I usually build software for myself first, and only later think about whether anyone else might want it. That’s the opposite of my day job, where as a PM I spend months getting up to speed on someone else’s product before it starts to feel like mine. The side-project version of me skips that step. I find myself wanting a thing, so I build it.
Over the last fifteen years I’ve started something close to a hundred projects on GitHub. Almost all of them are deleted or archived. None of them ever fully scratched the itch. I’m never finished building, no matter how much I’ve already built.
Lately the itch has gotten worse, in scale and scope, because of AI coding tools like Claude Code. The projects I can finish now are more elaborate, with better code and better design, than anything I’ve ever finished. And so the latest one is yrdsl.app. A digital yard sale.
The reason for it is concrete. We’re moving out of our place in the 22nd district of Vienna, back to the United States. That means selling, donating, or throwing away basically everything we own. I could use Willhaben (the Austrian Craigslist; nobody here actually uses Craigslist, or eBay), but I wanted everything in one place that I controlled. And I’ll admit the engineer urge was in there too. Surely I can do this better.
So I built it. And I’m going to use it. Over the next few months I’ll be photographing furniture, kitchen things, and seven years of accumulated whatever, putting it all on the site, and then linking the items into local Facebook groups (Expats in Vienna, that kind of thing). We’ll see how it goes.
The flood
While I was building, I was also lurking on r/sideproject and r/microsaas. Every day there’s a fresh round of “I built a…” posts. A few of them look like they’re working: actual users, actual paying customers, microSaaS in the literal sense. Most of them just disappear by the next day. The MCP registries are an extreme version of this. I submitted a different project to Glama earlier this year and saw something like ten thousand other entries already in there, less than a year after most of us had even learned what an MCP was.
The same tools that let me ship faster let everyone ship faster. Throwing together a working web app is now easy. I don’t see that going back.
A decade ago, building something took months. I’d cold-email a person who might care about it, and they’d often write back. There were fewer projects in the world, so a project from a stranger was worth a few minutes of attention. Now any inbox is full of similar emails by Tuesday morning, and most get archived without being opened.
The worry
The honest fear is that yrdsl.app is just another “I built a…” that nobody bothers to click on. That there’s nothing about it that feels special, because the things that used to make a project feel special (months of work, a rare skill set, simply finishing it at all) don’t filter the way they once did. GitHub has hundreds of millions of repositories now. Product Hunt sees more launches in a week than it used to in a month. I’m probably just another person who built another thing.
That’s a demotivating place to land, and not just for this project.
Two reasons I’m not putting it down
Two things keep me at it anyway.
The first is that the building isn’t the whole thing. It’s writing about it, thinking about it on dog walks, figuring out what’s actually interesting enough to write about. In this case, that turned out to be the worry I just laid out: that the project isn’t very special, and that I’m building it anyway. That’s worth a blog post. Even if the audience for this kind of thing ends up being a few siblings and a couple of friends, that’s fine. Code by itself doesn’t tell you why a project exists. A blog can.
The second is that I’m actually going to use yrdsl.app myself. Not as a demo. Not as a pretend customer. I have a couch, a vacuum, a kitchen table, and seven years of other things to sell in Vienna over the next few months, and the only way I’m going to find the rough edges is by hitting them myself.
So that’s the deal. I built a thing. I’m using it. And now I’ve blogged about it. :)