I wanted to build an app. From the moment that thought took hold, my notes started filling up with lines that began “it would be nice if there were an app that…”. Before long there were more than ten of them.
On paper that looks like a good problem to have. In practice it was the opposite. Too many ideas, and no way to tell which one to pick up first.
Wanting everything, doing nothing
I wanted to do all of them. But I only have one body, and my time is limited. So what actually happened was that every idea stayed half-interesting in the back of my mind, and not a single one got started.
That is the most wasteful state there is. You are not resting and you are not working. You are just carrying the whole list around.
So I did what I always do now, and talked it over with my AI partner Kuro (Claude).
“You are not cutting ideas. You are ordering them”
Kuro’s answer changed the shape of the problem in one sentence.
Jun, I don’t think this is about reducing your ideas. It’s about putting them in order. Let’s keep all of them, and decide together which one to move on first.
Something in my shoulders let go when I read that. I had been quietly bracing myself to throw ideas away, and I did not want to. I did not have to. I only had to line them up.
That felt like something I could actually do.
I asked Kuro to look up the apps that already exist
To put them in order, what I asked for was market research. For each idea on my list, one at a time: does something like this already exist? Kuro searched the web and checked.
If I had tried to do that myself, it would have meant scrolling through app stores forever, hunting for anything similar, comparing them, and starting again with the next idea. A full day of that and I would not have finished. Kuro worked through them one after another and organized what it found.
And the results took my assumptions apart — in a way that felt good, not discouraging.
The rule I had not seen: easy to build means already crowded
The biggest discovery came out like this.
Jun, this is harsh, but there’s a pattern. Easy to build means everyone can build it, which means it’s already full of competitors. The ideas you thought would be simplest to start on are the ones where the store shelves are already packed with strong apps.
Once it is said out loud, it is obvious. Anything I look at and think “I could probably make that” has been thought of by thousands of other people, in exactly the same way, and plenty of them have already built it. It is easy, so it got built first. Arriving late to that shelf means being buried on it.
Turn it around, though, and it tells you where to aim: the thing that is easy to build and yet, for some reason, nobody has built. There are not many ideas that meet both conditions. But because Kuro had checked mine one by one, I could finally see where those gaps were.
Sorting the list into stages made it light
With the research in hand, Kuro and I split the ideas into a few levels:
- Start on it now.
- Look into it a bit more first, then start.
- Let it sit and mature for a while.
- Honestly, pass on this one.
And here is the strange part. The weight I had felt from having too many ideas simply vanished.
It was heavy because I was looking at all of them at the same time. Once they were arranged in a single line, “right, this one first” became something I could say without hesitating, and the first step stopped being frightening.
Having a lot of ideas isn’t a bad thing. It means you have plenty in your drawers. You just don’t have to open every drawer at once. One at a time is fine.
What I would take away from this
I doubt I am the only person who has ground to a halt because there was too much they wanted to do. If that is you, you do not have to force yourself to throw ideas out.
Ask an AI to look up what already exists and help you set the order. That alone gets the traffic jam in your head moving again. The part I could never have reached on my own was that one observation: the easier something looks to build, the more competition is already sitting there.
Deciding what the next step is — just that — and today already feels like a day I moved forward.
If your list is still a pile rather than a plan, the earlier piece on turning too many ideas into a plan pairs well with this one. And once you have picked a candidate, I also wrote about asking AI whether the app will actually make money.
