The problem in your week is your first app

Ask people who finished a small app where it came from and the answer is rarely “I had an idea”. It is “I was sick of doing this by hand”. A parent who kept a child’s morning checklist on the fridge. A restaurant owner tracking recipes across three notebooks. A club treasurer texting the same fixture list to forty families every Friday. The app was the fourth or fifth thing they tried, after the spreadsheet and the group chat failed. This is part one of three: how to find that problem in your own week.

1. Ideas are cheap. Problems you already have are rare

An idea is a guess about someone else’s life. A problem you have is a fact about yours. You know how often it happens, what you do today instead, what it costs you, and exactly which part is the annoying one. Nobody has to be interviewed. There is no “would people want this?”, because you already do.

That is also why these apps get finished. Motivation for an idea runs out at the first boring part. Motivation for your own Tuesday problem renews every Tuesday.

2. Notice the Tuesday

For one week, keep a note on your phone with one line per annoyance: the thing you did by hand, how long it took, and the tool you used instead (a text, a spreadsheet, a photo of a whiteboard). Do not judge them yet.

At the end of the week, cross out everything that happened once. What is left repeats, and repeating is what makes a tool worth building. Then circle the one with the most texts. Texting is the sound of a missing app: every message is a person asking for information a screen could have shown them.

3. Write the smallest tool that makes it stop

Take the circled line and write what would make it stop, in one sentence, as a tool and not as a product: “A list of this week’s fixtures that updates when I change it, that every parent can open without asking me.” Not “a sports club platform”. If the sentence has the word “and” in it more than once, you have two tools. Pick the one you would use tonight.

The trap: imagining the version other people would want. That version has accounts, payments, chat, and it never ships. Build the version that fixes your week. Other people’s wants come later, and they will tell you what they are.

4. You are the first user, so the research is done

Building for yourself removes the hardest part of making anything: finding out whether it is wanted. You want it. You will open it on Tuesday because Tuesday comes whether or not you feel like testing.

It leaves one question, and it is a later question: are there other people like you? For a club treasurer, there are tens of thousands. For a problem specific to your own kitchen, maybe not, and that is fine. A tool that only you use, that works, is a finished product. Part three of this series is about what to do when it turns out other people want it too.

5. Draw it tonight

You have the sentence. Now draw the five screens it needs: the one you open, the one where you change things, the one everyone else sees, and the two in between. Boxes, a few words, arrows for where each tap goes. Paper is fine. If you would rather draw with real screens, open the App Builder, pick the starter closest to your problem (a bookings diary, a noticeboard, a checklist, a menu) and rename it. Five wired screens, on your phone, before bed.

Part two is the weekend that follows: from the sketch to a real app on your phone, and what a weekend can and cannot finish.