// DAN FERG — BUILDER / STRATEGIST / OPTIMIST
Technology for problems that actually matter.
I’m a social entrepreneur and software builder working where technology, community, and practical problem-solving meet.
- 01 / APPROACH
- Start with the human problem.
- 02 / MEDIUM
- Products, systems, and stories.
- 03 / PRINCIPLE
- Make the complex feel obvious.
01 // SELECTED PROJECTS
Experiments with a job to do.
Products and ventures built around practical problems—from community response and leadership to productivity and startup infrastructure.
Open project archive FEATURED_
01 Communiti Labs A practitioner-led civic engagement platform helping organisations hear more people, turn feedback into defensible evidence, and close the loop with communities. ACTIVE / FLAGSHIP PROJECT PROJECT_
02 Airproxy An edge-first caching and proxy layer that made Airtable practical as a production backend without inheriting its rate limits, attachment constraints, or operational fragility. PROJECT / CASE STUDY PROJECT_
03 Guardian A privacy-first COVID exposure-warning prototype that kept a person's location history on their device while checking it against rapidly changing public exposure-site data. PROJECT / CASE STUDY PROJECT_
04 Helping Group A social-impact organisation born during Australia's Black Summer, creating practical digital services that help communities respond, connect, and recover together. PROJECT / CASE STUDY PROJECT_
05 Land Index A GovHack geospatial proof of concept that combined soil, rainfall, water, and proximity data to make the agricultural value of land visible in planning conversations. PROJECT / CASE STUDY PROJECT_
06 Mates Motivate A social accountability MVP that helped people set a goal, build a visible check-in streak, and invite trusted friends to encourage the work and celebrate the result. PROJECT / CASE STUDY PROJECT_
07 Observer A service-monitoring prototype designed to warn small teams before their customers did, track recovery, and turn infrastructure anxiety into a clear operational signal. PROJECT / CASE STUDY PROJECT_
08 Swin Lead A student-led leadership community that gave Swinburne's thinkers, builders, and organisers a place to share their work, find collaborators, and learn in public. PROJECT / CASE STUDY PROJECT_
09 yFocus An early idea-validation concept for turning a promising thought into a clearer problem, a testable assumption, and an informed decision about whether to build. PROJECT / CASE STUDY
02 // ARTICLES
Notes from making things.
Writing about entrepreneurship, burnout, software decisions, and the lessons that only turn up once you start.
Read every article- Launching Airproxy I'm launching the first of my 12 startups in 12 months for 2023, and we're starting with Airproxy; a platform to help Airtable users scale fearlessly!
- What's next? Well, that was the start to the definitive decade... pretty much a waste of an invaluable chance so far, wouldn't you say?
- Burnout; let's talk about it. This year has been the wildest, most productive, most humbling year of my life to date. I completely burned out, and it sucked. Let's talk about it.
- You are the product. We live in a world surrounded by ‘free'. Free shipping, free software, etc. However — all of these things boil down to the need to make a profit.
- A better, brighter, cleaner future. I believe that you have a powerful voice. One of the ways you can be clearly clearly heard is through how you chose to spend your money.
- Welcome, to Website v3! Why? The last one was outdated, lacked imagination and was built for a different purpose. I wanted to expand my experience with web technologies.
03 // TALKS
Ideas, spoken aloud.
Talks and workshops about building startups, working without code, and developing leaders.
- Building a business in an hour... with no code! A practical walkthrough of using no-code tools to build a digital-facing business quickly.
- Concept to Production The five steps I use to take startup ideas from a rough concept to a product people can use.
- SwinLead Leadership Workshop An honest discussion about the experiences, challenges, and successes of leading student communities.
// HAVE A HARD, USEFUL PROBLEM?