I’ve always been a maker at heart—someone who loves to bring ideas to life. When AI exploded, I saw a chance to create something new and meaningful for solo designers. But making Griffin AI was only half the battle…

Birth of an Idea

About a year ago, a few months after GPT-4 was released and took the world by storm, I worked on several AI features at Convex. One was a straightforward email drafting feature but with a twist. We incorporated details we knew about the sender—such as their role and offering—and the email recipient, as well as their role plus info about their company’s industry. To accomplish this, I combined some prompt engineering and data from our data providers, shaping the responses we got from GPT-4.

Playing with this new technology was incredibly fun and eye-opening. And that gave me an idea. Foundational large language models (LLMs) aren’t great yet for factual data retrieval and analysis. But they’re pretty decent at creativity. No, GPT, Claude, or Gemini couldn’t write an Oscar-winning screenplay or win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, but it’s not bad for starter ideas that are good enough for specific use cases. Hold that thought.

I belong to a Facebook group for WordPress developers and designers. From the posts in the group, I could see most members were solopreneurs, with very few having worked at a large agency. From my time at Razorfish, Organic, Rosetta, and others, branding projects always included brand strategy, usually weeks- or months-long endeavors led by brilliant brand or digital strategists. These brand insights and positioning always led to better work and transformed our relationship with the client into a partnership.

So, I saw an opportunity. Harness the power of gen AI to create brand strategies for this target audience. In my mind, this could allow these solo developers and designers to charge a little more money, give their customers more value, and, most of all, act like true partners.

Validating the Problem Space

The prevailing wisdom is to leverage Facebook groups and Reddit forums to perform cheap—free—market research. However, the reality is that good online communities ban this sort of activity. So, even though I had a captive audience, I couldn’t outright ask. The next best thing for me was paid research. I found Pollfish, an online survey platform that could assemble a panel of 100 web developers who own their own businesses. According to the data, there was overwhelming interest in a tool like this.*

Notice the asterisk. We’ll come back to that later on.

I also asked some of my designer and strategist friends who work in branding. They all agreed that there was likely a market for this.

Testing the Theory

I had a vague sense of what the application would be. The cool thing about ChatGPT is that you can bounce ideas back and forth with it as almost a co-creation partner. But you had to know what to ask, which is why prompt engineering skills were developed.

I first tested GPT 3.5’s general knowledge. Did it know about brand strategy? Yes. What about specific books on brand strategy, like Designing Brand Identity by Alina Wheeler? Yes. OK, so the knowledge is in there. I just needed the right prompts to coax out good answers.

I developed a method whereby the prompt reminded GPT of how to come up with the answer and, of course, contained the input from the user about the specific brand.

Through trial and error and burning through a lot of OpenAI credits, I figured out a series of questions and prompts to produce a decent brand strategy document.

I tested this flow with a variety of brands, including real ones I knew and fake ones I’d have GPT imagine.

Designing the MVP

The Core Product

Now that I had the conceptual flow, I had to develop a UI to solicit the answers from the user and have those answers inform subsequent prompts. Everything builds on itself.

I first tried an open chat, just like ChatGPT, but with specific questions. Only issue was I couldn’t limit what the user wrote in the text box.

Early mockup of the chat UI for Griffin AI

AI Prompts as Design

Because the prompts were central to the product design, I decided to add them into my Figma file as part of the flow. In each prompt, I indicated where the user inputs would be injected. Also, most of the answers from the LLM needed to be stored for reuse in later parts of the flow.

AI prompts are indicated directly in the Figma file

Living With Imperfect Design

Knowing that I wanted a freelance developer to help me bring my idea to life, I didn’t want to fuss too much about the app design. So, I settled on using an off-the-shelf design system called Flowbite. I just tweaked the colors and typography and lived with the components as-is.

Building the MVP

Building the app would be out of my depths. When GPT 3.5 first came out, I test-drove it for writing simple Python scripts. But it failed, and I couldn’t figure out a good workflow to get working code. So I gave up. (Of course, fast-forward until now, and gen AI for coding is much better!)

