49.10°N 119.55°W South Okanagan, BC Open to conversations
Danny Halarewich Company & product builder

About

I build software companies, and write to figure out what to build next.

For more than a decade I’ve been founding, building, and shipping commerce software — sometimes independently, sometimes inside scale. This site is where I think out loud about the work: product judgment, AI, commerce, design taste, and a growing interest in the outdoor industry.

Name
Danny Halarewich
Role
Company & product builder
Based
South Okanagan, BC
Now
CEO, Orbit Apps
Built
LemonStand → Mailchimp
Writes
AI · Product · Commerce

01 Currently UPD Jun 01, 2026

PRJ

Building

  • Alliance Pro — software for outdoor-industry pro programs, at the sketch-and-prototype stage.
  • This station — treating my own site as a small product, not a résumé.
  • A handful of weekend prototypes pressure-testing AI-native commerce ideas.
STD

Studying

  • Where value accrues in agentic commerce once the checkout is commoditized.
  • What makes a moat when building cost approaches zero.
  • How the best pro programs and channel businesses actually operate.
  • The unglamorous software gaps inside the outdoor industry.
WRT

Writing about

  • Judgment and taste as the scarce inputs in an age of cheap building.
  • The difference between thin ideas and deep ones.
  • Commerce infrastructure beneath the visible surface.
OUT

Outside

  • Long days in the South Okanagan backcountry — trail, rock, and water.
  • Paying close attention to the gear, shops, guides, and brands of the outdoor world.
  • Treating time outside as research as much as recovery.

02 Why I build & write

I started in commerce because it’s where software meets the real world most directly: someone has something to sell, someone wants to buy it, and a hundred unglamorous things have to work for the exchange to happen. That problem has held my attention for over a decade and still isn’t solved.

Along the way I’ve learned that the visible product is the easy part. The durable advantage almost always lives in the boring infrastructure beneath it, in distribution, and in the judgment to build the right thing rather than the impressive thing.

I write because it’s the cheapest way to find out whether an idea actually holds. A hunch can feel profound right up until you try to write it down. The field reports here are the ideas that survived that test; the signal logs are the ones still being interrogated.

What I’m good at

  • Product judgment — what to build, in what order, and what to leave unbuilt
  • Zero-to-one: turning a vague hunch into a shipped, used product
  • Commerce and the merchant’s side of the table
  • Design taste and the craft of a polished interface
  • Writing clearly enough to think clearly

03 Selected work

A decade-plus of building, in brief. The full record — companies, products, and experiments — lives in the Records Room.

AR Open the full archive