Poets and Products

Alright, so nobody wakes up on a Tuesday morning and thinks, you know what this world needs right now?……another poem.

I mean, who in their right mind would open their notebook, look at the state of humanity, and conclude that what we’re really missing is a four-line rhyming verse about a dying flower?

And yet, someone writes it.

The same goes for products. Nobody wakes up thinking, you know what’s missing from my life? Another app. Another way to take photos of my food and share them with everyone so they know I have a life.

And yet, someone builds it.

The poet typically sits alone somewhere trying to put feelings into words that have probably existed for thousands of years. The product builder sits in front of a screen, or several, trying to solve a problem that people might not even have figured out how to describe yet. Both end up spending an unreasonable amount of time on something that, to everyone else, seems entirely optional.

And the funny thing is, neither can quite explain why they feel the thing needs to exist. They just have this idea they can’t seem to leave alone.

Occasionally, that turns out to be enough.

The audacity of making something nobody asked for

There’s something a little weird about creating things, especially when you think about how much time people spend doing it without any guarantee that anyone else will care.

Before Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, nobody was submitting a feature request for a tragedy about two teenagers with shitty family dynamics. I mean, I doubt there was a petition going around asking someone to finally write a few lines about heartbreak or drinking poison because the other person did it (which is dumb in my opinion)

And before someone built the first spreadsheet, nobody was probably sitting around thinking, if only there were a grid of cells that automatically calculated things for me. Well, perhaps someone was. I mean, accountants have always been a weird breed.

Look, the thing is, a lot of what we now consider essential started as an idea that probably seemed unnecessary to most people at the time. Nobody was asking for it because nobody knew what life would be like with it.

We’re quite good at asking for improvements to things we already do understand. We know what annoys us about our current music app or social media app, which part of our workflow takes too long, or why the software we use makes a simple task unnecessarily complicated. Ask us things that could be faster or cheaper, and we’ll have a list of suggestions ready.

But asking someone whether they’d like to read a poem that puts a feeling they’ve never been able to explain into words is a different thing altogether. The same goes for a product that changes how they approach a problem they thought they’d have to live with.

How are you supposed to ask for something when you don’t know it exists?

Sometimes, the person making something has to get a little ahead of the people they’re making it for. Not because they know better than everyone else, necessarily, but they’ve noticed something worth exploring and want to see where it leads.

Of course, this is also basically how we end up with 17 productivity apps that all promise to help us get our lives together. You see, having an idea doesn’t automatically make you a visionary. Sometimes it’s just an idea, and sometimes the world would genuinely be better off without it.

Still, somebody has to be willing to try.

The poet and the product builder have the same problem

I’ve always found it funny how much work goes into making something that, if you’ve done it right, barely feels like work to the person experiencing it.

Take a poet trying to describe the sadness of leaving a place you no longer belong to (Basically the first half of Meiyazhagan) . They might spend weeks on it, changing words that seem perfectly fine, deleting entire stanzas, then bringing them back because the original was somehow better. Eventually, they publish twelve lines that someone reads in thirty seconds.

Now imagine someone building a product. They’ve noticed that people keep losing track of what they’ve learned every time they switch between apps. (See what I did there… you know… cos lmnts.app…anyway...) They spend weeks thinking through the problem, testing different approaches, removing features, and rewriting things that looked perfectly good yesterday. After all that, someone uses the product and gets what they need in half a minute.

The creator has spent weeks thinking about an experience the other person barely has to think about at all.

A good poem doesn’t announce how difficult it was to write ( a bad poet might). It just makes you feel something, and you might never stop to wonder how many terrible drafts the poet had to get through to make those twelve lines work.

A well-made product is much the same. You click a button, find what you’re looking for, and carry on with your day. You don’t think about the decisions behind it, or the argument the team probably had about whether that button should even exist.

Most of the work is invisible to the person on the other side. Maybe that’s part of the fun of making things, even if nobody is going to send you a thank-you note for getting the spacing or the font right.

Most people won’t care. That’s part of the deal.

Now, here’s the less romantic side of making things.

You spend months writing a collection of poems, finally publish it, and discover that eleven people have read it. Three are friends, two are relatives, and one is your mother, who has read it twice because she thinks the first five readers might include you.

You spend months building a product, launch it to the world, and eleven people sign up. Three are friends, two are relatives, and your mother somehow manages to count as two users.

Ya laugh it up…cos It’s funny until you’re the person who made the thing. When you’ve spent that much time on something, it’s hard not to feel that other people should care about it too. I mean, why wouldn’t they, right? You’ve thought about it for months. You worked on it with such care, and you have spent entire nights tweaking the UX or Fixing the bugs…others have to care…right?

Then you put it out into the world, and the world doesn’t care as expected.

The internet makes this particularly strange. We can now announce our creations to billions of people, and most of them will never know we exist. They have their own problems, their own interests, and approximately forty-seven other tabs open. Your creation is competing with all of that, and nobody is obliged to give it a chance just because you worked hard on it.

