The Strange Fruits of Exploration

And maybe a beach bar

Build Your Own Apps with AI is on track to be the most successful course I’ve ever launched, which is saying a lot since the last successful course paid for a house.

But I never planned to make this course, or make any content on this topic. If my friend Harry hadn’t suggested I do it, I might never have made it.

From the outside, the timeline looks quite short. I started tweeting about coding with AI tools in December, and by January people were asking me to make this course, so it has the illusion of an extremely quick success. It appears to have almost literally happened overnight.

But the real timeline is a little different. I poked at the first AI coding tools in 2023, and by the end of the year felt like they might be getting good enough to handle a significant amount of programming for me. So in 2024 I used Cursor to build an iPhone app I wanted: a Strava for writing called “Prolific.”

That project failed. There wasn’t much demand for a Strava for writing. Even I eventually got bored of using it. But it showed me what the tools were starting to be capable of, and gave me the clue that we might have a very different relationship with software and programming in the near future.

So last fall when the agent-based programming tools started to take off, like Bolt and Lovable and the newly improved Cursor, it felt like the moment I’d been waiting for. They were finally good enough for people with less programming experience than me but with the curiosity to learn to start building their own apps using these AI tools.

Build Your Own Apps was the real payoff for building Prolific. I thought exploring and trying something new would pay off one way, and even though the original plan failed, a tangential (better!) plan popped up in its place.e

The more I look for this pattern in my life, the more it appears in strange and unexpected ways.

Way back at the beginning of my blogging journey I was writing about men’s sexual health to dominate the SEO rankings. And while I did take over that search traffic for a while, the real “payoff” was that other people started asking for SEO help so I started Growth Machine.

When I started taking programming seriously in 2021, my plan was to launch some apps and try to make money that way. But then I stumbled down the crypto rabbit hole (the whole Crypto Confidential story) and ended up writing code for crypto projects.

When I had some downtime between Crypto Confidential drafts and started hacking on a short story, my only goal was to get some story telling practice. Now that’s turned into a whole novel, and part of me suspects it’s going to sell better than Crypto Confidential has.

When I stated this blog in 2014 it was only meant to be a resume builder, a way to show companies that I knew how to write a decent blog post so I could get freelance gigs. And now it’s… well it’s turned into a sorts of wonderful things along the way.

The pattern even shows up in weirder ways: like when Cosette and I bought a house to turn into an Airbnb, then some frat stars shat in our bathtub (yes, really) and we said “fuck this” and sold it at the top of the Austin market in 2022.

To get to the point I suspect I’m not alone in this. I know it shows up constantly in business stories: where the company starts off trying to tackle one problem and discovers there’s a better related problem along the way (Slack was originally a video game company IIRC, and Nintendo was a camera company!). Or you discover a sub-problem that’s a no-brainer to tackle, like SpaceX realizing they could sell internet service.

As you explore in a direction, you have to be willing to alter the destination when a better one presents itself. You might think you’re charting a course towards A but if the current suddenly pulls you towards B, then maybe B has a better beach bar anyway.

The challenge of course is not being too willing to abandon the original plan in favor of the new one that’s presented itself. I probably err too far on the side of changing courses, to my occasional detriment, but it has worked out in its own way.

You can explore and try new things with a certain lightness. It doesn’t need to work out right away, or in the way you want it to, and you don’t need to justify the exploration at the start. By exploring you are discovering the ways in which the exploration can justify itself.

So try things, experiment, explore. You never know how the various threads will tie together later.

Other Things

• My novel Husk is coming along nicely. I’ll be turning in the final draft to Scribe next week (more on that here) and am still targeting an end of May release.

• Nathan and I have had some great Between Drafts episodes recently, like how I wrote my first draft in a month, our favorite books from 2024, and how we self-edit.

• I was also on the Every podcast with Dan Shipper to talk about building Build Your Own Apps, working with AI, and my extremely strange entrepreneurial journey (which inspired this post!).