How embracing ‘useless’ ideas leads to better learning, better design, and surprisingly durable software.
Most companies build software by chasing targets. Roadmaps, KPIs, sprint boards, output. It keeps things organized, but it also narrows what you’re allowed to explore. When every idea needs a business case on day zero, the most interesting ones never get a real chance.
At Rightrun, we work from the opposite direction, we follow curiosity first.
When we say “useless,” we don’t mean pointless. We mean free from pressure. An idea that doesn’t have to justify itself yet. Something worth building simply because it feels interesting enough to investigate. That space is where our best thinking tends to happen.
Curiosity lets us explore the edges of generative AI, system design, infrastructure, and how people naturally interact with tools. We build small, strange, expressive experiments not because they promise anything, but because they reveal things we couldn’t have planned for.
Experiments expose the real constraints: which abstractions feel natural, which interfaces stay calm under complexity, where AI behaves unexpectedly, and what principles quietly repeat themselves.
You learn these things by building, not by predicting.
We care about experience even without a formal design function. In practice, experience comes from clarity. When an idea grows out of exploration instead of pressure, the design tends to follow the logic naturally. Software feels cleaner when the thinking behind it is clear.
Most experiments will stay experiments, and that’s fine. Each one leaves a signal, a small insight, a pattern, a behavior worth noting. These signals compound. They sharpen our taste, inform our architecture, and gradually point toward what deserves to grow.
If something eventually becomes a product, it will be because the idea proved itself through exploration, not because we forced it into existence.
We’re a company, but we operate with the spirit of a research lab. Our goal is to build an open-core collective where discovery guides direction, not urgency or fear.
That’s why we build “useless” software on purpose, because that’s where the signals live.
And those signals shape whatever we become next.