The first paying customer was the test that mattered

Seventy people signed up to MyOS off the back of one Reddit post. Felt great. Felt like proof of something. But sign-ups are cheap. The test I'd told myself I was running was whether anyone would actually pay to keep using it.

The first paying customer changed how I thought about the whole project. Not because of the money. Because somebody, somewhere, had compared the cost of a coffee against the value of the thing and chosen the thing. That's a different signal entirely.

Everything I build now, I'm trying to get to that signal as fast as possible. Anything before it is theatre.