There's a graffiti artist from New York named Dave Ellis who changed the way I think about creative work. Dave would work on these massive pieces — portraits, murals — and if you watched the time-lapses, it looked like he was moving at impossible speed. But the reality was hours and hours of work. What made him different wasn't the speed. It was the way he saw what was already there and jumped into it. He'd finish a portrait and immediately throw fresh paint over it, designing on top of what he'd just made. The finished piece was never the point. The act of creating was the point.
That idea got into me deep enough that one of my first tattoos was a piece of his work — a graffiti piece he did on a slab of concrete, now covering most of my right forearm. It has this musical movement to it that I couldn't shake. And as I've matured, I've come to appreciate what he was doing even more than when I first encountered it.
That philosophy is the foundation of what I'm trying to build with Beast Creative.
Most software companies spend months — sometimes a full year — building and releasing a single product or feature. There's a whole machinery around it: roadmaps, sprints, stakeholder reviews, cautious rollouts. And that works for a certain kind of company. But it's not what I'm attempting here.
I should be honest: I'm new to software. I spent 15 years in hardware — manufacturing, crowdfunding, shipping physical products globally. I'm now learning to build digital products with the help of AI-assisted development, and I'm very much still figuring things out. But the philosophy I'm experimenting with is this: what happens when you prioritize the system over any single output?
Think of it like a manufacturing line. When I was running production in China, I wasn't selling the factory — I was selling the product that came off the line. But the real advantage was always the factory itself. The process. The ability to produce at quality and at scale. I'm trying to apply that same thinking to software, even though the medium is completely new to me.
Each product I work on — whether it's a productivity tool, a breathing app, or a minimalist game — is part of a larger creative practice I'm building. That practice is what I care about most. It's a research-to-shipping pipeline that I'm refining as I go: market listening, rapid prototyping, learning from what ships and what doesn't.
I don't have it all figured out. I'm not launching products every week — not yet, maybe not ever at that exact pace. But I'm endeavoring to build a practice where the rhythm of making things compounds over time. Where I learn more from ten small attempts than from one big bet. Where each project teaches me something that feeds the next one.
Process over product. Systems over output. That's what I'm working toward.
And if you're watching Beast Creative from the outside, the products reflect an intention — but the system behind them is what I'm really building.