People assume the hard part of a one-person studio is building. It is not. The hard part is deciding what not to build, because every new app is a promise to support it for years, and there is only one of me.
It has to be my own problem first
Every app in the catalog began as a real frustration in my own life, not an opportunity spotted on a chart. If I am not the person who needs it, I am the wrong person to build it, and the app comes out hollow.
That filter kills a lot of perfectly reasonable ideas. It should.
Then it has to pass three questions
If an idea survives the first test, it has to answer three more before I will start.
- Can it do one thing well, instead of ten things adequately?
- Can it work offline, with no account and no server of mine?
- Can one person support it for years without cutting corners?
A "no" to any of them is usually a "not yet," and sometimes a "never." What makes it through is a small, honest app I will still be glad to maintain in three years. You can see what has passed the test in the catalog.
I would rather ship six apps I can stand behind than sixty I cannot.
The end-of-shift habit that pays off
The value of a tip tracker is not any single number. It is the small habit of logging every shift, and what that record tells you a month later.
Continent to city: how precisely to track a place
A weekend in a city and a layover on a continent are not the same kind of visit. Worldly lets you choose how precisely to log each place.
A viewer, not another dashboard
HogWatch never writes back to PostHog. That single constraint is what makes it safe to hand your analytics key to a phone app.