The Lightning Bolt

The afternoon I couldn’t stop seeing app ideas everywhere I looked

I’d been struggling, before 7 May, to find the next thing to build. Three apps running, Claude Pro committed since 1 April, CR Tracker doing its job — and yet the ideas had dried up. I’d been listening to Peter Diamandis argue that everybody could be an entrepreneur, and I’d wanted to believe him, and I couldn’t find a single problem I thought I had any ability to solve.

Diamandis draws a distinction I’ve been sitting with since: between consumers, who are served by AI, and creators, who use AI to do bold things in their lives. I knew which one I wanted to be. I just couldn’t find the door.

Then Ramble & Roam happened.

The afternoon everything became an app idea

The itinerary from that single session was sitting in front of me — specific, tailored, built around what I’d actually asked for rather than what was already popular. I ran the same prompt through three other AI tools to compare the results. What came back was so different, so much less useful, in such different ways, that I sat back and thought: there’s an app in this. A tool that sent the same prompt to multiple AI models simultaneously and let you compare the outputs side by side.

That became WeighUp.

Then I noticed I was drowning in Claude sessions — sometimes three handovers in a single day, every new chat arriving as a slightly different version of my collaborator, none of them fully knowing what the others had built or decided. I needed something to keep the project instructions consistent across all of them. There’s an app in this.

That became BossLadyCommands.

Somewhere in that same stretch I used a silly metaphor in conversation and started wondering about its etymology. The curiosity felt like it deserved its own home. There’s an app in this.

That became MetaphoricallySpeaking.

I’d been noticing, across all these sessions, that my best material was arriving mid-conversation — unguarded, specific, the real Sandi showing up in the middle of a chat about something else entirely. I wanted somewhere to keep those moments before they fell off the context window and were gone. There’s an app in this.

That became Thoughtpool.

Then I had to do my tax. There’s an app in this.

TaxLens.

I was generating images in Gemini and the first results were reliably, frustratingly wrong — good enough to see what was possible, not good enough to use. I needed something to help me translate what I actually wanted into language Gemini could work with. There’s an app in this.

That became Mahna Mahna.

Six ideas. One afternoon of seeing. One solid week of building.

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What had actually changed

The ideas hadn’t been hiding. I’d been looking for them in the wrong way — scanning for big, impressive, marketable problems I was qualified to solve, the way Diamandis seemed to suggest, and finding nothing. What Ramble & Roam showed me was that the problems worth solving were already in my own life, in the friction I was already feeling. The comparison frustration. The handover overwhelm. The lost Sandi moments. The tax.

I wasn’t too inexperienced to find ideas. I was too busy looking outward when the ideas were all pointing inward.

That’s the door Diamandis kept gesturing at but never quite named: you don’t find the problems by scanning the horizon for something worthy of being solved. You find them by paying attention to your own friction. The moment I stopped asking “what problem is big enough?” and started asking “what annoyed me this week?” — everything became an app idea.

Twelve apps in two months. 236 change requests. One person. The pace of it reminded me of the particular head-down, bum-up, making-things-happen mode I used to drop into at work when a project needed someone to just go and get it done. I hadn’t felt it for months before 7 May. After it, I barely came up for air.

I want to say this clearly, though, because Diamandis is also honest about it: anyone can start, not anyone can sustain. The barrier to entry collapsed to near zero with AI — one conversation, one afternoon, one working thing that didn’t exist before. What hasn’t collapsed is the eighteen months between launch and knowing whether any of it matters to anyone but you. I’m still in that stretch. The apps are built. The hard questions are still arriving.

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Where the lightning bolt actually landed

My intensity and energy bolt didn’t stay in the apps.

A few weeks later, I was at a scrapbooking workshop sitting next to a school principal who described, with the particular resigned fluency of someone who’s made peace with it, the administrative weight eating every hour that should go to actual teaching. I looked at her and thought the same thing I’d been thinking about my own friction for weeks: there’s something in this. Not an app this time — an audience. A whole category of capable, overloaded people who had no idea AI was already there for exactly their kind of mind.

That conversation is where juxtaConversation started. Not as a blog, not yet — just as the recognition that the thing I’d spent two months learning how to see might be worth pointing at someone else’s life too.

Before 7 May, I couldn’t find a single idea worth building.

After it, I haven’t been able to stop.

And if you’re sitting there thinking “that’s all very well for someone with forty-one years of problem-solving instinct” — look up from this screen for a moment.

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What do you actually see?

The pantry. The recipe books your mother left you, the ones you never quite cook from anymore. There’s an app idea — store your family’s recipes, match them to what’s already in the pantry, know what you can cook tonight without a shopping trip.

The pile of insurance papers on the bench. The bills you’ve been meaning to deal with for three months. There’s an app idea — file the papers, search for better deals, arrange the switch, store everything ready for tax time.

The plants wilting on the back step because you forgot again, because summer arrived faster than expected. There’s an app idea — monitor the forecast, alert you before the heat spike, before the frost, before the thing you can still prevent becomes the thing you couldn’t.

The potted plants that need up-potting, lined up along the fence in their too-small pots, and you can’t work out where to start or what order makes sense. There’s an app idea — list them by pot size and plant name, source the care instructions for each one, work out the order that maximises your success and minimises your effort, and then just tell you where to begin.

None of these are billion-dollar ideas. Every single one of them is a real problem sitting in a real life, right now, today — yours, probably, or someone you love.

You don’t need to scan the horizon. You just need to look at what’s actually in front of you.

Open your AI tool of choice. Describe the problem you can actually see from where you’re sitting. See what comes back.

The afternoon is still there.

Sandi is a Melbourne-based problem-solver, crisis-averter, and translator of the technical into the human. She spent decades being the person everyone called when something was broken, confusing, or just needed explaining properly — earning a reputation that preceded her wherever she went. Now she’s channelling that same instinct into AI: making it accessible, practical, and genuinely useful for people who think it isn’t for them.