I was in Bangkok recently, having coffee with Marc Köhlbrugge, founder of WIP and BetaList. He told me how BetaList started: It was basically a growth hack for another startup he was building. The other startup did not work out, but BetaList is still alive. His message was: Just ship. You never know what comes out of it.
I shared that I wanted to start building my own projects, but I never deployed something "real" to production. My goal was to learn how to deploy something to production in the next two weeks. And he pushed me and said "why not two days?"
That put a little fire under my ass and a dent in my ego (in a good way). It was nice to get an insight into Marc's mindset and how he forces himself to keep shipping.
Only happy accidents
His stories reminded me of that Bob Ross quote: "There are no mistakes, only happy accidents."
As we get older, I think we naturally become more conservative. We stick to what we're good at. It's not easy being a beginner in one field when you're an expert in another. And as we stick to what we're good at, we don't make any mistakes. Alas, no happy accidents.
After exiting AppSignal this year, I decided to take a few months off. And I realized there is zero pressure. I can just build stuff for fun. No business plan, no pressure to make money, just making things because I want to.
I made an active decision to think less, do more, and make more happy accidents. And with AI, I'm able to have more accidents than ever before.
The fun is just getting started
The app formerly known as Twitter is buzzing. Every day there's new exciting AI development and tools. It really feels like the momentum is picking up, not slowing down.
And I feel this personally. Over the last few weeks, I've been vibecoding, building, designing. Running into problems and bugs I don't know how to solve, and then talking through them with Claude and figuring it out anyway. I even deployed an actual app with a database to production. And then 3 more. I connected domains through CLI. Got email services working. Small steps for mankind, but a giant leap for Wes.
It's giving me so much joy. Like, an incredible amount. Just the act of building stuff again, tweaking my Claude skill files every day, learning what works and what doesn't.
There's this post by @hosseeb that resonated with me: try everything. Don't wait until it becomes a job requirement. Throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Everyone should be doing some of that right now.
Making a mess
I'm pretty confident I'm gonna make a big old mess. Some projects will be dumb, some only useful to me (or my kid, I'm creating a bedtime routine app). And maybe something will come out of this that's useful to others too. Building the next big thing isn't even my goal right now. I'm just building.
That's it. I'm having so much fun, and I wanted to share that.