I used to roll my eyes at the “ship fast, worry about the rest later” crowd. I’d seen enough startup graveyards. Full of solo devs and indie hackers who built in a frenzy, shipped a dozen half-finished things, and disappeared quietly. I didn’t want to be that person.

Then I re-read my own post about what I built in 30 days with Claude AI, and I genuinely couldn’t account for all of it. Working products. BETAs. Things I couldn’t have touched six months ago without knowing a single line of real code. 

And I thought: okay, maybe I need to check myself here.

The Idea Board Problem

I opened my dashboard and looked at my idea board. The list was endless.

Not in a “this is exciting” way. In a “this might be a problem” way.

I still think of most of them as experiments. I’m deliberately in exploration mode, and that’s by design.

The goal was always to build a portfolio of micro-SaaS projects with generous free tiers, things that are sustainable rather than just flashy, and that compound into something real over time: the permanent capital brand I’m building through Ryoka.

That’s a three-to-five-year play. Not a sprint.

But I have a dedicated Claude project folder called “idea bin.” And that itch, just pulling the trigger, spinning something up, deploying a random project, is sometimes genuinely hard to resist.

This Is What the Rabbit Hole Looks Like

This is where most indie builders go wrong, and I’ve watched it happen enough times to recognize the pattern.

You get traction on one idea. It doesn’t quite convert, so you pivot to the next one. Then another. Then you’re six months deep, twelve projects in, and none of them have users.

The problem usually isn’t the ideas. It’s the compulsive building without a filter. Every new tool (and especially something like Claude AI) lowers the activation energy so much that it stops feeling like work.

So you build more. And more. And eventually you look up and realize you’ve been busy without moving.

I felt that pull. Every morning I’d sit down with a clear schedule. Dedicated time for each project, dry runs, testing, incremental improvements, and still end up asking Claude about something completely new before noon.

So I had to ask myself honestly: Am I heading toward shipping dozens of things nobody wants and becoming a deadbeat wannabe?

My Honest Answer

No. And here’s why I believe that:

I built a dedicated sub-brand within Ryoka specifically for this. It exists to hold experiments. The ones that work, the ones that fail, and everything in between. The failures don’t pollute the brand. They’re accounted for.

I’m not a software engineer. I never was. For me, building with Claude is also a form of education. Understanding the ins and outs of how products are constructed, what makes them break, and what makes them stick. That has value independent of whether a project generates revenue.

I know where my real focus belongs: TWO Docs and Sorano are my working BETAs, and they deserve most of my attention. The idea bin doesn’t change that. It just runs in parallel.

Documenting all of it, including the weird tangents and failed experiments, is part of the point. That’s the story I’m building alongside the products.

Revenue Isn’t the Metric Right Now

This is probably the part that most traditional startup advice would argue with.

Revenue matters. Of course it does. But it’s not my north star right now, and I think that’s okay if you’re clear-eyed about it.

Ryoka is a long-term build. Three to five years. The foundation I’m laying, the experiments, the learnings, the content, the micro-products, all of that compounds.

Chasing early revenue from the wrong product too soon is how builders end up optimizing for the wrong thing. I’d rather build something that belongs in a real portfolio five years from now than squeeze margin out of something disposable today.

The Stupid App Series

That said, I’m still planning to build a series of ridiculous, deliberately stupid app ideas. Not everything needs to be meaningful. Not everything needs to solve a real problem.

Sometimes building something absurd is just what keeps you sharp. It breaks the pattern. It removes the pressure of consequence and reminds you that building can actually be fun.

I have more room for error than I give myself credit for. And I intend to use it.