I thought I was building apps. I was actually studying retrieval.

Over the last few months, I've posted a lot about building.

76 ideas.

89 ideas.

90 ideas.

Multiple MVPs.

Several shipped products.

From the outside, it probably looks like I'm obsessed with creating apps.

But recently, I noticed something strange.

The products keep changing.

The underlying problem doesn't.

No matter what I build, I keep running into the same pattern:

People save things.

And then they can't find them when they need them.

Notes.

Bookmarks.

Prompts.

Ideas.

Screenshots.

Articles.

Even conversations.

For a long time, I assumed the challenge was helping people capture more information.

Now I'm starting to think capture is mostly solved.

Storage is cheap.

Saving is easy.

Retrieval is where things break.

What's interesting is that this pattern keeps appearing across products that seem completely unrelated on the surface.

The apps are different.

The behavior is not.

The more products I build, the more I find myself studying the same question:

Why is information so easy to save and so difficult to reuse?

That question has become more interesting to me than any individual product.

It's also changing how I think about what to build next.

Instead of asking:

"What's my next product?"

I'm increasingly asking:

"What's the underlying problem that keeps showing up regardless of the product?"

I'm curious if other founders have experienced something similar.

Have you ever built multiple products and eventually realized they were all pointing toward the same core problem?

Or is this just what happens when you stare at the same space for too long?