There is one thing that I keep coming back to, something Tobi Lütke, the CEO of Shopify, talks about in interviews and something I experienced firsthand during my years there: the idea of getting obsessed with problems. Not interested. Not aware. Obsessed. The kind of obsession where you wake up thinking about a problem, carry it with you through the day, and let it shape how you see everything around you.

What's remarkable is how rare this is. And how difficult it is to find people who share your obsession for the same problem.

I think about this all the time in the context of building Tuist. If you want to build something that truly stands out, something that brings something unique to the world, you need a deep love for the problem you're solving. Not a passing interest. Not a strategic bet. Love. The kind that makes you willing to go deeper than anyone else, to sit with complexity longer than is comfortable, to resist the temptation of doing what everyone else is doing just because it looks like that's where the opportunity is.

Passion for problems vs. passion for business

When I look around at tools and companies in our space, I notice that the gravitational pull of business can be very strong. And look, you need that component. You need to know how to sell what you're building. You need revenue. You need sustainability. But I think when the business side takes over, something subtle happens to the products that come out of it.

They start looking the same. Same design language. Same feature sets. Same concepts. Same positioning. It's not that the people building them don't care. I think most founders do care. But the pressure to grow, to compete, to ship what the market expects, can quietly push the product toward a kind of sameness. Sometimes you fall so in love with an idea that feels unique but isn't, and you don't realize you're standing in a crowded room full of people saying the same thing with slightly different words.

A good example of this dynamic is the compute space right now. Compute for CI. Compute for agents. Compute for whatever comes next. There's a natural tendency to look at what's gaining traction and move toward it. Then capital flows in, and the incentive becomes to do the same thing at scale as fast as possible. I don't think this is necessarily wrong. But I do think it creates a landscape where the products can end up feeling similar. They solve real technical challenges, but they can lose some of that personality along the way. That sense that someone poured their particular obsession into every detail.

What personality actually means

When I say personality, I mean something very specific. I mean how you feel when you use a product. How you interface with the problem domain. How simple it is. How enjoyable it is. Whether it evokes something in you, some kind of emotion, when you interact with it.

There isn't a better example of this than 37signals. Every product they build, every problem space they enter, they do it differently. There's a craft and a point of view that's unmistakable. You use their products and you feel something. They're not just functional, they're opinionated in a way that feels alive.

Shopify does this too. One thing I took from my time there is how deeply they understand their business. They don't just build features for e-commerce. They study e-commerce so well that they can model it properly, and from that deep understanding they build domain-specific building blocks that enable creative solutions. When a new technology with new capabilities arrives, like AI, they jump into exploring what that means for their product space. They don't just bolt features on. They think deeply about what the technology enables for the people they serve, because they understand the domain well enough to see what others can't.

Apple has done this for decades. Their products don't just work. They feel considered. They feel like someone cared about every detail, every transition, every moment of interaction. That investment in how something feels is not superficial. It's foundational to why people love using their products.

Building with feeling

At Tuist, we're trying to do the same. We look around. We know what's happening in our space. But we try to be different. We invest in areas where people don't usually invest: in making the product feel alive through animations, through interactions, through videos, so that when you use it, something is evoked. Not just utility. Emotion. We want ours to feel like it was made by people who care, because it was.

We're also open source, which we think is unique and important in how it shapes our relationship with the people who use what we build.

We design everything so that the product is layered. People can choose the layer they want and plug it into their system. We look at every single detail. How we name things. How the experience feels when using the CLI. How the dashboard communicates information. We care about the small things because we believe they add up to something meaningful.

And critically, we use the tool ourselves. Not just passively, but we are constantly looking for ways to use it more. We look at our own setup and ask ourselves where the friction is, where we can push Tuist further into our own workflow. We are developers. We develop software every day, and we have our own productivity issues. So we solve them for ourselves first, and that becomes a source of ideas for the product. On top of that, we work very closely with our users. We listen to their problems, we get ideas from the challenges they share with us, and we translate those into solutions that are genuinely useful. When you use a product and it feels broken, you can't help but wonder what would happen if the people building it lived inside it every day. I understand that organizational complexity makes this hard. But for me, it's kind of unthinkable to build something we don't use daily, alongside the people we build it for.

The discomfort of going your own way

Most importantly, we're avoiding jumping into whatever everyone else is jumping into just for the sake of following the crowd. This feels very uncomfortable, I'll be honest. When everyone moves in the same direction, that's where the money flows. And money has a gravitational pull that's hard to resist.

But I also have to say that money tends to have a short-term, short-sighted view of spaces. Capital chases what looks like it's working right now. It rewards speed over depth, imitation over originality, scale over craft. If you want to be a long-term business, which is what we're aiming to do with Tuist, you need to think differently.

Think out of the box, like Apple used to say.

We're going deep into areas like build systems to understand them well. Not superficially. Not just enough to ship a product. Deeply enough that when we intersect that knowledge with AI, we can bring something of real value to companies. Something shaped by our particular obsession with this problem space.

We announced recently that we are going to solve compute. But not compute for the sake of compute. We are building on compute capabilities so that we can enable creative solutions for productivity, which is what we are truly obsessed with solving. From all the learnings we got at Shopify, from making developers productive, from working very close to the tools, from understanding them deeply, we learned that you need to build domain building blocks so that you can model those problem spaces properly. That's what we're doing. We're not entering compute to compete on price or speed. We're entering it because compute is a foundation on top of which we can build something different. It's not that we're the only ones thinking about developer productivity. But we are very obsessed with it, and that obsession, combined with years of working close to the tools, gives us a particular perspective that shapes everything we build.

The bet

This is ultimately a bet.

A bet that obsession matters more than speed. That personality matters more than feature parity. That going deep matters more than going wide. That building something you love using yourself every day produces better outcomes than optimizing for metrics in a pitch deck.

It's not the easy path. It's not the path that gets you the loudest applause or the biggest funding round. But I believe it's the path that leads to products people actually love, companies that actually last, and work that you can actually be proud of.

That's what we're building at Tuist. Not just a product. A point of view.