I Built the App Because Nobody Could Find the Right Person

#productivity #buildinpublic #tools

Someone asked me a question in Slack that had nothing to do with me. I forwarded it to someone else. They forwarded it to another person. Forty minutes later, nobody knew who was actually supposed to answer it. I joked that we needed a map just to figure out who owned what. Then I thought about it again. That evening, I opened Greta and built a tiny internal directory where you could search a problem and see who usually handled it. It wasn't sophisticated. It just saved us from playing “who knows this?” in Slack. The first version was used by about six people. Then someone added their own categories. Someone else suggested another search. Within a week, people were using it more than I expected. It wasn't really a product. It was a tiny answer to a very specific annoyance. But that's how a lot of useful things seem to start. Nobody sits down saying, “Today I'm going to invent an internal tool.” Usually, you're just tired of asking the same stupid question.