Builder of Small Sweet Things

I don't want to build a unicorn.

I don't want to raise a round. I don't want to scale a team. I don't want a board meeting on my calendar. I don't want a pitch deck that talks about TAM.

I want to build small sweet things.

I want to build something on Friday and have three people use it on Monday and have one of them text me saying "I cried, thank you." That's the unit of value I care about.

This isn't a lifestyle brag

It's a strategic position.

I watched the last ten years of tech get dominated by a single idea — that anything worth building had to scale. That if the idea wasn't infrastructure for a billion users, it wasn't serious. That small was a failure of ambition.

I don't believe that anymore. I'm not sure I ever did.

There's a whole universe of valuable software that doesn't scale. Tools for one studio. Apps for one family. Prayer books for the students in my class. Valentine's Day games for my girlfriend. Pitch decks for an Oakland pickleball club. Fan platforms for one artist.

Each one is useful to a small number of people. Each one would be worse if it tried to be bigger.

The AI era doesn't make the small stuff smaller. It makes it easier to build.

What "small sweet things" means

Small. One person, one couple, one studio, one congregation. Not a market segment. A real group of humans I can picture.

Sweet. It makes someone's day a little better. Not transformative. Not world-changing. Just better. A text they smile at. A breath they exhale. A moment they didn't expect to have.

Things. Not ideas. Not decks. Not promises. Working software with a URL.

That's the standard. If I can hit all three, I ship it.

A note to ambitious builders

I'm not against big. I'm against the idea that big is the only thing worth building.

If you want to build a unicorn, go build one. I'll read your S-1 when it drops.

But if you've been sitting on twelve ideas that feel too small, I'm writing this to tell you that those are the ones I want you to build. The world has enough people chasing scale. It's short on people making beautiful things for the person in front of them.

Make one this weekend.

Send it to three people.

See what happens.

That's the whole practice.