Ian Park

Ian Park began his career at a media group. Some of the time he worked on small digital projects, and he saw the same thing happen again and again: months of work, good people and real budgets went into products nobody had checked anyone wanted, and most of them closed quietly a year later no matter the budget. The few that worked had started the other way round, with a customer who was already looking for something. He took that lesson into his own work. He built two small SaaS products, found their first customers by hand, and sold both. It was some money, not a fortune, and it taught him what a first version cannot skip and what it never needed. He read Exploding Ideas for months before he ran it. Now he writes it every week: he looks for the customers that a change in rules, technology or behavior has just created, maps the economy forming around them, and says plainly which businesses are worth building and which are not. He also writes the books published under the Exploding Ideas imprint, on validating an idea, shipping it and finding the first hundred customers.