On Building Tools You Wish Existed
Why the best projects start from personal frustration, and why that frustration is a feature.
The best reason to build something is embarrassingly simple: it doesn’t exist, and you want it.
Not “the market needs it.” Not “this will scale.” Just — I kept hitting this wall, and I got tired of it.
That’s how Folio started. I read a lot. PDFs, EPUBs, long articles saved for later. Every tool I tried made tradeoffs I didn’t want to make: either my data lived in someone else’s cloud, or the reading experience was bad, or note-taking felt bolted on as an afterthought. So I built the thing I actually wanted to use.
There’s something clarifying about building for yourself. You know exactly when it’s working because you feel it. No user research needed. Your own frustration is the spec.
The risk is building something only you will ever use. But I think that risk is overrated.
If the frustration is real and specific — if you can articulate why existing solutions fail — then other people probably hit the same wall. They just didn’t build their way out.
Specific knowledge, as Naval puts it, is built by pursuing what you’re genuinely curious about, not by following a curriculum. Building tools you wish existed is one of the most direct expressions of that. You’re not chasing a trend. You’re following the gradient of your own needs.
The other thing I’ve learned: a tool that works for you first tends to be more honest than one designed to impress.
It’s not decorated with features you don’t use. It does the thing, in the way you actually want it done. That constraint — building to your own taste — is quietly a form of quality control.
Build the thing you wish existed. Use it. Then decide if you want to tell anyone.