Selfishly Making Stuff For Yourself

Build it and they will come is partly true.

Jason Fried build Basecamp into a monster.

27 years, profitable the whole time while ignoring most SAAS and VC lore of raise a ton of money and spend a fortune on acquisition.

He started with a simple mantra:

’build stuff for yourself’

He built software for him and then millions of people liked it and pay for it.

I accidentally did this for years before I heard him say it as a thing.

I switched from free webinars to paid workshops when I didn’t vibe with Brunson’s perfect webinar.

I switched from sales calls to Google docs because I had kids, travelled, wanted to live in odd timezones and didn’t want to hire sales people.

I switched from running 13 people on a team to Solo delivery + Alex the Assistant when I had to re-structure my whole life.

None of these things were a ‘thing’ when I started doing them.

I had to work it out through trial and error and leaning on mentors for insight and inspo.

Many of them are the norm now.

I built SoloOs for me.

I ‘knew’ that agents that were trained on me could recall and execute better because they remembered stuff I have forgotten.

I ‘knew’ that I could help more people by developing a VirtualMe.

I ‘knew’ that GPT’s would become commodities, gave generic results with limited context and hard to maintain inside a product ecosystem.

I ‘knew’ that if I build this that other people would probably want a version for themselves.

I ‘knew’ none of those things.

And I use it everyday.

I had no idea what would happen and how it would work but I do know that when I build things for myself they tend to work out really well for me and others.

Being selfish and selfless turn into interesting bedfellows.

Selfishly building it for myself, then building product with others who request things that aren’t obviously useful to me is how we have been able to develop something great so fast.

SoloOs users and our white label clients drive the product from the inside.

I see products that are built to get things.

Especially in the age of Ai coding.

Mainly products that purely exist to get the creator money.

These products are not hard to make but they are very hard to grow with any ease or sustainability.

The builder has to push the marketing hard as they need to transfer conviction to the market rather than having proving conviction through being the power user.

Selfishly putting yourself first is simultaneously the simplest and hardest thing to do.

Pioneers get to conquer new lands but they also get arrows in their back.

It’s worked well for me.