How to Build Apps with Parallel Agents

Building products alongside a full-time job is one of the most asymmetric bets you can make.

Employment gives you stability: predictable income, benefits, and a ceiling. Side projects give you optionality. They let you explore ideas that can grow beyond your salary, fail cheaply, or quietly compound while you sleep.

There's also a structural advantage. Running even a small business unlocks flexibility around expenses, tooling, and tax planning that simply doesn't exist when all your income flows through payroll. This isn't about loopholes—it's about playing the game that already exists.

More importantly, side projects give you leverage over time and location. You can build once and sell globally. You can work asynchronously. You can create assets instead of trading hours.

The trick is not to "go all in." The trick is to build in parallel. Keep the job. Reduce the risk. Let momentum, not motivation, decide what grows.

You are not one thing when you build a product.

You are a designer, an engineer, a marketer, a support desk, a product manager, and occasionally a customer. Traditionally, startups solve this by hiring people. Solo builders solve it by context switching until burnout.

Parallel agents are the third option.

Some agents are you, deliberately time-boxed into roles. Others are AI tools acting as accelerators: generating drafts, validating assumptions, scaffolding code, or summarising feedback. The goal is not automation for its own sake—it's keeping multiple streams moving forward at once without waiting for "perfect focus."

The rest of this post is about setting up those streams.

Start with what you keep returning to when no one is paying you.

Not what you're good at. Not what sounds impressive. What you've circled back to for years out of curiosity or joy.

For me, that's psychometrics and video games—systems that measure humans, and systems that let humans play with rules. That intersection gives me energy even when progress is slow, which matters more than raw talent.

This step filters ideas by stamina. If you're going to build at night, on weekends, or between life obligations, the idea has to survive boredom.

Do not start by inventing demand.

Look for products in your interest area that already make money. Subscriptions, SaaS tools, niche marketplaces—anything with customers who have pulled out their credit cards voluntarily.

This isn't laziness. It's respect for reality.

A proven market answers three questions for free:

1. Someone wants this
2. They want it badly enough to pay
3. They can be reached somehow

You're not copying success—you're borrowing signal.

Now you copy—but carefully.

You are copying structure, not assets. Features, flows, pricing logic, onboarding patterns. You are not copying branding, copy, or proprietary data.

As you recreate the product piece by piece, you will naturally inject taste: different defaults, better explanations, sharper constraints, or a clearer audience. That's how differentiation actually happens in practice, not through brainstormed "unique value propositions."

Build one feature at a time. Write the plan down. Reduce ambiguity until the next step is obvious.

A practical baseline stack looks like this:

1. Frontend: React with Next.js
2. Database: Postgres (Neon is an easy free start)
3. Auth: Next's built-in patterns or a lightweight provider
4. Payments: Stripe

Do not treat design as an afterthought. Users can tell immediately when design is careless or AI-generated without taste. AI is a tool, not a substitute for understanding hierarchy, spacing, and intent. Bad design kills trust faster than bugs.

Most side projects fail quietly because no one ever sees them.

Your first users should not be strangers. They should be people who already trust you. Reach out warmly. No pitching. No "I built a thing" spam. Just conversations.

Every person you know is a gateway to hundreds you don't. Networks compound in ways code does not.

If this feels uncomfortable, that's a signal—not a stop sign.

As a rule of thumb, at least half your time should be spent on outreach, feedback, and distribution. Building is only half the job. Visibility is the other half, and it's the one engineers love to ignore.

Building apps with parallel agents is less about speed and more about flow. Keep multiple small bets alive. Let tools carry cognitive load. Let curiosity decide direction.

You're not trying to build the next unicorn. You're trying to build momentum that survives real life.

Momentum, once established, is stubborn in the best possible way.