Justin Scott has a complaint about the internet, and it is hiding in plain sight on nearly every product page. We took the magazine advertisement, he says, placed it inside a browser, added a shopping cart, and called the matter settled. The customer still gets a flat photograph, a paragraph, perhaps a zoom tool with the social grace of a magnifying glass. Then comes the request: choose the finish, trust the dimensions, and spend the money.
Scott has spent much of his career circling that gap between information and understanding. He was an early revenue employee at Zillow, where a house became a collection of photographs, maps, facts, and possibilities on a screen. At Tumblr, he worked around a different visual system, one that handed creators several media types and let them build an audience from a phone. At FiscalNote, he encountered legislation and regulation as enormous bodies of text that software could turn into recognizable patterns.
The industries changed. His question did not: how do you show people enough to make a better decision without making them work harder to reach it?
01 · The recurring pictureA career with one hidden subject
At Zillow, Scott remembers the era before the phone camera swallowed the digital camera. High-definition listing photographs were serious work. Mapping then made the neighborhood explorable. His imagination moved one step further: what if he could hold a phone toward a house and look inside? The thought now sounds familiar because 3D home tours eventually arrived. At the time, it was a glimpse of an interface that could lower the wall between curiosity and comprehension.
Tumblr supplied another piece. Its tools gave professional and amateur creators alike a way to publish visually and gather a network around their taste. FiscalNote made the theme more analytical. Humans leave patterns in policy and behavior, Scott observed, but patterns are hard to diagnose when they are trapped in text. Visualization was not cosmetic. It was a means of making the underlying structure available to the person who needed to act.
One idea, five rooms
In 2019, the thread led Scott to Charleston-based Atlatl Software. He arrived as chief growth officer to lead partnerships and customer-facing teams, then became CEO in 2020. Atlatl used visual configuration to simplify complex made-to-order industrial sales. Pipes, tanks, and machinery could be specified and seen before they existed. The technology worked, but Scott and colleagues came to believe it was aimed at a market too narrow for their ambitions.
His blunt summary is more useful than a polished pivot story: right technology, wrong market.
02 · The spinoutSetting the technology free
Dopple emerged when a group inside Atlatl decided the same visual machinery could serve a much larger commerce market. Ecommerce was expanding. Attention was increasingly visual. Computing power and browser standards had caught up with ideas that had spent years wearing futuristic costumes. Scott saw a chance to make 3D useful to marketers, designers, sales teams, and buyers without asking every brand to become a game studio.
The name is a clipped doppelganger. A physical product gets a digital double, built from photography or CAD files, optimized, textured, and prepared to travel. It can appear as a visualizer, a configurator, an augmented-reality placement, or a sales tool. Its value is not confined to one page because the model can move across the channels where a brand explains what it sells.
Dopple's first customer arrived inbound from London with a furniture problem. That detail pleases Scott's argument that digital partnerships ignore borders. The company launched its public digital storefront in September 2022. Roughly seven or eight months later, he said it had signed its fifteenth customer. He also admitted the tradeoff in the founding choice: Dopple built a platform early, rather than a tiny product with a short feature list, because the team wanted the underlying 3D asset to keep earning its keep.
His favorite image for the old problem comes from Breakfast at Tiffany's. Audrey Hepburn stands outside the glass, looking at objects she cannot touch. Ecommerce offers greater convenience than the shop window, but often preserves the pane. You can read about the object and stare at it. You cannot quite handle it. Scott wants the interface to let the buyer reach through.
03 · The quiet focus groupWhat a rotation tells you
Interactivity also produces a trail. A shopper rotates a product, changes the color, opens an option, zooms into the stitching, or ignores it. Scott calls these movements “digital body language.” The phrase converts analytics from an abstract dashboard into a record of attention. If a brand believes its stitching is the value proposition and nobody examines the seam, the silence is information.
Reading a configurable product
This matters most where the customer is being asked to imagine a complicated future. A boat, a copper hood, a piece of heavy equipment, or an industrial system may have materials, finishes, accessories, and tradeoffs that refuse to fit inside six tidy photographs. In a 2026 conversation about B2B ecommerce, Scott argued that such product pages still ask buyers to make decisions ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars with a strangely thin visual vocabulary.
His principle is buyer empowerment. The modern buying process begins in self-service, before a seller enters the room. A good 3D experience does part of the patient work of a good salesperson: it answers, demonstrates, lets the buyer choose, and notices where interest gathers. Scott's neatest recent line turns the sequence into a business case: “Control turns into confidence and confidence turns into conversions.”
Find the point where your customer is being asked to imagine too much. Replace that act of faith with an interaction that answers the next question.
04 · Founder mechanicsNo lonely lightbulbs
Scott is less romantic about how the company itself gets made. He resists the lone inventor and the clean lightbulb moment. Dopple, in his telling, came from colleagues examining the old company, naming the skills they had, admitting the ones they lacked, and assembling around the opportunity. He calls it “a team of teams, we.” The slightly awkward phrase is intentionally plural.
Startups, he says, are full of breakages. A company can spiral upward when a diverse team repairs them quickly, or downward when it cannot. The founder's responsibility includes “scaling thyself,” surrounding the problem with strong people, and using candor to improve. Conviction still matters. Scott likes the familiar hockey-puck maxim and adds a surfing metaphor for the same idea: you cannot create the macro wave, but you can make something valuable enough to float and move in front of it.
There is wit in his language because commerce, for all its conversion funnels, is still made of human peculiarities. He calls products “beautiful machines.” He says the internet is excellent at information and unfinished at communicating it in a real-world way. When discussing augmented-reality hardware, he imagines performance data floating over a bike ride in Yellowstone, emergency information available to firefighters, and brand marks unlocking product information on demand. His punchline is wonderfully mischievous: “The world just became a shopping mall.”
The hardware may change more slowly than the pitch decks promise. Scott once expected wearables to advance faster after trying Google Glass. His practical focus remained the devices people already carry and the browser already open. The ambition is large, but the delivery mechanism is deliberately ordinary.
05 · What the object says backThe next container
Scott's career is easy to file as revenue leadership: Zillow, Tumblr, FiscalNote, Atlatl, Dopple. It becomes more interesting when read as a long study of containers. A home-details page can contain a place. A social post can contain an identity. A visualization can contain a legislative pattern. A 3D model can contain a product, its options, and the clues left by everyone who explored it.
The pattern also explains why he talks about art and sales in the same breath. Configuring a bike or a kitchen hood is a small creative act. The buyer assembles color, material, and function into an imagined possession. The brand tells a story, but the customer gets to edit the ending. A useful interface makes room for that authorship.
Dopple's work now leans into products whose complexity makes static presentation particularly severe: marine equipment, heavy machinery, outdoor goods, and other configurable categories. The bet is not that every rotating object is enchanting. It is that the right object, shown with enough fidelity and useful choice, asks less blind trust of the person considering it.
The old photograph will survive, of course. So did print after the browser. But Scott's complaint remains hard to unsee. A product has dimension, personality, and a life beyond its front angle. Once the customer can turn it around, the flat page begins to look less like a standard and more like a historical accident.