On focus

I got into the consumer app space because I witnessed an app called Umax make millions. Umax is an API wrapper that rates how attractive you are and people had to pay a subscription fee to gain access to the result.

This app made me realize how much demand was sitting there, unclaimed, in the consumer app space. Building a product that solves a random problem for people and getting paid for it sounded too good to be true. I decided to officially double down on consumer apps.

Keep in mind this was in the pre-claude code era where code was still relatively expensive. A month later, I shipped Pillar, a self-improvement tracker.

Within three weeks I scaled it to 50M+ organic views and 8K downloads, and I hadn't spent a dollar on ads. That's about as clear a signal of product-market fit as you get. Even until this day we still have new users paying us.

Then I made the mistake that first-time founders make. I lost focus.

I stopped doing the boring work as obvious bugs piled up and started thinking about the next idea. In retrospect I should have stayed focused on one singular product and made it good. A few apps in the same category launched after I'd already moved on went on to do hundreds of thousands in profit a month. The market hadn't changed. The timing hadn't shifted. I simply just left the market because I was not "interested" anymore.

The same thing happened with my second app called HeightGPT. It is a GPT wrapper that claimed it could predict and maximize one's height. A product that was built for social media virality. The plan did work out and 67K people downloaded it.

Fun fact here is that I never used it personally for more than 5 minutes a day. I never talked to a single user and shipped almost nothing for months. 67K people downloaded my app and got silence back.

After voluntarily abandoning two products that clearly had traction, I went on to build more products that ended up in similar situations.

Now I'm working on Snag, which shows you free stuff near you. It's simple information arbitrage: someone's getting rid of something, someone else wants it, we connect them. We just crossed $30K MRR recently.

The difference this time is that I actually took my time and think from a user's perspective. I open Snag on weekends. Bits of my apartment came from it. One Sunday I watched a free mechanical keyboard appear a mile from me so I went and got it. Best feeling ever. When you use your own product, you don't need systems to make yourself keep working on it. The small annoyances bother you personally, so you fix them.

I think the most underrated question in startups is really "do you use your own product?" It sounds too obvious to be useful, but it isn't. When I look at the products that compound, they're almost always built by founders who live inside their own creation.

I still wonder what Pillar would look like if I'd stayed six more months. I still think about those 67K HeightGPT users sometimes.