Ideas versus systems

For years my side projects all started the same way. I had an idea, I opened a new project, and I built. Some of them got to ninety percent. None of them got to customers.

Every one of them started from the idea. Not from a workflow. Not from a person doing a job badly because the tools around them were wrong. Just from "this would be cool."

An idea asks, "wouldn’t it be cool if?" A system asks, "where does the work get stuck?"

The things I’ve built that actually stuck were the opposite. They started inside a real business, solving a loop someone ran every day. They were boring on day one. And they got used, because they had to be.

Only later did it become obvious the loop wasn’t unique. That’s the moment a system becomes a product: not when you have the idea, but when you notice everyone has the problem.

— T.