About Me

Hi. I'm Dan. Thanks for checking out my little spot on the Internet.

At the moment, I'm building Star Path.

Star Path is an AI guide that uses your astrology birth chart to help you understand what you're feeling, what it's happening, and what to do next. The first version of Star Path was a custom GPT that my wife built for herself. About a year of polishing later, she shared it with some friends. Then it went viral, and users started asking for things that custom GPTs just can't do, so we built an entire product around it.

My take on astrology is that it's a framework that some people can use to live a better life, and it's worked: many of our users thank us for helping repair their relationships, catapult their businesses, or just feel better about who they are.

We're fully bootstrapped and self-funded, growing fast, and users love us. If you're into astrology, try it out!

Star Path is interesting because it's very different than anything else I've done before. However, the important things about making things people want, like frequently talking to users, shipping quickly, and designing good systems, remain the same.

Here are some other things I've done:

Champify

My most recent focus was starting Champify. Champify helps sales teams at large enterprise find their best advocates and sell smarter.

We raised a $3.2m seed from Jack Altman (Founder of Lattice, GP at Benchmark), Unusual Ventures, Joe Thomas (CEO of Loom), cofounders of Heap, Goldcast, Ethena, Stemma, Airplane, Dover, and GTM execs from Lattice, Sonder, and Simon Data.

I collected an embarrassing amount of expertise in Salesforce and how GTM teams work end-to-end. I also learned enough Apex and SOQL to last me a lifetime. If you want to know something about B2B data, I likely can answer it for you.

Data Engineering, SDKs, and Developer Experience

At Heap, I helped scale our data collection infrastructure and maintained our client-side JavaScript SDKs as we scaled traffic several magnitudes during COVID. I also started our developer tooling / experience team because I like fast build times and making engineers happy.

Early-Stage Startups

Through both Elm City Labs and Lionheart Software, a boutique software studio, I was deeply involved in building the foundational technology for several companies, some of which are now quite successful.

iOS Development

I've been building iOS apps since the iPhone SDK was first released in 2008. Here are a few that you might like!

Viral Apps

You might also know me from Breakup Notifier, a site I wrote that went viral a long time ago (it was acquired and unfortunately, is no longer running). Breakup Notifier was one of the first viral websites of the social media era, and was featured in Time (both in print and online), Jay Leno, and many others.

About This Blog

This site is hosted on GitHub Pages. The directory structure and files are generated by a home-grown static site generator (some details on that are here).

All posts and pages are written in Markdown and stored in SQLite.

If you want to reach me, just send me an email.

Thanks for reading. :)

- Dan