While AI hype was everywhere towards the end of 2024 (I guess it probably still hasn't died down), I got to enjoy one of the greatest honors in life: becoming a dad. Not only did that change my role at home, but it made me think about how everything else was going to change. I work from home most days, but how was I going to balance the increasing demands of my role while ensuring I was there for my daughter? How was I going to find that time? YouTube told me I could build a billion dollar company with AI and that would give me that time back.
Obviously, YouTubers don't lie so this had to be possible, right? The promise sounds so great. You can build the next great product, have agents do everything and then just spend time watching your kids grow up. So during her nap windows, I'd work in my attic on those ideas and here is my billion dollar product…actually, I don't have that idea, I'm still at the same job and have a graveyard of ideas in my computer's trash. Where did I go wrong?
Ignoring My Own Advice
Back in my consulting days of 2017-2019, I was still relatively early on getting people onto the idea of Machine Learning and automation. Most of my intro calls were to help companies take their data to the next level, just for them to hand me broken Excels to demo off of. To not completely lose the client, my next move was always to ask "What is the one task that annoys your teams the most and do you think we can automate that?" This typically resulted in an engagement from the entire team and many successful projects spun out of that question. So with my explorations into AI and software development, why wasn't I taking the same approach?
Why We Get This Wrong
I imagine most of my reader base has seen The Social Network and thought Vibe Coding was going to have the same outcome. Let me go into my attic for a few hours and a couple of drinks and I'll go to bed having launched the next big thing. But think about how Facebook actually took off. Did the team try to build a massive social platform on day one? Nope. They built one ranking tool to accomplish one task: rating people's photos. Crude, sure, but it resonated. From there other ideas sparked, because people connected with the application over time as it spread from Harvard to everywhere in the world. That's why we have to remember: the best ideas aren't going to come from solving for every persona. They come from solving a problem (preferably yours) first.
How I Course Corrected
Lately my biggest time saver has been to marry two products that I loathe but have elements I like: Miro and Jira. Over the last few months my role has been around organizational alignment and neither tool has been helpful for me. With Miro I hate that I have to decide on a template or whether I want a circle or triangle. And for Jira, well, outside of logging notes, there isn't much value it provides me. So I decided to blend them together.
In 2 hours, I spun up something that worked for me. Is it perfect? No. But it helps me work better. Now I can spin up a board, AI helps me generate a template based on my goal, put in my notes and reminders and I have everything I need in one application. Yes, I could have probably done the same between the two products but I don't have time to battle IT for plug-ins. And with AI, the cost to prototype something like this is less than a dollar.
The Real Lesson
The billion-dollar idea probably isn't hiding in your attic. But the tool that saves you 30 minutes a day? That one's right in front of you.
Start with your own friction. Build something that makes your work better, even if it's ugly. If it solves your problem, there's a decent chance it solves someone else's too. And if it doesn't scale? At least you got your time back.
That's the trade I wish someone had told me about sooner: stop chasing unicorns and start building something unique to you.
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