Welcome to Easy, Breezi.

Your friend who sends you a weekly update on what she's working on, reading through, and thinking about – in a list.

What we'll be covering in this newsletter

1. The five types of consumer apps that exist

2. What is a Gem and how do we make one

3. Kicking off dev on Breezi v1

4. How I'm navigating that as a non-technical founder

5. What I'm loving about Tulum

6. And how I'm staying at a resort (for free)

When I look at consumer apps, I categorize them into these five types

1. Legacy: all the big social apps that we use everyday, Facebook (I still refuse to call them Meta), Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, Reddit ... and likely a few others that I'm missing

2. Hotshots: the popular app of the moment, right now it's BeReal, a year ago it was Clubhouse and Dispo, around that same time. Hotshots come out of nowhere and blast to the top of the charts, everyone trying to claim their username before it gets taken but like all explosions, it never lasts and eventually gets put out

3. Mini Upgrades: these apps act like mini turbo jets attached onto the back of your car to give you extra speed – like a AI-powered photo finder for your camera roll or a automatic playlist maker for your mood, it scales quickly to massive audiences because of its helpfulness but if it disappeared one day, life would carry on as is

4. Unnecessary Fun: the word "unnecessary" is extremely subjective so take this with a grain of salt, I look at apps like Co–Star (horoscopes) and VSCO on my phone and think about how unnecessary they are to my life, but I keep them around because it's fun to use (even though I barely use them)

5. Gems: Then we have these, Gems are up and coming products that combine all of the above in the best way possible – making them extremely hard to find or build

What characteristics makes up a Gem of a consumer product?

• Necessary Fun (instead of Unnecessary Fun): a product that sparks joy, creativity, expression BUT in a way where it's vital to a user's daily life perhaps by making them better at their jobs or helps them find their passion

• Huge Upgrades (instead of Mini Upgrades): a product that solves a core problem a user faces and by doing so, hugely shifts their life for the better

• GOAT Mentality (instead of Hotshot): a product that will withstand the test of time, AKA retention, AKA lifeblood of an app, and the hardest metric to “game”, if you need an example, it's like Kobe Bryant vs. Ben Simmons – ones a GOAT, the other was a Hotshot

Here are some examples for the above

Note that none of these are mutually exclusive, ultimately, the Legacy products that we all know and love today became as successful as they are by having a mix of it all

• Apps that add Necessary Fun: Pinterest, Reddit, Spotify, Twitch

• Apps that gives Huge Upgrades: ChatGPT, LinkedIn, Etsy, Discord

• Apps that have GOAT Mentality: Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat,

Basically what I'm trying to say is

• Building consumer apps is extremely difficult

• But like Justine said on Twitter

• "Building a new social app is one of the craziest and most irrational things you can do, and we need more people doing it"

• I have no desire to build the next BeReal or Clubhouse

• I don't care about racing to the top of the charts

• I'm going to make sure Breezi is a Gem

• A product that adds Necessary Fun

• Gives you Huge Upgrades

• And has GOAT Mentality

• To eventually one day become a Legacy product

Exciting news! We're almost ready to start building Breezi V1

• As you know, I've been on the hunt for a technical cofounder

• While I haven't found that person yet, I did meet someone a few weeks ago who I think is a great fit to build out a working MVP with us

• If you're wondering how we got in touch, I'll go into that later but I have to give some credit to my Hinge lead magnet I posted on Twitter a while ago

• I've spent the last week pivoting from user research, prelaunch growth and product design into all things dev

• Which I know very minimal about but am learning quickly

Here are 7 amazing tips I got from a mentor on how to manage an engineer, as someone who's non-technical

1. As a founder, your job is to uncover and communicate what the user needs right now and what's most important to get there

2. The most powerful things you can tell an engineer is “that is not important right now”

3. Ask them how long it'll take to build the first version the product

4. Ask them what they're going to work on first and what things will take the longest

5. Create constraints for them and cut out things from the scope that don't matter

6. My involvement is most important from a high-level (e.g. what, why, vision, roadmap) and on the tiniest details (e.g. least once a week, run the code on your machine and see what it looks like)

7. What they’re working on day to day = none of my business

An article I really liked on this topic

• Demystifying the role of a founding engineer by Alana Goyal

My favorite parts of Tulum so far

Also added Tulum spots to my Corner to follow me there :)

• This awesome Airbnb we're staying at

• This place for breakfast and coffee

• This super local Cenote tour

• This fiction book for reading by the pool

• This playlist for sunset rooftop dinners

Top 3 tips for managing and being good at remote work

1. Schedule all your meetings for 9-12am so you have more flexibility throughout the rest of the day to work at your own pace

2. Set expectations with your team on when they can expect to hear from you (e.g. "I'll be actively responding in the mornings and then again from 9-11pm")

3. Allocate dedicated time for vision-focused and creative work – I always find that working in a new country makes me more creative and I can usually come up with ideas that I would've never thought on being at home

We're leaving our Airbnb today and stayed at a resort for the rest of the trip for free – here's how:

• Our Airbnb was awesome but my friend Val and I wanted to be closer to the beach

• We're both content creators – we know how to film TikTok viral videos

• And these beachfront resorts depend heavily on social media (especially TikTok) for bookings and awareness

• So we emailed 10 different hotels by the water and asked them for comped stays in exchange for videos

• We worked out a deal with a yoga and wellness resort for a weeks stay in exchange for videos of our time there (with full usage rights)

• That's all to say: it never hurts to ask and there is no better time to be a content creator than today

If you found anything in this newsletter helpful, I'd love to connect on Twitter – tweet me a screenshot of your favorite part and let's chat 👋

I'll be back next week with more lists!