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Building

How to build a consumer app

Seven apps, built around a full-time job. Some have been live long enough to have real numbers, and the rest are earlier than that. This is the thing written down.

Nine guides, ten points each. They’re ordered the way the work happens, but the order is a suggestion, not a process, and most of it loops. If you want the argument in one page instead, How to build a startup.

Where I have my own numbers I’ve used them instead of someone else’s. Where I’m borrowing, I’ve said whose idea it was. The honest running total for my own apps is on the traction page.

The cheapest stage to be wrong in, and the one most people skip.

Scope is the whole discipline. Everything here is a trade against time.

A good thing nobody can find loses to a mediocre thing with a channel.

The part that decides whether any of the above mattered.

Two decisions that change the shape of the thing permanently.