Built for an Audience of One
Most software is built for an audience the builder has never met.
I spent fifteen years doing that. We'd hold roadmap meetings about people who weren't in the room. We'd argue about what "users want" — which, looking back, was almost always shorthand for what the loudest person on the team wanted, dressed up in a focus-group jersey.
The dirty secret of product design is that "the user" is a stand-in. Most of the time, when someone at the table says "users want X," what they mean is "I want X, but I'm not allowed to say that out loud, so I'll make it sound objective."
I used to be that person. I'd build features I'd never use myself, for users I couldn't picture, because the chart said the feature would move a number. Sometimes the number moved. The product still felt hollow.
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These days I build for an audience of one.
The audience is me. The required user is me. The filter for every feature, every layout decision, every word of copy is: would I, the actual person sitting at this actual laptop, reach for this tomorrow morning?
If the answer is no, it doesn't ship. Even if a chart somewhere says it should.
That sounds simple. It is and it isn't.
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The simple part is the decision-making. When you stop hiding behind imaginary users, every product question becomes a private conversation with yourself. Do I need this button? Have I ever, in my real life, wanted what this feature would give me? When was the last time? What did I do instead?
The conversation gets brutal. You catch yourself lying. You catch yourself adding features because they'd look good in a launch tweet, not because you'd use them. You catch yourself building because you're bored, or anxious, or because building is easier than facing whatever the product reveals you don't actually want.
You can't lie to yourself for very long when you're the only required user. The product just sits there. You stop opening it. And you know.
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The hard part is the loneliness.
When you build for a market, you have a story to tell about why the work matters. There are users out there. There's demand. There's traction, or there will be, or there should be. Even if nobody ever uses the thing, you can keep the story going for years.
When you build for an audience of one, the story collapses. The thing matters because you use it. That's the whole pitch. You don't get to point at a chart and feel important.
It's quiet. There's no applause built into the process. No focus group nodding. No team meeting where someone validates the choice. Just you, the work, and the daily question of whether you actually opened it today.
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Here's the thing I didn't expect: when you build for yourself first, the work often resonates more with strangers, not less.
I think it's because honesty is rare in software. Most products are designed by committees pretending to know what a hypothetical user wants. The result is a kind of averaged-out, focus-grouped mush — polite, predictable, forgettable. The hypothetical user never wrote a one-star review, because the hypothetical user doesn't exist.
But when you build something for yourself, refusing to compromise the parts that matter to you, you end up making something with a point of view. And it turns out a lot of people are starving for software with a point of view. They didn't know they wanted it until they saw it. They just kept opening forgettable products and not feeling anything.
The paradox of building for one is that you accidentally make things that resonate with thousands. Not by trying to. By refusing to.
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The catch — and there's always a catch — is that this only works if you actually use what you build. Not "I might use it." Not "I would use it in theory." Not "this would be useful for someone like me." Daily. Tomorrow. This morning.
If you stop using your own product, you've lost the only signal that matters, and you're back to designing for ghosts.
That's why the test for me is always the same: am I opening this thing without thinking about it? Has it become part of how I move through the day? Or am I performing usage to justify the work?
The answer is rarely flattering. But it's always honest.
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I'm not building for a market. I'm building for the person typing on this exact laptop. The required audience is one.
If anyone else shows up — and sometimes they do — that's not a metric. That's a gift.