Build the Toy: Use Weird Ideas to Stay Sharp, Find Insight, and Avoid Burnout

Hey Reader,

Focus. Relentlessly. With precision. Insane Discipline. Unreasonable levels of work. Just you. Heads down. Do the work. Ship the roadmap. Hit the milestones.

But also? Build the toy....

This is really about permission. Somewhere between all the jobs, it’s easy to become a project manager. But. Often. Builders have to build to remember why they’re building.

Building the toy is how builders build. You’re probably doing it already. You’re hearing it from an investor, a dev you keep distracting, or the whole internet yelling "do the one thing."

Ignore it. Kinda. Building for many founders is the default mode and you should be at peace and embrace it, because it’s who you are and more importantly this is how new things get discovered.

Sometimes this looks like building. Sometimes it looks like high value procrastination, your brain running around making connections while you’re supposedly doing nothing productive, or worse, doing something counter productive.

When I say build the toy, I don’t mean shipping a feature or catching up to parity. I mean the weird thing you made inside the platform that nobody asked for. The dashboard you built for yourself because the existing one doesn’t work for you, the hacky zapier meets rubber bands internal tool you spun up by mistake for fun. The stupid self-indulgent idea that doesn’t obviously "ladder up" to the business.

That.

For builders. Our brain is wired chaotically, we need to make a thing, with our hands, always, it’s not a hobby, it’s literally how we think, including the driveway of 72% completed ideas you dropped for the next one.

Startups have an epic habit of turning builders into operators and it’s prob for good reason as you go through your CEO glow up, but, suddenly you’re spending more time talking about building than actually building. You are no longer grinding in the trenches, and that has some perks. But. You become a CEO who’s good at talking about building, but not at actually building.

The moment you stop building toys is the moment you start dying as a founder. For builders, toys are the pathway to:

Stay sharp: Your instincts atrophy when you only build what’s expected.

See opportunities: New paths reveal themselves through play, not planning.

Remember who you are: You’re not just a CEO. You’re a builder who happens to run a company.

Fight burnout: The toy is often the only honest space you have left to think and be uniquely you. No expectations, no market narrative. Just you, with some curiosity...

Without toys, you become predictable. One could say predictable founders get outmaneuvered by dangerous ones who are fighting to not be predictable?

Build Toys IS NOT a strategy. It’s not build toys instead of focusing. Sometimes the only way to stay in motion is to build something that feels like play, that makes you smile, that takes you back to the roots of who you are.

Most fab ideas don’t come from reading something. They come from the builders in the pit who made a toy to solve their own friction. Then it becomes something.

Slack came from a dev tool inside a failed game.
Gmail came out of a 10% time experiment.
Twitter was a side thing born inside Odeo.
(the famous pivots)

Toys first. Traction later. Sometimes.

Sometimes is important, because this doesn’t work if you’re using toys to procrastinate. If you haven’t done the work. If you’re avoiding the reality. You don’t get to build toys if your real product isn’t shipping. But if you’re shipping? If you’re doing the work? Then build the toy.

The point of all of this, is when done honestly, toys aren’t distractions. They’re the real work in its purest form. They’re detours that reveal new insight. Teach you things and show you things your roadmap can’t. For builders its how we explore a system, not by diagramming it, but by touching it, breaking it, seeing it, loving it, hating it. And sometimes, the toys become the roadmap.

Sometimes building the toy is the thing that keeps you building at all. It’s the dopamine, the spark, the reminder that you still love this. That you’re still dangerous.

And even if your silly toy is of no value to anything ever, they still move you forward. They still make you sharper. Those new inputs. A new pattern for your brain to decipher. A needed break. Whatever. Doing something intellectually stimulating has benefits.

The permission to stay connected to that compulsion and protect that weird space where building happens without permission and maybe ends up being the place where founders build a thing that matters.

Build the toy. If I can be of service, feel free to grab time.

LFG.

-- James