Try many things, and change with the times. How I want to work from here

Not narrowing down to one

In NexA Voice #088 I talked about not narrowing a business down to one thing. The usual advice is to focus: pick one bet and put everything into it. Sometimes that is right.

But things change faster now. AI keeps making it cheaper to build, and a way of working that was normal yesterday can stop working within months. If you bet on one thing and it misses, having no next move is the scary part.

You only know what lands after you ship it

You can’t tell what will land before you try. A plan you thought through may fall flat, and something you built on the side may be what people respond to.

So I build small, ship it, watch the response, and fix it. Doing that more often beats trying to guess the right answer up front. With AI lowering the effort per attempt, I can make far more attempts than before.

Lately, I’ve been shipping a lot

In the last few weeks alone I shipped Aiiro, an iPhone app that turns two birthdays into wallpapers; FloatBar Timer, which shows time left as a slim bar; a simulator for estimating AI API costs; and a ranking of 100 riots and uprisings around the world.

Side by side they probably look scattered. But they all come from the same motion: turn an idea into something that works, and put it out there. I don’t expect every one to land. Even the ones that don’t leave material for what to build next.

Changing when things change

Doing many things doesn’t mean scattering on a whim. It means staying ready to switch quickly when things change.

Try the new model when it comes out. Rebuild when the way people use something changes. Stop what isn’t working. To make those calls fast, keep building and keep more options open. That is the principle I want to work by from here.

Let’s build something together

If you think along similar lines, I’d really like to do something together. A company that wants to test a new business on a small scale, someone with an idea but not enough hands to build it, a maker who is also trying lots of things. Any shape is fine.

It’s fine if you don’t know what yet. We talk, and if there is something worth trying, we build a small version. If it doesn’t fit, we’ve learned that, and we move on.

Reach out any time through nariyachan on this site, or on X.

So, I’ll keep trying things

Rather than settling on one answer before moving, I’d rather change the answer as I go. I’ll keep recording that process here and on YouTube.

So I’ll keep doing all sorts of things. If you think we could work together, please say hello.