I Quit to Build Apps Alone. The Hard Part Wasn't the Code.

It’s been almost a year since I left a big company to build things on my own. In that year I shipped five apps. One of them now gets used by about 600 people a day. But the thing that actually surprised me had nothing to do with code: the hard part was never building the thing. It’s getting anyone to see it.

It started on an ordinary afternoon. I was on the 16th floor, staring at a wall of Jira tickets, when it hit me: this wasn’t the life I wanted.

When I first joined the team, there were about a dozen of us. Every week we’d look at how the product was selling, sit in on customer calls, listen to their problems, and turn them into features. That feeling, that real people were using something I’d made, was the reason I signed up. Then came a reorg. Our product got shelved, and I was absorbed into some enormous system. My days went from building things to patching a rickety framework and bending myself around the org chart. The pay was good. The perks were good. But that afternoon I asked myself: is this really what I’m trading my time and my life for?

Not long after, I joined a San Francisco startup as a contractor. It was right around the moment coding went from pressing Tab to pressing Enter (Copilot, then Claude). Suddenly everything was faster, and even as a backend guy, I could build an entire app end to end. The worst case, I figured, was that I’d burn through my savings and go back to a job. Once I’d made peace with that, there wasn’t much left to be afraid of.

So I kept taking contract work and poured the rest of my time and energy into the things I actually wanted to make. I didn’t treat it as some grand plan. “Startup” felt like too heavy a word. What I had in mind was simpler: while I was still young enough and unburdened enough, be a little reckless for once, build the things I’d always wanted to, and see how far I could get.

How I Decided What to Build

My method for choosing what to build was simple: start from my own life. Whenever something got under my skin, I’d make a little tool to fix it. Looking back, every app from that stretch maps neatly onto whatever I was living through at the time.

While I was freelancing, I needed to track my hours for invoicing. So I built Hourly, a small tool for logging contract hours. Tiny as it was, it taught me something real: people will actually pay for something I made.

My sister is a tutor, and she was always losing track of a dozen students’ progress. She asked me to build her something. That became Keban, and it showed me my apps could help a whole group of people, not just me.

Then came Furwise. Two years ago I adopted my first cat, made every rookie mistake in the book, and spent my evenings googling. I wanted an app that could jot things down on the fly and actually teach me how to take care of her. To get the knowledge right, I even spent a stretch working as an assistant at an animal hospital (that’s a story for another day).

Last came Picki. I’d noticed that social feeds are full of things worth keeping, but the saving features are almost universally terrible, and people in Taiwan are especially active on Threads. So I built Picki. It’s the fastest-growing thing I’ve made so far.

These apps are all still alive. People open them every day, and some even pay for them. Compared to the metrics I used to chase back at the company, watching something I grew out of my own life get used by real people feels solid in a way those numbers never did. It feels a lot more like the kind of success I was actually after.

The Hard Part Was Never the Building

After building all of these, one thing became clear: making the product was no longer the hard part. The hard part is marketing, pricing, getting the right product in front of the right people. Back at the company, someone else usually made those calls and handed me a spec to implement. Now nobody writes me a spec. Every decision is mine to own, and mine to get wrong.

One day, a stranger said a few kind words about Picki on Threads. That one afternoon brought in more new users than a month of my own effort. I watched the line shoot up the chart, and my feelings were a tangle: half joy, half a quiet “oh, so that’s how this works,” and a little bit of wounded pride. The thing had been there all along. It just never had anyone to give it a stage.

I still have plenty of problems. My paid conversion is low enough to be embarrassing, and new-user growth just won’t take off. But I’m slowly learning to see all of that as a muscle I haven’t trained yet, rather than a report card proving I’m not good enough. I can build a solid product now. What comes next, the whole business of getting it in front of the right people, is just the part I still have to learn.

So, Where Am I Now?

As I write this, Picki has around 600 people using it every day, saving several thousand posts between them. The numbers aren’t huge. But for someone who’s only been at this for a year, they’re numbers I’m genuinely proud of.

The bigger surprise has been the people. Some users started out just sending me feedback and somehow became friends. One of them later told me he was moving to Japan to make music. The little things I built have quietly connected people who’d never have met otherwise, and that’s something I never saw coming.

Meanwhile, Furwise is still cooking. It’s another product I’ve put a lot into, and it’s taking its time becoming what it’s meant to be.

So this blog is the record of that reckless bet.

I’ll write here about how I build things, how I’m stumbling my way toward getting them seen, and how I’m trying to take a tiny studio that grew up in Taiwan and push it somewhere further out into the world. If you’re building something of your own, or still on the fence about starting, I hope these notes make it feel a little less lonely.

I figured I’d be reckless just once. A year later, I still haven’t gone back to a job, and I don’t think I’m going to.

Turns out the real adventure is only just beginning.