HeyJaredHilah's Things
I'm Hilah, the CEO and founder of Spoak. This is a newsletter full of my favorite things, my musings on life and work and design, and the lessons I've learned as an entrepreneur. I hope it brings a bit of joy to your inbox.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
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- Sep 18, 2026
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- Jul 20, 2026
Latest issues
How we operate day-to-day as a small, remote team building a big product (opens the original)
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Spoak is a seven-person team working 4 days a week. We work remotely all over the world, from Rome to Dublin to New York to Missouri to Colorado, and have since before the pandemic.From the outside looking in, this sounds like a recipe for a very low-output operation. But our software is competing — and often winning — against companies 100x to 10,000x our size.So how do we do it?Here’s what it actually looks like in practice.Most of our collaboration happens through Roam.I don’t need a lot of t
Destruction, construction, and the art of the pivot: part 2 (opens the original)
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I have pivoted Spoak once before, months after we first launched in 2019. We had about 100 users. What we lacked in size we gained in anonymity.The stakes were low and the transition seamless. Today, it’s a different undertaking.After a decade, we’ve built a complex suite of design tools that our users have come to rely on for their projects and professions. We had to reconsider them from all angles.Some features were deprecated outright, others left untouched. Many more were adapted, requiring
Birth, rebirth, and the art of pivoting: part 1 (opens the original)
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<img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="4293" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!fO9N!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca36d908-c2b2-4b92-bdca-5a94034601f5_4284x4293.
Design is a verb (opens the original)
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Interior design is real life turned art form. In order to love, appreciate, or even understand it, it must be physically experienced. Good design is form meeting function: it’s the light switches exactly where you expected them to be; the living room perfectly carved for the routines of daily life; the mudroom that happens to hold everything and still have an arm to embrace you when you walk in the door.Anyone who loves interior design understands that. They’ve felt the zap of electricity when t
Why we've built Spoak on minimal investment (opens the original)
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Even before I started Spoak, I was surrounded by entrepreneurs. My career was built at early-stage startups. My dad, my brother and my best friend from college were all Silicon Valley founders. I bore witness to both the highs and the lows of venture capital funding.I saw the abundance it gave, but I also saw all that it took away.It’s a “hamster wheel” you cannot get off of. You raise to scale, then are forced to operate so unsustainably you have to keep raising simply to stay alive.When a foun
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