Curator to Builder

I spent the better part of fifteen years curating other people's work. Siteinspire was a design showcase — I'd find the best websites, screenshot them, tag them, publish them. Thousands of sites over more than a decade. The design community knew the name and I'm proud of what it became, but at some point I realised I was spending all my energy pointing at what other people had built instead of building things myself.

The shift was gradual. I'd always coded — Siteinspire itself was a custom build, rebuilt several times over the years. But the projects were always in service of curation. The database, the CMS, the frontend. Tools for showcasing, not tools for making.

Materia was the turning point. A real product with real enterprise customers, real data complexity, real stakes. Not a showcase — a platform. Products with 165 attributes per item, colour search across millions of assets, AI-generated recommendations. The engineering problems were orders of magnitude harder than anything I'd done before, and I loved it.

What surprised me was how much the curation instinct transferred. Fifteen years of looking at design every day gives you a sense for what works. I can tell within seconds whether a product page layout is right, whether the information hierarchy makes sense, whether the colour palette will read on screen. That's not engineering skill — it's accumulated taste from years of studying the work.

Now I build tools. Arc, Fiction, Falcon, Obsi, Sift — each one scratches a specific itch. The curation muscle is still there. I still run Siteinspire. But the balance has shifted decisively toward making things, and I'm building more in a month than I used to in a year.

The irony is that the velocity comes partly from AI. The same shift that's changing how people think about creative work is what gave me the leverage to become a builder rather than a curator. I don't think that's a coincidence.