There is a line I wrote five years ago that I've been thinking about a lot lately. "Maxout can't fail." I meant it when I wrote it, I genuinely did. The logic was simple: If something fulfills you, it can't really fail by the usual definitions. You learn, you grow, you keep going. There was something almost elegant about that framing. It let me feel secure while taking a risk.
The problem is that it wasn't quite true. Maxout did fail. But not in the way I feared it might. Instead, this is what happened:
I built the right thing, then mistook curiosity for demand, attracted the wrong audience, tried to pivot toward what they needed, and lost all motivation in the process.
By the time I stopped, Maxout had become just yet another fitness app. Maxout was in a sea of so many other apps that solved those problems far better than we ever would. I wrote at the time that maybe the audience for Maxout was just one person: me. So I closed it to the public and kept pondering what it could have been.
Recently, I started working at Buffer. And there, I could see that some things I suspected turned out to be true. A remote, async team works really well, much better than co-located teams.
Ownership, the kind that comes from not having investors breathing down your neck really does change how you think about the person using your product. When there is no pressure to hit a number by an arbitrary date, you are genuinely free to care about whether something is actually good.
But the thing that surprised me was what I learned about people. I wrote in 2021 that I didn't want to hire anyone, ever. Freedom above everything. What I understood that to mean was: no obligations, no one else's life tied to my decisions, no risk.
What I hadn't understood is that the right people — a small, deeply trusted group— don't subtract from that freedom. They multiply what you can do within it. I am watching that happening from close range every single day.
There is one more thing that has changed since 2021, and it is harder to articulate without sounding like everyone else (and at times myself) talking about AI right now. So I will try to be specific.
The version of Maxout I always actually wanted to build — one that adapts to you, that understands your training rather than just logging it — used to require either significant resources or significant compromise. The gap between what I imagined and what I could ship on my own (or two of us) was real. That gap has closed considerably.
Not because the hard thinking goes away, but because the execution cost of each step has dropped enough that one person who genuinely understands the whole product can move through it. The constraint I used to use as a reason to aim smaller no longer has the same force.
An example? The first version of Maxout was built as a PWA but following Apple's design guidelines. Not because I wanted to have a PWA but because I didn't have the capabilities to built native Apps using Swift UI. This contraint does not exist anymore. Since then, I've build a native MacOS menubar app as well as a fitness-focussed iOS app using Swift UI.
So I am building Maxout again.
Not with the same confidence I had in 2021 — I'm more careful with confidence now. But with something that feels more durable than confidence: a clearer sense of why it failed, and what I am not willing to repeat.
The original idea was always personal. An app that actually worked for the way I train, built with the care I hadn't found elsewhere. Maybe the audience really is just one person — maybe it starts and stops there. But that's perfectly fine.
What I know now is that building for yourself without lying to yourself about demand or pivoting toward an audience that was never yours, is harder than it sounds. I got it wrong once. I'm trying to get it right this time.
Whether that turns out to be enough, I genuinely don't know. But I think that uncertainty is the right place to be working from.
"Maxout can't fail" was a comfortable thing to believe. What I want to believe now is something smaller and more honest: that building something you care about, and not abandoning it when it gets hard, is at least the right kind of trying.