You’ll find an audio edition of today’s newsletter below. Enjoy.
I was standing in the bathroom at Ski Liberty, boots half-buckled, kids already annoyed at me for taking too long, when I teed up the first prompt.
Not the kind of thing I planned. I'd been kicking an idea around for a few weeks — a tool to help virtual assistants track their daily LinkedIn outreach for clients. The problem was straightforward: the reporting was all over the place. Sometimes a WhatsApp message. Sometimes a Notion doc. Sometimes a Google Sheet no one updated consistently. It was chaos disguised as communication, and I kept thinking there had to be a simpler way to hold it together.
But I hadn't built it. I'd thought about it. That's different.
The ski day was supposed to be a ski day. Just me and the kids, cold air, some runs, maybe a hot chocolate halfway through. Somewhere in the lead-up to loading into the car, I decided to add a constraint: I'd build something. Only at the resort. Only on my phone. Only on the chairlift. Done before I pressed the button to start the car on the way home.
The first prompt went in while I was still in the bathroom. Then I put the phone back in my pocket and went to find the kids.
What ended up getting built over the course of that day was more than I expected. The activity tracker. A lightweight CRM for LinkedIn relationships. A way to pull in connections and set reminders and see the last time you reached out to someone. Not a polished product. But a real one. One that works. One that people are actually using now.
The part that keeps sitting with me isn't the tool itself. It's how little I needed to get started.
No wide block of time. No proper setup. No planning document. Just a hunch, a voice prompt, and thirty minutes of stolen chairlift time between runs. And then the next ride. And the next one.
I've been using tools like Lovable and Whisper Flow for a while now. What Whisper Flow does specifically is let me talk directly to a development environment — I'm not typing, I'm speaking, which means I can iterate while I'm doing something else. On a ski lift. In a car. On a treadmill. In the thirty-one minutes between dropping my kids at school and getting to the office.
Those aren't wasted minutes anymore. They're working minutes.
I know what some of you are thinking. That this is fine for someone who has ski days with their kids and long car rides and open treadmill time. That not everyone has those windows. And I hear that. But I also want to push back on it a little, because what I'm describing is not luxury time. It's margin time. The time most of us fill with scrolling. The time between things.
You have more of it than you think.
And here's the thing about building in those moments: you don't need to arrive at something finished. You need to arrive at something started. The ski lift build worked because I'd already been building reps in shorter windows. There was no way I could have moved all the way through that build in one day without those earlier, messier, quieter attempts. The ones where nothing worked but I learned what wouldn't.
Had you not tried, nothing would exist.
That's the whole thing. The whole point. The whole reason I'm writing this.
There's a version of you that has an idea sitting somewhere in the back of your head. A tool, a product, a system, a thing you keep almost starting. And it's still not started because the conditions aren't right. The time isn't there. The plan isn't solid enough yet.
I'm telling you the conditions aren't coming. The time isn't going to clear. The plan is going to stay in your head until you start talking to something and see what it makes back.
Start in the bathroom if you have to.
If you're in Baltimore and want to build alongside people doing exactly this — messy, real, in-progress — come to Baltimore Creators. Head to baltimorecreators.com.
Or if you've been sitting on something bigger than an app — something in your business that's stuck — the Blind Spot Finder is a good place to start seeing it clearly: https://tally.so/r/obeOlx
This is Ground Control. Patrick.
P.S. The full episode is short and pointed. Worth the listen: https://podcast.patrickrife.com/