Someone asked me last week what platform they should build their business on.
I started to answer. Then I stopped.
Because the honest answer was "it depends" — and "it depends" is the most useless sentence in business. It's what every article says right before it helps you with nothing. You go looking for a decision and you get handed a shrug with a word count.
So I went away and built the thing I wished I could have just handed them.
The problem isn't a lack of information
There's no shortage of advice about what to build a website with. Type the question into Google and you'll drown in it — fifty "best platform" listicles, each one hedging, each one ending with the same useless line about how the right choice depends on your needs. Thanks. Genuinely useful.
The problem for a beginner isn't too little information. It's too much, with no way to apply it to their actual situation. They don't need another comparison table. They need someone to look at what they're trying to do and say: for you, start here.
That's a decision, not an article. And nobody was shipping a decision.
What it actually does
Five plain-language questions. No jargon, no account, nothing to install.
It asks what you're building, how you want to build it, what your budget is, whether you want to own the thing or just rent something that works, and — honestly — how much time you've got. Then it gives you one recommendation: what to build it with, why it fits you specifically, roughly what it costs, and the honest trade-off you're making by choosing it.
One answer. Not twelve options to go away and agonise over.
The first question is the one that does the real work. It asks how you want to build — whether you want to write code, learn a little, or never touch it. Most beginners get pushed toward coding by roadmaps written by people who code. A lot of them shouldn't be writing code at all, and nobody ever tells them that. The tool tells them that.
The hard part wasn't the code
I've been building things online for 23 years. The code was the easy bit. It always is.
The hard part was keeping it simple enough that someone who has never built anything could use it without feeling stupid. That's the bit most tools get wrong — they're built by people who've forgotten what not knowing feels like. Every assumed step, every unexplained term, every "obviously you just…" is a small door closing in a beginner's face.
So I kept stripping things out. Fewer questions. Plainer words. No feature that existed to look clever. The version that shipped is smaller than the version I first built, and it's better for it.
The other hard part was honesty. The tool recommends real platforms by name. The temptation — the thing every comparison site quietly does — is to nudge the recommendation toward whatever pays the most. I built it to recommend on fit alone, and tested every possible combination of answers to prove the logic never bends toward the convenient answer. A recommendation you can't trust isn't worth shipping. It's the whole product.
Why I gave it away
I run three businesses. Two are on one platform, one's on another, and I've built things on a third when the job called for it. I've made most of the choices this tool helps with, and I've made some of them wrong. It's the same instinct behind Nomad Compass — another decision nobody packages honestly, built by someone who'd actually been through it.
That's the only thing that makes a tool like this worth anything — not that it knows about platforms, but that someone who's actually lived the decisions stood behind which one to point you at. A search engine can list your options. It can't tell you which one you should pick and why. That part still needs a person who's been there.
I gave it away because the people it's for — the ones stuck at "I don't even know what to build this with" — are exactly the people least likely to pay for a tool to find out. They'll happily pay later, once they're building. Right now they just need to get unstuck.
It's on the site. It's free. If you're at that exact stage, go and use it.
And if you're not — if you already know your stack cold — then you were never the audience for this, and that's fine too. Build the thing. Tell the truth about the thing. That's the whole job.
Part of The Operator's Library — drewmitchell.co.uk
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