Business · Founder Lessons
Why I Built Spodus
Five products, thirty people, and a year and a half of moving information by hand between systems that should have already agreed.
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4 min read
Every essay
6 essays37 min of reading
Lose Money on Purpose
Costco loses up to $40 million a year on a chicken. On purpose.
10 min read
Why Three of the Most Interesting Companies in the World Refused to Grow
Growth is the religion of business. The most interesting companies are the heretics.
6 min read
The More Curated You Look, the Less People Trust You
What happens to trust when anyone can produce perfect communication.
5 min read
Why the Best Products Are Deliberately Incomplete
The Betty Crocker egg story is half-wrong. But the insight underneath it explains why the most loved products are the ones that are deliberately incomplete.
7 min read
The Companies That Won Were Misunderstood for Years First
The competitive advantage nobody wants to talk about.
5 min read
What I write about
Business4 essays
How businesses actually work when nobody's watching. Not the pitch deck version. The real one.
Marketing3 essays
Why people pay attention. Why they buy. Why most marketing fails and the people doing it can't figure out why.
Human Behavior3 essays
How people think, decide, and act. Especially when they're under pressure, scared, or don't realize they're being irrational.
Founder Lessons1 essay
The stuff you only learn by doing it. Hiring the wrong person. Burning out quietly. Killing something you loved because the numbers said so.
Who writes this
I'm Hammad. I started at 16 writing affiliate reviews, spent my early twenties making YouTube shows that passed 500 million views, ran a marketing agency, and built Spodus. These essays are what I learn while it is still happening.
The longer version