I posted a job on Upwork and interviewed four developers. I chose Geeks of Kolachi, a development agency out of Pakistan. I picked them because they were an agency—meaning they would be a team rather than an individual. Their process included oversight and QA, which I was familiar with working at a tech company.

Working Proof-of-Concept in Six Weeks

In just six weeks, I had a working prototype that I could start testing with real users. My first beta testers were friends who graciously gave me feedback on the chat UI.

Through this early user testing, I found that I needed to change the UI. Users wanted more real estate for the generated content, and the free response feedback text field was simply too open, as users didn’t know what to do next.

So I spent another few weekends redesigning the main chat UI, and then the development team needed another three or four weeks to refactor the interface.

The revised UI gives more room for the main content and allows the user to make their own adjustments.

AI Slop?

As a creative practitioner, I was very sensitive to not developing a tool that would eliminate jobs. The fact is that the brand strategies GPT generated were OK; they were good enough. However, to create a real strategy, a lot more research is required. This would include interviewing prospects, customers, and internal stakeholders, studying the competition, and analyzing market trends.

Griffin AI was a shortcut to producing a brand strategy good enough for a small local or regional business. It was something the WordPress developer could use to inform their website design. However, these businesses would never be able to afford the services of a skilled agency strategist in addition to the logo or website work.

However, the solo designer could charge a little extra for this branding exercise or provide more value in addition to their normal offering.

I spent a lot of time tweaking the prompts and the flow to produce more than decent brand strategies for the likes of Feline Friends Coffee House (cat cafe), WoofWagon Grooming (mobile pet wash), and Dice & Duels (board game store).

Beyond the Core Product

While the core product was good enough for an MVP, I wanted to figure out a valuable feature to justify monthly recurring revenue, aka a subscription. LLMs are pretty good at mimicking voice and tone if you give it enough direction. Therefore I decided to include copywriting as a feature, but writing based on a brand voice created after a brand strategy has been developed. ChatGPT isn’t primed to write in a consistent voice, but it can with the right prompting and context.

Screenshots of the Griffin AI marketing site

Beyond those two features, I also had to build ancillary app services like billing, administration, onboarding, tutorials, and help docs. I had to extend the branding and come up with a marketing website. All this ate up weeks more time.

Failure to Launch

They say the last 20% takes 80% of the time, or something like that. And it’s true. The stuff beyond the core features just took a lot to perfect. While the dev team was building and fixing bugs, I was on Reddit, trying to gather leads to check out the app in its beta state.

Griffin AI finally launched in mid-June. I made announcements on my social media accounts. Some friends congratulated me and even checked out the app a little. But my agency and tech company friends weren’t the target audience. No, my ideal customer was in that WordPress developers Facebook group where I couldn’t do any self-promotion.

I continued to talk about it on Reddit and everywhere I could. But the app never gained traction. I wasn’t savvy enough to build momentum and launch on ProductHunt. The Summer Olympics in Paris happened. Football season started. The Dodgers won the World Series. And I got all but one sale.

When I told this customer that I was going to shut down the app, he replied, “I enjoyed using the app, and it helped me brief my client on a project I’m working on.” Yup, that was the idea! But not enough people knew about it or thought it was worthwhile to keep it going.

Lessons Learned

I’m shutting Griffin AI down, but I’m not too broken up about it. For me, I learned a lot and that’s all that matters. Call it paying tuition into the school of life.

When I perform a post-mortem on why it didn’t take off, I can point to a few things.

I’m a maker, not a seller.

I absolutely love making and building. And I think I’m not too bad at it. But I hate the actual process of marketing and selling. I believe that had I poured more time and money into getting the word out, I could have attracted more customers. Maybe.

Don’t rely on survey data.

