Nottingham Forest isn't a sensible football club to support. I want to be clear about that upfront. If you were designing the optimal football-supporting experience from scratch - maximum joy, minimum heartbreak, reasonable expectation of trophies - you wouldn't pick Forest. You would pick Manchester City, or Arsenal, or one of the other clubs where success is a reasonable expectation rather than a minor miracle.
But nobody chooses their football club. It chooses you. And Forest chose me, or more accurately, Nottingham chose me by being the city I grew up in. So here I'm, thirty-plus years later, still watching, still believing, still showing up. Two European Cups won in 1979 and 1980, then decades of decline, relegation, administration, near-extinction, and a long, painful exile from the top flight that lasted over twenty years.
It's, when I think about it, the best preparation for building anything worth building.
The long game
Forest fans waited twenty-three years to return to the Premier League. Twenty-three years. Think about that for a moment. That isn't a setback. That isn't a bad patch. That's an entire generation of supporters who grew up never seeing their club in the top division. Kid who were born after relegation in 1999 were adults with jobs and mortgages by the time Forest went up in 2022.
During those twenty-three years, there were false dawns every single season. The play-off near-misses. The managers who were going to be the one. The January signings who were going to change everything. Year after year, the hope would build, the reality would crush it, and then you would do the whole thing again the following August.
Product building is the same. Most of the work happens in the dark, when nobody is watching, when the results aren't there yet. You ship something and nobody notices. You improve it and still nobody notices. You keep going because you believe in what you're building, not because anyone else does. The metrics aren't there. The validation isn't there. The only thing there's your conviction that this matters.
Every single one of my projects went through a period where the only user was me. Where the analytics showed single-digit visits. Where the rational move would have been to stop. Forest taught me that the rational move isn't always the right move. Sometimes you just keep going.
Community is everything
The City Ground on a Saturday afternoon. The Trent End filling up an hour before kick-off. The songs that have been sung for decades, slightly modified for the current squad but fundamentally the same. The bloke next to you who you've never met but who you'll share ninety minutes of collective emotion with - the groans, the celebrations, the fury at the referee, the quiet hope during injury time.
That is community. Not the LinkedIn version of community, where everyone is networking and personal-branding and optimising their connections. Real community. The kind where you share something with strangers because you all care about the same thing, and that shared caring creates a bond that doesn't need to be articulated or monetised.
Building products can be solitary. I build alone, mostly. Saturday mornings with Claude Code, hot chocolate instead of coffee, the house quiet while the family is out. But the people who care about what you're making - the users who send a message saying they found a great pub through your guide, the person who shares your culture aggregator with their team, the fellow builders who understand what it takes to ship something from nothing - that is your community. They're your City Ground.
You don't need millions of them. Forest's ground holds thirty thousand. That is plenty. A small, passionate community that genuinely cares is worth more than a million passive followers who don't.
The underdog mentality
Forest's entire identity is built on being underestimated. A club from a mid-sized city in the East Midlands that won the First Division title and then - in their first ever European campaign - won the European Cup. Then won it again the following year. Brian Clough took a second-division team and, within three years, made them the best team in Europe. That story is so absurd it would be rejected as fiction.
That energy - proving people wrong, doing more with less, achieving things that look impossible from the outside - is the energy I bring to every project. A non-coder building fourteen live products is, in its own small way, the Forest of the tech world. Nobody expects it. Nobody would predict it. The resources aren't there. The pedigree isn't there. The technical background isn't there. And yet, here we're.
There's something clarifying about being the underdog. You have nothing to protect. No reputation to maintain. No expectations to manage. You can take risks that established players can't, because failure costs you nothing - you weren't supposed to succeed in the first place. That freedom is genuinely powerful. It's why the best ideas often come from outsiders, not incumbents.
Ritual and rhythm
Saturday, 3pm. That's when football happens. Not when it is convenient. Not when you feel like it. Not when the conditions are perfect. Saturday, 3pm. The fixture list comes out in June and you know exactly when you'll be at the ground, when you'll be listening on the radio, when you'll be checking your phone obsessively for score updates.
That rhythm - the relentless, non-negotiable cadence of a football season - creates something powerful. It creates habit. It creates momentum. It means you show up even when you don't feel like it, even when the last three results have been terrible, even when the rational part of your brain is suggesting you find a less painful hobby.
Building has the same cadence, or at least it should. Ship on Saturday. Check the stats on Sunday. Plan the next feature on Monday. Not when inspiration strikes. Not when the mood is right. On a rhythm. Because rhythm creates output, and output creates progress, and progress - even slow, unglamorous progress - is what eventually produces something worth showing.
The best builders I know have a rhythm. The best football supporters I know have a rhythm. It's the same muscle.
The thing that isn't work
Football is play. I mean that literally. It's the one thing in my life that isn't work pretending to be something else. It isn't "content." It isn't "networking." It isn't a side project or a learning opportunity or a personal brand exercise. It's ninety minutes of pure, irrational emotional investment in something that doesn't matter at all and matters more than almost anything.
I think every builder needs that. Something that is genuinely play. Something that recharges rather than depletes. Something that reminds you what it feels like to care about an outcome you can't control, to be part of something bigger than yourself, to experience joy and frustration in their purest forms.
The lessons transfer, even though they aren't supposed to. Loyalty. Patience. Belief. Community. The willingness to show up week after week, year after year, decade after decade, regardless of the results. That is building. That is Forest.
You don't stop when it is hard. You don't stop when nobody is watching. You don't stop when the rational choice is to stop. You keep going. Because the thing you believe in deserves your persistence, even when - especially when - nobody else believes in it yet.
You. Reds.
