ADPList

On an ambitious mission to help every person unlock their potential. 🏔️ Discover what’s possible with 40K+ mentors by your side.

[Julia Fedorin @juliafedorin]

AI is making all design look the same. But does that actually matter?

"@OpenAI and @ElevenLabs: their design is quite similar. White, clean, Apple-like. But @AnthropicAI and @ChatGPT look totally different. As long as there's a baseline of really good visual, at some point it really doesn't matter to consumers. They just want value."

@felixleezd, founder of @ADPList, on why originality in design might be the wrong thing to optimize for.

Full convo below!

[ADPList @ADPList]

@felixleezd always the small things 💯

[ADPList @ADPList]

San Diego! 🌴🕶️

We're doing something cool, bringing some fun people around. Come join in ☕️ coffee on us.

Apply to join (waitlist): https://t.co/CfqUBlVQTH

[Ira Bodnar @irabukht]

@felixleezd is an alien sent to earth to help us all get better at design

[Anuj Patel @byanujpatel]

- amazing pod
- journey of adplist and personally used it and interacted with mentors.

[Felix Lee @felixleezd]

They said AI would replace design, instead it proved how much design matters.

[ADPList @ADPList]

@felixleezd well said

[Felix Lee @felixleezd]

Designers who ship are now the most valuable hires in tech.

[Julia Fedorin @juliafedorin]

"They said AI would replace design. Instead it proved how much design matters."

That's @felixleezd's line, and he'd know. A VC told him at 20 that Singaporeans can't build companies. No design degree, rejected from the jobs he wanted.

Then he built @ADPList into the biggest free mentorship platform in the world instead. A million users, 40,000 mentors, 140 countries.

We got into:
•Why judgment, not pixels, is the real moat in design now
•Why "originality is dead," and why similar-looking apps can both win
•Why super-app clutter vs. Western minimalism is cultural, not a quality gap
•Splitting with a co-founder the right way
•The hiring mistakes he'd take back

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Oakland Ice Center Intro
(00:47) From Singapore's National Skating Team
(02:22) AI vs. Human Design
(04:53) Is Originality Dead?
(06:42) Designers vs. Engineers
(08:23) Minimalism and Culture
(10:55) Ethics and AI Trust
(12:57) What ADPList Is
(13:37) Closed Doors and Why He Built It
(17:42) Quitting to Go All In
(20:31) The Founder Outreach Playbook
(26:04) Don Norman Lessons
(28:56) Scaling Free Mentorship to a Million
(31:57) Designing With Claude
(33:59) Fable Workflows
(41:51) Audience vs. Community
(43:16) The PR Crisis
(52:31) What Sports Taught Him About Failure
(54:42) Splitting With a Co-Founder the Right Way
(59:33) Hiring Mistakes
(01:04:21) San Francisco Culture Shock
(01:11:25) Long-Term Games

[ADPList @ADPList]

@juliafedorin @felixleezd goated for this location, Julia! 🐐🧊

[ADPList @ADPList]

@teehadesigns love this!!

[Teeha @teehadesigns]

Got my first mentee session on @ADPList. I'm so excited 🥹

I get DMs almost every week asking how to break into design with no degree, no portfolio, zero connections

Having these conversations reminds me of why I got into tech and design and why I love what i do

[Irosha de Silva @iroshads]

Sequoia backed him in 2021.

A million users later, a mentorship session on @ADPList still costs nothing.

@felixleezd and I were on @Tesla FSD through San Francisco for @theteslapod, talking about the decision he's had to defend for five years - the one most founders would have quietly reversed by now.

The thing that stayed with me wasn't the scale. It was how ordinary he made the choice sound.

A few things from the ride:
→ No university degree. He flunked the exam at twelve that Singapore uses to sort children, and spent a long time believing what it told him.
→ He sold his first company at nineteen, while still at polytechnic.
→ He took nearly two years off before ADPList. Not a break. A search.
→ On AI and mentorship, he doesn't think one replaces the other. He thinks most people have never had access to either.
→ "Not everything needs to be usable to be valuable." We spent a while on that one.

That last line is funnier than it looks. Jakob Nielsen is an investor in ADPList - the man who wrote the usability heuristics every designer alive has studied. Felix argues not everything needs to be usable to be valuable, and the person who literally wrote those rules is on his cap table. For designers, that's Newton showing up on the captable.

@P_Kemps of @sequoia came up more than once. He was the first believer - the one who backed Felix when this was a free mentorship platform and nothing about it looked like a business yet. That bet changed his life, and Felix says so plainly. I've had the privilege of that same clarity. His advice moved our thinking at @marketrix_ai more than once.

I first got to know @ADPList through @sajeee_1, the founding engineer at the previous company I started out of my garage. Mentorship brought out the leadership in him, and he grew the team from just himself to 25 engineers.

So this one was personal. The platform a friend put me onto, and the person who backed it first, in the same conversation.

His Interview Practice product is a rehearsal before the real thing. Same bet we're making at @marketrix_ai, simulating real users so teams find what breaks before real customers do. Two different problems, one wager - that a good enough rehearsal changes the real outcome.

Full episode is live on @theteslapod. Link in comments.

#Mentorship #AI #Startups #Design

[ADPList @ADPList]

@iroshads @felixleezd @Tesla @theteslapod love this!

[Felix Lee @felixleezd]

Designers who build, should be paid the same as engineers.

[ADPList @ADPList]

In case you needed a reminder: Your mental health is an important Q3 priority, too.

[ADPList @ADPList]

@zoink veryyy alive 😌

[Dreameryanyan @yanliudreamer]

我在海外做career coach的平台@ADPlist
今天宣布和Claude合作，但我最开心的：

在推荐视频里，发现自己是北美Product方向的10位Top mentor之一哈哈 🤭

从最开始只是帮助几个朋友找工作，到后来慢慢发展成一份正式的副业，再到现在，已经陪伴超过500位小伙伴成长，也帮助至少50+人拿到理想的工作机会。

很开心这件事从一次次简单的帮助，慢慢变成了连接和影响力。这些微小但长期的积累，被看见了。

又是长期主义的另一个见证💪

[ADPList @ADPList]

@sweetadaga94 Congratsss 👸

[Sweeta @sweetadaga94]

50 mentoring sessions on @ADPList ! 🎉

50 People from around the world. Countless perspectives.

I’ve learnt as much from my mentees as I hope they’ve learnt from me. ❤️

Empathy begins with listening.

Grateful for this journey. 50 done, many more to go!

#UXDesign