Anatomy of a rejected app idea
Here's one I threw out earlier.
So, I’ve just built Fanzine and I’ve found that it doesn’t really work. Am I disheartened? Suicidal? Yes, of course. Just not over this.
Over the years, I’ve learned that most things don’t work and I get the feeling much of the value of making something is the time spent understanding why it’s not working. Where I’d been going wrong, of course, is, I’d been thinking like an artist rather than taking on the more odious, and more potentially lucrative, of asking about the wants or needs of other people. No matter what, it alway comes back to other people. Hell is other people, as is commerce1.
I began over. This summer, I participated in the summer accelerator at Verci and went through a bunch of ideas that I eventually rejected. This is one of them.
The great insight of Fanzine from users was that many people considered what they consumed as an extension of themselves, as about them rather than for others. I knew I wanted to do something with that. I’ve come to realize I have been making products around taste and I wanted to try to make another one.
I wanted whatever I did next to involve what I call the holy trinity — video, text, audio. I knew I still didn’t want to make anything that has AI or algorithms. So what had changed? Well, no more Christopher Columbus; I did not want to discover new worlds anymore. I wanted to take on a small slice of a big market. I had also been building things that I liked it in theory but didn’t actually like to use myself. This time, I would only make something I enjoyed using. And I would go fast. Fanzine took six months with two of us. This time, I was alone and I resolved to be quicker. I would just build it2.
People use link-in-bio to share links about all their socials in one place. Some of the big players are Linktree and Beacons. They are the modern CV; you can attach your online presence to your work. I started thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a link-in-bio that showed your taste?
Riffing on an idea about a more personal link-in-bio, I started to imagine a small card pinned to the top of a profile, or embedded in some way, constantly updating your friends about what content you were enjoying. It would be linked passively to your YouTube, Spotify, etc accounts, so others would see your life in that moment of discovery — whichever book or song you happened to be with at the time.
(You might be able to see see that this is an evolution of some of the ideas in Fanzine.
Here, you have Malvika’s Sunday morning as a fanzine. Really, it’s an image. It can sit in Instagram. But if you click the image, you have the card to play with. Each element is clickable; each creator is a link and you can find out more about Malvika herself. I’m really interested in cards as a format, particularly ones that have different kinds of information [static and interactive] at the same time. Schrodinger's cards.)
In this case, the product would similarly live at a “xxxxx.com/name” url and there would be more detail, maybe with “snapshots” that act as past versions of yourself, the music you were listening to, the things you were reading, all catalogued like library cards, stacked on top of each other back to the beginning of time.
I still think it’s a fun idea. So why didn’t I pursue it?
I wasn’t sure who would use it. Like Fanzine before it, it requires a lot of effort on the part of the user to be useful. Links-in-bio are mainly used by creators to send followers to their myriad web of random social accounts, a way for the creator to make money. This idea needs people to share what they love for love’s sake. What is the exchange of value?
Even if they did, what hack did I have to get in front of them to use it? I’ve come to realize that distribution is the key to business.
Why me? I’d have to spend a bunch of my finite life building a link-on-bio app. I don’t use links-in-bio and I’m not technical. And I couldn’t figure out how I would make money from it. I had little to offer, nothing to gain.
So I left it as a bunch of drawings on the dining table and one eye-meltingly ugly Figma3. Fittingly, as I was writing this, I browsed the Indie Hackers newsletter and it profiled Charlie Clark, the man behind Liinks, a lovely stripped-down link-in-bio that is far better than anything I could have done solo. He even has a similar left-right UX interface to my sketch at the top. His app makes $25,000 a month. If you’re intrigued by the idea of a link-in-bio, I’d try his.
So after rejecting this idea, what did I do next? I began this exact process again with several more ideas. One had some promise and I’m now working on the MVP4. I’ll show it soon and you can tell me whether I’m making the same old mistakes again.
In looking for a link to Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit,” I found out that 83% of Google users liked the play. That drove me to a bad case of existentialism.
Jobs, Steve: “Real artists ship.”
Indeed, I used this app idea to teach myself Figma by watching a bunch of YouTube videos.
In fact, it’s already in TestFlight. If you want to try out the beta on iPhone, reply to this email and I’ll send you the link.