Suasor, Part 1: The Best Product Ideas Are Noticed, Not Brainstormed

This is the first entry in a live experiment: I'm taking a brand new product called Suasor from zero to its first customer, in public, using the first-customers method this whole site teaches. If it works, you'll watch it work. If it doesn't, you'll watch that too.

But the honest starting point isn't the launch. It's the moment I realised the product already existed, because I'd accidentally built it for myself.

Quick answer

Suasor began as an internal content system: I answer interview questions out loud, and the system turns my thinking into articles and posts in my own voice. After answering around 45 questions in three days and watching the output pile up, the signal was unmistakable: I couldn't stop using it. This series documents productizing that workflow and taking it to its first customer, live.

The workflow that wouldn't stay internal

It started as a MyPip problem, not a product idea. I knew search and long-tail questions were a huge opportunity, and I knew the catch: generic AI-generated content doesn't earn rankings or authority. What ranks is authoritative, own-voice, own-brand writing. The thing nobody has time to produce.

So I ran an experiment on myself. I do a lot of walking, and it's easy to walk and talk. What if I could just speak freely about a topic I know deeply, and a system could pick up what I'm actually arguing, keep my voice, and backfill the research and data around it?

The first few articles that came out were incredible. Not incredible as in perfect. Incredible as in: this is so much easier than writing, and it still sounds like me. Within days I was asking the next question: if this works for articles, why not social posts? Why not everything?

Three days in, I'd answered about 45 interview questions and the output had stacked into pillar articles, posts, and a queue of content in my voice. That pile is what I noticed. I've had plenty of ideas that didn't get this reaction from me, and one of them matters to this story, which we'll get to. The tell wasn't excitement. It was usage.

Obsess over what worked

At Baseline, my video production company, we once had a video do 100,000 views, and the next week's went back to a thousand. The instinct everyone preaches is to study the flop. I did the opposite: I went frame by frame through the one that worked.

You do have to do a bit of both. But failure analysis has a trap in it: a lot of the time, understanding why something didn't work just produces another failure, because you're over-analysing one wrong turn instead of finding a right one. Sometimes you dust your hands off and move on. When something works, though, the intense study pays differently. Distil it from first principles, cause and effect, until you know exactly why it worked, and you're holding something you can repeat on purpose.

Suasor came from pointing that same instinct at my own operations. Rather than reinventing the wheel hunting for startup ideas, I look at my own workflow, my own needs as a business user in my own vertical. If I build something internally that has real value to me as a fairly advanced technical user, then productizing it is worth a huge amount to the people who don't have that skill set. The idea generation isn't a brainstorm. It's an audit of what you already can't live without.

Being your own first customer

The standard validation advice is a checklist: interview customers, run surveys, build a waitlist, maybe pre-sell. I did none of it before committing three days to Suasor. My validation was one sentence: I am the customer, and I can't stop using it.

That's a strong signal under specific conditions. If you are the ideal customer profile, you're building to make your own life better, and, the part people skip, you *consistently use the thing*, then you know the customer's psychology better than fifty interviews would tell you. When the idea isn't for you, that's when you genuinely need the research apparatus, because you're guessing at someone else's morning.

I've lived the failure case of this exact test, with this exact product name. The first version of Suasor was a meeting transcription tool that reviewed my speaking performance: drop in a meeting, redact the personal information, get a report on how pointed I was. It was good. And I never opened it on a daily basis, so it died. Same founder, same domain, same skills. The only difference between dead Suasor and this one is daily use. That's the whole test.

There's also a simplicity filter hiding in here. Products get easier to sell as the promise gets more primitive: take a daily habit you already do, shorten the time it takes, multiply the output, point it at a business result. "I save you time and multiply your content" needs no education. If your idea needs a survey to explain, it might need a survey to sell.

Talk first, structure after

The first real planning session was one long conversation, deliberately unstructured. Free fall. Talk it out, follow the thinking wherever it goes, then capture it into a brief the same night.

I plan this way now because of a mistake I made with MyPip: I went too fast toward making the idea visual and tangible, branding it, making it pretty, when the real value was never another app to open. People just want the result delivered as easily as possible. The polish was procrastination with better lighting.

So this time the order is inverted. I haven't touched branding. Make it functional, get it into people's hands, get real feedback, understand pricing, move quickly. Pretty comes after paid.

The night's one load-bearing discovery: the internal system's instructions, the ones I'd written for myself over weeks of daily use, effectively were the product spec. Zero product-design meetings happened, because the design had already been done by usage. That's what stealing your own workflow buys you: a sense of what the product should feel like, what data it should expect, all the little nuances a blank-page founder has to guess at and A/B test their way toward.

One caution from the same night: don't over-worship the initial idea. Products change downstream, markets move, and your first framing rarely survives contact with users. The head start is real. It isn't a destiny.

What the skeptic gets right

The strongest objection to all this: your system works because you're you. A founder with domain knowledge, an existing map of your audience, and fluency with AI tooling. Productizing your own workflow just ships your unfair advantages as someone else's broken promise.

They're partly right. My honest answer is that I'm not unique in the ways that matter: the working principles underneath my setup are shared by a lot of people, and the productization work is precisely the act of making it ubiquitous, stripping out the parts that only work because it's me. Where the skeptic is right: a founder with no domain knowledge or point of view won't get what I get out of it. Though it may be exactly the tool that helps them build one. You can't please everybody; you need the market of people it genuinely works for to be big enough. I think it is. Finding out is what this series is for.

Does it fit the portfolio? Honestly, it's an afterthought

There's a tidy strategy story available here: MyPip finds a founder the people worth talking to, Suasor makes the founder worth listening to. Adjacent products, one audience.

The truth is that adjacency was noticed afterwards, not planned. The actual reasoning was simpler: I've built MyPip, it works, and now I have to tell the world about it. Every product I spin up right now comes from staring at the problems a founder physically goes through on the way to market, because I'm the founder going through them. Suasor isn't part of a master plan. It's a complementary product that might pair with MyPip someday, once I've built the audience both of them need.

Next entry: designing the product from first principles, and what got cut. The system that writes these articles is the product being written about, which is either elegant or a conflict of interest. Probably both.