I made an app, and you should too

As you can guess from the subject line of this newsletter, I made an app! It’s kind of like Canva, but optimized for making weird, glitchy graphics.

It's still very WIP, but it already supports a lot of features you won't find in Figma, Illustrator, etc like 20+ types of noise and distortion with detailed controls, and aliasing on text and shape edges.

Check it out here if you want (still lots of rough spots).

But the bigger question is, why did I make this?

First, to see if Claude Code is the real deal

I saw the Twitter hype for Claude Code, but I’m always skeptical of that. 80% of the time the app they glaze as “THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!!” is just OK.

But every engineer I know was also raving about it (and especially Opus 4.6), so I figured I should give it a try.

And…. the hype is real. It’s just insanely powerful, especially for someone like me who already has a decent technical background (used to write code full time, and I know computer science fundamentals).

I picked this app as a test case because anything involving graphics programming is very, very hard. Way too much advanced math that I haven’t touched in 20 years! So I figured if I can do this, just about anything should be possible.

So the verdict is in: it’s legit. You can build whatever you want.

(I also hear GPT 5.4 + Codex are great, but I haven’t tried it)

Just build it yourself

Nobody is going to vibe code a replacement for Salesforce or Stripe. And if they try… they’ll realize exactly why those companies are so massive, and their products are so sticky.

But it’s VERY clear to me that building your own micro-tools is the future.

NOT as a cost savings (it’s almost always smarter to just use an off-the-shelf app if you can), but to solve a problem that no existing tool solves in the extremely specific way that you need.

This has especially big implications for agencies & consultants, because it will completely re-invent their business model.

Essentially, the future of agencies & consultants is to become software-enabled services businesses.

You capture your expertise in a custom app, and your clients pay you for ongoing access to the app. It’s basically the same as the typical retainer model, except that a lot of the rote, lower-level work is done by software instead of humans.

→ For a creative agency, instead of just giving them a PDF of brand guidelines which nobody will ever look at or use, you make an app that creates on-brand assets with a few clicks.

→ Let’s say you’re an ecom consultant. You make an app that integrates all their data sources and finds “profit leaks” (SKUs that aren’t selling, campaigns with bad ROAS, etc). But it’s not just another dashboard (nobody looks at those) - it has an agent that will fix the problems it finds, eg automatically ordering less of a hoodie that’s not selling.

You get the idea… you can literally do ANYTHING. A typical engagement might look something like this:

• 2-4 weeks to design & build the app (project-based pricing)

• Charge them monthly for use & maintenance of the app you made (like SaaS)

• Projects every so often to make updates to the app (eg, add a new feature)

The important thing to note is that your expertise is still the critical part, it’s just turned into software so you don’t have to do it all manually (and clients don’t have to wait for you).

Now here’s the even better part:

This is a WAAAAY better business model than the traditional agency model of selling time by the hour (or project).

And this also means RECURRING REVENUE, which is the best thing on Earth. Instead of going your separate ways after the project is done, now they’ll keep paying you for months or years, assuming your app is actually useful for them.

This has huge implications for valuation if you ever want to sell the company: you want to be valued more like a software company than an agency. And just to spell it out, this could easily be a 2-5x difference in company valuation - it’s literally lifechanging.

It’ll be a while before this becomes the default, but I’m VERY sure this is where we’re headed.

PS - I don’t have anything to sell you right now, so there’s no CTA. But I always love hearing you guys, so if you liked this email, hit reply and let me know what you think! I read and reply to all of them.

PPS - Try my app if you want: https://glitch-app.onrender.com/ (still early and rough around the edges)