One of our favorite parts of building read.cv is meeting incredible builders that we look up to from around the world. One such person is Dennis Müller, founder at Amie. We were able to catch up and have a quick conversation with him about his inspirations, team building, and Amie.
Before chatting I assumed you had a design background, but you have a long history of product strategy, management, and development. Can you tell us a bit about your background and where your interest in design stems from?
Hah, I appreciate when people notice that. I’ve always loved designs, I guess my first “designs” were ICQ themes back in the days. Then I modded Pokemon Yellow and changed up the map and dialogs.
Photography was the first thing I took more serious. My problem was always that I whole-y overestimated the creative process of professionals. “They would never do it like this” was on my mind. Now I’ve learned, yes they do the exact same ha.
I would’ve never even considered to call myself a designer. Only recently felt like “What else would I need to do than design something from scratch across brand and product?”, and felt confident.
Outside of software, where do you draw inspiration from? What are some of your favorite physical and digital products?
I love all pretty or astonishingly handy things.
Eg products like Tangle Teezer (hair brush), Invisibobble (hair band) or OXO (kitchen utensils).
All of those solve a specific problem so well, they’ve shaped an entire industry.
Otherwise I love the all-time greats like: LAMY (affordable pens), Rimowa (the iconic suitcases) or Leica (highest quality analogue cameras).
On the digital side: Pinterest has a distinct design, are.na is amazing for brand inspo, Noto is an amazing indie app (funnily designed+built by a Pinterest employee).
The one app I wish would be designed better: Apple Health. And an impressive recent release is Duolingo Math, it’s so fun to use.
My first introduction to Amie was the viral marketing site you and your team built. I can’t think of another site that has that much detail packed into it. Can you tell us a bit about the process of creating something like that and the team behind it?
We built this site together with Krijn Rijshouwer. He squeezed it between other projects. For many months we were just bouncing around concepts and prototypes.
Then got serious around 3 weeks before the announcement.
We could’ve done it within 1 full-time month I guess. The result wouldn’t have been as fun though.
A lot of ideas came through sitting on some ideas for a while.
The stack is super simple with Next.js, React and SCSS.
I still love Krijn for finessing the keynote video. It’s hosted on YouTube, but no one would ever know because we applied hack on hack to modify the experience way past what they allow.
You’ve talked about hiring a team made up of “undiscovered awesome people”, which I love and believe in as well. What are some signs you look for in candidates that show they will be a good collaborator?
This whole topic is what I think about the most. And still only make small improvements.
The most reliable sign is side projects. Interestingly: very few people working at “hot companies” have something to show. Often they are unable to send over even a small repository.
So this kinda biases everything towards unproven people. Which may be the reason they build side projects—to prove themselves.
An easier thing is the initial email. We don’t have an application form, everyone has to send an email with their data to me.
Looking back: eg Ivo who joined us also sent a very good initial email.
Another one is asking “Teach me about your favorite topic”. No question levels the playing field more. (credit goes to the Google founders who famously asked this).
High profile candidates may bore you, and a kid out of a country without tech companies teaches you something you never thought about.
Who is someone you look up to who has inspired your entrepreneurial journey?
There’s no one person that inspired me entrepreneurially. Dieter Rams is a big inspiration design-wise. The old Zenly design made me really happy and was a big reference.
Product-wise I’m mainly inspired by people who vertically integrate, so take adjacent products and do it all themselves. Eg. Apple, Rippling, Tesla.
I was super moved by Jeff Bezos’ last shareholder letter. Especially: “What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen. You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it.”