Today I’m talking with Myke Hurley, who is best known as co-founder of the Relay podcast network, and as host of Cortex, a show about how creative people work. Out of that show came a much harder challenge: a physical product business.
Lots of creators sell merch, but this is something very different. Cortex Brand makes premium notebooks and planning tools, and in this episode, we go deep on what that process really looks like.
We talk about why he once paid hundreds of pounds just to produce a sample notebook he never planned to sell, why “everything is a trade-off” when you’re making physical goods, and why he refuses to release products unless they genuinely “say something.”