Hi there 👋  I'm Daniel, but my friends call me DZ.

Most importantly, here are a few photos of me on fake sales calls.

Photos taken by my friend Luke Beard

Photos of me acting like I'm on a sales call

Most days I spend my time exploring new software projects and writing. Right now, my focus is on Arrows.to and working with my clients via my studio No Small Things.

In the past I helped make Housecraft and Shortwave with some wonderful friends.

Before that, I did work for ngrok, OneShot, Jewelbots, RunKit, SilviaTerra, and others. Earlier in life I worked for Twilio as a product manager and Coudal Partners on Field Notes notebooks.

Otherwise, I have a long list of failures. My personal failed products are 😭 Mocky (a magic window into your team's Dropbox), 😢 Driftless (your friends' best Amazon purchases; later a spending tracker), 😞 The Shakedown (shake your phone, get points, be happy), 😩 Hermes (helping designers & developers find jobs in Chicago), and 😑 Colorplane (a color picker for humans).

Some of my writing...

How To Play Politics Onboarding Your Users Skip the analytics Draw the owl Digging Your Own Hole Creating moments for discovery Why I care about code Open For Business Frivolous Experimentation Making Yourself Irrelevant OneShot, a one week design case study view all posts →