From Jigs to Products: How Side Tools Become Real Businesses
In a physical workshop, a jig is never the end goal. It's a temporary thing you build so that something else can be built more easily, more accurately, or more consistently. It's not designed to be beautiful or even durable. It just needs to work well enough to remove friction from the task at hand.
Software has its own version of jigs, even if we rarely call them that. Small scripts, internal dashboards, bots, shortcuts, one-off tools that exist purely to make our own work tolerable. They're not planned as products. They're built because repeating the same task manually starts to feel wasteful, and building a tool feels faster than enduring the annoyance.
What's interesting is how often these jigs outgrow their original purpose.
Most meaningful tools don't start with a grand product vision. They start with irritation. Something you do often enough that the cost of not fixing it becomes higher than the cost of building something quick and imperfect. When you build a jig for yourself, there's no abstraction layer. You're not imagining a user; you are the user. The feedback loop is immediate and unforgiving.
Once a jig works, it gets reused. Reuse exposes cracks. Cracks invite small improvements. And slowly, almost without ceremony, the tool becomes something you rely on. At that point, polish stops being optional, because breakage now costs you real time and real attention.
A classic example of this pattern is Slack. Before it was a company, Slack was an internal communication tool built by a team trying to make a completely different product. The original product failed, but the communication jig survived because it solved a genuine problem for the people using it every day. Email was too slow, too fragmented, too heavy. The internal tool was lighter, faster, and more humane. It didn't succeed because it was visionary. It succeeded because it was necessary.
This pattern repeats across software history. Tools like Git, Basecamp, and Notion didn't emerge from speculative market gaps. They emerged from builders trying to reduce friction in their own workflows. The product came later. First came the need, then the tool, then the realisation that the tool might be useful beyond its original context.
That same path is how Imizuzu came into existence.
It began as a personal convenience. I was sending myself voice notes constantly — ideas, reminders, half-formed thoughts — often in different languages. Typing them out was slow, and leaving them as audio made them hard to search, reuse, or organise. The friction wasn't dramatic, but it was persistent.
So I built a simple WhatsApp bot. You send a voice note, and it sends text back. No positioning, no onboarding, no product language. Just a jig that removed a small but frequent annoyance.
But once it existed, its use expanded naturally. Transcripts became inputs for other things. To-do lists. Shopping lists. Drafts. Translations. Patterns emerged not because they were planned, but because that's how people were already using the output. The jig started suggesting its own next steps.
At some point, the question quietly shifted. It was no longer "Should this exist?" but "What happens if this breaks?" When the answer became "That would be a problem," the jig had crossed a threshold. It wasn't just a helper anymore. It had become the thing itself.
This is how most real pivots happen. Not as sharp turns, but as slow drifts. A tool gets reused. Reuse demands reliability. Reliability demands structure. Structure forces decisions. By the time you realise you've built a product, you've already been maintaining one for a while.
There's a particular strength in building this way. When a product grows out of a jig, it carries an honesty that's hard to fake later. Features exist because they're used. Flows exist because they evolved. Complexity arrives reluctantly, only when the simple version can no longer cope.
Instead of asking what product to build, it's often more useful to ask what you keep fixing for yourself. The answer is usually smaller, quieter, and far more real.
Most products don't begin as ambitions. They begin as jigs on messy workbenches, built to get through the day. Occasionally, if you pay attention, they earn the right to become something more.
