I’ve always been enamored with building and fixing things. From fixing bikes at a young age, to building custom furniture, spending some time in architecture, and eventually writing software, that love for building has always drawn me toward small problems. Sometimes it’s not a grand problem, but it’s my problem, and that’s usually enough to spark the desire to fix it.
Pi Cubed grew out of that instinct. Most of what we build isn’t a billion-dollar idea or a grand plan to reinvent an industry. It’s a way to fix everyday problems with highly crafted software. And truthfully, I wanted a place where I could make lots of small bets, learn about different consumer businesses, and continue honing my craft.
Some ideas might become meaningful businesses, others might be useful to a few thousand people, and some will probably fail completely. That’s okay. The point isn’t to predict which ideas are going to work before we build them. The point is to turn ideas into real, high-quality products that solve a problem and hopefully bring people a little bit of joy.
And who knows, maybe one day we’ll overhear someone at a coffee shop say, “Have you heard of X app? I love it,” and realize they’re talking about something we made. That’s the dream.
Building in public. Sort of.
We’re also learning a lot. Every product seems to lead us down some unexpected path, whether it’s a technical problem, a design decision, or just figuring out how something actually works in the real world. A surprising amount of what we learn along the way ends up being useful well beyond the thing we were originally trying to build.
I’ve benefited enormously over the years from other software companies and engineers writing about those kinds of experiences. This blog is our attempt to contribute some of that back.
What’s next
For our first technical post, we’ll start with something that came directly out of running the studio. We wanted to manage our Apple Ads infrastructure with Terraform, but there wasn’t a provider.
So we built one. (Here’s that story.)