Building software has become more accessible. Giving people a reason to care still takes work.
A founder needs a practical way to collect feedback and communicate changes. A business owner needs help turning a conversation into a marketing plan. Someone browsing new products needs a shortlist worth opening. And sometimes, a person scrolling through the internet needs something unexpected enough to make them laugh.
Products can earn attention by solving a familiar problem, making a useful choice, or creating an experience people want to share.
Welcome back to Builders Behind the Launches, our recurring series about the people building in the BuildHop community.
This time, we are featuring Allan MacGregor, Jaime Rubianogroot, Julien, and James McKay.
Their projects take very different forms, but each founder is learning what makes someone stop, take an interest, and come back for more.
Allan MacGregor, ShipLog
Allan MacGregor likes puzzles, especially challenging problems that have meaningful value for other people.
Usefulness is central to how he thinks about building. He wants to create things people actually use, and that practical standard helps him decide which problems deserve his attention.
His main focus is ShipLog, a feedback board and changelog for indie SaaS founders. He is also experimenting with harnesses and custom agents.
Much of that work begins with something he needs himself.
Building around his own problems gives Allan a direct way to evaluate what he creates. He can bring a tool into his workflow and see whether it earns its place there.
ShipLog has done that. When asked about a moment that showed something was working, Allan points to how useful the product has become in his own day-to-day work.
For him, that is a meaningful signal: the thing he built is helping him do the work that prompted him to build it.
Getting other people to discover it is a separate challenge.
Allan says distribution feels harder than it did five years ago. Building has become easier, more people are releasing products, and getting someone’s attention takes more effort.
That observation sits alongside another constraint: time.
There are many things he wants to do and many projects he would like to build. Finding enough time and focus remains one of his biggest challenges.
His advice to first-time builders is straightforward. Expect failures, keep trying, and resist the temptation to treat an unsuccessful attempt as a reason to stop.
Perseverance, in Allan’s view, is part of the work.
What is ShipLog?
ShipLog is a feedback board and changelog for indie SaaS founders, bringing a place to collect product feedback and share updates into one tool.
Jaime Rubianogroot, GROOT-OS
Jaime Rubianogroot has spent more than two decades working in agencies, doing strategy and analytics across a wide range of industries.
He is interested in the story behind the numbers and the way customers think. Building narratives that help brands connect with people has also taught him to look closely at the relationship between what buyers want and what businesses say they offer.
That experience now shapes GROOT-OS.
Jaime’s longer-term vision is an agency in a box. His current focus is more specific: a marketing planning tool that holds a conversation with a strategist or business owner and turns it into a working plan.
He wants the process to feel collaborative, produce plain-language recommendations, and help someone understand and defend the thinking behind the plan.
The idea grew out of a difficult professional moment.
After another agency layoff, Jaime wanted to create something of his own. Around the same time, a neighbor asked him for help with his business.
Jaime built a bot to help that neighbor learn marketing in an approachable way. The experience pointed him toward a broader need: business owners who could benefit from senior strategic thinking but could not afford the agency fees usually attached to it.
Requests for help teaching an AI model about marketing reinforced that direction.
Jaime had worked as a strategist, negotiator, analyst, client manager, and client. He saw an opportunity to bring those perspectives into a tool that could help an owner or a small strategy team work through a problem.
Encouraging responses during demonstrations and board meetings have strengthened his belief in the idea. He initially doubted how large the opportunity might be. Showing people the product has made him more confident about its potential.
The challenge he is working on now is the conversation itself.
A good discovery session has room for an unexpected answer, a new line of thought, or a question that changes the direction of the discussion. Jaime wants GROOT-OS to follow those turns naturally, brainstorming and responding as a strategist would.
His advice to first-time builders comes from the clarity he brought to his own project.
Understand the structure and experience you want to create before you start building. When he struggled to move something forward, Jaime used PowerPoint to draw out what he could already see in his mind.
For him, knowing the product that closely is an important part of bringing it to life.
What is GROOT-OS?
GROOT-OS is a conversational marketing planning tool designed to turn a discovery session into a clear, practical strategy. Jaime is building it to make experienced strategic thinking more accessible to business owners and small teams.
Julien, Sunday Club
Julien is a senior software engineer and indie builder who likes products that stay small on purpose.
His interests include curation, discovery, and tools that help people focus. These are areas where deciding what belongs in a product can be just as consequential as building it.
