The last few months have been the most productive of my life.
I’ve been developing apps, learning new skills, starting hobbies and figuring out more about what I’m actually good at than in the last ten years combined. And it started with a few realisations about something I’d been doing quietly for years without seeing its value.
I build tools. Clipboard managers, remote desktop apps, update checkers, financial dashboards, health trackers, link capture tools, diary search engines. I’ve written about the specifics elsewhere. Each one replaced some piece of software or subscription that was expensive and bloated with something that worked exactly how I needed it to. Most took a few days.
The most ambitious one is Synaptique. It monitors what I’m working on, what pages I visit, what applications I have open - all privately, all local to my Mac - and when it sees I’m doing something related to a resource I saved weeks ago, it surfaces it. It runs its own machine learning model. No cloud. No subscription. Just an expansion of my memory, built because nothing like it exists commercially in the configuration I needed.
For years I thought this was just a nerd thing. A personality quirk. I like building tools. I like the control. I like knowing the data stays on my machine and I can fix a bug whenever I need to without waiting for a developer who never responds.
Then I read a dissertation on polymathy by a researcher called Michael Araki. He describes three modes that people with broad interests operate in. Afferent, which is absorbing from the world. Introspective, which is reflecting and synthesising. And efferent, which is contributing back.
His framework pointed out, quite bluntly, that I was stuck in absorption mode. Building constantly. Learning constantly. But never pushing any of it outward, even though I spend a lot of time helping and mentoring people. The tools I built worked brilliantly for me but nobody else ever saw them. The skills I had were real but they weren’t going anywhere.
That changed things for me.
Learning to share it
I grew up as the weird kid in rural New Zealand. IQ of 156, tested by the government because the teachers didn’t know what to do with me. In a world of rugby and farming and confidence, being the nerd who read about lasers and holograms meant I learned early to keep my internal world private.
That instinct stuck around for decades. Even now, writing these blog posts takes effort. But the Araki framework helped me see that keeping everything internal was the thing holding me back. The reluctance to charge for my skills, the pile of unshipped projects, the gap between what I could do and what anyone knew I could do. All connected. All fixable, once I started pushing outward.
What I started seeing
I started looking at the businesses around me. The restaurant where the staff make you wait because “the computer is down.” The doctor’s surgery where the receptionist fights with a system that takes too long to load. Small business owners paying hundreds of pounds a month for CRM software where they use maybe 20% of the features.
I realised the thing I’d been doing for myself was exactly what these people needed. I could exercise the same instincts and desire to help, just aimed at other people’s problems as well as my own.
TableGuru
The clearest example is a project I’m building right now called TableGuru. I was experimenting with AI voice assistants and started working with an Indian restaurant on automating their phone bookings. During that process I discovered what restaurant booking tools actually cost. The prices were absurd. Every additional feature was an add-on. The tools were legacy systems dressed up with a modern interface, charging restaurants for every bolt-on they could think of.
I looked at that and thought: I’ve built every component of a booking system before in different projects. Calendars, payment integration, email automation, SMS notifications, client management, analytics dashboards. I could combine all of those skills and build something modern, secure, flexible, and cheaper than what these restaurants are currently paying.
But it goes further than that. There are restaurants that have never even considered using booking software because the cost was too high. They’re using spreadsheets, or bits of paper, or notes on their phones. For those businesses, something like TableGuru isn’t a cheaper alternative to what they have. It’s access to something they never thought they could afford.
Same instinct, different people
I’m also building a language teaching platform for a friend who always dreamed of running an online language school but never had the technical knowledge to make it happen. And a nutrition planning tool for a friend in France who spends six to eight hours after each client meeting manually building meal plans. The tool takes the client’s health data and interview notes and generates the plan programmatically, saving hours every day and allowing him to scale his business. And a website for a London talent agency that needed their actors displayed professionally with smart filtering, PDF downloads, and an automated pipeline that keeps everything up to date from industry databases.
These are all the same instinct. See a problem that software could solve. Build something that fits exactly. Make it affordable. Move on to the next one.
What I wish business owners understood
Business owners are great at business. They go into it because they have a dream, a passion, a skill they want to make money from. Unless that skill is software development, technology is usually something they see as a necessary burden. They want to grow their business and reach customers and find new marketing opportunities, but I suspect most of them hate having to deal with software upgrades, website problems, overflowing inboxes, and expensive subscriptions for tools that don’t quite do what they need.
The world has reached a point where most of those problems can actually be solved. A business owner can take a step back, look at all the complicated processes and pain points in their business, and have most of them replaced with something elegant, cost-effective, fast, modern, secure, and private. Something designed specifically for their business that handles their major pain points and lets them take a deep breath and go back to what they actually enjoy, which is running a business.
That’s what I do now. Same skills I’ve had for my whole life. I’m just finally learning how to share them.
If this sounds like your business
If you’re paying for software that doesn’t fit how your business works, that’s not a technology problem. That’s a design problem. And design problems are what I solve.
Tell me what tools you’re using. Tell me what you wish they could do, or what they do that drives you mad, and how much they cost. I’ll come back to you with a suggestion for something custom that’s cheaper, more effective, and built around how your business actually works.
Want to learn hieroglyphs? Try my app Hierolyte.