I’m Morgan Holland. I build small software for my family, my health and my work, and write essays about how products get made and how they make money. I lead a product team at Shopify and live in Burlington, Vermont, with my wife and two small kids.
Writing
- I Built My Own Longevity Clinic — A concierge longevity clinic is really just a bundle: labs, a coach, a protocol, a plan, for five figures a year. So I unbundled it and rebuilt each piece as software I own, running on my own data, with every number auditable instead of trusted on faith.
- I Build Software for My Family — Most software is built for a funnel. Mine is built for a specific kid at bedtime, a specific meltdown at 7:47am, and the friends I want to leave a porch light on for. The audience is a household, and it changes everything about how you build.
- How a Non-Engineer Built Tend — Nobody wants to run a sales pipeline on their friendships. So I built the warm opposite of a CRM: you leave one note after seeing someone, and it does the remembering. The hard parts were the ones you can't see.
- How a Non-Engineer Built FlightClaim — The first version was a beautiful lie: an AI-generated brochure with fake testimonials and a button that did nothing. Here's how I tore it down and rebuilt a real flight-compensation engine that reads EU aviation law in a minute.
- How a Non-Engineer Built Cardfloor — Trading cards are assets that people run like portfolios, with prices in one tab and a spreadsheet in another. So I built the terminal they were missing: live prices, P&L, and a deal radar across three games, shipped in a day.
- Sixty Cycles: A Tour of the Machine That Refuses to Die — The power toasting your bread did not exist a moment ago — it is being made right now by a rotor four hundred miles away that felt you push the lever. A tour of the electrical grid: why it is so hard to kill, how it amputates itself to survive, and what a water tower is really for.
- The First Draft Is the Work — Everyone says PRDs are dead and writing is a relic. They're half right. AI can write a better first draft than you can, and that's exactly the problem: the messy first draft is where the thinking happens, and skipping it skips the work.
- Tearing Down Claude.ai's Free-to-Paid Funnel — An outside-in teardown of Claude.ai's free-to-paid funnel: where the path leaks conversion, and three experiments anchored on the moment a free user is trying to finish the thing they came to do.
- Three Monetization Swings I'd Run on Claude This Quarter — Anthropic went from $1B to $14B in fourteen months, but it still prices Claude per token: a value metric built for a chatbot, not an agent. Three pricing swings I'd run this quarter, with the willingness-to-pay math for each: charge for completed outcomes, get paid to cut customers' compute bills, and sell idle GPUs on a spot market.
- The Agents That Run My Mornings — I'm a product manager who has never shipped production code, and a handful of AI agents run my mornings on a schedule. How a non-engineer wires this up, the one rule that keeps it safe, and the uncomfortable thing they get very good at: noticing what you avoid.
- The Layer Below — Software ate industries, then ambition, and now computation is eating expertise itself. For product managers, AI just dissolved the wall between understanding a problem and building the solution. A field report from inside the shift.
- How to Build an Angel Portfolio That Can Actually 5x — Most angel portfolios die from too few bets, not bad ones. How to think in probabilities, respect the power law, and build a portfolio that can 5x over a decade.
- The GTD Setup That Finally Stuck — I've cycled through every productivity system on the internet and abandoned all of them but one: a boring, fifteen-minute setup I stole off a blog three years ago and still run today. Here's the system, and why it works when nothing else did.
- Productivity Is Unproductive — I went on an OCD-level inbox-zero clean-out over the holiday and noticed something ugly: clearing my lists didn't make room for real work, it crowded it out. A case against productivity systems, by way of Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks.
- The Magic of Backlinks — How one dumb feature, the bidirectional link, turns a pile of notes into a thinking instrument that compounds for years. The mechanic, the eighty-year lineage from Vannevar Bush's Memex, why most people quit before month four, and why AI will make the practice matter more, not less.
- Vermont: Building the Ecosystem — A systems-first, twenty-year plan for growing a real startup ecosystem in Vermont, synthesizing Brad Feld's startup-community principles, Donella Meadows' leverage points, and a working map of the people actually building here. A draft, published to be argued with.
Projects
Software I built because I wanted it to exist. All of it, with a page for each. Also Trillions of Souls, a serialized graphic novel; Labs, five calculators for growth work; and Watson, an AI agent that runs its own product experiments.