John Davison
John Davison portrait
hello world · Austin, TX

Howdy & hello —
I'm John Davison.

Steve Jobs liked to celebrate the weirdos, the misfits, the outliers. As long as I can remember, I've been incapable of "just getting along." Let me tell you, this has not made my life easy or glamorous. It has made my life challenging, eventful and highly evolutionary — ie, perform or die basically. I'm an entrepreneur cause that's how I got made, for better and sometimes worse.

For the last decade, I've been an employee for about 2 years — mostly I did contract web development. Now I lead my own product development team at startuplandia.io. Some people think hiring an "agency" is a bad move; some people have taken a chance on my weird and had positive upside because of it.

What I love to do is help non-technical entrepreneurs align growth, product and engineering to build massively useful products on fractions of the normal budget. As one put it: "saved us tens of thousands of dollars early in and months of heartache."

John Davison playing a wooden flute under a tree

My personal magic is that I'm not just good at general web engineering and hiring engineers/designers — I'm really good at helping people figure out how their assumptions connect. Or, usually, how their assumptions don't connect, and where to make them connect. Many founders chase cheap engineering; cheap engineers build low-quality stuff. The companies that go big don't focus on cheap. They focus on valuable.

I help entrepreneurs find & build their highest-leveraged feature set while capturing the 80/20 of developer/design costs. People who've worked with me have gone on to y-combinator, techstars, shark tank, INC 1000 — and some projects haven't done so well. There's no guarantee of success. I guarantee process, iteration, transparency and a performance mindset.

Hope you're enjoying this. The rest of my content is dedicated — as I said on x.com/jcdavison — to counter-intuition, self-learning, full-stack web, fitness for longevity, solo entrepreneurship, fatherhood, and vibes.
The writing room

Notes, essays & nuggets

Have a wonderful day, and thanks for the visit. John
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