Nobody asked for it

I had a thought.

I was building a side project. I wanted to design a mobile interface I had never seen before.

Not a list you scroll down. Something you move through in two directions.

So I made a 2x2 matrix interface (you probably know it from a SWOT analysis). Everything you put in lands in one of the four quadrants.

I liked it immediately.

Then I asked myself why I was making this. What it was for. Nobody asked for it. It exists because I couldn’t name a single app that had one.

That’s the real reason. It’s not a user’s reason.

Founders do this constantly. We find the thing nobody else does and build it. The reasoning arrives later.

And we know better. Every one of us says we start with the user.

We focus a lot on being different. But different is a comparison. It only says something next to someone else.

Some of those ideas turn out to be the thing. Every design pattern we now call obvious was somebody’s unreasonable idea first.

So I’m keeping mine, and I will finish this app.

But the idea came first and the purpose came second. I don’t know yet if anyone has any use for it.

When did you last build something nobody asked for?