During a train ride, I built a website for our family vacation.
I used ChatGPT on my phone. After about an hour, I had a site with a route for each day, photos, maps, riddles for the kids, and ideas for things to do.
The users were six people: my family.
I had no business plan. I did not want to start a travel company or sell subscriptions. I did not want to make it useful for thousands of other families. I wanted something that fit our trip.
And we really used it.
This matters more to me than how fast I built it. The site stayed with us during the whole vacation, and it changed when our trip changed. Here is the site we used for our family trip to Prague.
When the Plan Broke
In the middle of the trip, I understood that a full day of hiking in a faraway place would not work for us. We did not have the energy, and the travel was too heavy. I talked it through with ChatGPT, and we replaced that day with other activities in the city. I updated the site on the spot, and in a few minutes everyone had the new plan.
The distance between “this no longer fits” and “now we have something useful again” was very short. Because of that, I actually closed the gap. This is where the value was.
Personal Enough to Belong to One Family
Most software is made for a category of people: travelers, parents, product managers, small business owners. I choose the product closest to what I need. Then I change the settings it allows me to change, and I adapt my habits to whatever remains.
This made sense in the past, because building software took a lot of time, money, and skill. A product needed enough customers to be worth the work.
But my family is not a market segment when we decide what to do tomorrow morning. We are six real people. We have different interests and different energy. Some of us have no patience for another museum. We have one apartment and a limited number of days. And a plan that looked good last night can look bad after breakfast.
A tool built around these details can be useful, even if no other family wants the same thing. For me, this is what “personal software” means: having a say in what the software does, how it is organized, and when it changes.
Software That Does Not Need More Users
Many useful tools never get built because their audience is too small.
Imagine someone who takes care of an older parent. They may need one simple place for appointments, instructions, and coordination between brothers and sisters. Or imagine a small neighborhood bakery. It may need a page that turns weekend orders into a list of what to bake.
People already handle needs like these with notebooks, group chats, and spreadsheets. Often this works well enough. What has changed is the effort needed to build something that fits more closely.
A tool no longer needs a big audience to justify the investment. Sometimes the return is a smoother morning, one forgotten detail caught, or six people who spend less of their vacation figuring out where to go next.
The ability to change the tool is part of the value. Personal needs are full of exceptions. When changes are expensive, people pile up workarounds. When changes are cheap, the tool can keep following the people who use it.
Small Can Be Enough
Not everything should be built this way. If a trip site is wrong, we might miss a museum. If a payment system or a system of record is wrong, the damage can be serious.
When building is almost free, the scarce skill is judgment. Before you start, you need to know what kind of software you are making. Then you need to decide how much checking it deserves.
My vacation site sat comfortably at the low end of that range. It did not need growth, retention metrics, or a roadmap beyond our next few days. It only needed to help my family enjoy the trip.
It did.
Many more people can now make software on these terms: small, specific, changeable, and worth building for the people who need it.
Sometimes, six users are enough.