Xander Wang

30 days ago my team looked around the room, confirmed we had zero marketing hires, and decided the person who analysis data should run our social media. This is my report from the field:
Lesson 1: Just make it fun is not a spec. My first draft was a clean blue banner with our logo and tagline. Rejected: "too corporate." Second draft: I added memes. Rejected: "what is this." There is apparently a narrow band of acceptable fun.

Lesson 2: Marketing has its own build pipeline and it's invisible. I used to think posting was the work. The work is actually: research the platform's culture, learn its unwritten rules, draft, get roasted internally, redraft, post at the right hour, then watch a number. It's a deploy with no logs and no rollback.

Some of you might remember my post about shipping a whole product without a UI designer. This is that product.

BettaScore pulls product reviews from Reddit, YouTube, Hacker News, Wired, RTINGS and Google onto one page, scores the tradeoffs, and links every point back to its source. The idea came from spending three evenings and fourteen tabs researching one action camera, then realizing the real problem wasn't too little information. It was that I couldn't trust any single source alone, so I was cross checking everything by hand.

Our landing page, product pages, design system, even our promo video, all of it came from AI tools plus taste. Five years ago this would have needed at least one designer on payroll and tons of Figma design effort.

Here's the uncomfortable part. The output is genuinely fine. Not award winning, but clean, consistent, and shipped in weeks instead of months. Nobody who visits our site asks if we have a designer.