Building for ten people is different

Sunday Hype fetches the week's Catholic Mass readings and uses OpenAI to rewrite them for teenagers — same meaning, language that a 15-year-old might actually engage with on a Sunday morning.

I built it in April 2025, then came back to it in May 2026 for a second pass. It's live at sunday-hype.vercel.app. My best guess is it has about ten users. My kids are some of them.

I think about this build a lot when I'm working on something bigger.

What "shipped" means at small scale

Most of the projects I'm proud of — the ones I'd call genuinely shipped — have real users who depend on them. Let's Raise It has schools running fundraisers through it. InsuranceNerds has CSRs at Cornerstone using it every day. KwiklyBI is open at least one team member's browser constantly.

Sunday Hype is different. The value is narrow, the audience is tiny, and that's entirely on purpose. The lectionary readings come out every week. The cache keeps the AI calls cheap. The app does one thing: it makes Sunday morning a little more accessible for teenagers who might otherwise tune out.

That specificity is the point. I didn't try to make it a general Catholic educational tool or add a study guide or build in a social layer. I built exactly the thing I wanted to exist, for people I actually know.

The thing about small-audience builds

They're faster to ship, easier to scope, and more honest about what they are. There's no pressure to grow them into something else. A tool for ten people that ten people find genuinely useful has done its job.

A lot of the prototypes in the app ledger died because I tried to make them bigger than the idea warranted. Sunday Hype survived because I resisted that impulse.

I keep coming back to it. It's still running. That's enough.