Remember the asterisk? The Pollfish data that showed interest in a product like this? Well, I wonder if this was a good panel at all. In the verbatims, some comments didn’t sound like these respondents were US-based, business owners, or taking the survey seriously. Comments like “i extremely love griffin al for many more research” and “this is a much-needed assistant for my work.” Instead of survey data with a suspect panel, I need to do more first-hand research before jumping into it.

AI moves really fast.

AI has been a rocket ship this past year-and-a-half. Keeping up with the changes and new capabilities is brutal as a side hustle and as a non-engineer. While I thought there might be a market for a specialized AI tool like Griffin, I think people are satisfied enough with a horizontal app like ChatGPT. To break through, you’d have to do something very different. I think Cursor and Replit might be onto something.

I still like making things, and I’ll always be a tinkerer. But maybe next time, I’ll be a little more aware of my limitations and either push past them or find collaborators who can augment my skills.

Yesterday Apple announced its third-generation iPad, simply named “iPad.” Buried in MG Siegler’s excellent take on the press event is this statement:

What’s more likely — 5 years from now, your primary home computing device is a PC? Or 5 years from now, your primary home computing device is a tablet? Just two years ago, this question would have been an absolute joke. Now it’s a joke to think it will take a full five years.

In the post-PC world, tablets are becoming the new normal more and more. In just the two years since the iPad was first introduced, we’ve seen it pervasive on airplanes to entertain children, many executives in Silicon Valley walking around with them instead of lugging laptops, and even the President of the United States receiving his Presidential Daily Briefing via iPad instead of a sheet of paper.

How We Really Use Tablets

Rosetta—the agency for which I work—released a study last month around how we consumers use tablets. Consumption and entertainment are still the primary uses of tablets today, but here are some interesting points to note:

• 33% of tablet users (who owned one 12+ months) prefer to read/check email on their tablets
• 38% of them prefer tablets to read e-books, magazines or newspapers
• 34% of them use their tablets at work
• 45% on the go

In other words we’re witnessing the trend of users either adding to their repertoire of connected devices or in some cases shifting away from traditional PCs to tablets. As MG Siegler said in the quote above, tablets are poised to become the primary computing device at home.

But I would argue that place is a misleading distinction. Yes, PCs will likely still be a primary computing device at the office, but maybe it’s the wrong way to put it.

Work/Life, Life/Work

PCs today are not stationary. Almost every workplace I’ve come across in recent years outfits its workforce with laptops. Those laptops are often taken home so that work can be done at home. And here’s the thing: as much as we’d like to draw a hard line between work and home, it’s too fuzzy. It’s too gray.

Workers check their personal emails and Facebook while at work, on their work machines. They IM their friends or watch funny cat videos on YouTube in the office. Conversely they check their work email on their personal smartphones and catch up with industry-related reading before bed.

The workforce of today achieves work/life balance by seamlessly blending the two to get things done. Wherever they are.

Responsive Web Design

Out of this notion of users being connected constantly and wanting access to information all the time, wherever they are, the responsive web design movement was born. Essentially it’s a set of techniques to enable a single codebase to deliver multiple layouts for different screen sizes. The redesign of BostonGlobe.com has become the poster child for this modern and forward-looking approach to designing for the web. It’s about letting users access content from whatever devices they have, wherever they are. And with this approach, content creators are also saving money on operating expenditures because they only have one site to maintain, not two or three. No longer should you need to write a different headline for mobile.

The Impending Future Is Here

With all this data staring at them in the face, it amazes me that when it comes to digital marketing, many corporations still have the traditional view of developing for mobile. They are still stuck on starting with the desktop experience and then dumbing it down for smartphones and tablets. The old way of thinking made sense at the time (three, four years ago?): users on the go have different needs, and the screen real estate is too small to do anything significant.

However, as we’ve become used to having the Internet in our pocket and as we’ve found a place for the tablet to live in our lives, that four year-old thinking is sadly out of touch with the impending future.

