The mission
Hey, Peter here đ
I'm 30, I'm a dad of 3, I live in the south of England, and I'm obsessed with product design.
Since 2019, I've been a UX consultant to some of the best product teams in the world. I'm also trying to build the library of UX analysis that I wish existed when I was starting out.
This is the Built for Mars story.
600,000+
readers annually
36,870
Newsletter subscribers
UX consultant to some of the best companies in the world
How it all started
🍀
FinTech exit
January 2018
My FinTech start-up, Movem, was acquired in a PE-backed deal. It was a company which I started while at uni, and 6 years later had created an industry-defining piece of technology. It's since been copied by everyone.
🙋ââď¸
Finding my feet
As most post-acquisition founders would attest to, I didn't know what to do with myself. So I started helping friends with their companies, and ended up focusing on user experienceâsomething I'd spend tens of thousands of hours obsessing over at my start-up. This eventually turned into paid consulting.
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Founded Built for Mars
December 2019
I was sat in a Costa, and thought to myself âI'm creating these UX presentations privately for companies, but I bet people would benefit if I could post them online". But because Iâd signed NDAs with all my clients, I decided to do a mini-study on Rightmove.
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The first few case studies
Private case studies are super detailed, and take me weeks. So it took me a few months to find a good balance of humour, memes, UX tips and a coherent story. That's why the first few studies aren't amazingâI even deleted a few of them.
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The bank study
January 2020
I released the UX of Bankingâa 6-part mega study comparing banks in the UK. It went wild.
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Helping unicorns
Although I'd been working on Built for Mars full-time for quite a while, after the success of the bank study I made a conscious effort to improve how I ran the business.
This meant saying "no" to a lot of small design jobs, and focusing on helping some world-class products (Notion, Klarna, Pitch, Octopus Energy, Quickbooks, Google).
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Built for Mars v2 launch
May 2021
The original Built for Mars website was a Wordpress site I'd knocked up myself, and it was terrible. The irony of a UX blog having terrible UX was not lost on me.
So at the end of 2020 I asked my subscribers for feedback, and had hundreds of responses. I then started trying to design the best possible reading experience for my work. It's going to be the launchpad for something much bigger.
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Joined Creandum
September 2021
I joined the VC Creandum as an entrepreneur-in-residence, as a UX advisor to some of the best product teams in the world.
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Built for Mars v3 launch
April 2023
Since releasing v2 in 2021, Built for Mars doubled-down on features that enhance the reading experience, including UX Bites, UX Tooltips, Cheatsheets, Collections and more.
So, for 6 months we painstakingly rebuilt the entire site in React, and reorganised how everything was connected and referenced. This became the foundations for a launchpad of really dynamic usage.
Oh, and we launched it at 11pm, it was fine, and then sometime over night it completely diedâproduct releases are fun.
👨â💻
Built for Mars Premium
November 2023
The newsletter subscribers was at 27,000 (and growing 5/10% MOM), and I'd calculated out that I've spent about 3,500 "real" hours of my life researching and publishing free content.
But I wanted to take it up a level. More content, better content, deeper research, more ideas. And so I released Built for Mars Premium (BFM+); a paid tier of content.
It includes all new filters, features, ways to organise and find UX ideas. Fundamentally, it's a step towards scaling a UX library in a sustainable way.