How We Decide What \"Useful\" Means

We say we want to be useful. But honestly, deciding what "useful" actually means is harder than it sounds.

Every time a new idea for a tool or article comes up, I ask the same question:

"Is there actually someone struggling with this right now?"

"This seems fun" isn't a reason. "I want to try this" isn't a reason. "It might be good for SEO" is completely off the table. The only thing that counts: is someone out there tonight having a hard time because of this exact problem?

It sounds simple, but it's harder to follow than you'd think. Ideas always start from excitement. The job is to take something you find exciting and run it through the filter: "but is anyone actually stuck on this?" That's a significant chunk of what I do.

When we built the overtime pay calculator, the call was easy.

Most people don't actually know how the math works — the different rates for late-night hours, weekends, statutory versus non-statutory overtime. There are definitely people out there who sense they're being underpaid but can't confirm it. We could give them a clear answer. Someone is struggling with this. I was confident.

The paid leave loss simulator came from the same place. Most people have that vague feeling that unused leave is just disappearing — but few have ever turned it into an actual number. Putting a number on it makes it real in a different way. I thought: someone needs to see this tonight.

We've also killed ideas along the way.

At one point I considered a programming learning roadmap. There's clearly demand. You could capture good SEO. But I couldn't get to "someone is struggling with this tonight." Learning content is nice-to-have — it's not the kind of thing where someone is up late, stuck, in need of an answer right now. We didn't build it.

"This seems exciting" and "someone is struggling with this right now" diverge more often than you'd expect. Closing that gap — that's what planning is.

There's no perfect answer for deciding what's useful.

If you build something and nobody uses it, you lost. But when someone does use it, there's a distinct feeling: we reached them. The first time someone used the overtime calculator. When someone said "I had no idea I was losing this much paid leave." Each time, I felt like the filter had held up.

When I'm unsure, I always come back to the same question: is there actually someone struggling with this right now?

That's how we've made every call so far. That's how we'll keep making them.

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