The joy of building on a stupid idea

15 July 2026

Years ago, a few friends and I would go deep discussing on building for the joy of building. I didn't really get it. Building always seemed like something you optimize for results: DAU, revenue, R&D milestones.

After graduating from Tech in Asia, I went the other direction. I built frantically in search of “the one.” A lot of different apps, a lot of different ideas. Most of them ended up as dead repos on my GitHub. I never touched them again.

The ones that survived were the ones I actually used. Family tools and personal stuff. Things I built because I wanted them to exist, not because I was chasing a metric.

TickerTown was a version of this.

A lot of people said it was a stupid idea. Ian and I went ahead anyway. We'd have to agree, to a certain degree, that it is a stupid idea. We gave it a 5% chance of working.

But I felt like this product should exist. People do too much vibe investing. They hear a podcast, get excited, buy something. I wanted a way for people to approach investing more systematically, without losing real money first.

With expectations that low, the stress drops.

Not that I don't care about the product doing well. I would like to think I'm very thoughtful about the entire product-building phase, especially the design. Making sure TickerTown is fun and sticky. Really talking to waitlist users to make sure it's useful.

The low expectations create room to actually enjoy the work instead of anxiously watching for outcomes. That's the part I underestimated and was pleasantly surprised by.

Clarity and focus on just one product, rather than building so many different things (especially with AI where you can spin up something new every weekend), and going deep into it. That really brings out the joy of building and learning.

As far as I can see, building for joy also attracts other people who want to experience it too. It's always nice to have people reaching out, cold, asking what they could do for TickerTown as a passion project. That's always a good feeling (though I'm still keeping the success rate low, 5%).

At the same time, Ian and I are also figuring out what the AI workflow for a small dev team looks like. That part is fun too. We're learning by doing.

Hakuna matata vibes, basically. I'm pretty grateful I get to have this experience.