The Builder and the Biller

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about an identity crisis on my personal blog. I thought it was just about me. Turns out it had quietly turned into a question about The Wandering Pro itself, and about whether building products is really the hill I want to plant my flag on.

We’re six months into Wander Labs now. And the gut-check showed up right on schedule. Am I doing the right thing here? Is this what I want to be running for the next five years?

This is me answering that out loud, where you can hold me to it.

Two Doors at the Start of the Year

When the year started, I had two doors in front of me for Wander Labs.
The first was the road I know cold. Come in, and I’ll help you build a services business. Land clients, write proposals, set up operations, open your own agency. I’ve spent years on that road. The workshops, the toolkits, the career and freelancing content, it’s all sitting there, ready to hand over. It’s also what most people who walk into my server actually want.

The second door was products. Build a real thing. Ship it in public. Get mentored by people who’ve already done it.

I picked the product door.

Part of it is simple. I’ve already said most of what I have to say about services. The other part is that the maker thing was always the point. The Wandering Pro’s tagline is literally “A Tribe for Makers” So this was never a pivot.

But picking a direction and being sure of it are two different things. Six months in, the doubt showed up anyway. So let me talk about the thing that actually matters. The ground reality.

The One Script We Sell in Pakistan

In Pakistan, there’s basically one script.

You get tired of your job. You go freelance. You open an agency. And then maybe, someday, if the stars line up, you build a product.

I’ve pushed that exact path to a lot of people, and I’ll own it again. It’s a good path. Freelancing teaches you clients. An agency teaches you operations. By the time you sit down to build something, you actually know what you’re doing.

But notice what’s missing. Almost nobody here promotes the part at the end. Building your own product gets no love. Career advice and freelancing advice is the only thing anyone sells, because it’s the safe track, the proven one, the one that pays this month.

I’ve written before about products versus services and product experience versus project experience. The short version is that a pure service is always one tool away from being replaced, and most of us here have only ever done agency work. We’re good at shipping other people’s projects and walking away. We’ve rarely owned the thing that has to stay alive.

Why Building Products Gets No Love Here

Here’s the part people skip past. The neglect isn’t stupidity.
There are real reasons building products gets no love in this market.

Payments are a mess. Getting paid for a product you sell to the world, from Pakistan, is genuinely painful in a way that getting paid for client work isn’t. The rails barely exist.
There’s no funding either. No real VC ecosystem waiting to catch you if you take the leap and run out of runway halfway.

And running a product is a heavier mental load than billing a client. It’s longer. It’s lonelier. There’s no one on the other end handing you a scope and cutting you a cheque at the end of the month. You carry the whole thing, with no guarantee anyone even wants it.

So people pick the path that pays now. Hard to argue with that when you run the numbers. I get it. I’ve lived that math for a decade.

Building Products Just Got Easier

Something shifted, and it shifted recently enough that most people haven’t caught up to it.
It’s easier than ever to build your own product.

I mean genuinely easier, not motivational-poster easier. I’m building my own app right now, for the first time in my life. A non-developer who’s managed a couple hundred projects and never once written the thing himself. And the tools have finally gotten good enough that I can actually do it. The part that used to make people like me quit, the syntax, the setup, the thousand small things, got cheap.

I wrote a while back that it’s easier than ever to enter a field, which means it’s harder than ever to compete out of the gate. That cuts both ways. The same drop in the floor that floods the market with juniors also means one person, with taste and a clear problem, can ship a real product without a team or a runway.

So if the floor is that much lower, maybe the script can change. Maybe building your own thing is a real answer here now, beyond freelancing and the endless remote-job hunt. One small product that solves one real problem well. You can put a price on it. You can own it. It doesn’t have to be a unicorn, and you don’t need a hundred grand in the bank to start.

Building Products Is the Part I Skipped

Now the personal part, because it’s the honest engine under all of this.

One arm of me has always been on the services side. It paid the bills, it built the network I never inherited and had to go make myself, and it’s the thing I’m demonstrably good at.

But the other arm was never idle. It’s always been building too, just not products. I built this community. I built a tech publication. I’ve spent years making things that didn’t exist before and pouring real time into them. The maker arm has been working the whole time. It just never built a product.

That was the one box I left unchecked. For years I told myself I’d only build a product once I had a comfortable number sitting in the bank to bootstrap with. That rule was always my own baggage. Nobody else carries that weight.

So this isn’t a dormant arm finally waking up. It’s an arm that’s always built, now taking on one more thing it can carry. Products. Wander Labs is me doing that out loud, in public, with my name on it. And if I can help other people build their own, maybe I finally build mine too.

Why I’m Betting on Building Products

So here’s the decision, and unlike the last time I wrote about this crisis, this one lands.

It’s decided. The builder direction is it. I’m committing to it for at least the next three years. Wander Labs is this year’s version, and there’ll be more after it. Whether it stays free or turns into something down the line is a question for later, and I’m fine leaving it there. For now, it runs as it is.

You’ll see it in what I write, too. More about building products and building things, less about servicing clients. Not because the services stuff was ever wrong. It paid for everything, and it’s all still there for anyone who needs it. But I’ve done more than enough workshops and content on that half. It’s time to own the other one.

The crisis doesn’t fully go away. The pull between building, teaching, and running a business is permanent, and I’ve stopped expecting it to resolve. But the one question that actually mattered, what The Wandering Pro is for, I’ve settled.

It’s for makers. It always was. I just took six months to admit which half of me I wanted to lead with.

If you’ve been sitting on a product idea for too long, telling yourself you’re not technical enough or not ready, take this as your sign. The floor dropped. The other half is yours to claim too. I’m around if you want help finding your footing.

With or without my help – I wish you the best.

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