It always starts the same way. I see something, read something, overhear something. A small thing. Barely worth noting. And then it doesn't go away. It sits in the back of my head while I'm making the kid's lunch, while I'm scrolling job listings, while I'm watching Forest lose to someone they should be beating. It sits there and it starts growing limbs.
By mid-afternoon it's got a name. By teatime it's got a colour palette. By the time the kid is in the bath I'm thinking about how the landing page should feel and what the navigation structure looks like. I haven't opened my laptop yet. I haven't written a single line of anything. But the product is already half-built in my head, and the only question left is whether I'll have the energy to build it tonight or whether it'll have to wait until tomorrow.
It never waits until tomorrow. If it could wait, it wasn't an obsession. It was just an idea.
How Modern Retro started
I was looking at old photographs. Not doing research. Not working on anything specific. Just looking at pictures of high streets from the seventies because that's the sort of thing I do when I'm avoiding something else. And I saw a hardware shop -- Woolworths or something similar -- with that specific seventies look. The orange signage, the brown trim, the slightly wonky lettering. And the thought appeared: what would a modern brand look like in that setting?
That was it. That was the spark. Except it wasn't a spark that flickered and died. It was a spark that caught. By the time I was cooking dinner I was thinking about which brands would be funniest, which ones would be most visually interesting, what the aesthetic should be. My wife was talking about her day and I was nodding in the right places while mentally generating a 1974 Nike storefront.
I sat down at nine o'clock and didn't get up until half twelve. By then I had six images generated and a rough site structure. The next evening I had twenty. By the end of the week, I had a live site with ninety-six brands and a scoring system I'd invented at eleven o'clock on a Wednesday. The gap between "huh, interesting" and "fully functioning website" was about five days. Most of the actual building happened in maybe twelve hours total, spread across evenings.
How CultureTerminal started
Different trigger, same pattern. I was frustrated with how I consumed culture news. I follow dozens of sources -- design blogs, music sites, culture magazines, tech commentary -- and they're scattered across a dozen apps and bookmarks. I wanted one place. One feed. One screen that showed me everything that was happening across the culture landscape, updating automatically.
The thought hit me on a Monday. By Tuesday evening I was building it. By Wednesday it was live. RSS feeds pulling from thirty-plus sources, categorised, automatically updating. CultureTerminal. The name came to me while I was putting the kid to bed -- I remember the exact moment because I actually said "CultureTerminal" out loud and my four-year-old asked me what a terminal was and I had to explain that it's like a screen that shows you things, which is a reasonable definition for a four-year-old and also a reasonable product description.
How Oishii London started
This one was personal. We'd been trying to find a good Japanese restaurant in our area of London and the options were either generic review sites that listed everything regardless of quality, or food blogs that covered the whole city but were impossible to filter. I wanted a curated list. Not every Japanese restaurant in London. The good ones. The ones where someone with taste had actually eaten and could vouch for them.
I built Oishii London in a single evening. The name came first -- oishii means "delicious" in Japanese, and I'm learning the language, slowly and badly, mostly through an app I also built. The design came together fast because I knew exactly what I wanted: clean, minimal, Japanese-influenced. No clutter. No ads. Just the restaurants, presented beautifully. It was live by 11:30pm. The obsession to live product pipeline had taken about eight hours from first thought to deployment.
The obsession spiral
There's a pattern to how these obsessions develop, and I've become quite good at recognising it. The first stage is the trigger -- the moment something catches. The second stage is incubation -- the hours where the idea is running in the background while I do normal life things. The third stage is the commitment -- the point where it tips from "that would be cool" to "I'm building this tonight."
The commitment is the important bit. Loads of ideas pass through the first two stages. I have five or six ideas a day that make it to incubation. They rattle around in my head for a few hours and then fade. That's normal. That's healthy. Not every idea deserves to be built. The ones that make it to stage three -- the ones I can't let go of, the ones that are still nagging me at nine o'clock when I open my laptop -- those are the ones that become products.
I don't have a system for deciding which ideas survive. It's not a scoring matrix or a prioritisation framework, despite fifteen years of advertising training that says it should be. It's more like the idea decides for itself. The strong ones won't let go. The weak ones drift away. My job is just to notice which is which and to have the discipline to only build the ones that survived the day.
The point of no return
There's a moment in every obsession build where it stops being optional. Usually it's when the thing starts looking like something. When the landing page has a layout and the name is in place and the colour palette is working and you can squint at it and see the finished product. That's the point of no return. You're not going to close the laptop and walk away from something that's 60% done and looks good. You're going to stay up an extra half hour and ship it.
That half hour is always the best part. The polish. The small details. The moment where it goes from "functional" to "considered." Adjusting the spacing. Getting the font weight right. Adding the one small touch that makes it feel finished. Those thirty minutes are where taste lives. Anyone can build a functional page. The extra half hour is where it becomes yours.
I know this pattern isn't sustainable at the current rate. Fourteen products in a month is a pace driven by novelty and the sheer backlog of ideas I'd been sitting on for years. It'll slow down. The obsessions will become less frequent, or I'll get better at letting them go. But right now, in this moment, the pipeline from thought to thing is open and flowing, and I'm going to keep feeding it until the ideas stop grabbing me by the collar at half past eight and refusing to let go.
