I kept building with the wrong goal in mind

I've shipped things that worked and still missed. Not because the product was bad. Because I had the wrong goal going in. Wrong goal means wrong first moves, wrong decisions all the way through. No amount of good execution fixes it.

What this is

I built a tool with Vercel v0 called Path Finder. It asks you one question: what are you actually trying to build toward?

Five answers: money fast, equity, reputation, learning, or lifestyle. Each one implies a completely different set of first moves. A money-fast project has a paywall before it has features. A reputation project has a write-up before it has users. Treating them the same is how you end up six weeks in with something nobody needed you to build yet.

If you're not sure which goal fits, there are four formats to help you find out. A diagnostic quiz, a branching question flow, a 2x2 trade-off plot, and five "day in the life" scenarios. Same five paths, different ways to surface which one is loudest right now.

Why I built it for myself

I skip the planning step. Not because I think it's unimportant. Because nothing in my tooling forced me to do it, and it's easy to just start building.

This is now the first thing I run in the Playbook section of modrynstudio.com before touching a new project. It takes three minutes and it's already caught me about to build the wrong thing once.

Where it lives

It's at modrynstudio.com/playbook/path-finder. No account, no sign-up, nothing stored. Run it, pick a path, get to work.

The Playbook is a new section of the site. This is the first entry. More plays get added as I build and refine them.