Every "build in public" thread and every YouTube growth guru tells you the same thing: pick the smallest possible surface, ship the lowest-effort thing that gets the biggest effect, validate, iterate. It's good advice. For this project I did almost the exact opposite — on purpose — and I want to be honest about why, and what it actually cost.
I'm building own.audio: a private home for the audiobooks, music, and podcasts a family already owns, playable on every device they actually use, with a real management story for the one person in the house who ends up being the admin. That product — every device, plus admin — is the reason the low-effort path was the wrong path. This is the long way round, and I'd take it again.
The false start: a web app for a thing nobody uses on the web
I started where a web developer starts: a backend in Rust with Axum, and a React front end on top of it. Clean, familiar, fast to move.
Then it hit me that I was building the wrong surface. This whole product lives on phones and speakers — music and audiobooks get consumed on a mobile device, or at least controlled from one while they play on some speaker across the room. The web app was the thing I knew how to build, not the thing people would actually live in. And as I kept pushing features into the backend, the React front end just fell further and further behind. It was a tax I was paying for a surface that wasn't the point.
