61 Apps and a Motivational Quote

I get a text from advisor and investor Chris Mahl:

"Hey, we haven't seen each other in 15 years. Let's find a time to catch up. I'm in San Francisco all the time."

Turns out he's at the Omni, so I head over to see him.

The catch-up

We start catching up — what we're both working on, all the changes we're seeing in technology, the usual sweep of 15 years compressed into an hour.

Then he says:

"I love Netlify. I've built 61 apps on it."

61 apps.

Where he's building them

From his phone. Walking around. Sitting in his hot tub.

Whenever he has an idea, he can just build it.

That's the part I keep turning over. Not the number — the lack of a setup step. No laptop, no terminal, no "I'll get to it this weekend." The distance between having an idea and having it running on the internet has collapsed to about the length of the idea itself.

Then he says: "By the way, if you're into fitness, check out my app. It's also got motivational quotes. I think you could use one."

What 61 actually means

Nobody builds 61 apps if each one costs them a weekend. You build 61 when the cost of trying is close to zero — when a bad idea is cheap to find out about and a good one ships the same afternoon.

That changes what an app is. Most of the 61 aren't products. They're thoughts he decided to run. Some of them are probably for exactly one user, and that user is Chris.

The old economics said an application had to justify itself before it existed. That's gone. And when it goes, the number of people who get to build goes up by an order of magnitude — which is the same shift I keep writing about from the governance side and the pricing side. This is what it looks like from the builder's side.

The hour

15 years since we'd seen each other.

Within an hour, we're talking about a world where someone can have an idea, pull out their phone, build an application, and ship it on Netlify.

And apparently get some much-needed motivational advice along the way.