Does this need to be a product?

I didn't set out to build a product.

I wanted something for myself. It didn't exist, so I built it.

For a while, that was enough.

Then other people started finding it.

A post about WatchMyCalendar got more attention than I expected. People in other forums were looking for something similar. Suddenly, there was a question I hadn't considered when I started:

Does this need to be a product?

Not:

Can I sell it?

But:

Is this something other people actually need?

I think that's an important distinction.

Building something for yourself is relatively simple. You know the problem. You know what you want. You can make the compromises that make sense to you.

Building something for other people is different.

You have to decide which problems are worth solving. Which features are actually useful. Which things should stay simple. And eventually, how much time you're willing to spend maintaining it.

With WatchMyCalendar, my answer was to keep the basic idea accessible and free, and to build the extra things I kept wishing for on top of that.

That doesn't make the original idea less simple. It just gives the project a way to support the time that goes into it.

Maybe that's when something becomes a product.

Not when you decide to charge for it.

But when something you built to solve your own problem turns out to solve a problem for someone else too.