Why I'm Building My Own App While Running NE Support

Because I don't think you should recommend systems you haven't tested on yourself first.

Alongside the day to day of NE Support, I've been quietly building a small app of my own. It's not finished, so I'm not going to oversell what it does yet. But the reason I'm doing it is worth sharing.

A big part of what I do for clients is finding the right tool or system for the mess they're in: the diary, the admin, the bit of the business that's outgrown a spreadsheet. It's easy to recommend that from the outside. It's a completely different thing to sit down yourself, hit the same frustrations everyone else hits, and work out what actually makes a system worth using rather than just another thing that gets abandoned after a fortnight.

It's a strange thing, building something for yourself after years of building things for other people. Usually I'm the one stepping into someone else's business and working out what they need. This time there's no client to interview, no existing process to untangle, just a blank page and my own judgement about what would actually be useful. It's humbling in away I wasn't expecting, and it's teaching me things about how I advise clients that I don't think I'd have learned any other way.

I'm being deliberately careful about what I share right now. There's still a fair bit to sort out properly before it's ready for the world. That's not me being cagey for the sake of it, it's the same advice I'd give any client sitting on an idea: do it properly before you put it out there.

What I can say is the dream is to launch before Christmas. Whether that happens exactly on schedule, who knows, launches rarely do, but that's the target I'm quietly working towards while everything else keeps running.

If you're sat on an idea for something that would make your own working life easier, whether that's an app, a new process, or just finally documenting the thing that's all in your head, that instinct is usually right. Most business owners just never get past the “someday” stage. Consider this your nudge. And if you'd like a hand building whatever that is, that's exactly the kind of thing I help people with every day.