Somewhere around the twentieth kickoff call, I realised I could finish the brand's sentences for them.

"We want to reward our community." Yes. "But we don't want it to feel like a crypto thing." Of course. "Can people claim it without a wallet?" They can. "And can it change over time, like, unlock something later?" It can, we've done that, let me show you. By the time the call ended I'd usually sketched the whole thing in my head, and a lot of the time it looked almost exactly like the one we'd built the month before for somebody else.

Every one of them felt special at the start. A different logo, a different launch date, a different person on their side who was very excited and slightly terrified. And every one, once you peeled off the branding, was asking for some combination of the same handful of things. Mint something. Gate something. Make it change. Make it easy to claim. Make people come back.

We're at twenty-nine now. I counted last week, which is how I know I'd stopped counting a while ago.

Client work is a brilliant teacher and I don't want to be ungrateful to it. You get paid to learn. You get real users on day one. You find out very quickly what brands care about versus what crypto Twitter cares about (very different lists). Almost everything we're good at, we're good at because someone asked for it and we said yes before we knew how.

But client work has a ceiling, and the ceiling is you. Every new brand is another kickoff, another scoping doc, another few weeks of the team rebuilding pieces that already exist somewhere in our repo, another launch night. And launch nights are addictive, I won't pretend otherwise. You can still get hooked on the adrenaline long after it's stopped teaching you anything. At some point you're just a very enthusiastic agency with a nice Discord.

So the question I've been sitting with is simple and a bit uncomfortable. What if we stopped building the same thing twenty-nine times by hand, and built it once, properly, for anyone to use?

Self-serve. Take everything that was always the same, give it to the brand directly, and let the excited-and-slightly-terrified person on their side just go and do it at 11pm on a Tuesday without waiting on us.

It's a strange thing to want. It means building the thing that makes your own calls unnecessary. There's a part of me that likes being in the room, likes being the person who says "we've done that, let me show you". Automating that away feels a bit like writing yourself out of your own story.

The hardest part isn't technical, though. It's deciding what to leave out. Every one of the twenty-nine had one special request, and if we built all of them in, we'd end up with a product nobody can use. A product is mostly a list of things you said no to.

It's also a different game. No hand-holding, no charm on a call. The product has to explain itself, and if it can't, nobody's going to tell you - they'll just close the tab.

I don't know yet if we'll pull it off. I know the patterns are there, because I can finish the sentences.

Maybe it's time to build the thirtieth once.