I Built Something Nobody Asked For (And That's the Point)
What happens when you do something for fun not for conversion optimization
I’ve been grinding for a while now.
Trying to make my business work. Trying to build the right offers, write the right content, ship the right things at the right time.
It’s the solopreneur grind, and you may be familiar.
It can be stressful, unrelenting, and not leave room for fun when it doesn’t seem to be working.
This week, I decided to just not give a f--k and build something that was fun.
There was no business plan or clear ROI.
Just a thing I made because I let my curiosity lead me without worrying about whether someone would buy it or not.
Pure curiosity, no strategy
For the past month or so, my business partner has been talking about worldbuilding. It keeps coming up in conversations with our franchising clients about how to think about their community and their brand.
So I picked up Ben Settle’s book on the topic, but it sat there for a while.
Then this week I read Kim Doyal’s article where she applied worldbuilding to Harry Potter, and it sounded cool.
I wanted to do the same thing for Star Trek because I am a Trek nerd (I had a book about the schematics of the Enterprise when I was a teenager…wish I still had it).
That was it. Pure curiosity. No business reason.
I just wanted to explore what makes the fictional universes I’ve loved for decades work. Star Trek. Lord of the Rings. Star Wars.
Not the plots or the characters, but the worlds themselves: What makes a world like that endure for decades? And how can brands learn from it?
The thing is, I’ve been part of building brands for a while. The hotel I built in Colombia, we thought a lot about branding, not just the logo, but the space, what we wanted it to feel like and be like.
I’ve heard the term “worldbuilding” over the years and have seen people connect it to branding. But I never explored it much.
This week I finally did.
I used Claude to help me think through the frameworks, then used Claude Code to build a website around it. I bought a $12 domain. I listed a $7 PDF on Gumroad. The whole thing took 6-8 hours spread across a few days.
Was I supposed to be working on something else? Yes.
The plan for this week was to get a totally different PDF finalized and out in the world. That was the thing I was going to do for myself.
Instead, I built this:
The detour that still builds
After college, I had no idea what I wanted to do.
I was debating a PhD in philosophy of education. I was thinking about joining the Marines (knee surgery killed that one). I was thinking about buying an old beat-up truck and just tooling around out west.
I was burned out.
Seventeen years of being a straight-A student and I couldn’t stomach another 6-10 years of school without knowing for sure that was really what I wanted.
The truck idea was tempting, but I kept thinking practically: how do I explain that on a resume in a year or two?
I chose Peace Corps. It was nothing I’d ever planned for. An adventure I hadn’t seen coming.
But it was a deviation that still built something for the future. It gave me new experiences. New friends. I learned a language. And I didn’t have to worry about explaining it.
This week’s project was the same thing on a tiny scale. A deviation from the plan that still built for the future.
I learned Claude Code and actually shipped a real project with it. I went deeper on branding than I would have if it was “work.”
And because AI helped create the frameworks and connections, there’s stuff in there for me to explore and discover that I didn’t already know. That’s the part that’s hard to explain but easy to feel: it’s genuinely exciting to interact with something you helped build but that still has more to teach you.
I’m already thinking about doing Game of Thrones next.
What it gave me (even if nobody buys the PDF)
Here’s the honest accounting of what a “useless” project produced in one week:
I had fun. For real.
First time in a while that I was building something and not stressing about whether it would convert or grow or perform.
No analytics. No email sequence. No worrying about whether it’s going to sell.
It was nice not to have to do any of that.
I learned a new tool. Claude Code has been sitting on my computer for weeks and I hadn’t really used it. Now I have.
That skill carries forward to every project after this.
I went deeper on branding. Not because I had to for a client deliverable, but because I wanted to. Curiosity is a better teacher than obligation.
And the biggest one: I’m excited again. That feeling matters more than most solopreneurs give it credit for.
When you’re burned out and running on fumes, excitement is fuel. You can’t buy it and you can’t fake it.
You have to stumble into it by doing something that actually interests you.
Build something useless on purpose
If you’ve been grinding for months (or years) and everything feels like it has to justify its existence with revenue or growth, try this: spend a few hours building something nobody asked for.
Pick the thing that sounds fun, not the thing that sounds smart. Ship it and see what happens.
Maybe a few people will buy it, and it’ll help them. Maybe it’ll blow up into something amazing. Maybe nobody will care about it.
But you’ll still learn. You’ll still have fun.
And sometimes I think that’s what you need to do when you’re burned out, and you’re tired: just find a way to have some fun.