432 million users use Facebook on a mobile device every month. Facebook partially attributes the 76% increase from 2010 to the release of its iPad app. With Apple selling more iPads in Q4 2011 than PCs sold by any PC manufacturer, and with annual tablet sales projected to be at over 45 million by 2016, tablets are here to stay and will become more and more prevalent.

Additionally 472 million smartphones were sold in 2011, 46% of the U.S. adult population have smartphones, and 69% of smartphone owners use it for business. Last, but not least: 81% of smartphone users browse the Internet. The mobile web and the notion of content anywhere cannot be ignored.

The workforce of tomorrow will read their work emails on their smartphones and tablets. They will do research and consume work-related content on those devices. And they will go beyond consumption and produce work on those devices.

As designers and marketers, to ignore this is ignoring the inevitable.

There’s been a lot of chatter in recent weeks about how so-called “digital” agencies are or are not ready to be the lead for a campaign. But I think the question is a little off.

Instead the question should be “Why are clients splitting up campaign work based on tactic?”

Despite the maturing of digital agencies such as Razorfish (for whom I work), R/GA and AKQA, today’s clients are still sending digital work to digital agencies and traditional work to traditional agencies. And equally bad is having a third company plan and buy their media (sometimes there’s a traditional media agency and a digital one). Why is this bad?

OK, the end-zone is down that way 50 yards! Make sure you talk to each other along the way. Now go! [Download PDF]

I’ve seen it time and time again: if you want an integrated marketing campaign, how could you possibly brief all the companies and hope they work together and come back with something good and cohesive? The agencies will pay lip-service and say they’re collaborating, but there’s only so much collaboration that can happen in reality. Each agency is moving fast and really has no time to talk to the others. Plus there is always unspoken political jockeying for protecting the work each agency does have and trying to steal more business from the others. I strongly believe that this model is inefficient (money and time), makes agency people insane, and creates less-than-stellar campaigns.

What should instead happen is the client needs to brief one agency who will create a singular idea and execute on that idea across different tactics and mediums. Therefore the messaging, art direction and strategy for the campaign are cohesive.

Let the one Agency bring in specialists as needed to serve the idea. [Download PDF]

Agencies should not be labeled “digital,” for digital is only a tactic. I’d say the same with “traditional.” What clients should ask for is strong strategic work that drives results. Let the agency—regardless of its label—decide on who to sub-contract to if necessary.

When we see clients trust their agency and its vision, we witness great work all around:

• TBWA\Chiat\Day + Apple
• Crispin Porter + Bogusky + Burger King
• Goodby, Silverstein Partners + Sprint

Oh wait. There isn’t a “digital” agency on that list. But there soon will be.

Further reading:

• Why Digital Agencies Aren’t Ready to Lead
• Why Digital Agencies Are Indeed Ready to Lead
• What if we held a controversy and nobody cared?
• Digital must be anchored at the heart of agencies

Please feel free to use the above diagrams which I’m making available through a Creative Commons license.

In the age of digital and social media, and in the age of realtime marketing, what matters more? The big idea or the smaller idea and execution?

Many digital agencies have been experimenting with new ways of working to try to get at those ideas and executions that a traditional agency couldn’t dream of. I was working at Organic when we rolled out the “Three Minds” initiative, meaning that for every brainstorm, we needed to have at least three people from three disciplines in the room. This is similar to what Big Spaceship has been trying to do by throwing together teams of creatives, strategists, technologists and production.

Digital agencies think that this is a point of differentiation. They think that online, social and viral are so complex that they need all this brainpower to figure it out. What ends up happening when you put a technologist and/or producer into a room with creatives? Executions. It’s a natural and inevitable thing. And I believe it’s a distraction from getting to a better and bigger idea.

I believe that when you add in people whose jobs are to make things (technologists build, producers produce, etc.) too early in the creative process, before the idea is baked, you shortchange the idea. The idea becomes smaller and less compelling.