That approach is at the center of Sunday Club.
The format is simple: seven curated product launches every Sunday, with free submissions.
Julien started it because launch directories kept becoming large collections that were difficult to browse meaningfully. He wanted to create a weekly shelf small enough for people to explore.
The limit of seven gives that idea a clear shape.
It also creates an ongoing responsibility. Every edition needs a worthwhile selection, and growing the product means finding consistent, quality submissions while preserving the reason someone would open it in the first place.
An encouraging signal came when founders began asking about the seven-product limit itself. Their interest suggested that they understood the constraint as part of Sunday Club’s appeal.
The small size was communicating something about the experience Julien wanted to provide.
Building Sunday Club has also changed how he thinks about the hardest part of releasing a product.
He once considered shipping the main bottleneck. As execution became more accessible, the work of getting the right people to care and maintaining the quality of the selection became more prominent.
That is where much of his attention goes now.
Alongside Sunday Club, Julien is working on Neeed for longer-term discovery and SEO, with other projects including Lock In, My Studios, and Shortcutly.
Across those interests, his advice to first-time builders stays focused: release something small that you can stand behind.
A carefully chosen list can earn trust. Keeping that trust gives a small product a reason to keep existing.
What is Sunday Club?
Sunday Club is a weekly collection of seven curated product launches, published every Sunday. It is free to submit and built around a deliberately small selection that people can take the time to browse.
James McKay, The 100 Cigarettes Project
James McKay has worked at high-growth startups that became unicorns and built a consulting agency that he continues to run.
He also found himself questioning how much of that work was making the world better.
What interested him was bringing more humor and fun into technology. James has always considered his sense of humor one of his greatest assets, and he wanted to build something that could interrupt the monotony of someone’s day.
That impulse became The 100 Cigarettes Project.
The premise starts with deliberately ridiculous T-shirts. The experiment is in how people buy them.
James plans to create 100 shirts, each with a different pricing mechanism. The original cigarettes shirt started at $1 and became a dollar more expensive every time someone bought it. A second shirt tied its price to Bitcoin, letting the market move the cost up and down.
The purchasing rules become part of the experience, giving people something to react to beyond the shirt itself.
The project began as a joke. People enjoyed it, James enjoyed their reaction, and that response gave him a reason to keep going.
One early launch produced almost 50 shirt sales in three days. People posted about the project on social media, and James says a shirt bearing the word “cigarettes” even led to an invitation to New York Fashion Week.
Seeing the joy it brought people convinced him there was something worth pursuing.
But the attention did not repeat automatically.
After his first launch received an unexpected response, James anticipated something similar from the second. It drew little attention, forcing him to reconsider how much work would go into getting the project seen.
Creating something entertaining was one part of the job. Learning how to consistently bring people to it became another.
That is where he is spending time now. He sees social media as a promising route to exposure and is learning how to use it.
His advice to first-time builders reflects his own decision to pursue an unconventional idea.
James challenges the assumption that working for someone else is always the safer path. He believes people can underestimate the cost of leaving their own projects unexplored.
For him, making something that brings people a moment of delight has become a reason to keep building.
What is The 100 Cigarettes Project?
The 100 Cigarettes Project combines T-shirts, humor, and experimental pricing. James is working toward 100 shirts with 100 different purchasing mechanics, including a price that increases with every sale and another that moves with Bitcoin.
The Pattern Behind the Products
ShipLog, GROOT-OS, Sunday Club, and The 100 Cigarettes Project give people very different reasons to pay attention.
One helps founders collect feedback and communicate product changes. One makes experienced marketing strategy more accessible. One limits the number of launches someone needs to browse. One turns buying a T-shirt into an experience worth talking about.
Each founder is also discovering what it takes to sustain that interest.
For Allan, a product has to earn a place in someone’s workflow, while distribution requires more effort in an increasingly crowded market.
For Jaime, an encouraging demonstration points toward a deeper challenge: making a conversation useful enough to help someone work through their business.
For Julien, growth depends on protecting the small, carefully chosen collection that makes Sunday Club appealing.
For James, an exciting first launch has become a lesson in learning how to attract attention again.
Their stories show how closely product building and distribution are connected.
The choices inside the product help give someone a reason to care. The work outside it helps that person discover the reason in the first place.
A useful tool, a thoughtful conversation, a trusted shortlist, or a good joke can open that door.
Behind each launch is a founder learning how to keep it open.
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