I have two recommendations if you’re building something online, or aiming to.

Not productivity tools or frameworks – two pieces of film that get you thinking about what it takes to get something great built, when everything’s against you.

The Founder (2016) is the story of Ray Kroc and the rise of McDonald’s. On the surface, it’s a business story.

But watch it as a designer or a builder and you start seeing it differently. It’s a masterclass in service design, systems, consumer behaviour, environment, expectation-setting. The way a product experience gets codified into something replicable at scale, and scaled whilst maintaining consistency.

The Offer (2022) is a TV series about the making of The Godfather. Everything is working against it. The studio doesn’t believe in it. Stakeholders are all pulling in different directions. The cast is wrong and the director is a liability (according to everyone else). On top of that, the mob has opinions. Then the accounts wade in about the budget…

And yet, both McDonald’s and The Godfather were so successful they were a turning point in history.

What both have in common is a single person who believed in the potential when almost no one else did.

Someone who absorbed the pushback, navigated the stakeholder chaos, kept the vision intact, and refused to let the thing die.

In The Offer, it’s the producer. The one person in the room who isn’t protecting their own turf, who keeps translating between all the competing languages being spoken (creative, commercial, political) and somehow holds it together long enough for the work to exist.

That role doesn’t get talked about enough. In film it has a name. In product building, we often don’t have one for it. But most things that make it through to the other side have someone playing that part.

Sometimes it’s a founder. Sometimes it’s a designer. Sometimes it’s the person who just won’t let it go quietly.

If you’re building something and it feels like everything’s pushing back, it may not be a sign to quit. It may be a sign to push through.

These two are worth your time. You’ll see yourself somewhere in there.