The Most Valuable Thing I Built Made Zero Money
Like any normal teenager, I spent large portions of my time hacking together Perl scripts to streamline my Linux setup.
One script in particular helped me backup and restore all my configuration files. As someone fond of reinstalling new Linux distributions every fortnight, it came in very handy. I made it public, and it ended up getting featured in a Linux magazine.
It felt like magic. Tinkering quietly in the hallway of my parents’ house, creating something from nothing and sharing it with the world. I didn’t know anyone who coded. I had no mentor, no plan. Just a noisy modem and a compulsion to build things.
That compulsion is still there: it’s just shape-shifted. Over the years, it’s taken me from writing Perl scripts to building complex SaaS applications, from founding startups to leading engineering teams, and—more recently—to coaching other leaders looking to build something meaningful whilst retaining their sanity. Along the way, I’ve written wonderful and woeful code, forged technical relationships with the biggest property and parent websites in the UK, and built a $150m company.
But if you’d told 17-year-old me that the most valuable thing I’d ever build was a free meditation app with zero revenue, I’d have been perplexed.
I’ve meditated for nearly 20 years and kept a journal from day one. I knew the value of keeping one, but reading others’ journals was just as powerful—seeing how different people struggled, broke through, got stuck again. So I built a social network for meditators to share their practice journals. I called it OpenSit.
I was the primary engineer, but a few members also contributed their own fixes and features. It never made any money and I never tried to charge. It was a side-project—a thing I tinkered on in the evenings because I cared about it, the same way I’d tinkered with that Perl script years before.
I learned a lot doing everything myself. How to build a community from scratch. How to balance technical work with design and marketing. How to focus on the highest-impact work when your time is limited and no one’s paying you.
Then doors started opening.
One morning, I woke up to an email from Alex Tew, CEO of Calm—now valued at $2 billion. He told me he liked OpenSit. I was flabbergasted that he was even aware of it, but we had a nice chat and stayed in touch.
A year later, Calm had a job opening and Alex invited me to apply. It didn’t work out in the end (see: Ruby developer applies for JavaScript job) but it was an opportunity I would have missed entirely if I hadn’t built something and put it out there.
Separately, someone emailed me out of the blue with a feature idea for OpenSit. We had some calls and stayed in contact. A year later, this person came back with funding. They were launching an app for the US market that offered pain relief through mindfulness. OpenSit was a solid base to build on and they wanted to acquire it.
And they did. It wasn’t life-changing money, but it was a significant outcome for something that was just a free side-project. I went to work with the new team as CTO and we got to partner with one of the UK’s leading mindfulness research centres.
Then another door: whilst doing in-person user research at that centre, I met a new consultant brought in to assist us. A year later, he was starting a new venture and asked me if I wanted to join as a cofounder. I said yes, and we went on to raise over $45m for our vision of remote work.
All from a side-project that made no money.
I tell this story because I think it reveals something about how careers actually work—especially in Tech. We’re trained to think in straight lines. Land the role, climb the ladder. But looking back, the most consequential moments of my career came from things I built in the margins: late evenings, weekends, the hallway.
The Perl script didn’t lead to a job. OpenSit didn’t generate revenue. But both created surface area for luck to land on. They put me in rooms and inboxes that I had no business being in.
Are side projects still valuable in the age of Cursor and Claude Code? Absolutely. How we build is changing, but that we choose to build for the thrill of it still says a lot about us.
Consider this your permission slip to keep building in the margins. Revive that side project. Not for your CV or your personal brand, but because you care about it, because it scratches an itch that won’t leave you alone. Share it and stick with it. You have no idea what doors it might open—or which version of yourself might walk through them.