Everything is cheap

What happens when everything is really cheap? What happens when it's super cheap to write a blog post, because you can have an AI do it for you? What happens when it's super cheap to edit video or edit audio? What happens when it's super cheap to build an app over the weekend?

What happens is that you begin to devalue your time.

Building little side projects continues to be my kryptonite in this AI era. I can't help but go on boondoggles to build things.

I built my own Granola

Earlier this year I built my own Granola. Why did I build my own Granola? I honestly have no idea.

It was a macOS menu bar app. It used the on-device AI inside macOS. It listened to your microphone, it created transcripts, and it put those transcripts in markdown files on your drive.

Super easy to build. Took me about a day and a half to get it working, another half day to get it clean visually, another day to get it all packaged up and ready to deploy.

And yeah, why? I should have just used Granola or Notion AI. Both those tools do a fine job. I already paid for Notion AI, and I got Granola for free with Lenny's product pass.

So why did I spend time, energy, and tokens on this little app? Because my time had been devalued by how cheap it was to build it.

It's very easy to get distracted by these things, when in truth most of them are not worth it.

Don't get me wrong. It's still incredibly valuable for marketing leaders to write code. In fact, writing code and building things is the way that I believe technical marketers stay on top of their game, even as the AI era swirls around them and threatens our livelihood. If you're a technical marketer, you need to be writing code. You need to be building things.

But you don't need to build everything.

The ones that were worth it

Indeed, there are some instances where it makes sense to build something yourself.

I built a utility to get the most out of Customer.io. There are a lot of things about Customer.io that are great, but there are a lot of things that are super frustrating. So I built a series of Python command line tools to make it easy to use Customer.io.

Recently, Customer.io shipped an MCP server. So combining my command line tools with Customer.io's MCP server, I'm able to send communications to our customers. In the past, that would take me three or four hours. Now it takes me 10 to 15 minutes. And the bulk of that time is actually writing the email that's going to be sent.

So the command line tool was a great use of time, because it has multiplied the value of my time many times over.

Another good example is we run a meetup program. And so I built an internal tool to help us manage all of the meetup organizers around the world, and ensure that they get reimbursed for their expenses on time. That is something that took me a weekend to build, and has proven to be incredibly valuable to our community team.

Ask yourself: does this thing that you want to build multiply your time after it ships? Granola multiplied nothing because I effectively already had the product in Notion. However, this CLI turned four hours into fifteen minutes, forever.

Knowing which is which

So there are times when things being inexpensive to create mean that it's a good thing to do, but there are also times when they're just boondoggles.

And the judgment to know which is which is the thing that I think is the most important in this era where everything is inexpensive and cheap.

If you're reading this, there's a chance that you're about to spend a weekend working on something. The question I want to ask you is: is this thing that you're about to start going to teach you something? Is it going to help your productivity, or does it just sound like a fun project? Any one of those things is a valid excuse, but only the first two are guaranteed to help you be more productive and to maximize your time.