How to Make Something People (Actually) Give a Shit About

WESTENBERG

SubscribeSign in

How to Make Something People (Actually) Give a Shit About<br>5 Rules for Creating Work That Leaves a Mark

JA Westenberg<br>Jul 26, 2026

94

14

Share

Photo by Mario Gogh on Unsplash<br>🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.<br>While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.<br>You can buy my book Permissionless here.

You could make something right now.<br>If you wanted to stop reading, grab a sheet of butcher’s paper and brainstorm ideas; you could probably come up with half a dozen ideas for apps, books, or products.<br>Ideas aren’t the hard part, after all  -  just ask Tom Haverford.<br>Or anyone with “Serial Founder” in their bio.<br>You could build a WordPress site and start harassing your friends to test the concept. You could start writing op-ed pieces on Substack and put “Founder” or “Author” in your Twitter bio within 48 hours. You could throw up a landing page, post the first chapter of a book, and start pushing it on Product Hunt.<br>Where things get tough is when you’re trying to make something that people genuinely give a shit about.<br>You don’t want your dream to die in the chamber, because nobody read it, watched it, used it, or listened to it.<br>Because the deafening silence surrounding your work can crush your soul.<br>You want people to care? Here’s how.

1.

Only Make What You Care About

If you want to make something that people actually care about, you have to care about it yourself. Because if you don’t, then try as you might, it’ll come out in the final product.<br>The reason for this?<br>Making something is hard. Making something you don’t care about is even harder.

The only way you’ll be able to consistently work when you don’t want to work, consistently try when you don’t want to try, is if you deeply and honestly care about your work.<br>This has never been more pronounced. AI seems to be making everything from software to the written word all but disposable; and the temptation that comes with it is to make as much work as possible, while caring as little as possible, and doing it at scale. I keep coming across creators who are obsessed with automating the work into a content farm; they want the glory of the written word, but they don’t want a single letter etched onto their souls.<br>Unfortunately - whether or not people can tell AI-written content from human-written content, I think most folks have an almost supernatural ability to sense whether a creator actually gives a damn. We know when someone doesn’t care. We know when someone’s phoning it in. We know when someone doesn’t give a shit.<br>The good news is this: being deeply invested in the things you make, say, and do is a moat that few will bother to build.<br>So, rule number one:<br>You want people to care?<br>You have to genuinely care yourself.

2.

Make Things For Real People

The best writing advice I have ever heard was to write specifically for someone I know.<br>It’s a genius idea.<br>Every time I go to create something, or build something, I think about who I know that would benefit from what I’m doing.<br>If you have something that you care enough about to make, you have to ask the next question  -  who are you making it for? What information do they need? What turn of phrase would stop them in their tracks? What is their single pain point that the product could solve, or their secret story that your novel would be able to touch and cultivate into a real emotional response?<br>Stop thinking about your audience as a vague concept, a collection of faceless people.<br>Believe that your audience is a real person with feelings, experiences and a story. It will change your perspective.

The mass appeal of social media makes this a good deal harder; the fact that every post has the (technical) potential to reach an audience of millions encourages us to believe that an audience of millions is within reach, that our target audience must be so broad as to give us the best possible fighting chance of capturing the multitudes.<br>This is a false idol.<br>Your audience is as small as the thing you care about, and as big as the things they care about. That’s it. The work of it all is finding out what those things are.<br>You want people to care?<br>You have to know what will make them care.

3.

Ask Yourself If You Fit The Project

You need to ask yourself whether you have the courage, the strength, the motivation, and the passion to make what you want to make.<br>Do you have what it takes to do this, specifically this?<br>And I mean really ask yourself.<br>When you first come up with an idea, you can get so caught up in it that you can’t see anything else. You can’t see the toil on your...