Small notes from
a life between two coasts.
I'm Iris. This is where I keep my longer thoughts: reflections, case studies of things I've shipped, travel journals, and the small products I keep making on weekends.
What you'll find here
All tags →POV, reflections, small essays. The public account corner.
Walk-throughs of things I've shipped or dissected.
Half itinerary, half feelings. From wherever I last landed.
Weekly whiplash of living between two countries.
Small products that started as one bad Sunday idea.
Latest
Turning a creator database into a CRM: open pools, team pools, and personal pools
Operators had a huge number of creators assigned to them, and only a small share were active. The missing piece wasn't features. It was ownership. I borrowed the lead-pool model from sales CRMs to fix it.
More writing
Cold-starting a content community: where creators come from, how to pay them, and when to let them go
A new visual community launches in a new country. On day one, users open the app. Where does the content come from? This is the supply-side playbook for launching a content community overseas.
Before you launch in a new market: team, user research, and paid acquisition tradeoffs
Taking a content community into a new country means three decisions: how to build the ops team, how to research local users, and which channel to buy your first users from. Each comes with a common trap.
GEO on a brand-new domain: my landing page was invisible to AI search
I ran a set of SEO/GEO cold-start experiments for Verbatim. The biggest lesson: Perplexity found my static pages in three days, and never read a word of my JavaScript-rendered homepage.
Stop watching citation rate in a GEO cold start: the metric I use instead, and the cost of a brand-name collision
A new domain's citation rate in AI search can sit at zero for six months. Watch only that and you'll think nothing works. I switched to a metric that shows signal earlier, and found a check you should run before you name anything.
Verbatim: 我在 build 一个基于真人真言的搜索引擎
别再问 GPT。去搜真人在播客里怎么说的。alpha 已上线 byverbatim.com，需要你的判断。
Blank canvas vs template marketplace: the hidden gap between US and Chinese AI tools
Opening Claude is a blank page. Opening Doubao is a wall of templates. Two products, two completely different invitations to your first sentence.
The hour I sat on Sunset Cliffs
On a late-March evening I sat on a cliff in San Diego and waited for the sun to go down. Ten years ago I did the same thing in Santorini. In the ten years between, I hadn't.
The content pipeline for a solo founder is broken. Here's the gap.
The middle of the solo creator's content pipeline is empty, I know because I keep falling into it.
Distribution isn't a content problem. It's an identity problem.
I published a blog post two weeks ago. It's still not on any social platform. Time isn't what stopped me.
My most reliable cofounder is AI
Two cofounders. One walked. One's still at his day job. The most invested one is me.
The first place online that's actually mine
For years I've been posting slices of myself on other people's platforms. This is where I get to keep the whole.
Building A Creator Partnership Platform in 2 Months (When 6 Was Standard)
We had to build our own. And we had to build it fast.
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