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🤿 chipping and carving

🤿 chipping and carving

5 keys to craft

Ridd
October 17, 2025

Over the last few months one product has risen to the top of my inspiration list: ツSupercut.

So I interviewed the founders David and Neil to learn what it takes to hit this level of craft while preserving the speed required when going 0 -> 1 on a new product.

We're going deep into how they work, how they think about product, and all of the little decisions they make that together create a truly excellent user experience. 👇

When design works in Figma vs. in code
How AI + small teams changes the design process
Supercut’s playbook for achieving design excellence
Strategies for weaving AI into the fabric of a product
Specific examples of how they sweat the details with animations
+ a lot more

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

🤝 WITH GRANOLA

So Granola just launched a new featured called Recipes and I already can’t imagine life without it.

It’s a simple way to run advanced prompts across all of the context of your Granola notes. And they have some pretty great defaults out of the box too!

You can even use the prompt that I made for Inflight called “Gather product feedback” which looks at all of my user interviews and pulls out product-related feedback with clear, actionable themes and even direct quotes.

I use it all the time and it’s another reason why I’m completely obsessed with Granola. If you haven’t tried it yet they’re offering 3 months free for you and anyone on your team 👇

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS

5 Keys to craft

In many ways Supercut has created the playbook that I intend to follow for Inflight. So I took notes on their playbook. Here’s what stood out to me:

1 — Small, senior teams

Back when I was working on my first startup, I fantasized about huge rounds, big offices, and headcount. Now it’s flipped. I’m asking the same question as Neil and David: “What’s the smallest possible team we can build?”.

2 — Carving your way to craft

Most teams I’ve worked on follow some version of this:

Ship new features in cycles
Toss polish tickets into a backlog
Once the pile gets big enough, fix what you can in a cooldown week

But Supercut’s approach to product development is pretty different.

It feels more like “chipping away and carving something”. They’re not afraid to iterate on the same surface area obsessively and admit they’re mostly “allergic to process”.

3 — Dogfooding

To effectively sand down the UX, you have to feel it. And to feel it, you have to use it every single day so you spot the bumpy parts.

Neil says most of the time they find bugs before their users do.

Because if you want to play in the upper echelon of craft, then you have to live in your product (not just the upcoming feature work).

4 — Fix things immediately

When you find a rough edge, fix it. Don’t backlog it with a P3 label.

The key is that designers can’t be reliant on others for polish.

When he was a co-founder of Typeform, David was stuck in Figma and frustrated with handoff. But now at Supercut he owns both design and frontend. And you can feel the difference.

5 — Use restraint

Small teams ship fast. And AI is accelerating this trend as good engineers are highly leveraged with AI.

But speed without restraint just leads to clutter and bloat.

What I admire about Supercut is that they’ve built something truly simple. They create value by removing just as often as they add new features. That discipline is going to matter even more as shipping velocity accelerates.