Research, design, and build
It's a hard problem, and the primary design challenge with
the product is keeping it simple. Turns out it is possible
to do that.
Joe Kelly
Author of
A Book Of The Way
A Book Of The Way
Founder
June 2022
Mission
Make everyone as resilient as possible in the face of misleading information.
→ Revolutionise news
→ Decrease polarisation in society
→ Recover a healthy information ecosystem
What?
Fallible is a transformative new addition to the way you stay informed and answer crucial questions in today's complex world.
It's a social platform designed around keeping a probabilistic mindset in all things and avoiding common causes of misjudgment.
It's a tool that helps you to master uncertainty, overcome the naturally error-prone ways of the human mind, and beat the manipulators.
How?
We've made intuitive UI for the fallibilist way of thinking so that it can become second nature.
You almost can't help but think probabilistically if that's how everything is presented. And it's hard not to develop the (very healthy) habit of always considering the possible distortions you may be facing when that's what everyone is openly focused on.
Fallible doesn't replace what you're already doing to stay informed (reading, watching, and listening to things). It adds something new into the mix: a layer over all of your usual content which you can jump off into at any point.
So, for example, at the push of a button, you can take what you're reading, watching, or listening to, and get a probabilistic re-framing of it while calling on the collective wisdom of everybody to supercharge your bullshit detector.
And?
As Fallible becomes an everyday part of the way people consume news, and more and more people have the tools to defend themselves vs. falsehoods and deceptions, the payoff for manipulative information strategies falls off a cliff.
There will always be bad actors out there, of course. Their pollution of the information commons is never going to go away completely. But there is massive room for improvement in the way we collectively deal with it compared to what we're doing now.
The net effect of making everyone more cognitively resilient will be an information ecosystem as a whole which is radically transformed for the better, positively impacting many of the most critical areas of life in free-market democratic societies.
My Role
Articles
Your Role?
🧲 If this sounds like something you want to be part of, get in touch today and tell us what you can do to help make it happen. We may have a position for you.
Investors too. We'd be happy to talk you through the business and investment opportunity.
Co-founder &
Head of Product
Head of Product
June 2016 - 2020
Mission
Get rid of the old, expensive, fraud-ridden card system and introduce a new era of ‘Smart Payments’ with much lower fees for merchants and better payment experiences for customers.
What?
Curl is an upgrade to the way we pay which doesn't use cards: it's a completely new payment network designed from scratch to serve people and businesses instead of banks and card companies.
How?
Curl works by @usernames and by turning your phone into a smart remote control for your bank account(s). You make Smart Payments by telling your own bank account @who to send money to and how much.
It's much cheaper than cards, no sensitive information needs to be exchanged at any time, even for online checkouts, and all your loyalty and discounts (like buy 6 coffees get your 7th free) gets handled for you automatically.
In your regular places, e.g. coffeeshop or lunch spots, you can even turn on Hands Free so everything about your payment is taken care of in the background and you just receive a push notification when it's done.
My Role
Product design
I'm responsible for the overall design of Curl as a product — how it works, what it looks and feels like, and ultimately the value it produces for the people and businesses using it.
iOS + Android
I lead the design of 2x mobile apps to turn your phone into a smart remote control for your bank account(s).
Web checkout
We made an e-commerce checkout flow with no forms, no logins, and no sensitive information exchange.
Point-of-sale
We made a merchant app for taking Curl payments in shops. It shows the shopkeeper a live list of nearby customers and reminds them of names and what each person's regular order is.
APIs
As a product guy, I get my hands dirty down to the wire. These interfaces matter — they can have major implications for the people using the product and those working on it.
Communicate
Nothing beats understanding. Good product management means making sure the whole team knows what we're trying to achieve with each feature and, more importantly, why.
Simplify
Complicated plans tend to create more problems than they solve. Good plans are simplified as much as possible and leave room for adaptation.
Measure
‘You make what what you measure’. Good task definitions are as specific as possible about goals, risks, and outcomes. And Trello is a good thing.
iOS app
Swift
Written exclusively in Swift, it has a redux architecture and makes extensive use of event sourcing and public-key crypto.
Point-of-sale app
Javascript - HTML - Sass
A fullscreen web app for taking Curl payments in shops, designed to run on any mobile device. This ‘Sidecar’ device sits next to the shop's main point-of-sale like a card machine, but better.
Web checkout
Javascript - HTML - Sass
An e-commerce plugin for paying with Curl from any website — no forms, no passwords, and no sensitive information exchanged.
Website
Javascript - HTML - Sass
The public website needed coding too. In olden times, when dial-up modems used to make cool noises, they'd've called me the webmaster.
Goodbye cards 🔗 medium.com
Curl mission statement — I wrote a blog post which says why Curl is here and what problem we're solving.
Terms and conditions 🔗 paywithcurl.com
Human-readable T&C's — it's good to cut through the legalese and (try to) add a bit of life and humour instead.
Privacy policy
🔗 paywithcurl.com
A straightforward explanation of how your data is protected as a Curl user.
COVID-19: Two Threats, One Path, No Good Solutions
COVID-19 Risk Assessment May 2020
“The coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has invaded our way of life and forced us into a brutal double bind where we have to navigate two highly destructive threats simultaneously—one biological, one economic.”
“The coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has invaded our way of life and forced us into a brutal double bind where we have to navigate two highly destructive threats simultaneously—one biological, one economic.”
Series: How To Kill Bitcoin
A deep dive into the game theory that (they say) secures Bitcoin, and a strategy to disrupt it—ruining the system’s incentives, operating mechanisms, and end-user value proposition to bring about its death.
Series: On Bitcoin’s Fee-Based Security Model
An analysis of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work security mechanism, how it works, and the hidden blow-up risks that it creates.
- Part 1: Beware The Turkey Fallacy
- Part 2: Security vs. What?
- Part 3: Bitcoin vs. The State
- Part 4: The Unhampered Fee Market (may write in future)
Older stuff...
2015–16
I joined Typeform just after they closed Series A. I went to Barcelona to be part of the API & Integration team with the goal of getting typeforms more embedded in other people's applications.
2014–15
I made a purpose-built 'beat battle' platform (i.e. weekly music sampling competitions, where 1 sample is chosen then music producers each 'flip' it into a full track), complete with profiles, voting system, etc.
We got a couple thousand users, including participation by a handful of notable artists from the LoFi scene (they're kind of a big deal... people know them), and even attracted battle sponsors and prizes.
Please write to hi@joekel.ly