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 (ish).

We are bringing back the mix-n-match format of long form writing with a blend of lists in between. I think I actually prefer this, you’ll get to know my voice and style of writing better! My “voice” is 90% sarcasm … do with it what you will. And don’t take anything too seriously (here and in life).

So what happened once it got to September?

By the way, this is a part two of my New York Summer update. If you haven’t read part one yet, skim it quickly here. I’ll assume you have and continue.

So where were we?

The second week of September had just come around.

I packed up all the stuff I had in my apartment in Chelsea and headed over to Union Square. This was by far my favorite sublet out of the three – doorman, elevator and best of all, no roommates.

I used to be very extroverted.

Whenever I did the Myers-Briggs personality test, I was surprised my results came back as ENFP instead of EEEEEENFP.

But over the last few years, some things changed:

• I started to prefer deep one-on-one conversations over big social events

• I became the person who listened on first dates, instead of gabbing on about her life

• At the end of a long day, I would often skip friend gatherings to go home for some peace and quiet

Hence why I was very excited to be living on my own this time.

Sometimes I think about why I’ve become less extroverted over the years.

I wonder if it’s just a part of growing up.

When I was younger, I didn’t think twice about what I said or who I said it to. I was just excited to share parts of myself with others.

Then two years ago when I went through a breakup and everything changed.

I realized I had spent years letting this person get to know me and all of a sudden, they weren’t there anymore. Not only did I lose this person, I also felt like I lost the parts of me that he knew and took with him. I didn’t like that there was someone in the world that knew my biggest fears, my most cherished memories, my secret hopes and dreams – and they weren’t even in my life anymore.

The EEEEENFP in me became eNFP.

And I started spending more time on my own.

But I knew I couldn’t work on Breezi alone

Once we caught whiff of early PMF engaging with our early users, designing the prototype was the next step.

I knew exactly who would be the perfect person for the role.

She and I went to college together and ran the same student organization on campus. All throughout school, I was obsessed with her ability to use design to tell stories. Not only was she a product designer, she was also a graphic designer with a background in branding.

One IG dm and a few FaceTimes later, she was in.

Within the week we had wireframes.

The following week, we finished the lo-fi mockups.

By the second week of October, we had a fully functioning Figma prototype that users could click through.

My opinion on early stage product design and user experience

At the earliest inception of your solution, speed is everything.

Once we finished our prototype, I thought about getting feedback.

But I decided not to.

Over the summer, I connected with someone (now, close friend) who worked directly with Evan Williams – cofounder of Twitter, Medium and Blogger. He shared that one of Evan’s philosophies with building consumer companies was to be wary of feedback. In fact, during the period of building Twitter, he didn’t ask for others opinions on the product.

His focus was just on making something he loved.

If he loved it and would use it, then chances are, others would to.

That’s because strong consumer founders are:

• tastemakers

• trendsetter

• influential

• visionaries

• pioneers

It’s very hard to create something that everyone will like.

But very easy to get caught up in trying to achieve that.

Instead, I opted to build something I really loved.

And since I’ve always been a tastemaker and influential, I had confidence others would like it as well.

Lastly, I’ll caveat this by saying this only works early stage.

When Breezi reaches 100k users, then a million users and then a billion users – it will no longer be my way or the highway. We’ll deploy religious testing iterations to improve the product and make changes based on real user behavior.

Are you going to show us some designs now?

No.

Not yet. But we have started coding.

Remember my whole cofounder thing? Well, updates on that in the next newsletter!

But in meantime, here are some extremely early design ideas I had for Breezi when it was just me, my Ipad and a Figma tutorial on Youtube.

I cringe. Don’t worry, Breezi does NOT look like that …

Takeaways from this newsletter

1. Take personality tests frequently: see how you’ve changed, reflect on why you’ve changed and what’s affected you most, it’s important to know yourself as deeply as possible

2. Being able to recruit is the number one skill for a founder: if you want to go fast, go alone but if you want to go far, go together

3. Consumer social founders need to be visionaries: you need to have a strong opinion on what the future looks like and be confident in that vision

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!