I Built the Wrong Thing First

I thought I was going to build a spreadsheet inspired task app. That was the plan. Simple, familiar, something I'd actually use. I'd been managing my work in two tabs for twenty years — one for home, one for work — and I wanted to build the version of that which a spreadsheet couldn't be.

What I actually built, for the first few weeks, was a collection of buttons and toggles I didn't need. Features that sounded right, designs I liked the look of, things I'd never had the inclination or the time to build before and suddenly could. The capability arrived before the clarity. I could build almost anything — so I tried to build everything. It was an experiment dressed as a product, and I was too caught up in the excitement of it to notice the difference.

There was a contract I was on at the time — a company that had no automated scripts, no joined-up dev team, processes that would make most engineers wince. I built something myself, quietly, and it worked better than anything I'd seen shipped in that building. I don't say that to sound impressive. I say it because that moment shifted something. I realised what was actually possible if you had the tools and the focus and the willingness to just do the thing rather than talk about doing the thing.

I came back to ka-do with different eyes after that.

The experiment phase ended — not with a decision, more with an accumulation of clarity. Bit by bit I started cutting instead of adding. The buttons I didn't need. The toggles nobody would use. The features that were fun to build and pointless to ship. The product got smaller and more honest with every pass, and somewhere in that process it stopped being a thing I was making and started being a thing I actually believed in.

By the numbers, five months in: nearly two thousand commits, almost four hundred thousand lines of code, a full commercial SaaS — auth, billing, AI pipeline, calendar integration, tests, CI/CD — that most teams take twelve to eighteen months to reach. I'm not sharing that to flex. I'm sharing it because I nearly didn't get there.

There was a month in the middle where I barely touched it. Seven active days out of thirty-odd. The distraction was real, but so was the doubt. You can build 70% of a product in three months. The question that month was whether the last 30% was worth doing properly. Whether every button and every design choice and every edge case that nobody would ever notice — except the person who hits it at the wrong moment — was worth the time.

It is. That's what I worked out when I came back. The first 70% proves you can build the thing. The last 30% is the actual product. That's what wins or loses customers — not whether it exists, but whether it's been done properly. Whether the person who opens it for the first time gets something that feels finished, not something that feels like it's almost there.

I didn't know what I was building at the start. I'm not sure you ever do. But I know what it is now — and the gap between those two things is where the real work happened.