👋 Hey, I’m Jaryd. I share one stealable idea with you a week on product, growth, AI, marketing, or strategy. My goal is to help with the hard part—growing the thing you’re trying to build. For more: Explore the top ideas | Watch me yap

So I’ve started yapping online recently. And by recently, I mean yesterday and I’ve made two videos so far.

It’s honestly very awkward but I’m leaning into it because 1. it’s a good challenge and 2. I think short-form video can help me grow my newsletter and apps.

And by yapping I mean doing talking head videos that are raw, unpolished, unscripted, and not edited besides captions. Hot takes, opinions, ideas. Yesterday I decided to go on a mini rant while walking and having coffee, and hit record to share a few things I’ve learnt while vibe coding 3 apps and making $0 from any of them.

It was my best TikTok video, relatively speaking.

So I posted it on LinkedIn and it did at least 55X better than any of my last posts. Therefore, here I am sharing it with you guys in email now…my OGs.

There’s a meta lesson at the end I realized a couple hours after posting this (that became my second yap video), I’m curious what you think. I’ve also added some extra comments from a few folks that resonated with me, so…

1. It’s so easy to make literally whatever you want now and to make it really good. This can make it tempting to pursue all your ideas (don't)

2. Good apps have no correlation to making money anymore. Product used to be a moat and advantage but it's not anymore when anyone can make whatever they want and make it really good. I've seen 💩 apps make a killing

3. It's almost impossible to get people to use what you make. All the stories of people making money and posting about it online that you compare yourself too IS NOT THE NORM 

4. A consumer app only has a chance at even having a chance if it does one thing at first, and that one thing can be discovered and done in under 10s. Your hook and main killer feature need to be fast and easy to talk about. This by no means guarantees anyone will care about it or use it but if you don't have that, no shot

5. #4 is particularly true, because if you're doing consumer and you want users you HAVE TO post on social media and make TikTok videos a lot and do whatever trends there are.

6. The apps that grow and make money these days are not because they are good, they just spend a ton of time obsessing over influencers and testing short form video formats. That is the moat now--willingness to spend hours making videos.

7. Because #6 is hard and most of us don't want to do it, we like to sit at the computer adding and building. That can feel like progress but it’s not really. The only thing that’s progress is making an effort to find users.

8. Copy and steal what other apps do for paywalls and onboarding, don’t invent new UI's or new flows that look pretty and feel good. Use apps like RevenueCat to use top performing paywalls and don't custom make things. It just slows you down.

9. Reminder to self—FOCUS ON ONE THING AT A TIME. If you’re working on 4 app projects and have 6 local repos for websites, none really stand a chance. Do one thing first, time box your effort, and then kill it and move on or continue with it.

10. If you're making a consumer app and you won’t use it personally, don’t make it. You're your first most important user.

11. Android is way harder than Apple around submitting and testing your app to the store. Even though apps like Expo let you build for IOS and Android at the same time, IOS is much easier to start with.

12. Just because you can add the feature certainly doesn’t mean you should. Adding is easy. Constraint is the hard part when you can just tell Claude to build whatever and bypass all permissions, but constraint makes your app way better

13. You don't need to redesign your website... it won't help you get new users. If people are not already finding you, no rebrand is going to make a difference

14. Don't worry about what app competition there is in your category. It will make very little difference to anything. Your app will die by your own hands before it dies by competition.

We build our ideas and that’s a ton of fun, then we don’t find users because we don’t invest enough time working the channels and doing that uncomfortable part. So we get annoyed and move onto the next idea we think might hit, build it quickly with Claude, then the same thing happens.

We do it again. And again, no users.

If none of your apps stick and find traction, it’s probably not the idea. It’s you. And I say you including myself more than anyone. It’s the classic “wherever you go, there you are” line…whatever app idea you jump to, if you don’t want to do the growthy stuff, you’ll have the same problem. Good product doesn’t talk for itself.

I have multiple projects going on at the same time. Not good. But if I look at it from the lens of how much I’ve learnt with each build from a product and design and development perspective, then it’s great. The bad part is juggling lots of apps (which can feel innocuously fine in the beginning) and trying to get people to use them.

It’s impossible to get people using even just one app, how do 3 stand a shot?

Then, the meta lesson I got from all this. 👇

Seriously. I’ve posted several videos on TikTok and YouTube. I’ve made awesome thumbnails and added sound effects and tidied up captions to be perfect. Nothing really landed.

Then I did this one take video and used auto captions with typos and just posted it, and it had the best engagement. Less polish worked by orders of magnitude.

Exact same thing on LinkedIn. Most of my posts have got 200-700 impressions of late. A few friends giving me a like.

This one was scrappy. No fancy image, it even had a glare on it. No bolding or formatting and took me 15 minutes to just type and post. It did the best, with over 35k impressions in less than 24 hours.

We spend a lot of time polishing and making this look professional, but sometimes the least professional and most honest and candid things to the best. Not just because they have less polish and come off as more human and authentic, but by embracing the lack of professionalism and neatness, we usually speak our mind most honestly without filter and that’s what people resonate with most. Even fancy CIOs and CEOs big companies spend so much money trying to reach through fancy content.

That’s a nice thing to know given point #5 about the need to be on social. It means the bar to doing the hardest thing is perhaps a bit lower than we think.

—Jaryd (if you’re wondering who am I…👇)