The Self-Product Era: Everyone Is Building Their Own Product
Where is this going?
Let me say this openly: for a while now, every time I open LinkedIn, I feel a kind of fomo (fear of missing out)
I see too many launches. I read posts from people who’ve never even built a website in their lives saying “I built this product in this space, that product in that space.” On one hand it excites me, makes me happy, makes me feel like I’m witnessing history. I’d say the AI revolution is the third major step after electricity and the internet. But at the same time something starts whipping me from the inside: “I should ship something under my venture studio Keiki, fast. I need to catch up.” And it whips hard.
This piece is partly an attempt to make sense of that urge. But first, let me tell you something that happened two days ago.
I came to Ordu from Barcelona to see my family. Ordu is a small but fast-growing town on the Black Sea coast in northern Türkiye, sweet and still keeping its niche character. Look it up if you haven’t.
The night I arrived, I sat down at one of my favorite pubs, Köşk Pub. I was going to have a beer and some fried peas. When I scanned the QR code to order, there it was: an online menu made with AI. I noticed it the moment I saw the UI. Digging in a bit more, I found bugs, structures that didn’t quite fit, and a section that redirected me to Replit. It was built with Replit.
Picture this. In Ordu, in a local pub, there’s a product they built themselves with Replit. In the 50-year history of Köşk Pub, perhaps the biggest technological transformation, made possible by AI.
I got up immediately and walked the three steps over to the owner. I asked him: “That’s interesting. Why did you change the old online menu and build this one with Replit?”
He used to pay 100 euros a year to the previous provider. He’d heard about Replit, tried it, built it easily. As he was telling me this, his face was smiling, he was visibly proud of himself, and I could tell he was glad I’d noticed.
“So how much did you spend?” I asked.
“150 euros,” he said.
Hold on a second. He could have kept paying 100 euros a year for a ready-made online menu provider with all the content already set up. Instead, he sat down, spent his hours, went through the learning curve, paid more money, and built it himself. And he’s happy about it. He’s proud of it.
Does this remind you of something? It reminded me of two things directly: cake mixes and IKEA.
People don’t buy ready-made cakes from the supermarket. They buy cake mixes where you crack the egg, stir the ingredients, bake it yourself. They pay more for it. And they enjoy doing it. Because we’re human, craft and the “I made this” feeling still matter a lot.
Replit isn’t just selling a browser-based, AI-powered product development platform. It’s giving you the ability to craft. It’s pulling you into the work. Especially for people who’ve never built products before, people who don’t see themselves as “product people,” this is incredibly valuable.
Today, Replit has become the cake mix of digital products.
When I noticed the Köşk Pub story, I realized this is actually the concrete, street-level version of the launch wave I see on LinkedIn.
On one side, a pub owner in Ordu. On the other, people all over the world shipping launches every week with Cursor, Replit, Lovable, Bolt, v0. Both move with the same urge. You don’t subscribe to Notion anymore. You build your own Notion, the way you like it, the way it fits you. Yes, you spend more than what you’d pay Notion over years, but it becomes your Notion.
I want to call this self-product. Not because it’s micro. It can be small or big. The intent is what’s different. Not built for the average needs of a generic crowd, but for your own problem.
The self-product era has started.
So, do you think this just keeps going and we end up with quadrillions of apps, digital products, everyone using their own branded product for everything? Doesn’t this make things a bit chaotic? Wouldn’t it have a destructive effect on some industries? Are everyone’s products actually high quality, working properly, a sensible investment?
Put another way: if everyone builds a solution to their own problem, will all problems be solved?
The answer is no.
Some will, yes. Köşk Pub’s menu got solved. That guy’s 100-euro SaaS dependency got solved. I’m not dismissing that, I mean it. But two new problems emerge at the same time.
The first is staying invisible. Building used to be hard, getting noticed was relatively easy. What you put on Product Hunt was actually competing against a small number of alternatives. Now it’s the other way around. The launches we see on LinkedIn are the ones that managed to be visible. But behind every visible launch, there are tens, hundreds of half-finished, abandoned, unused products. We don’t see them because they didn’t get visible. Classic survivorship bias. When you see “I shipped last week” posts in your feed, what you need to keep in mind is: there were hundreds of other launches you didn’t see.
The ability to ship has become baseline. “I shipped” doesn’t mean anything on its own anymore. The new bottleneck is this: can you get people to see what you built, try it, and stay with it? Distribution, attention, mindshare. These used to come after the product. Now they weigh as much as the product itself.
The second is the junk sea. App Store and Product Hunt are already full. They’ll be 10 times fuller in the next 5 years. Simple arithmetic. As the marginal cost of building approaches zero, production becomes unlimited. Anything that becomes unlimited loses value. We’ve already lived through content inflation, and we’re still living it. Product inflation is coming too. Some of it will be personalized, meaningful self-products. But most of it will be junk. Half-finished, buggy, abandoned, security-flawed products that nobody maintains. This junk might solve someone’s problem for a moment. But it doesn’t create lasting value. It floats around like a ghost.
There’s also this: does Köşk Pub’s menu actually belong to him, or to Replit’s template? We changed the tool, but the dependency just moved. What will the pub owner do if a bug shows up in the menu six months from now? Building is one thing. Sustaining is another.
The notion of “one right product” has collapsed. I accept this, and I don’t think there’s any going back. Notion doesn’t have to be the same for everyone anymore. This means more variety, more choice, more personalization. Good.
But what’s replacing it, the self-product, isn’t enough on its own. New filters emerge: Is it visible? Is it sustainable? Is it memorable? Can it actually be owned?
A product is no longer just an artifact. It’s something that forms around voice, attitude, community, and story. As building gets easier, everything outside of building gains weight.
I don’t know what state Köşk Pub’s menu will be in two years from now. But I do have a prediction about where digital products are headed in two years. Bookmark this if you want, let’s see in 2028.
Here’s what will win: products that can actually personalize. I’m not talking about changing the color of the interface. I’m not talking about the surface-level “personalization” we’ve been discussing for the past decade. Products that understand you, shape themselves to you, in another dimension. Products that carry AI not as a feature, but in their veins, their voice, their power. Products that start to resemble you the more you use them.
I’m not sure if fomo is needed. Even though it feels like we’re horses being whipped on our backs in a constant time-race, most tokens will end up as junk. As always, what should be will be. The right things will win.
With one difference: the problem of this era is no longer just “doing the right thing.” What can be distributed will win. As what can be built gets built by everyone, what can be noticed will stay scarce. Being good is the baseline. Being reachable is the new moat.
Köşk Pub’s owner built his own menu for 150 euros, and he’s proud. In the next 10 years, millions of people around the world will do something similar.
Most of these will be forgotten, abandoned, decayed within two years. Some will last. Some will become important parts of people’s lives. We don’t know yet which will be which, but where it lands depends on whether people can convert the “pride of building” into the “investment of sustaining.”
I’m writing this while still in Ordu. Every time I open LinkedIn, I’ll feel fomo again. But a different fomo. No longer “I should ship something too.” Now: “will what I ship be visible, sustainable, meaningful?”
The self-product era has started. The story isn’t written yet. We’re writing it together.