Supppp. I’m here vibe coding on a plane as I write this. I’m actually updating yet another blog that will inevitably be neglected. But I love writing so I gotta keep trying to make this a habit lol.

Anyway, I’m hoping to reflect about how I broke the “cycle of presumed importance” when it comes to building things. I’ll explain.

I wrote an article last year about how personal projects can take years to feel legit, referring to the journey of my app Bleep and how long it took for me to feel like I narrowed down what I wanted it to be.

Fast forward to today, it’s been arguably successful in attracting paying customers and active users. I’ve gotten enough validation to know that I should keep going. But the road ahead feels ever so daunting.

The cycle

Let’s focus on the thought of “getting enough validation to know that I should keep going.” For as satisfying as it is, it’s also worth noting that it’s coming after 3-4 years of working on the same project. This “presumed importance” that surely this must be the project is what I’m trying to question at this turning point.

And thus I “broke” this cycle by starting to revisit other ideas I’m still very curious about. I also never got to start over on a new project with everything I even learned about Bleep.

Enter Flow, a “finance” app that has a much narrower scope: manual tracking of accounts, budgets & goals AND…

Me

The simple act of starting a new project immediately forced me to think in terms of what I can bring to the table. If I were to start building a portfolio of apps, what do these apps have in common? What’s my take on digital experiences?

I started this work with such low expectations (in the best possible way) by being clear about making the scope small: just data entry pretty much & only available on iPhone. Compared to Bleep that is cross platform and is kind of an everything app.

This allowed me to use this as an opportunity to build it primarily through LLMS (shout out to Claude Code) and do a lot of manual fine tuning at a record time. I built this app in two weeks to a very endearing amount of polish. Launching it also softly through TestFlight. As opposed to directly to the world in all stores on Bleep without having the opportunity to fix obvious bugs, etc.

Introducing a new app gave me the opportunity to revisit my portfolio/website as well, because I needed to think a bit about what I wanted to offer to the world as a brand of apps, plural.

So what now?

Will I be making more apps? Keep focusing on Flow? What about Bleep?

I actually don’t know. I’m in a priviledged position where I have a better idea of what can work and what steps I could take to get there. Whether that’s on Flow, Bleep, both, or none.

If you care about being a good app developer you keep polishing your work until you can’t no more. I don’t think Bleep is fully there yet. About 60-70% if I’m conservative. But having worked on something else has actually helped in making me renew my momentum when needed. So the story here is not over.

And the same goes for Flow.