I’ve always been inclined towards finding the best productivity tools that fit my workflows while also spending countless hours watching productivity gurus on YouTube like Thomas Frank, Ali Abdaal, etc. to learn what the best workflows even are. Somedays, I even consider going back to bullet journaling when I miss the creative tactile pleasure of pen to paper. Of course, there are a lot of benefits you miss out on going analog over digital. But, with time I couldn’t resonate with the ideas of these productivity YouTubers and didn’t love my productivity tools. So, I decided I could build my own digital task manager.
Planting the Seeds: Building Modal
Wanting to build my own task manager also came at a time of wanting to build my own startup. So, I thought, why not make this my first SaaS startup? Enter Modal, a SaaS productivity app designed to follow the Priority Matrix method while incorporating features from other beloved task apps like Things and Notion.
Inspired by Herman’s words in My Product is my Garden, Modal — my newly named task manager app — would be my garden. I would tend to it routinely with care, nurturing it with precision, waiting to bear witness to the fruits it could produce.
Tending to Modal was a chore. Initially, embracing the indie hacker spirit, I envisioned a swift release within a month. However, transitioning from a structured software engineering background at a large tech company, where tasks are distributed among specialized teams, posed a steep learning curve when building a product entirely on my own. Despite this, four months later, I launched a private beta. The reception was less than stellar; feedback at best was lukewarm. I decided I could do a re-write, make it sleeker, and feature-rich.
I poured nearly a year into Modal before launching it on Product Hunt. The satisfaction of seeing it featured on Product Hunt was a moment of pride. The joy, however, was short-lived as the hopeful surge in sales never came to materialize. I found myself at a crossroads, grappling with technical barriers and dwindling motivation in the absence of monetary validation.
Tending to a Wilted Garden
Post-Product Hunt, I continued to toil on Modal, but the struggle became increasingly daunting. The realization hit hard—it wasn’t working. The garden I envisioned, filled with thriving users, seemed more like a desolate field. Faced with this harsh truth, I made a difficult decision—I listed Modal’s assets for acquisition and closed up shop.
The decision to part ways with Modal wasn’t easy. It was my creation, my digital haven, but the reality was that its roots weren’t nourished by the commercial soil I planted it in. To clarify, I am not saying Modal shouldn’t be a product for others, but its essence resonated more personally with me than it did as a commercial entity.
A New Seed: Open Sourcing the Future
I came across Linus’ compelling blog post on why you should build your own productivity tools. The author asserts that we shouldn’t cater our workflows to tools that exist when we can instead code the tools that cater to our specific workflows. In a way, this was what I was doing with Modal — I had a very specific way of doing things, so I built an app around that. But, I tried selling it as a commercial farm rather than tending to it as my personal garden.
I think I’d like to make Modal open source. I’ll build it for myself catered to my workflows, but others can use use it or copy it as they like. I can see a future in which, like Linus, I’ll build more of my own tools and replace the services that I currently settle for. It would feel like a light touch of the gilded age of tech, where coders were mere tinkerers, learning from the code of others, directly copying it and modifying (a time before the young Bill Gates would issue copyright triggering the creation of copyleft).
While there are many problems worth solving that could make a person a pretty penny, I’ve recognized a distinction that some of those solutions are best kept…as a garden.