Find your project

Portfolios, dashboards, marketplaces, or automating your own job.

The best first project is something you actually want to exist. Wanting the result is what carries you through the inevitable rough patch. If you're staring at a blank page, here are the shapes that work well for a first build, roughly mapped to who you are.

Show yourself off

Portfolio or personal site. A one-page site for your work, your writing, or your studio. Fast to build, genuinely useful, and a perfect way to learn the whole loop end to end. Designers and creatives: this is your lane, and it doubles as a live design playground.

Put something out there

Landing or marketing page. Validating an idea, launching a product, promoting an event? A sharp landing page with a signup form and analytics tells you within a week whether anyone cares. Founders and marketers live here.

Fix your own workflow

Internal tool or dashboard. A tracker for your clients, a dashboard that pulls your numbers into one screen, an intake form that replaces a messy spreadsheet. Operators and product folks get the most immediate payoff here, because you feel the win the same day.

Build a small product

A marketplace or MVP. Two-sided apps (buyers and sellers, hosts and guests) are ambitious but very doable once you've met accounts and databases later in this group. Start with the core loop (list a thing, browse things, contact a seller) and add the rest once it works.

Skip the app entirely

Automate your job. Sometimes the right build isn't an app at all. If your goal is to move faster at work, the answer might be a script that cleans a weekly export, a dashboard over data you already have, or a set of Claude skills that turn your team's repeated tasks into one-command workflows (see Cowork, and the Skills chapter later). GTM, ops, and content folks: this is often higher-leverage than any website.

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