Telescope

For Telescope, the product bet was simple: people still want recommendations from humans, not from an algorithm optimizing for attention. Members follow curators because they trust their taste, and the feed only shows what those curators choose to publish. No ranking tricks, no ads, no engagement loop to game.

The harder part was turning that idea into something a founder could actually launch. Telescope needed the core product system: curator tools, a member experience, payments in both directions, fast ways to add recommendations, and a business model where creators could earn without making the experience feel fragmented.

This is the kind of 0-1 work we like taking on: helping a founder turn a product bet into something launchable, then staying close enough to keep learning and shipping. Telescope started as a 2-3 month MVP brief. Eighteen months later, we're still the technical partner.

Telescope shipped as a real web product, not a clickable prototype: member-facing product, creator workflows, payments, email, search, and the operating tools behind it.

The first pattern was simple: when curators joined Telescope, a lot of them started with a city guide. Restaurants, coffee shops, places to walk. Lists they already kept for themselves and sent to friends whenever someone asked where to go.

A lot of that work was already sitting in Google Maps. Curators had spent years saving places and refining their taste, just in a tool that was not built for publishing, attribution, or a paid member experience.

So we built around the behavior instead of forcing a new one. A curator pastes a Google Maps list URL, and Telescope turns it into a draft collection with places, metadata, and photos already populated. From there, they edit the copy, remove anything they do not stand behind, and publish.

The same pattern works outside of places. Paste a URL to a book, product, or article, and Telescope pulls what it can from the page, uses an LLM to structure the useful fields, and gives the curator a pre-filled entry instead of an empty form.

The point was not to add AI for its own sake. It was to respect the work curators had already done and remove as much duplicate effort as possible. A generic build would have started with a form. We started with the curator's actual workflow.

For Telescope, the work was not just getting a polished web app online. It was building the first real version of the business: something members could pay for, curators could publish into, and the team could operate every day after launch.

That meant the member product and the operating layer had to be built together. Curators needed practical ways to publish, members needed a clear reason to pay and return, and the Telescope team needed the tools to manage content, onboarding, payments, search, and day-to-day workflows without leaning on fragile manual work.

The result was a production-ready foundation, not a prototype that only proved the interface. Telescope could launch, learn from real usage, and keep expanding the product without having to rebuild the system underneath it, giving the team a first version the business could actually start running on.

For Telescope, the business model was part of the product design. The question was not only what members would pay, but how value would move through the network in a way that made sense for members, curators, and the platform at the same time.

The pressure point was alignment. Members were paying for trusted taste, not a pile of separate creator subscriptions. Curators were creating the supply that made the network valuable, so the model could not make publishing feel like something they had to unlock before they could contribute.

Direct feedback made those constraints clear. Per-curator subscriptions were a short-form no-go: people did not want a stack of small paid relationships just to follow the curators they liked. A platform-level membership solved that side of the experience, but a paywall around curator publishing created the wrong kind of friction. One user who hit it said they had not even realized it was there, and probably would not have used the product if they had.

So the model shifted toward a shared structure. Members pay one platform-level subscription. Curators can publish members-only collections freely. When members engage with those collections, that engagement contributes to a profit pool, and a meaningful share gets distributed to the curators whose work members are actually consuming.

That gave each side a reason to participate without turning the product into a bundle of paywalls. Members get one simple subscription, curators have a reason to keep contributing, and Telescope becomes the shared layer that connects value across the network. It was not just a Stripe integration. It was the product and the business model finding the same shape.

We take on a small number of 0-1 product builds each quarter. Same shape of engagement as Telescope: founder has a real idea, we build the first version end-to-end, then keep iterating with them after launch.

If you're early on something and want to talk through what building it actually looks like: get in touch.