About Danniel Roumian Booker

Growing up in Spain, I always thought I’d be a writer.

Not in the marketing sense. In the author sense. I grew up reading obsessively — finishing books the day they came out, rereading the ones that stayed with me, pulling them apart to see how they worked. I was as interested in why a sentence landed as in what it said.

Alongside fiction, I spent years reading philosophy, psychology, poetry, and drama. I liked arguments, metaphors, and the way people think when they believe they’re being rational. Music worked the same way for me. I studied classical piano for years, then picked up other instruments out of curiosity. I’m not exceptional at any of them, but patterns make sense to me.

What didn’t make sense was how to earn a living as a writer.

So I got a Masters in Engineering and Architecture in the UK, instead.

Selling ideas before I knew that’s what I was doing

After my master’s, I moved to Armenia. The original plan was to stay a few months, explore the last unexplored part of my family history, and continue on. That was more than a decade ago.

I worked in architecture and urban development for the UK-based architecture firm Tim Flynn Architects, helping design and pitch large-scale projects for one of Armenia’s most impactful non-profit social initiatives, the IDeA Foundation: schools, preservation guidelines for entire cities, tourism initiatives, infrastructure concepts that often stayed at the proposal stage.

What became obvious over time was that most of the work wasn’t design. It was persuasion. Convincing investors, municipalities, residents, and internal teams that a particular future was worth committing to.

The projects that stalled rarely failed because of drawings. They failed because the idea wasn’t framed in a way people could act on.

That realization pulled me sideways into copywriting, then strategy.

I freelanced, worked with tourism boards, brands, hotels, restaurants, and tech products, and learned—through repetition—how positioning actually behaves when money and attention are on the line.

Eventually I joined TCF, a world-renowned product-launch agency, built and led the agency’s first Copywriting Team, and later became part of the founding team at Prelaunch. That work scaled the same questions I’d been circling for years: what makes a useful insight, how to extract it from real users, and how to test assumptions before they harden into certainty.

I learned that I’m better upstream than downstream.

Not quite belonging anywhere

Part of this probably comes from never fitting cleanly into one place.

I grew up in Spain with an English mother and an Armenian father, speaking multiple languages, moving between cultural contexts, and never fully identifying with a single one. I was comfortable talking to people, but just as comfortable disappearing into something that held my attention.

I was always the youngest in the room. Not sporty. Rarely interested in team games. Drawn instead to unfamiliar terrain, long efforts, and doing things the indirect way.

That tendency followed me into adulthood—geographically, professionally, and personally. I’ve consistently chosen uncertainty over default paths, not as a statement, but because I don’t do well in environments that feel pre-written.

The mountains weren’t a hobby

Living in Shushi, Artsakh, in my early twenties changed the pace of everything.

It was quiet in a way I hadn’t experienced before. No nightlife, no distractions, just ruins, cliffs, forests, and time. I read, walked, hitchhiked long distances, slept wherever made sense, and learned to be comfortable without infrastructure.

Without guides or systems to rely on, I started pushing my own boundaries—scrambling cliffs, exploring caves, navigating long days alone, knowing help wasn’t guaranteed. It wasn’t about danger for its own sake. It was about learning how I behaved when things weren’t buffered.

When I later moved back to Yerevan, I found people with similar instincts. We built one of the first accessible climbing crags near the city, Ohanavan. Started projects like Flying Santas—rappelling into hospitals and orphanages dressed as Santa Claus to bring gifts to children who couldn’t go home for Christmas.

I returned to skiing, then discovered ski touring at a time when almost no one in Armenia was doing it. What started as curiosity turned into years of experience, then guiding—first informally, then professionally—working with highly experienced skiers visiting from abroad.

I learned a lot from people older and more experienced than me. I also learned where to draw lines.

The mountains taught me restraint, not bravado.

Life, by design

I live in Yerevan by choice.

It’s chaotic, frustrating, deeply human, and unforgiving in ways Europe isn’t. Things don’t work unless you make them work. You are responsible for yourself in a very literal sense.

I gave up a lot of comfort to live this way—reliable infrastructure, proximity to family, safety nets—but gained something that mattered more to me: agency.

A good week now is split roughly in half between thinking work and being outside. I work with clients, write, build systems, then spend the rest of my time in the mountains with friends or my kid, regardless of season.

I usually have too many side projects. Writing, podcasting, learning new tools, building things that don’t strictly need to exist. I like understanding systems deeply enough that they stop feeling opaque.

Writing, again and again

I’ve written on and off my whole life.

When I don’t write for long stretches, my thinking gets sloppy. Writing forces me to slow down, argue with myself, and notice how my views change over time.

Most of what I write is for myself—or for a younger version of me who needed proof that a non-standard path was survivable. Some of it is for friends. Some of it is for people I’ll never meet.

Until this site existed, many of those thoughts lived in long messages to individuals. This is a more honest place to put them.

What this site is

This site is a home for the things I work on, think about, and keep returning to.

It isn’t resolved. Neither am I. I don’t need to be.

If something here resonates, that’s enough.

If not, that’s fine too.

And whether it does or doesn’t, I’m always happy to hear from you, here.