Request for Apps
We need more of them.
It’s late and all I can think about is apps.
Digital apps, not appetizers. The kind you can buy on the Apple App Store. We need more of them.
Tonight we need a mocktail bar finder so if you don’t wanna drink you can find a mocktail that looks like a drink costs like a drink but isn’t actually a drink. You could go there alone or you could bring a friend or even a date. You’d find the place using the mocktail bar finder app and the experience would be incredibly slick.
My friend Louisa recently told me she has an idea for an app. It’s called “Double date@ and it’s unclear if that’s the name of the app or a typo or if she actually was proposing a double date? I think it’s an app.
I’ve been reading some Cormac McCarthy who. Writes. Like. This. Incredibly terse. Never semicolons thank god. Maybe there could be a Cormac McCarthy app that uses LLMs (large language models) to convert everything that’s not fun to read into something that is.
Paul Graham wants more apps. He recently put out an entire request for apps. He wants someone to apply machine learning to robotics. He wants both spacial computing and new space companies. He wants to eliminate middlemen in healthcare and he wants to find someone talented to build better enterprise glue. He wants stablecoin finance and a way to end cancer. Me too.
I have an app. It’s a music app with thousands of users and no revenue. Maybe it will soon but first I need to finish building a few other apps for other people who also want more apps.
An investor recommended I look into supply chain management. The warehouses need better apps. Hello is this the warehouse manager speaking? Yes this is Cory and I build apps and I would like to inquire about your apps. Do you need a new app? I’m sorry sir we lift heavy boxes with forklifts ain’t nothin them apps fixin to help. You have a blessed day son.
Designers hate making portfolio websites so maybe there could be an app where you sign in with Figma and it chooses your best work and the site is magically created and it’s free because unbeknownst to you we’re actually training an AI designer to replace you and we’re feeding the model your own work. An evil app.
What about supply chain management? The shelves at my local Rite Aid are still half empty. Maybe it’s macroeconomics. Or maybe they need a new app! Can we solve inflation with an app?
Last week I met a few egirls who started a Solana meme coin called $EGIRL. They’re putting girls on the blockchain. I wonder if they’ll need an app?
What about a dating app! It could be a virtual agent you talk to for an hour as it slowly encrypts your soul at which point the soul is sent to Amazon Web Services and commingled with other souls until two connect. This triggers a push notification, alerting the user their soul match has been discovered and can be unlocked for $99.
You see everything can really be an app and this realization is the reason I’m writing to you instead of going to sleep. We need more apps and they’re not going to build themselves unless pretty soon they actually do.
Do you need an app? Please reply.
I hit reply to say that we don’t need more apps imo.
I’ve had some related thoughts which in my head refer to something like ‘Too much tech’. Not everything need to be app-ify. What about establishing new communities or educational resources? Maybe we’ll need an app for that too, but at least we could form new frameworks and meaningful relationships.
I think we’re surrounded in tech bubble by people who benefit from the culture of ‘all you need is app’. Although I'm not hinting for a politics game, I'm sure people really hold such opinions.
I guess in part it's my tech fatigue, but I’ve started to feel a sense of disgust—why don't why we build other things than apps?