In 2014, after six years of building Positive Posters and Sex Drugs & Helvetica, and doing various stints at IDEO and other start-up's, I founded a digital product agency and studio called Joan with my two friends Ed and Tony.
We helped clients both figure out what to build as well as how to build it - 'building the right thing vs. building the thing right'. It was lots of prototyping, research, testing and then design and build.
We tried to spend most Friday's working on our own ideas. Ideally, we wanted to move towards having customer over clients.
Together, we build and launched half-a-dozen products like an app where you could enter the mobile number of someone who was going to pick you up at the other end of a flight and it would message them in real time if your flight was delayed.
Ultimately, we went all in on a product to help small teams more accurately record their time. After 2.5 years of development, we successfully launched Tiller on Kickstarter in 2018.
Running an agency was wonderful. We made incredible friends along the way and did some brilliant work that I'm still proud of.
We shut down Joan in late 2018 to focus on Tiller.
