I’m a product manager by day, a path I stumbled upon after graduating from Grove City College. My first job out of college was working at Tessco Technologies where I got my first experience working with software on the development of their e-commerce site. This quickly led to my transition into product management, where I oversaw the re-platform and redesign of their entire website.
The discovery of product management pushed me to continue my education, receiving my MBA from Loyola University Maryland. I continued to learn new cross-functional skills while establishing more discipline for innovation. It was in my Customer Focused Innovation class with Dr. Gerard Athaide where my entrepreneurial DNA began to take root. In our class we were instructed to always be aware of everyday frustrations and to use those frustrations to come up with innovative ideas.
Then, one of those everyday frustrations surfaced when my wife and I started rating restaurants around Baltimore in a Google Sheet. It was nothing fancy, just categories that mattered to us and a running list of favorites. The spreadsheet worked well in the beginning, until it became too much of a pain to maintain. That gap between “this should exist” and “nothing quite does” is where the idea for Rate It was born.
Now that Rate It exists, I use it to track and rate some of my personal interests — golf courses, travel, restaurants, movies, whiskey. This is where I document those experiences honestly, partly so I don’t lose them to memory, and partly in the hope that a good recommendation or an honest score might steer someone else toward something worth their time.
The other half of this blog is the build itself. I write about the product decisions, the technical tradeoffs, and what it’s actually like to go from side-project idea to shipped app — including where AI tools fit into that process now. If you’ve got your own entrepreneurial itch and are wondering whether you could build the thing you keep wishing existed, that’s who this is for.
What I rate
Distill Digital is the company I run. Rate It is the app I built there — real, structured ratings instead of five-star noise. The categories and ratings on this site are the same as what I have rated in the app.