You’d start with a simple idea, but before shipping anything useful, you’d already be thinking about: 

• authentication 

• billing 

• onboarding 

• dashboards 

• scaling

Somewhere along the way, the original idea gets buried under product thinking.

Lately, I’ve been trying a different approach: just build small, single-purpose web apps. 

Something that: 

• solves one problem 

• works instantly 

• doesn’t require an account 

• doesn’t try to become a business

And honestly, it feels closer to what the web was originally good at. 

The real problem isn’t building anymore

With modern tools (and especially AI), spinning up a working app is faster than ever. 

The bottleneck now is something else: discovery. 

These small tools end up: 

• hidden in GitHub repos 

• shared once on social media, then lost 

• buried inside personal portfolios

Which is a shame, because many of them are genuinely useful. 

What if we had a home for these apps?

Not a marketplace in the traditional sense. 
More like a place where you can: 

• browse small web apps 

• instantly try them 

• move on when you’re done

No friction, no commitment. 

I recently came across Unstore while thinking about this idea, and it felt like a step in that direction: a collection of lightweight apps you can just open and use. 

A different way of building

Maybe not every project needs to become a startup. 

Maybe it’s enough to: 

• build something useful 

• put it out there 

• let people use it when they need it

No growth hacks. No monetization strategy. Just utility. 

If more developers leaned into that, we might end up with a web that feels a lot more…usable.