I did not start HeadsUp with code.
I opened Notion. Made a document by hand. Sent it to eight founders. “Here is what your competitors are doing.”
Ugly. Manual. Hours of work per document.
Three people wanted to pay for it.
That Notion document was the dirty vertical. The entire system, end to end, held together with “tape.” It did one thing: delivered value to a person. No infrastructure. No scale. No elegance.
It worked.
Thirteen years earlier, Shommi was the opposite. Months of coding. Zero users. Lesson learned the hard way.
John Gall wrote it in 1975.
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.”
This is the same principle as skateboard to spaceship. I’ll write about that one separately. But “dirty vertical” hits different because it emphasizes the mess. The skateboard metaphor is clean. It implies a polished, minimal product.
A dirty vertical is not polished. It is a Google Doc emailed after a Stripe payment. It is a spreadsheet you update by hand every Monday morning.
But it is vertical. It goes all the way from input to output. A user can touch it, use it, pay for it. That is what matters.
Some builders do the opposite. A beautiful database schema. A “perfect” API. Gorgeous components. The stack never reaches the user. Pretty. Useless.
The Notion doc became HeadsUp. Shommi became a lesson.
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What’s the simplest version of your best idea that someone could use today?