Creative teams go there all the time too. Too often do I hear an art director or copywriter say “OK, so the idea is a game within a banner.” No. That’s not the idea. That’s an execution. What’s the idea?

People may argue that the mass audience doesn’t care about the idea; all people will remember is the commercial, billboard or Facebook app (no one remembers banners). I disagree. People remember the campaign which was essentially that story dreamt up one late night in a conference room by a creative partnership.

In the traditional advertising agency model, the two-person copywriter and art director partnership is designed to tell stories. The idea isn’t a TV spot, a print ad or a billboard. The idea isn’t a banner, a microsite or a Facebook app. The idea is a story. It’s a story with a hook, that draws people in, makes them feel something and act on that. And as humans, we love stories.

I believe that for digital agencies to compete with the traditional ones, they need to be better at developing compelling ideas. A big traditional shop can always farm out a digital execution, but digital agencies can’t farm out the idea generation.

A couple of weeks ago, I happened upon a site called crowdSPRING. I forget exactly how I got to the site, but what I found there made me feel a little icky and left a bad taste in my mouth. I wrote a tweet about it (which in turn updated my Facebook status) and many of my designer friends had strong negative reactions too.

Stepping back a bit, what is crowdSPRING? It’s a website that allows companies to post briefs for design projects (mostly logos and websites), with the expectation that dozens if not hundreds of designers from around the world will post their solutions to those projects. Finished solutions. Not portfolios, resumes or even sketches. But the finished logo, website comps, CD packaging design, etc.

Why the ick factor? It took me a few days to process it internally, but I eventually came to this conclusion: the site sucks time away from thousands of budding designers. They are all working for free. Only the lucky ones whose solutions get chosen are paid. Imagine if you ate dinner at five different restaurants and only paid for the one dinner you liked? That is what’s happening on crowdSPRING: free work.

This Forbes article talks about pushback from the design community. I’ve long been against spec work. It’s just plain wrong from the free work angle as I’ve already illustrated. The AIGA has also had a long-standing policy against spec work because in their mind it compromises the quality of the work. How? Company asks for free submissions; young, inexperienced and unqualified designers submit solutions; established professionals stay away. That is a recipe for sub-standard creative work. Or how about designer Mark Boulton’s argument that spec work is bad for business? “Architects are invited to submit bids, proposals and designs for prestigious competitions. The winner gets the contract and the glory. The losers get nothing; the work is conducted speculatively.”

My friend and colleague at Razorfish, Garrick Schmitt wrote an article at AdAge.com titled “Can Creativity Be Crowdsourced?” He posits that crowdsourcing creativity is here to stay. Whether it’s finished product ala crowdSPRING or inspiration ala FFFFOUND!, there is a place for it. I honestly don’t know if crowdsourcing creative output in an ethical way is possible. Maybe. But crowdsourcing creativity is entirely possible.

Rivers Cuomo from the band Weezer did a collaborative songwriting project called “Let’s Write a Sawng” on YouTube last year. He started with a single video, saying that he needed help writing a song. He led his large base of fans through the process, breaking it down step-by-step, starting with suggestions for a title, through lyrics and melodies. What worked was that he crowdsourced for ideas, picked the best ones and came up with a compelling pop record. On NPR’s Fresh Air he mentioned that if the song were ever officially released, it would probably break a record for songwriting credits.

Intel also experimented with crowdsourcing via an advertising program call Mass Animation last year. Via Facebook they invited animators to animate shots that would be part of a larger animated short film. I think it works here too because an animated film is very much like an open source dev project: the work can be divvied up into small discreet parts and worked on by volunteers. Intel goes one step further and has promised to credit and compensate contributors whose work appears in the final film.

I think the aforementioned two examples ultimately work as crowdsourced creative because they were volunteer collaborative efforts. Rivers Cuomo’s fans or Intel’s animators really wanted to be part of a project larger than themselves. Whereas design contests or sites like crowdSPRING feel unethical are because they’re requesting intellectual capital without investing a dime.