Stop Looking, Start Leaping: How AI Empowered Me to Build 3 Apps in 6 Months

I used to be the classic "look ten times before you leap" guy. And then, more often than not, I would completely forget the actual leaping part. If an idea or project wasn't 100% perfect, there was zero chance I was going to show it to the world. Which, as you can probably guess, meant a lot of great concepts just sat in a drawer collecting digital dust.

I know I’m not the only one who suffers from this particular brand of perfectionist paralysis. But if there’s one piece of advice I find myself giving website clients over and over, it’s that you really just need an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to get some forward motion and test the space.

If you listen to the heavy hitters in business, people like Daniel Priestley or Simon Squibb, they’ll tell you the exact same thing. Get the core concept together, throw up a sales page or a waitlist, and test the waters. See if the market actually gives a hoot before you spend six months crafting a "perfect" website or obsessing over edge-case features that nobody asked for.

I was thinking about this recently after a tech podcast was weighing up the impact of Amazon's AI integration to the warehouse; my mind strayed from the impact on the workforce, that they were discussing and went, instead, to Jeff Bezos who remains the pioneer of home shopping and optimisation because he considers how to integrate the new, tests it and implements it.  This is what makes Amazon a cutting edge system.  I considered more about the biggest hitters who actually made things happen in their lives.

Jeff Bezos, as mentioned, stood firm in the face of an endless wall of doubters... and did it anyway. Elon Musk forced his vision into reality, no matter how much it sounded like ridiculous sci-fi at the time. Steve Jobs decided we should all have a thousand songs in our pocket, and changed the music industry forever.

Obviously, not everyone is going to build Amazon, Tesla, or Apple, and it’s a bit silly to pretend we are. But the core lesson is identical: every single one of them chose forward motion over doubt. They picked execution over endlessly tweaking the blueprint.

Over the last couple of years, and especially since the start of 2026, I’ve been forcing myself to make that same choice...

And I’m bloody glad I did. With AI completely reshaping our industry right now, taking action quickly meant I didn't get left behind like I might have in the past.

AI is changing everything, and fast. While I still frown on non-responsible vibe-coding, "AI assisted coding" has opened the floodgates, giving us the ability to build bespoke apps and business tools tailored specifically to exact workflows.

Instead of trying to shoehorn your operations into a half-baked template kit or generic software platform, you can grab a Claude Code subscription and build software that actually fits your business.

How many times have we tried to force WordPress to handle a complex web app it clearly wasn't built for? Or wrestled with Monday.com, ClickUp, HubSpot, or Zoho, only to realise they have half the stuff you don't need and lack the three features you actually do?

Now, we can just build the exact tool we need, both for ourselves and for our clients.

This is where the real mindset shift happened for me. A year ago, the old perfectionist in me would have listened to the usual choir of doom-mongers: "AI code isn't viable! It's messy! You need ten years of traditional software engineering before you even think about building an app!"

Meanwhile, the industry is moving at breakneck speed. Websites that used to take two months are being built in minutes. But more importantly, AI didn't make me obsolete; it empowered me to build software far beyond what I thought was possible.

Take FEWD Studio, for instance. I built a visual desktop code editor for Astro and static sites. It’s the first desktop editor of its kind, giving developers a proper visual page-builder experience directly over raw code, complete with visual component creation for Astro. I built it for myself using Claude Code, and now I’m selling it to other developers who use it every day in their professional workflows.

Then there’s GenCSS, my desktop CSS framework generator. I built it because I was fed up with existing CSS frameworks, like ACSS. I wanted a visual way to construct a design system, output clean code, and have it work seamlessly with FEWD Studio (or as a WordPress plugin). It works flawlessly, I tweak and update it regularly, and people are actively buying it alongside FEWD.

And right now, I’m putting the finishing touches on my third app. Sebcentral completely replaces my entire CRM and project management SaaS setup, while baking in a custom voice-activated AI business assistant that offers business coaching based on all that business data. All rolled into one slick desktop app that I built to solve my own headaches, and which is now out there for sale also!

If you had told me back in December 2025 that I’d be developing commercial software apps for business and web development, I’d have been skeptical. It certainly wasn't on my list of New Year's resolutions.

My resolution for 2026 was simply to be courageous. To step out when I felt nervous, to stop waiting for perfection, and to just have a go.

It turns out the doubters stay right where they are, while the people who take a breath and leap forward actually get to enjoy a bit of success.

I’m incredibly grateful for that shift in perspective. It's a brand new game out there, and I'm loving every minute of taking hold of these opportunities. 

For wherever it goes, I won't look back on the ideas I had in 2026 and think: "What if...?"