Okay, that’s not entirely true. I know some things. I’ve spent six years as a product manager, which means I’ve written more PRDs than I can count, facilitated hundreds of user story mapping sessions, and sat in enough sprint planning meetings to last a lifetime. I know how to take a product from idea to launch.
What I’d never done, until now, was build something that’s mine.
Meet Voluta
Voluta is a reading app I’m building from scratch. (It started life under a different name, Next Chapter, but it grew into something that needed a name of its own.) Voluta is a reading companion. Something that helps you track what you’ve read, discover what to read next, find your people, and actually see your reading life in a way that feels meaningful.
The idea came from my own frustration. I read a lot. I always have. But I could never find an app that captured the way I actually engage with books. I don’t just want to rate things on a five-star scale. I want to remember why a book mattered to me. I want to see patterns in my reading. Am I gravitating toward certain themes? Have I been stuck in a genre rut? When was the last time I read something that really challenged me?
And I wanted the parts that are social to feel like a good conversation instead of a feed to perform for. So Voluta has clubs, buddy reads, and a way to share what you’re reading with the people whose taste you actually trust, without turning into another place to chase likes.
So I decided to build the thing I couldn’t find.
The Product Manager’s Curse (and Gift)
Here’s the funny thing about being a PM who’s building their own product: you can’t turn off the PM brain. Every feature idea immediately spawns a mental backlog. Every design decision triggers a debate about scope, timeline, and trade-offs.
I’ve caught myself writing PRDs for features that are three versions away from maturity. I’ve spent entire evenings mapping out an onboarding flow before I had, you know, an actual app to onboard people into.
But it’s also been a gift. I know how to break an overwhelming vision into small, shippable pieces. I know that the first version should be embarrassingly simple. I know that the hardest part isn’t building. It’s deciding what not to build.
Early on, that meant getting two things right before anything else: the core reading log and the import experience. If you’re switching from another platform, the last thing you want is to manually re-enter hundreds of books. Both of those are real now, which is a strange and wonderful thing to type, and the challenge has shifted to the community side: making clubs and buddy reads feel alive without feeling loud.
Why I’m Doing This
Honestly? Because I need something that’s mine.
At my day job, I spend my working hours building products for someone else’s vision, solving someone else’s problems, optimizing someone else’s metrics. It’s good work, I enjoy it, and I’m good at it, but it doesn’t feed the part of me that wants to create.
Voluta is my creative project. It’s the thing I think about when I’m in the shower, the thing I sketch out ideas for while I’m hanging out on Sundays, the thing that makes me excited!
It’s also a bet on myself. Can I take everything I’ve learned as a product manager and apply it to something from zero? Can I wear all the hats, researcher, designer, product owner, project manager, and actually ship something?
Turns out the answer is yes. Voluta is live on the web, with the iOS app in review, and there are about fifty people using it right now. Fifty. It’s a small number and somehow also the most exciting number I’ve ever seen, because every one of them is a real person who decided my little reading app was worth their time.
What’s Next
I’m documenting the entire process here. The wins, the mistakes, the “what was I thinking?” moments, all of it. If you’ve ever thought about building something on the side, I hope my journey gives you permission to start.
Upcoming posts in this series will cover the tools I’m using to design and organize everything (spoiler: Notion is doing heavy lifting), and the surprisingly emotional experience of building something you actually care about, including the day I decided to rename it.
Speaking of Notion doing the heavy lifting: the workspace I actually run my content business out of is the same system I packaged as Creator Workspace Pro. If you’re a systems person building something on the side too, it’s the calendar, pipeline, and workflows already set up, without the from-scratch part.
For now, Voluta is out in the world, fifty readers deep, and still growing. And that’s the hardest, most exciting part.
Are you building something on the side? A project, a business, a creative experiment? I’d love to hear what you’re working on.
