Introducing Building with Intent
Weekly product strategy and founder journey insights for entrepreneurs building with purpose and intention.
The Vision Forward
I'm building two things that solve problems I couldn't ignore anymore. The first came from having too many conversations with my wife and kids about our parents and grandparents and realizing that we’d wish we had asked more questions. The second came from watching brilliant small business owners struggle with product decisions that Fortune 500 companies solve with entire teams. Both problems felt solvable to me, and more importantly, both felt like they mattered in ways that go beyond just building products.
Why These Projects
Seven years ago, my family stood in a neighborhood in my mother-in-law’s hometown, looking at building fronts. One had been my mother-in-law's childhood home, but sixty years of city changes plus her vascular dementia meant we weren't sure which one. I contrasted this with my father's years of cataloging things—he has spreadsheets for everything: cars owned, airports visited, countries explored, places lived. What struck me was that despite his meticulous cataloging, I didn't have the fabric to wrap around the list. What was their Hawaii home actually like? What memories did he have from that place?
The following years brought losses that hit our family especially hard. We lost cousins, my father-in-law, my wife's uncle, and my uncle over four years. The voice telling me to start cataloging memories got louder, but it wasn't until mesothelioma reduced my father from a super active octogenarian to struggling to catch his breath that I reached the turning point.
I saw the opportunity to create something that could weave those memories into a richer, shared tapestry. For that, I’m building MemoryWeaver. I’m opening up the doors for beta testers now.
The Professional Opportunity: Democratizing Expertise
I've spent 25+ years solving the same fundamental problem: how do you figure out what to build, why to build it, and how to get it done? The value Product Management brings is outsized compared to our cost, but many small businesses can't afford dedicated PMs. That expertise stays trapped in larger companies. A bakery client was recently torn between building a mobile ordering app or a better custom order system—a classic prioritization matrix problem that a $50M company solves with a PM team, but a 3-location owner has to guess at. I'm making these frameworks accessible to entrepreneurs and small business owners.
The Lifestyle Design: Building for Flexibility
But here's the thing - I'm not just solving other people's problems. I'm solving my own. I'm in the sandwich generation, trying to balance career growth with family presence, and I realized that traditional employment, even at companies I loved, wasn't giving me the flexibility I needed for this stage of life. I’m not the only person trying to balance career with being in the sandwich generation, but I see an opportunity to let me do both a little better: to create meaningful products while I enjoy my family, share some wisdom along the way about how I’m going about this project and, if you’ll join me, bringing you along the journey.
The Founder Journey: What I'm Learning
AI is lowering the barrier for much of the founder's journey - not everything, but enough to make solo building viable in ways that weren't possible even two years ago. Instead of spending weeks researching the competitive landscape and user interviews, I can have Claude analyze market trends, help me design survey questions, and even roleplay as different customer personas to stress-test my assumptions. The research phase that used to take months now takes days. I'll share specifics about my AI-assisted workflow in future posts, but for now, just know that it's fundamentally changing what's possible for someone building products independently.
What You Can Expect
I’ll be sharing updates around the founder journey, process, and learnings I’m encountering along the way. We’ll cover some of the product management aspects of it and how those apply outside of corporate life. And I’ll talk about how I’m balancing building a business, which could be all-encompassing, with my most important roles as father and husband.
The Invitation
I welcome you to join me on this journey of building with intention. Every week, I'll share what I'm learning about preserving family stories, building better products, and designing life on our own terms. This isn't just product development—it's about intentional living. I'd love to have you subscribe to follow along as I build things that matter.