I Don't Solve Problems. I Create Solutions.

For years my answer to "what do you do" was some version of "I love solving problems."

I stopped saying it. Not because it was untrue, but because I noticed something. The sentence has the word problem in it twice if you count the one you are quietly inviting in. Say it enough and life starts handing you material. More problems, bigger problems, problems that arrive with your name on them.

So I changed the words. I create solutions. Same energy, different direction. And when I say it that way it actually describes what I have been doing my whole life.

This Started Long Before Software

I was the kid who took things apart. Not to break them, to see the shape of them. If something in the house was annoying, I would sit with it until I had some contraption that made it less annoying. Half of those were terrible. That was never the point.

The point was the moment when a mess turns into a thing that works.

Later it became software, because software is the fastest material I have ever found for that feeling. You picture something in the morning that does not exist, and by evening people can use it. Nothing else in my life turns thought into a working object that quickly.

But the instinct was there first. The software is just where it landed.

It Is Closer to an Addiction Than a Hobby

I want to be honest about this instead of dressing it up as discipline.

When I see a gap between how something works and how it should work, I do not really get to choose whether I engage with it. My brain has already opened the thing up and started sketching. I have built tools nobody asked for. I have replaced services I was perfectly capable of just continuing to pay for. I have started something on a Saturday because a small irritation would not leave me alone.

Creating gives me joy. It gives me energy at moments when nothing else does. On the hard days, and there have been plenty, building something is the thing that puts me back on my feet. It is not what I do to earn a living. It is closer to how I stay upright.

That is a strange thing to admit at 47. It is also just true.

The Question Every Software Owner Asks

Here is the problem that would not leave me alone this time.

You launch something. People sign up. And then you sit there with almost no idea what is happening inside your own product. What are they doing after they log in? Do they come back? How often? Did anyone actually touch the feature you spent three weeks on? How many visitors became users? Are the people who joined in March still around?

I have run software businesses for a long time, and I still find myself guessing at these answers more often than I would like to admit.

There are good products that solve this. I have used several. The trouble is that the good ones get expensive quickly, and the free tiers tend to stop being useful right at the point where the data starts getting interesting. So you either pay a lot, or you accept that you are flying half blind, or you send your users' behaviour to someone else's servers and hope that is fine.

None of those three felt like a good answer to me.

So I Built Lyraflow

Lyraflow.app is self-hosted customer journey analytics. You download it, install it on your own server, and run it. Your data stays on your machine. It is open source, so you can read every line of it, change what you want, and keep whatever you build on top.

It is early. I want to be clear about that rather than oversell it. But it already does the things I built it for. There is a live feed so you can watch activity as it happens. There is retention, so you can see whether people are actually coming back. There are trends over time, funnels for the paths that matter to you, and a people list so you can look at individual users instead of only aggregates.

I am improving it most days. It gets a little better each time I sit down with it.

If you own a product and you have ever wanted to know what your users do without paying a subscription for the privilege, go and take a look. Install it. Break it. Tell me what is missing.

Why Open Source

Because the version of this problem I had is the version thousands of other people have, and most of them are not going to build their own.

I have been on the internet long enough to know that the things I gave away have come back to me in ways I could not have designed. Not always as money. Usually as great people, conversations, and doors I did not know were there.

Also, honestly, I like the idea of someone installing this on a small server somewhere and getting an answer to a question that used to cost them real money.

The Part That Does Not Change

Lyraflow will not be the last one. I know that the same way I know my own handwriting.

Some things I build will find users. Some will sit quietly with an audience of one. I have made peace with that ratio, because the value was never only in the outcome. It is in the making. It is the same feeling I had as a kid with a screwdriver and something I probably should not have been taking apart.

I create solutions. That is the sentence I use now, and it is the closest thing to an accurate description of me that I have found.

What is the thing your mind keeps reaching for, whether or not anyone is paying you to do it?