There is a folder on my laptop I do not open in front of people. It has somewhere north of thirty projects in it, all started with real conviction, most abandoned somewhere between working and finished. A few of them are genuinely good ideas. None of them are things a stranger could use.

One escaped. It has two users. I know both of them personally, which I recognize is not the same as having users, and I have thought about that distinction more than is healthy.

The Thirty-Project Folder and Why Nothing Leaves It

I build these things because I like building them, and I should say that plainly before I dress it up as strategy. Something annoys me, I think about it in the shower, and by that evening there is a folder with a name in it. That is the whole origin story of every one of them.

Why they don't ship is less flattering. Building is the fun part and shipping is the part where you have to decide what the thing is, name it, explain it to somebody who does not already understand it, and then find out whether they care. Every one of those steps is harder than writing the code, and none of them are enjoyable in the way the code is enjoyable.

So the folder grows. I have described this to myself as being busy, as being a perfectionist, and as having high standards. It is none of those. It is that I prefer the part I am good at, which is a thing I would spot instantly in anybody else.

The One That Got Out, and How Low the Bar Actually Was

The one that shipped got out because I told John about it before it was finished. That's it. That is the whole difference between this project and the thirty others.

He had a specific problem, I said I had a thing that half-solved it, and he said send it to me — which meant that within about a day there was a person on the other end waiting for a link. So I did the naming, and the explaining, and the ugly bit of work where you make a thing survive contact with somebody who does not know how it works. It took an evening and a half. Not weeks. An evening and a half.

He used it. He sent me two messages about things that were broken, both correct. I fixed them. Then somebody he mentioned it to also started using it, and that was the entire growth story of this product.

Two users is not a business and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But it is infinitely more than thirty folders, and the gap between those two states was one evening and one person expecting something.

What Two Users Cost Me in Actual Hours

The build was maybe fifteen hours across three weeks, in the gaps — while something compiled at work, after everybody went to bed. Call it free, in the sense that the alternative use of most of that time was scrolling.

What is not free is the tail. Two users means it has to keep running. Something breaks, it costs money in small amounts, and every few months there's an evening I did not plan on spending. Nobody tells you that shipping is a subscription you pay forever, and that a thing with two users costs meaningfully more to maintain than a thing with zero.

"You know this would be better if more people used it," John said once, which is technically the most obvious statement anybody has ever made to me, and which I have thought about at least monthly ever since.

He is right and he is also describing the exact wall I have never climbed. Getting from two people I know to one person I don't is a completely different job than the one I am good at, and I have not seriously attempted it. I don't think that's a failure, particularly. But it's the truth, and it belongs on the ledger.

The Rule I Took From It, Which I Also Ignore

The takeaway was supposed to be: tell somebody about it early, because a person expecting a link is worth more than any amount of motivation. I believe that. I have written it on the whiteboard in the garage.

I have also started four things since then and told nobody about any of them, so make of that what you will. The folder is still growing. It is a nicer folder now — the newer things in it are better built than the older things, which is either progress or an elaborate way of not shipping.

Two users, though. Two people who type a thing into a box I made and get back something useful, on a Tuesday, without thinking about me at all. I'd be lying if I said that wasn't most of the reason I keep doing this.

The tool is still up. It still has two users. Every couple of months I think about trying to find a third, and then I open the folder and start something new instead.

Note: Everyday Hustle Jeff is the written side of a digital series. These accounts are composite and dramatized. Any figures are what they were on the day, for one person, and are not a projection, a track record, or advice.