Why I am building again...and why Ableten?
Almost exactly a decade ago, I launched Dollop 2.0 here on Product Hunt.
Recently, a friend asked me why I wanted to become a founder again.
My answer came surprisingly quickly:
“Probably because I failed the first time…and it’s not how I want my founder story to end.”
Dollop was a social gifting and payments startup. In my very early-twenties-founder era, I spent months going door to door to coffee shops, dessert shops, and restaurants in New York trying to convince merchants to use it.
Some signed up. Some thought I was trying to scam them and kicked me out. One coffee shop made me prove the value of Dollop on the spot, so I spent eight hours standing outside trying to generate customers for them. Somewhere around person #40, I realized the skeptical guy with messy hair politely telling me “no thanks” was Dennis Crowley, the founder of Foursquare.
But those slightly embarassing conversations were also where the product got better with each experiement
Merchants told us their POS was their single source of truth so we sold cheap android "scanners" for a little while
We noticed Square and Clover replacing traditional payment terminals with iPads so we started downloading our merchant app on partner iPads
And during a meeting with an ice cream truck franchise, the CEO pointed out that many of their trucks didn't reliably have Wi-Fi, so we made our biggest pivot of all:
After hearing the customer story, my technical co-founder suggested:
“Why don't we reverse the QR code—have the customer scan the merchant instead?”
We dismissed it as a slightly dumb idea. Then I started floating it to merchants. Their willingness to sign on increased by more than 30%. We ultimately patented the customer-scanned QR payment flow in 2015, and we had a Product Hunt launch (#6) that brought in hundreds and thousands of new users. With each tweak we began to see the traction we were dreaming of.
But not long after, for reasons outside the business, I had to shut Dollop down. Yet, five years later, during Covid, versions of that interaction seemed to be everywhere.
For a long time, I mostly experienced that as regret.
But recently, I've come to take a different lesson from it:
The idea hadn't appeared out of nowhere.
It came from hundreds of small observations—things merchants said, behaviors I noticed, strange constraints, failed pitches, an ice cream truck without Wi-Fi, and a conversation over ramen.
None of those things individually were the idea.
Together, they became the source material for one.
That experience has shaped how I think about creativity and product building today. The best ideas I've had rarely arrive fully formed. They start as fragments: something you notice, something someone says, an article you read, a workaround that seems strange. If you hold onto those fragments for long enough, sometimes they collide and become something new.
That's also one of the ideas behind what I'm building now: Ableten, a Source Library for preserving the articles, screenshots, recommendations, notes, and observations that catch your attention before you necessarily know what they'll become.
I'm not quite ready to launch Ableten here yet.
But there's something meaningful about realizing that, almost ten years after launching Dollop 2.0 on Product Hunt, I'm getting ready to press that button again.
I'm curious, especially from other repeat founders:
What did your first company teach you that you're carrying into the one you're building now?
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