Sometimes the thing you’ve made isn’t very good. Sometimes it’s good, but nobody knows it exists. And sometimes people understand it perfectly well and simply don’t need it. It’s tempting to assume the world just isn’t ready (trust me!), but that’s a rather convenient explanation to reach for every time something doesn’t work.

You have to leave room for the possibility that you got it completely wrong.

That’s probably one of the harder parts of creating anything. You need enough conviction to spend months working on something that might go nowhere, while accepting that your conviction doesn’t count as evidence that other people will want it.

The poet can write another poem tomorrow. The product builder can try another version. Neither has any guarantee that the next attempt will work out.

And honestly, what else can you do? You make the thing, put it out there, and see what happens.

But then someone finds it

Every now and then, someone comes across something you’ve made and gets it in a way you couldn’t have planned for.

They read a poem and think, Wait, other people feel this way too? Anyone who’s ever found themselves in a book or a song knows what I mean. It’s a strange thing to feel understood by someone who has no idea you exist.

Or someone starts using a product and realises they’ve been putting up with an annoying little problem( like how switching learning apps make you start things all over again) for years when they didn’t have to. Maybe it doesn’t transform their life. It just saves them half an hour every week, or means they don’t have to repeat the same frustrating process for the hundredth time. Small things, really, until you imagine going back to how you did them before.

The person who made the thing might never know what it ended up meaning to someone else.

The poet was probably thinking about a particular feeling when they wrote those lines. The product builder was trying to fix a particular problem. Neither could have known exactly who would eventually find their work useful, or what that person would take from it.

And then, somewhere along the way, the thing takes on a life of its own. Someone reads the poem years later and connects it to an entirely different experience. Someone uses the product in a way the original builder hadn’t anticipated.

I find that quite lovely, actually. You can spend all that time making something for reasons that are entirely your own, and then someone else comes along and finds their own reason to care about it.

You don’t get to control that part. You just hope the thing finds its way to someone who appreciates it.

Not everything needs to justify its existence

Of course, poetry and products aren’t quite the same thing.

A poem can exist simply because someone wanted to write it. It doesn’t need a business model or a retention strategy. Three people could read it, and it might still have been worth writing. There’s something nice about being able to make something without having to prove that it’s useful.

A product has a slightly harder time with that argument. If nobody finds it useful, you can’t keep insisting that people just don’t understand your vision. (Again…trust me, I have tried.) Eventually, you have to accept that people have other things to do and your app isn’t one of them.

Fair enough. Products do have to earn their place in people’s lives.

But I wonder if we’ve become a little too accustomed to asking what everything is for before we let ourselves get excited about making it. What’s the market? Who’s the audience? How much value does it create? When are you going to stop with this product bullshit and get married?

These are reasonable questions, particularly if you’re trying to build a business and would like to pay your bills.

Still, not every interesting idea starts with a neatly defined problem and a spreadsheet proving it’s worth pursuing. Sometimes you notice something that bothers you, or you come across a possibility you can’t stop thinking about. You don’t know whether it’ll work, and you certainly don’t know whether anyone else will care. You just want to see if there’s something there.

I think there’s room for that kind of curiosity, even when you’re building something practical. You don’t have to know exactly what you’re going to end up with before you begin. Sometimes you only figure out what the thing is supposed to be by trying to make it.

Of course, at some point, you have to stop listening to your own enthusiasm and pay attention to the people you’re making it for. Being attached to an idea doesn’t make it a good one. If you’re building a product, you have to be willing to change things when reality doesn’t quite match your expectations.

But that doesn’t mean the original impulse was pointless. You noticed something, followed it, and found out what was there. Even if the result wasn’t what you expected, at least you know a little more than you did before.

I don’t think every poet sits down to change the world, and I doubt every product builder wakes up thinking about their contribution to humanity. Sometimes you just have an idea that won’t leave you alone, and after a while, doing nothing about it becomes more annoying than trying.

So you write the poem. You build the product. You spend an unreasonable amount of time getting something right that most people will probably never notice, then put it out into the world without knowing whether anyone will care.

Usually, life goes on. A few people might like what you’ve made. Most won’t come across it at all, and that’s probably how it should be. We can’t all spend our lives paying attention to everything everyone else creates.

But occasionally, someone finds the thing at exactly the right time. They read a few lines that put a feeling into words they’ve been searching for, or they use a product that makes an everyday frustration disappear. Something that began as an idea in a stranger’s head ends up making a small but genuine difference to someone else’s life.

The creator might never find out. They could be off writing another poem or building something else entirely, having no idea that the thing they made has become part of somebody else’s story.

And maybe that’s enough. You don’t have to know exactly who will find your work, or what they’ll make of it. You just have to care enough to make it in the first place, and be willing to let it go once it’s out there.

Nobody asked for another poem. Nobody asked for another product. But the world would be a very dull place if we only ever made things people already knew they wanted.

Sometimes, someone makes something anyway, and years later, someone else is very glad they did.

I think that’s a good enough reason to keep making things.

And my Claude Code session just reset. So, yeah. Back to building.