In this episode of Lessons From Digital Crafting, we chat with Chris Castig, who has developed dozens of digital products for seed-stage startups and top brands. Experienced in growth and strategy, Chris has a successful track record of launching digital products that customers love. 

Today, we spoke with him about his role as co-founder of Console, an all-in-one community-building platform with Web3 features developed in partnership with Z1. 

We cover:

• Why building cohesive communities is so hard
• The Web2.5 approach
• Crafting lazy (and even evil!) software
• The error of mistaking features for value
• and much more!

We hope you learn something new as we try to demystify the journey from zero to one.

Subscribe for more lessons from digital crafting, and remember: You have a digital vision, and the team at Z1 has a proven process to help make it come true.

Give us a shout at [email protected]. We've helped many founders take their ideas from zero to one, and we'd love to help you, too.

In this episode of Lessons From Digital Crafting, we chat with Matt Stein, an environmental engineer from Stanford who built the app Wheeli while having a full-time, high-level executive job.

We cover:

• How to balance time and attention when building off the side of your desk.
• What are the best collaborative tools.
• How to not get lost in an iterative process.
• How to plan each milestone around specific budget constraints to get to the next steps.
• The difference between choosing React or Swift.
• Ideas to acquire early users and promotion

Wheeli app is based on the wheel of life concept, and it helps your personal growth journey by focusing on the moments that are most important to you.

We hope you learned something new as we try to demystify the journey from zero to one. Subscribe for more lessons from digital crafting, and remember: You have a digital vision, the team at Z1 have a proven process to help make it come true.

Give us a shout at [email protected]; we've helped many founders take their ideas from zero to one, and we'd love to help you too.

In this Z1's Lessons From Digital Crafting episode, we share some of the pains and some of the excitement a solo founder finds in her journey. From detecting a real problem to be solved to crafting the first version of an app to solve that specific problem. We talk about:

• The importance of finding a partner you can collaborate with in building your business. Not someone who just follows your instructions, but someone who understands “the why” behind everything.
• How sometimes there are features you have envisioned that you need to compromise to launch the first V1 of your product. If you don’t have a technical background, you’d need to properly transmit your pillars and trust in the design process and your team of engineers.
• The vibrant startup ecosystem in Dubai, where the “can do” attitude is contagious and empowers you to take risks and move forward with your ideas.
• The challenge of solving privacy issues by design when you have a product that’s accessing and managing data and images on somebody's personal device. How to make the user know that they have control over what's happening while using the app.
• The constraints on designing products for the new AI age. Trying to find a good balance between going hyper-technical or 100% design driven.

In this episode of Z1's Lessons From Digital Crafting, we talk with Eric Mayville and Andrew Haynes, CEO & CoFounder, VP, Executive Creative Director, from Fairgame, about how they crafted a digital solution that transformed their love for golf into their business.

You’ll learn:

- How to craft a digital solution for an industry related to your personal life.
- What are the main challenges of finding and translating the complexities and nuances of a game like golf into a simple user experience.
- How to prioritize the most critical elements of functionality, maintaining an ideal timeline for the app’s first version.

Discover how to innovate for a non-digital space and capture trends with a wonderful result!

In this first episode of Z1's Lessons From Digital Crafting, we talk with Stuart Winchester, CEO + Founder, and Adi Sundar, CTO of the NY-based fintech startup Marble.

Listen to this episode to learn:
- what research activities are appropriate while first validating an early idea
- how design and engineering teams work together to translate "analog" processes (insurance is full of them) into digital
- or how to balance maintaining a certain speed and ideal timeline towards launch with the desire to continue research and design.

Join our hosts, Michelle Reid and Héctor Giner, and discover how this recently nominated for the UX Design Awards product has entered a vast market with huge incumbents.