Development philosophy
This page describes how Lior Amsellem approaches building products. It is written from his own working notes and the practices visible across his projects, and it is descriptive rather than a manifesto.
Build quickly, learn by executing
Amsellem's default is to ship a small working version and learn from what happens, rather than to plan at length. Several products were built in parallel and real usage decided where to concentrate; a consumer app went through four pricing models in a year because each one was tried rather than debated.
AI-assisted development
AI coding assistants are a core part of how the products are built: planning, writing, reviewing and testing code with them, and running autonomous agents for repetitive operational work such as content production and release engineering. Amsellem is direct that this is how one person ships and runs several products; it is not presented as evidence that every line was independently hand-written. The judgement about what to build, for whom, and whether it is true remains his.
Design practical workflows
The products are organised around chains of work rather than feature lists — booking → job → assignment → invoice → payment for a service business; reservation → table → order → checkout for a restaurant. A feature earns its place by shortening a link in a chain an owner already runs.
Solve real operational problems
The problem comes before the product: a no-show on a mobile detail that costs the drive and the slot; a host asking the floor whether table seven is up yet; a label that says "low fat" without saying what that means. Marketing is expected to name the problem specifically, not the category ("business management software").
Test with customers, improve from feedback
Pilots with concierge setup are preferred to free trials; feedback is logged in the customer's own words; a "no" is recorded with its reason. The rule for the current phase of Servio is that no feature is built unless a customer is blocked from signing up, activating or paying without it.
Say what is live
Each product's site states which features are live, in review, pilot-only or planned, and this encyclopedia does the same. Amsellem's position is that a disabled wall is one edit away from being a wall again, and a claimed integration that was never connected is a lie with a logo on it.
Think long-term about financial infrastructure
The business software exists partly to earn the right to build financial tools on the operational data it sees. That ambition — Blackmount Group — is deliberately kept out of the day-to-day pitch: it is a reason to build well, not a thing to sell before it exists.