Deciding What To Build

The Idea of Unfair Advantages

As I’ve been deciding what projects I want to build in the upcoming year, I’ve been paying special attention to the idea of unfair advantages. More specifically, what makes an app idea especially good for me to build, as opposed to anyone else?

Everyone has a different set of unfair advantages - they just might not be immediately apparent. In my experience, this is usually due to an inability to see outside of my own bubble.

On a very broad scale, access to a computer and the internet is an unfair advantage. Zooming in, I have a lot of experience with writing code - that’s an unfair advantage. But - if you zoom all the way in to the level at which you identify yourself - you’re suddenly…normal.

Given that I identify as a software engineer, and spend most of my time talking to other software engineers, this no longer appears to me as an unfair advantage because my circle contains a disproportionately high number of other programmers.

I can zoom in a little bit more - I have a decent amount of experience in certain domains (such as iOS development) compared to the average developer, but I’m under no illusion that I am at the pinnacle of any subfield of software engineering. So…what are my unfair advantages?

My unfair advantages exist at the intersection of software engineering and my other passions.

I’m a pretty good software engineer, and it’s something that the majority of people can’t do. But that’s still too large of a demographic to be my unfair advantage, at least within the realm of making software.

I also happen to have four years of experience creating videos on YouTube, which is another area where most people don’t have much experience. I’ve learned a lot about filming, editing, and the YouTube platform from making over a hundred videos in that time - but I’m also not the next Marques Brownlee or Casey Neistat.

Putting those two things together is an unfair advantage. I exist in a relatively small subset of software developers who have intimate knowledge of what it’s like to create for YouTube. Not only does that make me better equipped to build good solutions to common issues faced by creators…it also means I’m able to recognize where there’s problems in the first place.

Though I can’t say that I made the connection at the time, I think this piece I discovered a while back does an excellent job of describing the idea. You can be incredibly, incredibly good at something - or you can just be pretty good at 2+ things, and put them together to carve out your niche.

I only had this realization earlier this year, and I’ve since experimented with three different concepts related to tools designed to support creators. Given that it’s not my only interest, I expect that I’ll still continue writing apps in other areas. But it’s a great framework for helping me consider where to direct my effort, and it also means I get to work on things that I care about - which makes the whole process much more fun.