Personalized assessment
A fan answers a focused set of questions and receives a diagnosis, recommendation, and action plan based on your framework.
An independent product lab
Products for people building their way forward.
Lodestar creates practical products and services that help people turn what they know, what they have lived, and what they want to build into greater agency, income, and opportunity.
We’re starting with creators, helping them turn the expertise already inside their content into useful products their audiences can buy.
What I bring to the studio
YouTube
Launched YouTube Courses and helped grow it from $0 to more than $10 million in annual revenue and 20 million active learners.
Replit
Led builder monetization and connectors, including commerce experiences, business-building tools, and integrations with hundreds of services.
Meta
Built consumer, safety, social-impact, marketplace, and partnership products at global scale.
Why Lodestar
One opportunity can change the direction of a life.
Finding a path
I grew up in South Florida and come from humble beginnings. Opportunities like Penn and a career in technology never felt inevitable.
Competitive debate changed that. It gave me a structure for learning, competing, and imagining a much bigger future. Becoming the top debater in the country helped propel me to the University of Pennsylvania, where I studied entrepreneurship at Wharton and Systems Engineering at the School of Engineering.
Building products that expand opportunity
That opportunity changed the trajectory of my life. I spent the next decade building technology at Meta, YouTube, and Replit. The settings changed, but I kept gravitating toward the same kind of work: helping people learn, create, reach an audience, and build economic opportunity.
Outside of technology, I spent more than a decade coaching debate and founded a nonprofit that primarily served low-income students. I saw firsthand how talent is everywhere, while access to guidance, tools, and opportunity is not.
Starting Lodestar
Lodestar is the next chapter of that work. It is a place to build practical products and services that give more people the ability to shape their own future.
The name reflects that goal. A lodestar does not choose your destination for you. It helps you find your direction.
What I bring to the studio
YouTube
Launched YouTube Courses and helped grow it from $0 to more than $10 million in annual revenue and 20 million active learners.
Replit
Led builder monetization and connectors, including commerce experiences, business-building tools, and integrations with hundreds of services.
Meta
Built consumer, safety, social-impact, marketplace, and partnership products at global scale.
Our first offering
Your best next product may already be hiding in your archive.
If you have spent years teaching through videos, newsletters, podcasts, articles, or social posts, you have already created far more than content.
You have developed a body of expertise. Your audience has revealed what it wants through the questions it asks, the content it returns to, and the problems it still struggles to solve.
That signal is scattered across your archive, comments, analytics, emails, and customer conversations. Creator Product Studio brings it together, identifies the strongest opportunity, and turns it into a product your audience can use and buy.
We do not help you generate more posts. We use what you have already created to build a new source of value and owned revenue.
What could we build?
More useful than another PDF. More focused than a generic app.
The right product depends on what you know and what your audience is trying to accomplish. It does not need to be a course, and it should not be an open-ended chatbot with your name on it.
Decision tool
Help someone choose a strategy, career direction, product approach, purchase, or next step using the principles you teach.
Planner or calculator
Turn your methodology into a structured tool that helps customers model a decision or produce a realistic plan.
Guided challenge
A time-bound email or web experience that helps customers achieve a specific outcome with daily direction and accountability.
Custom playbook
Generate a personalized guide, roadmap, or operating plan based on a customer’s situation and your body of knowledge.
Lightweight application
A focused interactive product that performs one valuable job for your audience without requiring you to become a software company.
The format is not the product. The customer outcome is the product.
One product. Four weeks. Real customers.
Week 1
Understand the opportunity
We gather your content and audience signals, map your expertise, identify recurring needs, and develop three evidence-backed product opportunities.
Week 2
Choose and validate
We select the strongest opportunity together, define the customer and outcome, set a price, and test the promise with a real segment of your audience.
Week 3
Build the product
We create the smallest excellent version, ground it in your point of view, connect checkout and analytics, and test the complete customer experience.
Week 4
Launch and learn
You introduce the product to your audience. We monitor the experience, talk with early customers, and determine what is working and what should happen next.
By the end of the sprint, you have:
- A map of your expertise and audience demand
- Three ranked product opportunities
- A validated product concept and price
- One branded, working product
- Checkout, delivery, and basic analytics
- Launch messaging and support
- A clear post-launch recommendation
A clear view of what customers valued, what should improve, and whether the product deserves further investment.
Design partners
Three spots for creators ready to build something their audience can use.
I’m opening three design-partner spots for creators who want to turn a substantial body of work into a new, owned product.
The 30-day Creator Product Sprint is $5,000. It includes archive and audience analysis, three product opportunities, product validation, one working product, checkout and delivery, launch support, and a post-launch learning report.
You own the finished product and the customer relationship.
Apply to Creator Product Studio
No payment is required to apply.
This is for you if:
- You have a substantial archive of useful content.
- Your audience repeatedly asks for your advice, recommendations, or frameworks.
- You have an engaged audience through YouTube, a newsletter, a podcast, a community, or another channel.
- You want to build owned revenue and are willing to share relevant data and introduce the product to your audience.
FAQ
Do I need to know what I want to build?
No. Finding the strongest product opportunity is part of the sprint. We begin with your content, audience behavior, recurring questions, and existing business.
What information will I need to share?
Typically, we use your public content, selected audience questions or comments, basic performance exports, information about existing products, and your goals and constraints. You should never need to share your passwords.
Who owns the product?
You do. You retain ownership of the finished product and the customer relationship, subject only to any clearly documented third-party tools or reusable components.
What happens after the 30 days?
You receive a clear view of customer response, product usage, operating requirements, and the most promising next step. Depending on the evidence, that may mean improving the product, expanding it, launching another product, or leaving it as a focused standalone offer.
Beyond the Creator Product Studio
Lodestar is an independent product lab exploring how thoughtful technology can help more people learn, earn, and build. We are starting with creators, with education and entrepreneurship as future areas of exploration.
Creators
Current focus
Education
Exploring
Entrepreneurship
Exploring