Request For Microproducts
Agent-first mirror of Request For Microproducts. Prose is identical; MDX interactive elements removed.
The Paradox of Personal Projects
You build personal projects to get hired.
Because that is your motivation, you probably will not.
Most technical talent has built personal projects to showcase on GitHub or in a portfolio. Here personal projects are not necessarily projects you build alone; they are projects you choose to pursue yourself. But too often, those projects exist for only one reason: to signal competence to an employer.
That changes what gets built.
Instead of asking, "What would be useful?" the builder starts asking, "What will look impressive?" The goal shifts from creating value to demonstrating skill. We believe that shift is one of the biggest constraints on what technical talent currently creates.
This is a version of Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.
The real goal might be to become an excellent software engineer or data scientist. LeetCode scores, Kaggle projects, GitHub activity, and portfolio projects are only proxies for that goal. Optimizing for the proxy can pull you away from the thing it was supposed to measure.
AI makes this problem more important. A single technical builder can now create far more than they could five years ago. As individual leverage increases, so does the standard.
That makes traditional signals less valuable. A polished Kaggle project may have helped someone stand out in 2021. In 2026, it is much less likely to.
The paradox is simple: the harder you optimize for getting hired, the more likely you are to build things designed to look good rather than be useful.
Build something people actually want.
If it is valuable enough, the hiring signal takes care of itself.
A New Standard For Personal Projects
We call this new standard a Microproduct, and it follows a few guiding principles.
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Build Something People Want
Do not look for problems that fit the solutions you already know how to build. Look for problems, then figure out how to solve them.
The second approach forces you to work backward from end-user value and learn whatever is necessary to create it. The first is constrained by your existing skills and therefore has a much lower ceiling.
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Value Continuum
Value creation takes many forms.
It can mean daily active users, revenue, open-source adoption, valuable datasets, research impact, or simply a passion project that serves a small community. A project can create real value without ever needing to become a company.
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Data Is Worth More Than You Think
In many technical projects, the most novel and valuable component is the data engine.
Treat the data itself as a core value proposition; your code is not your product.
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Follow Best Practices
Projects naturally accumulate complexity and become harder to maintain over time.
Software engineering best practices reduce that entropy. Testing, documentation, version control, automation, reproducibility, and clean architecture are not overhead. They are what allow useful projects to survive and grow.
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Build With Confidence
AI and agentic tools give technical builders unprecedented leverage across a much broader range of problems.
Use that leverage to expand what you believe you can build, not just to build familiar things faster.
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Do Before You Learn
Some problems are best learned by trying to solve them before you feel ready.
Getting started is often a bigger barrier to value creation than missing prerequisites, expertise, or funding. Start building, discover what you do not know, then learn it as needed.
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Solve One Problem Well
The "micro" in Microproduct refers to scope. Do not try to solve an entire category of problems. Identify one specific problem and solve it exceptionally well.
Focus makes ambitious projects feasible. It gives you somewhere to start, makes the value proposition clear, and lets complexity grow only when the problem demands it.
As a simple rule, if you cannot explain the problem you are solving and the value you are creating in one sentence, your scope is probably too broad.
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Have Ownership
Going above and beyond is difficult when you do not care deeply about what you are building.
Choose problems you believe are worth solving. Ownership creates the motivation to keep improving a project long after the initial excitement disappears.
Trilemma Foundation wanted to capture this mindset for our community of builders, so we gave it a name: Microproducts.
On its own, however, the term is abstract. A mindset is only useful if it changes how people build. That is why we created an open knowledge hub that turns Microproducts into a practical framework for identifying problems, creating value, and building projects that last.