Kirubakaran Athmanathan
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What to Build Next?

Nov 10, 2018
Published on Aug 27, 2025. It was sitting in drafts. It's funny that I wrote this before I spent 5 years working on histre, and am publishing it now.

Why?

Writing helps me clairfy my thoughts. I'm trying to figure out what I'd like to build next. I feel a bit stuck on the question, so I'm writing to get me unstuck. So why not write in private? I also see that I may have an issue getting started. The last couple of things I built went nowhere, for various reasons. So I sense that I'm spending a lot of time trying find the perfect thing, which is the worst thing I can do. Spending time working on finding what I want to invest the next few years in is fine. But spinning my wheels from some combination of fear of failure is not great. So I thought that if I worked in the open, then there's no such thing as a "launch" that I can put off.

Criteria

Must:

  1. b2b
  2. simple sales
  3. can build mvp in less than two months
  4. bootstrapable

Nice:

  1. ml enhancements possible - so I can learn it
  2. dev tool, so I can use it myself everyday maybe

Target Audiences

Devs

If I build some dev tool, I can use it myself and that'd be great.

Sales / Marketing

This is probably easier crowd to sell to than devs. But there are so many tools.

Communication

Communication tools are super interesting, as they are horizontal.