Buy Mindfully was the first project I ever published, which is probably why it still has a special place in my head.

The idea had been sitting in my Obsidian vault for a long time under a much less charming name: Product Durability App. I wanted a place where people could look beyond price and hype and think more seriously about whether a product would last, whether it could be repaired and whether the company behind it was actually building things well.

Part of the reason this project mattered so much to me was that it was tied to a personal promise. I wanted to finally build and publish something, even if it was small. That goal sat untouched for a long time.

What brought the idea back was seeing other people think and write in a similar direction. A post by Steph Ango about buying wisely gave the idea fresh energy, and around the same time I came across other personal writing that pushed me to stop circling the idea and just make the thing.

So I did. I spent one weekend building Buy Mindfully and the next one releasing it. I also ended up writing the first post for this blog around the same time, so in practice I launched both together.

This was before LLMs were good at coding, so most of it was written by hand, like a cave-man. That is part of why I look back on it differently from some of my later projects. The app idea mattered, but the bigger thing was that it forced me to learn by doing.

Buy Mindfully was the first time I really went through the full loop myself: building the app, getting it running on a server, learning the basics of deployment and picking up the first real devops lessons along the way. A lot of what I learned here was less about product strategy and more about coding, shipping and dealing with all the small practical steps required to make something real on the internet.

The core idea behind it was that better buying decisions should not be reduced to star ratings or brand prestige. I was interested in cost per use, but also in something softer: whether a product keeps making you happy over time. A durable object that still feels good to own is very different from a cheap purchase that has to be replaced a year later.

That naturally expanded into bigger questions about waste, repairability and incentives. Why do so many products feel disposable now? Why did repair shops become rarer? Why are so many companies rewarded for pushing replacement instead of longevity? Buy Mindfully was my attempt to turn those questions into a product direction instead of just a personal frustration.

Where it stands

Buy Mindfully is currently offline, though I still think about whether I should bring it back. Even if I never do, it still matters to me because it was the first project that crossed the line from idea to published thing. More than anything, it taught me that the real learning starts when you stop thinking abstractly and actually try to build, deploy and maintain something yourself.