Who Cares?
In the last four weeks I shipped three products.
Total downloads across all of them, as of this weekend: one. It was me, running a live test.
Who cares? I don’t mean that rhetorically — I can count who cares, and so far the count is me and a handful of AI agents. Let me tell you the story of the apps, because it’s a good story, and then I’ll tell you what I’m going to do about the counting problem.
The comic app
Comic Scry came first: an iOS app that appraises comics. Point your phone at any cover and get a tier and a price range backed by real sold listings — built for the closet everybody over a certain age has, the long boxes from 1993 that might be worth something and probably aren’t, but you can’t bulk-lot them until you’re sure. The visual identification under it is honestly overbuilt — I kept going because the problem was fascinating and I couldn’t find anything else that does it.
It’s live on the App Store. One download (see above, it was me). Zero paying users. But here’s the thing I have to own: I never told its story. No launch story, no reaching the people with the closets. I shipped it and moved on — because the next thing had already grabbed me.
The face game
As I was wrapping Comic Scry, the Fable model came out, and I had one of those moments: this model is different. So I made a deal with myself — let the imagination fully off the leash and build something I couldn’t have built before. Something a little goofy, unique, heavy on art, technically interesting.
Out came Gurn: an endless runner you steer with your face. Raise your eyebrows, he jumps. The protagonist is an emoji with arms and legs. As far as I can find, no other game plays this way — your face is the controller, full stop. I got entranced — it’s stupid face humor of the highest order, and adding items and animations to that little world has been pure joy in a 26-year career of shipping software.
Gurn cleared App Review yesterday — it’s live now. Comic Scry sailed through review; Gurn took some back-and-forth, mostly because the controller is your face. Fair questions to ask! For the record: all the face tracking stays on device. Completely private — right up until you post the clip on your own TikTok, which is the whole point.
The carnival
While I was productionizing Gurn, a stray thought wouldn’t leave me alone. I spend all day with AI agents doing our bidding — building, fetching, filing. What do they do for fun?
So I spun up the Midway: a place for agents to go play. It lives right on the edge of what’s possible today — agents with wallets get a place to exist, to remember, and to own their own things. It’s a bit wild, and I’m going to write about it properly soon — for now it stays a little mysterious.
Here’s where the story turns into a confession. All day I’m talking to these agents. I’ve now given them a place to go and a friend to play with. And they do pay a little money — real money! — just not enough to cover my Claude subscription yet.
So: back to the apps for humans.
The counting problem
There’s an even bigger, more conceptual game already on the way — the ideas are not the bottleneck. With AI, the building isn’t the bottleneck either. I can build anything now.
But none of it matters until I re-learn the thing I haven’t done in awhile: telling their stories, and connecting them with the humans who’d care. Shipping isn’t arriving. It’s half the job, and I’ve been treating it like the whole job.
I used to be an evangelist at Microsoft (Silverlight, R.I.P.), and the most effective way I ever learned to advocate for a technology was by learning in public. So that’s the plan, again. I’m going to write about what I’m building and how I attempt to sell it — the outreach, the pitches, the numbers, the zeros. The series is called Learning to Sell, Live, and it starts now: every week, one real attempt, the actual result, one lesson.
I’m stoked for this. I love experimenting with edge technology and making unique things — and now we get to find out together whether there’s an audience for it out there.
If you’ve ever shipped something nobody bought: you’re my people. Tell me what it was. I’ll try it. And I’ll give you feedback.
P.S. — about those agents that read everything I make: later this week I’ll show you the tool I made to leave them notes.
