The Tuesday Crisis

I’ve built ten products in the last three months.

An AI-powered marketing platform. A thought manager. A research-backed personalized productivity system. An AI coaching tool that operationalizes your entire AI stack. An adult literacy platform. A personal operating system. A social and career networking platform. Websites for friends’ small businesses. This site. And a few more I’m probably forgetting.

I’m not listing these to impress anyone. I’m listing them because the list is the problem.

I can build anything now. And every Tuesday — sometimes Wednesday, sometimes 2am on a Saturday — the same thought arrives: so what?

The instinct flip

Something shifted in my behavior over the past few months and I want to name it because I think it’s happening to a lot of builders right now.

When I encounter software that does something I need, my first instinct is no longer to buy it. My first instinct is to assess it. What parts of this do I actually need? Where are the gaps? What’s the subscription cost? Could I build the version I actually want for less?

The answer is almost always yes. Not a clone — a version that fits the exact shape of my problem instead of the average shape of everyone’s problem. And the build time keeps getting shorter. What used to be a weekend project is now an evening. What used to be an evening is now an hour.

So I build it. And it works. And it’s better than what I would have paid for, because it’s mine — tuned to how I think, how I work, what I actually need.

And then I build the next one. And the next one.

This feels like a superpower right up until the moment you realize you’ve built ten things and shipped zero of them into the world.

The pipe dream

I want to be honest about something I suspect a lot of builders share but don’t say out loud.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, with every product I build, there’s a fantasy. This one takes off. This one finds an audience. This one generates enough revenue that I never have to sit in another standup. The dream isn’t retirement — it’s freedom. The freedom to build what matters without the constraint of building what someone else decided matters.

That dream is dying. Not because the products are bad. Because I watch versions of everything I’m building appear everywhere, built by other people, sometimes within days of when I had the idea.

An AI coaching tool? There are twelve. A personalized productivity system? Twenty. A thought manager? The category barely existed six months ago and now there’s a Product Hunt launch every week.

The rational part of my brain knows the counterarguments. Maybe it’s the red car effect — you buy a red car and suddenly every car on the road is red. Maybe the existence of competitors doesn’t mean your version can’t succeed. Maybe your specific angle, your specific taste, your specific audience makes the difference.

The irrational part of my brain doesn’t care about the counterarguments. It just sees the field getting more crowded every day and asks: why would anyone choose yours?

The rollercoaster

Here’s the part that’s hardest to describe.

The crisis isn’t constant. It’s not a steady decline into despair. It’s a rollercoaster, and the distance between the peaks and valleys is getting shorter.

The high: I’m building something. The pieces are clicking together. I can see the architecture forming. My brain is making connections between systems I’ve worked on before, and the AI is executing my vision faster than I can think of the next feature. I feel powerful. I feel like the combination of my systems thinking and these tools is genuinely rare. I feel like I’m doing something.

The low: I open Twitter. Someone shipped something similar. Someone with a bigger audience. Someone who’s already monetizing. I look at my ten products and none of them have users. None of them have distribution. I built them for me, or for the fantasy, and the fantasy is deflating. I feel like I’m arranging furniture in a house nobody’s going to visit.

The highs are real. The creative satisfaction of building something well — of seeing a system come together, of solving a problem elegantly — that’s genuine. It’s not fake. It’s not cope.

The lows are also real. The market is flooded. The tools that make me powerful make everyone powerful. The moat I thought I was building was never a moat — it was a head start, and the starting gun has gone off for everyone.

Both are true at the same time. That’s what makes it a rollercoaster instead of a trajectory.

What I’m starting to notice

I don’t have the answer to this one. “The Existential Middle” ended with something resembling a resolution — pay attention to what only you can notice, write it down, trust the quiet part. I believed that when I wrote it. I still do.

But this crisis is different. This isn’t about whether I have something to offer. I clearly do — I just built ten products that work. This is about whether what I have to offer matters in a world where building is no longer the bottleneck.

A few things I’m noticing in the middle of it:

Building is not shipping. I have ten products. I have zero products with users. Those are different things, and I’ve been treating them as the same thing. The building scratches an itch — creative, technical, satisfying. The shipping requires something else entirely — vulnerability, marketing, the willingness to let people see your work and judge it. I keep choosing the building because the building is the part I’m good at.

The “build don’t buy” instinct might be avoidance. Every hour I spend building a tool I could have bought for $12/month is an hour I’m not spending on distribution, on writing, on the work that actually creates an audience. Building feels productive. It is productive. But productive isn’t the same as strategic. Sometimes the strategic move is to pay the $12 and spend the hour on something that compounds.

The fantasy is the wrong metric. “This one takes off and I never have to work again” is not a business plan. It’s a lottery ticket with better odds. The products I’ve built that actually serve me — the content system, the personal OS, this site — serve me because I use them, not because millions of people use them. Maybe the question isn’t “will this take off?” Maybe it’s “does this make my life or work meaningfully better?” If yes, it already succeeded.

Taste is still the differentiator, even in a crowded market. There are a thousand productivity tools. The ones I actually use are the ones where I can feel that a specific person made specific decisions about how it should work. Not the most feature-rich. Not the cheapest. The one with the best taste. If that’s true for me as a user, it might be true for the people who would use what I build.

The comparison trap is a trap. Watching other people ship similar products isn’t market research. It’s self-harm disguised as diligence. I’m not competing with everyone building an AI tool. I’m building for a specific person with specific problems. The flood of similar products is irrelevant unless those products are solving the exact problem in the exact way for the exact person I’m building for. They almost never are.

Where I actually am

Honestly? I’m not sure.

I’m proud of what I’ve built. I’m uncertain about what it means. I’m energized by the capability and exhausted by the existential weight of having capability without clarity.

The Tuesday crisis keeps coming. I don’t think it stops. I think it’s the tax you pay for building in a moment where building is simultaneously easier than ever and less differentiated than ever.

What I’m trying to do — what I think the move is — is to stop treating building as the end and start treating it as the beginning. The product isn’t the product. The product plus the taste plus the distribution plus the willingness to let people see it — that’s the product.

I built ten things. Now I need to ship one.