Purpose-built

Actionable advice for entrepreneurs who want to build products that people love.

What's new

Blog

Delivering Features Faster

Get the most velocity from your product team as it transitions from prototyping and validation to growth.

Kane Baccigalupi, Development Director, thoughtbot

Podcast

Have a Slide for That

Alec Stern, startup founder, entrepreneur, mentor, investor, and advisor, discusses founding Constant Contact, the early days of SaaS, the importance and utilization of 'channels', and pursuing customer feedback.

Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Podcast

Building Hundreds of Products with Chad Pytel

Chad, developer and CEO of thoughtbot, shares his thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of consulting vs building scalable SaaS products, how he grew thoughtbot, and the lessons he's learned from 15 years as a first-time founder.

Indie Hackers Podcast

Video

The Value of Honesty

Managing Director Josh Clayton explains the value of honesty when working with clients

Josh Clayton, Managing Director at thoughtbot

Founder Leon Johnson discusses his app, Lightswap

Video

Building a New Crypto App to Pitch Investors

Founder Leon Johnson discusses feature prioritization of his MVP.

Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Podcast

Human to human connection

CEO and co-founder of Drift and former Chief Product Officer at Hubspot, David Cancel, talks about how they approached the earliest iterations of Drift during the testing and validation days.

Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Blog

Eight Essential Steps to Reducing Product Risk

One of the biggest risks when starting a new business is accidentally building something people won’t use. Here are eight essential steps to reduce this risk.

Chad Pytel, CEO and co-founder, thoughtbot

Video

Taking a marketplace app from concept to MVP to rapid growth

How non-technical founders took their fitness app to market

Topics

Validate or Fail Fast

Direct user feedback is your best friend. Learn how to improve your feedback loops.

Learn more about Validation →

De-risk Your Business

Increase your likelihood of success by addressing big risks quickly and thoroughly.

Learn more about De-risking →

Accelerate time to market

Take advantage of opportunities to get your product into new users’ hands quickly.

Learn more about time to market →

Ensure Product Quality

Build for quality and you build for customer (and employee) loyalty.

Learn more about ensuring product quality →

Spotlight guide

Product Design Sprint Guide

Answer your critical early business questions with our guide through the design and prototyping process.

Start here

Who is thoughtbot?

For entrepreneurs who are passionate about building great digital products, thoughtbot offers a range of premier design and development consulting services.

Beyond high-quality development work, thoughtbot provided invaluable guidance to us on hiring, process, and upskilling our team to be self-sufficient.

— Justin Seeley, DRAFT

Feeling stuck on something?

It can be frustrating to feel like you don’t know how to de-risk your business, move faster, or validate your idea. You’re not alone.

Running a startup is hard! We’re here to help.

Upcoming

Office hours

Founder office hours

Review code, analyze customer feedback or rubberduck a pesky problem one-on-one with consultants.

thoughtbot San Francisco

Designing a thoroughly user-validated onboarding flow

Tile came to us to help with user onboarding and their iOS app design. Tile had developed hardware and an iPhone app to work seamlessly together to help folks easily locate their missing items.

See how we designed an amazing onboarding experience