I got into the consumer app space because I witnessed an app called Umax make millions. Umax is an API wrapper that rates how attractive you are and people had to pay a subscription fee to gain access to the result.

This app made me realize how much demand was sitting there, unclaimed, in the consumer app space. Building a product that solves a random problem for people and getting paid for it sounded too good to be true. I decided to officially double down on consumer apps.

Keep in mind this was in the pre-claude code era where code was still relatively expensive. A month later, I shipped Pillar, a self-improvement tracker.

Within three weeks I scaled it to 50M+ organic views and 8K downloads, and I hadn't spent a dollar on ads. That's about as clear a signal of product-market fit as you get. Even until this day we still have new users paying us.

Then I made the mistake that first-time founders make. I lost focus.

I stopped doing the boring work as obvious bugs piled up and started thinking about the next idea. In retrospect I should have stayed focused on one singular product and made it good. A few apps in the same category launched after I'd already moved on went on to do hundreds of thousands in profit a month. The market hadn't changed. The timing hadn't shifted. I simply just left the market because I was not "interested" anymore.

The same thing happened with my second app called HeightGPT. It is a GPT wrapper that claimed it could predict and maximize one's height. A product that was built for social media virality. The plan did work out and 67K people downloaded it.

Fun fact here is that I never used it personally for more than 5 minutes a day. I never talked to a single user and shipped almost nothing for months. 67K people downloaded my app and got silence back.

After voluntarily abandoning two products that clearly had traction, I went on to build more products that ended up in similar situations.

Now I'm working on Snag, which shows you free stuff near you. It's simple information arbitrage: someone's getting rid of something, someone else wants it, we connect them. We just crossed $30K MRR recently.

The difference this time is that I actually took my time and think from a user's perspective. I open Snag on weekends. Bits of my apartment came from it. One Sunday I watched a free mechanical keyboard appear a mile from me so I went and got it. Best feeling ever. When you use your own product, you don't need systems to make yourself keep working on it. The small annoyances bother you personally, so you fix them.

I think the most underrated question in startups is really "do you use your own product?" It sounds too obvious to be useful, but it isn't. When I look at the products that compound, they're almost always built by founders who live inside their own creation.

I still wonder what Pillar would look like if I'd stayed six more months. I still think about those 67K HeightGPT users sometimes.

One realization after burning months on failed projects and scattered ideas is that I wasted far too much time trying to figure everything out by myself.

Every problem I kept slamming into had already been solved dozens of times by someone else. I just refused to look because I convinced myself I needed to discover it my own way. That stubbornness was arrogance dressed up as independence.

I fell into what I now call originality obsession. I treated any form of borrowing as weakness or even shame. I'd rather crash into every wall in the name of pure invention than study how someone who'd already succeeded built a smoother path. It felt noble on the surface. In reality it was slow, expensive, and mostly just low-level repetition of other people's past failures.

The proof was always right in front of me. Ali rewatched his idols' fights frame by frame and drilled their moves until they became his own, while Spielberg and Lucas still trade scripts and storyboards and openly borrow each other's rhythm. The people at the very top of their fields are constantly copying, calibrating, and stealing from one another, and I was pretending I could outrun all of that on sheer originality alone, which is really just bad math dressed up as conviction.

Munger taught this quieter than anyone. He never set out to invent grand new theories. He pulled classic models from physics, biology, psychology and applied them ruthlessly to business, investing, and life. The real shift happened when I stopped romanticizing originality and started copying deliberately. I began seeking out people who had already reached the outcomes I wanted and treated them as living maps. I closed my ego long enough to do a brutal disassembly.

That single change, copy first then iterate, has saved me more time and pain than almost anything else.

All the greatness I admire started with humble imitation. The breakthroughs came later, only after a deep, honest possession of someone else's proven logic.

The most practical reminder I can give myself every morning: stop trying to be the first to everything. Start by becoming a good student of those who already figured it out. The rest tends to follow quietly from there.