The Product Was Me

I've tried to build something before.

The first time was early in my career, before the contracting years. I could see that the system we were using needed replacing: MS Access, held together with good intentions and not much else. I built a working demo in my own time. Went in with it. My boss looked at it, said no, and that was that. No real reason. Clients weren't asking for it. Too much of a gamble. Whatever.

I was gutted, not because I'd wasted the time (I hadn't), but because I knew it was better and it didn't matter anyway.

When I eventually left, the last thing he said to me was: you'll never do better than you did here.

I've thought about that line a lot.

I spent the next fifteen years contracting, in patterns I didn't fully recognise until much later (more on that in Fifteen Years of Preparation That Didn't Look Like Preparation). Large organisations, big retail, enterprise. In and out of other people's systems, other people's problems, other people's decisions. Always the person who could see what needed building. Never the one with the keys.

There were other attempts along the way. Hydroponics, of all things, after a rough spell at my first real contract. Didn't have the business knowledge, didn't have the focus. I did what I always do: built around the edges, the interesting bits, the parts that probably didn't need doing yet. Ignored the hard centre. It didn't go anywhere.

The pattern wasn't hard to see, in hindsight. Two things I kept not doing: getting clear on what I was actually building, and doing the marketing.

Ka-do nearly went the same way.

There was a point where I stepped back from it. Not gave up, just stepped back. And when I came back and started using it properly, as a real user, I hit dead ends. Things that didn't work. Bugs. Decisions I'd made six months earlier that didn't hold up.

That's when it sharpened.

Not from a user interview or market research, but from using the thing myself and recognising every frustration from fifteen years of contracting. The strive to be two steps ahead. The Monday morning scramble to get on top of everything before anyone else noticed you weren't. The feeling of carrying too much, across too many clients, with nowhere reliable to put it down.

I wasn't solving a problem I'd studied. I was solving a problem I'd been living.

What is founder-market fit and why does it matter?

It's a term the indie-founder canon uses too, read sixteen years late but no less true for it: founder-market fit is the idea that the best person to build a product for a specific problem is someone who has lived that problem deeply, not just studied it. It's distinct from product-market fit, which is about whether a product resonates with a market. Founder-market fit is about whether the person building it has the right lived experience to make good decisions, fast, without needing constant external validation.

It matters because product decisions compound. A founder who has spent fifteen years inside the problem knows instinctively what to build, what to cut, and what the product should feel like at 11pm on a Sunday when nothing is going right. That judgement isn't teachable from a brief. It accumulates through time.

A well-funded competitor could build a better feature set. They could hire a team, run sprints, ship faster.

What they can't replicate is the fifteen years. The architecture knowledge, the product ownership, the project pragmatism, the coding: none of it learned in a course, all of it accumulated across roles I threw myself into because I always wanted to be part of building something real. The essence of what ka-do is came from all of that. The back story. The care.

All those skills, and I never found, or was offered, a place to use them like this. To lead something. To call something my own.

Ka-do is that place.

The product exists because I spent years carrying a problem I could feel but couldn't prove. Every decision (what to build, what to cut, what the thing should feel like to use) came from that, not from a brief or a market map.

From being the user, for fifteen years, before I knew I was building the product. For a long stretch of that I didn't even know what I wanted, which is its own story: I Didn't Know What I Wanted. For Decades.

Steve Drew is the founder of ka-do, a calm task and planning tool for busy professionals.