of personal experiences, myth-busting, and unapologetic hot takes.

Let’s get started.

People don’t fall in love with a product because it solves a problem.

They fall in love with how it feels.

Yet, most teams obsess over MVPs, roadmaps, and frameworks, convincing themselves that function alone will make users care.

Sure, a few generic apps have shipped and made money overnight. I call them crapps.

Disposable, forgettable and clogging up the App Store (and our feeds).

In their handbook, the Duolingo team makes a key distinction between shipping MVPs and shipping v1s.

They never compromise on experience. They invest whatever it takes to get it right.

So instead of building a minimum viable product, how about aiming for a minimum lovable product?

Honestly, it doesn’t take much. Just don’t fall into the trap of treating your product’s DNA as a branding exercise.

The difference between another disposable tool and something people actually want in their lives? Soul.

Sometimes they don’t even need it—but they want it. They enjoy it. And for 99% of social consumer apps, that’s the whole game.

When was the last time an app made you smile?

Or surprised you?

Or made you want to open it again, instead of letting it rot on your 45th home screen page, buried under a pile of forgotten apps?

What does it really take to earn a prime spot on a user’s first home screen, or even in their muscle memory?

That question shaped everything we did at Zenly. We knew we couldn’t rely on the usual product playbook, so we wrote our own.

The app already existed, but its iconic look and feel didn’t start with user interviews or market research. It started with a logo. A vibe. Custom emojis that traditional product thinking would call unnecessary polish. A waste of time.

That waste of time became our moat.

It didn’t just define how the app looked. It shaped how it thought, how it spoke, how it moved.

Every interaction was an opportunity to surprise, to delight, to do something unexpected.

While others played it safe, we made things different—sometimes harder— because that’s what made it memorable.

That’s why every Zenly clone failed miserably. (Besides Bump of course, Zenly’s rightful heir).

The goal wasn't to build a utility.

It was to create something that felt more like a toy than an app.

Daniel Gross once said:

Opening Zenly is like unwrapping a cool lemon pop on a hot summer day. It’s colorful. It smiles at you. When you think of Zenly, your inner eye sees rainbows.

At amo, I thought we had a head start, applying these same principles, building on everything we had learned.

After years of Zenly product evolution, I figured we had a playbook—that the right moves would come naturally.

I was wrong.

Starting over from scratch, going back to basics, was daunting in ways I didn’t expect.

We knew we wanted amo to feel premium—somewhere between tech, fashion, and culture.

So in those first few months, Valentin and I obsessed over look and feel. We leaned hard into that high-end, luxury aesthetic.

And it backfired.

Our apps looked slick. Clean. Polished.

I guess it had a soul, but it was too exclusive, too far from what we wanted to create.

No more head start. Back to the drawing board.

Because sometimes we’re just wrong. There’s no formula, no plug-and-play framework for building something that feels right.

Funny enough, the debate—art vs. science in product design—was the topic of a recent Friends of Figma event I spoke at.

I didn’t hesitate to stand for chaos, for creativity. For trusting the messy, instinctive side of design.

Because when you’re starting from scratch, data won’t save you. Intuition will.

Innovation doesn’t begin with numbers. It begins with a feeling.

Your app’s DNA isn’t just visuals and branding though.

It’s how it moves, speaks, and feels—the sum of every interaction that makes users think “wait, that was different.”

Your product is a persona. Its tone should be warm, playful, sharp—whatever fits. But it should never sound like it was written by ChatGPT. (We all see you…)

Sound design matters more than people think. I know, most of us keep our phones on vibrate. Still. That satisfying click, that subtle confirmation chime, the quirkiness.

We obsessed over sound at Zenly and amo, and it never disappoints, thanks mostly to Gus, our amazing sound designer.

You know you get it right when your Japanese fans are doing tiktoks with your stuff.

Haptics are the invisible magic of great experiences. That tap-tap-taaaaap feedback. The micro-vibration that makes a button feel real.

That “crazy onboarding" with those perfectly tuned vibrations in that new app everyone’s talking about.

Haptics make digital interactions feel physical, turning swipes and taps into something you feel, not just see.

Nico designed custom haptics at amo, and our users loved every bit of it.

Or this tweet.

Motion design isn’t just decoration. It’s the language of interaction.

The way elements glide, bounce, or settle. The difference between something feeling static or alive.

We’ve built a solid reputation for fine-tuning custom transitions and pushing shaders to their limits.

Because when motion is done right, it’s not just eye candy, it’s clarity, personality, and intent in motion.

These details aren’t icing on the cake.

They are the difference between forgettable and iconic.

In 2025, everything is built faster, cheaper, worse.

Yes, you should leverage AI to speed up development or build a proof of concept.

Yes, you should build with efficiency in mind.

But don’t confuse speed with craft.

As Jordan puts it:

Hunt for that smile-trigger moment. That one detail that turns a passive user into a lifelong ambassador.

There’s a reason why we remember the Yik Yaks, the Vines, the Paths, the Rdios, the Mailbox.

They went above and beyond. They obsessed over the details.

Yeah they’re all gone.

But we still talk about them.

The biggest risk isn't being wrong.

It's being forgettable.

Julien.