Cook Your Own Software

In 2020 a writer named Robin Sloan shipped an app that got downloaded by four people in three time zones. Five years later it still has exactly four daily users, zero churn, and not a single new signup — and he calls it "a resounding success." Why would anyone celebrate an app nobody uses? I'll come back to it.

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Sloan built BoopSnoop for his family after their favorite messaging app shut down. No login screen, no contacts list, no settings — it already knew the four people who would ever touch it. It took him about a week, half of which he spent wrestling Xcode code-signing. His verdict on himself: "I am the programming equivalent of a home cook."

His real argument is about the phrase "learn to code." We sell it like a résumé line — leverage, a way up, a way out. He flips it to "learn to cook." Almost nobody learns to cook to become a chef. They learn to eat better, to carry on a tradition, to spend an evening with someone they love. Code can connect the same way, he says — but only once you stop demanding that it be professional and scalable.

Here's why this lands harder in 2026 than it did in 2020. Sloan needed a full week and real engineering chops to make a four-user app. You don't anymore. You describe the thing to an AI and it exists by dinner. The "home cook" tier of software — the tiny tool that fixes one annoyance for one household — just opened up to everyone who can write a clear sentence. Meanwhile the industry is sprinting the opposite way: managed runtimes, billion-user TAMs, everything built to scale. But the software that actually changes your week is usually the un-scalable kind. Four users isn't a failure state. Sometimes it's the entire point.

Test this weekend: build the dumbest possible app that fixes exactly one thing that annoys you — a shared list for your household, a button that texts one person, a tracker for one habit. Don't validate it. Don't make it scale. Time-box it to two hours in Claude or your vibe-coding setup and ship it to an audience of one. The bar isn't "would this get users." The bar is "would I open this tomorrow."

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Code keeps drifting toward plain English. The fastest-growing way to build software in 2026 isn't a new framework — it's describing what you want in a sentence and letting the model write the syntax. That's the exact shift that turns Sloan's week-long Xcode wrestle into an afternoon. The barrier that made home-cooked software a programmer's privilege is quietly gone. Full breakdown.

This week on the blog

Revenue Stack — June 2026

The home-cooked app has one prerequisite nobody warns you about: you have to believe you're allowed to build it. That belief is the whole reason I wrote the book — not "become an engineer," but "you can cook now, here's the kitchen." It's the manual for the four-user app, the household tool, the dumb little thing you'll actually open on Monday.

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Phil

PS: hit reply with the one tiny tool you wish existed just for you — the dumb, un-scalable, four-user kind. I'm collecting them.

Back to Robin's four users. The success was never the number — it was that his mom, dad, and sister still tap a pane of glass he built and send the same wordless message: I'm thinking of you. Five years, exactly one feature added (at his mother's request), zero churn. That's the return on a home-cooked meal. Most software will never come close.

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