Here’s the sentence I’d been telling myself, more or less word for word:
If I could just stop wasting time on projects I know are only a play thing, I would finally write more.
The play thing is South Fork Apps. I’ve put something like 250 small web apps on that site. Timers, converters, calculators, little single-purpose tools. I’ve written about the three I actually use. The site has earned me exactly zero dollars.
So there’s the case against it. Lots of hours, no revenue, and a newsletter that keeps not getting written.
The standard I invented after the fact
Ask me why I started building them and the honest answer has nothing to do with money. It was fun to see what AI tools could actually create. That was it. That is why I started building the site. I was building tools and decided I might as well make somewhere to put them.
I never sat down and projected revenue. I never picked app ideas because they’d convert. There was no business plan, because it wasn’t a business, it was me finding out what the tools could do.
And then I turned around and graded it on revenue.
Read that again, because I think a lot of people do this and don’t notice. I set out to do something for fun, succeeded at doing it for fun, and then measured the result against a goal I’d never set. Of course it failed. It was never trying to pass.
That’s not an honest assessment. That’s a standard applied backwards to justify a feeling I already had.
Below the line: what 250 apps with no revenue actually bought me, the one question that settled whether the project was ever the problem, and the reason I pick building over writing every single time.
Disclosure: This article contains no affiliate links, but does include links to other sites that I own and manage.