Building Something Nobody Asked For (But I Want Anyway)
On building from a feeling instead of a spreadsheet.
Nobody asked me to build 142.
I think that’s important to say out loud, because some mornings I forget it, and I start acting like there’s a queue of people waiting for this thing. There isn’t. There’s me, a domain, a Substack, and a feeling I can’t quite put down.
No investor told me the market needs this. No focus group raised their hand. There’s no petition, no waitlist of thousands, no viral thread with people begging for exactly this. Just me, sitting with the sense that something’s a bit broken, and deciding (probably foolishly) to do something about it.
Which is terrifying, if I’m honest..
Because the voice in my head is pretty relentless about it. What if nobody wants this? What if you’re the only person who feels this way? What if you spend a year of evenings and weekends on something and people just shrug and carry on scrolling..?
I don’t have a neat answer. What I’ve got is a feeling, and a handful of conversations where someone said “yeah, actually, I’ve been thinking about that too”.
That might be enough.. It might not.. I genuinely don’t know yet..
But here’s the thing I keep coming back to, and the thing that’s made me actually open the laptop instead of just talking about it: I’m building this because I want it to exist. For me. I’m the user I’m building for. And if it turns out other people want it too, which I think they will, that’s the whole point.
That’s a different thing from “nobody asked for it.” Nobody asked for it, but I’m asking for it. I’m the one who’s tired of opening an app to see what my friends are up to and instead getting served three ads, a reel from someone I’ve never heard of, and a photo from a bloke I went to school with who I don’t think I’d recognise in the street now.
So what is it I’m actually building?
142 is a social app with a cap. You can have 142 friend connections. That’s it.
No followers. No follower count. No likes. No algorithm deciding what you see. No infinite scroll designed to keep your thumb moving after your brain has checked out. No “people you may know” quietly suggesting the ex you’ve spent two years not thinking about.
Just the people you actually chose, and the things they’re actually up to..
I know how that sounds. It sounds like I’m building the anti-app, and there’s a long graveyard full of anti-apps that nobody uses because they were built to be against something rather than for something. I’m trying very hard not to fall into that trap. I don’t want 142 to be “Instagram but annoyed.” I want it to be something that feels, when you open it, the way it felt to text your best friend back in the day before text messages had read receipts and everyone had eighteen group chats..
A small, warm, specific thing. Not a global feed. Not a town square. Just a place for your people..
And the reason I keep pushing on it, even when the doubt gets loud, is that every time I talk to someone about it, there’s this pause. A little one. Where their face changes and they go “huh.” And then they tell me something unprompted about how much time they waste on their phone, or how they’ve muted half their group chats, or how they haven’t seen a friend’s post in a while..
That pause keeps happening. And it keeps happening with different people, about different bits of the same underlying thing. I think that means something. (Or I’m very good at picking the right people to chat with. Probably a bit of both.)
There’s a version of this where I wait. Where I put up a landing page, collect emails, run some ads, try to “validate the idea” before writing a line of code. And I get why people do that. It’s sensible. It’s the done thing.
But I’ve done the sensible thing with other ideas and watched them die in the validation phase, because validation without a product is just a popularity contest for a promise. And promises are cheap. I’d rather build a scrappy version of the actual thing and show it to ten people I trust than have two thousand strangers tick a box saying they’d maybe use a better social network one day.
So the plan (and I use the word “plan” loosely, the way you might use it to describe “I’m going to start running more this year”) is roughly this:
Build small. Build ugly first. Get something onto a phone I can hand to a friend. Watch what happens. Fix the bit that made them frown. Hand it to someone else. Repeat until it either stops frowning or I do.
And write about it. That’s what this Substack is for. Not to manufacture a launch narrative or perform founder-ness at anyone, but because the writing keeps me honest, and it keeps me moving. If I’ve told you I’m building it, I have to actually build it. Which is the single most effective accountability trick I’ve found for me..
Here’s the question I’ve been sitting with for a few weeks now.
Is it okay to build something just because you want it to exist?
Not because a form full of strangers said they’d pay. Not because there’s a market gap with a neat little dollar sign in it. Just because you, personally, want to use the thing, and you’ve got a hunch a few people you know might too.
I’m going to argue yes. Not “yes, as a hobby” but “yes, as a reason to actually ship something.” Because the alternative (and I say this as someone who has absolutely lived the alternative) is that you spend your life scrolling through other people’s things and never making your own. And if I’m going to lose 30 days a year to my phone, I’d rather lose some of them to building than to watching.
If you’re building something nobody asked for too.. I really do get it. The uncertainty is mad. The little voice is loud. The spreadsheet doesn’t care about your feeling.
But the feeling is the reason you started. And I don’t think that’s as soft a reason as the business books make it sound.
I’ll let you know if I’m still saying that in six months.. hopefully you’ll be able to see before then anyway..
Matt