Why We Wrote the Buddy Guidebook
The same vision from day one — now with our learnings, our process, how we work, what we believe, and where we're going.
By Alexis Jabbour2 min read
From the very start, it mattered to me that Buddy had a vision — not a tagline, an actual set of beliefs about why we exist and how we'd build. It's easy to say that. It's harder to hold onto it when you're heads-down shipping, hiring, and putting out fires.
So a few years in, I finally wrote it down: The Buddy Guidebook. It's the operating philosophy behind everything — the principles we make decisions against when the roadmap gets loud.
The principles
A few of the ideas the Guidebook is built on:
- Design is infrastructure. In an industry held together by trust and duct tape, good design isn't decoration — it's the thing that makes the whole system work.
- Deep, not wide. Win one community completely before chasing the next. Divers first, done right.
- Build with, not for. Operators aren't a target market; they're co-authors. The best decisions came from being on the boat, not in a deck.
Each of these will get its own essay here over time. But writing them down wasn't the surprising part.
The part that gave me chills
While pulling the Guidebook together, I went back to a Google Zoo brand sprint I'd done at the very beginning — a few days of exercises with my head of design to establish what Buddy would stand for. I hadn't looked at it in years.
Image · Horizontal 3:2
Placeholder — a slide from the Google Zoo brand sprint. (Drop the screenshot in and I'll place it.)
It was one of those rare, quiet gut-checks: the mission we'd sketched on those slides was, almost word for word, the mission we're still on. The details had grown up. The core hadn't moved an inch.
Image · Vertical 4:5
Placeholder — brand sprint exercise output.
I don't share that to say we got everything right — we've changed our minds about plenty. I share it because it's the clearest proof I have that a real vision, written honestly and early, does its job: it keeps you in line without you having to think about it.
Where that leaves us
Who Buddy is today isn't a departure from who we set out to be — it's the same bet, further along. The Guidebook is how we keep it that way, and it's public on purpose. If you want to understand how I build, read it here.
More principle-by-principle notes to come.