The Brand DMs I Haven't Answered
People keep DMing me to make content about their products, and I keep not answering. I went looking for whether that's just me being precious, and the numbers on trust made it more complicated, not less.
Building
20 posts
BUILD LOG
BUILD LOG
Here's Why All My Resources Are Free
Someone DMed asking about my paid offerings. Here's what I told them, and what changed once I stopped chasing the algorithm and started just documenting what I'm building instead.
BUILD LOG
Your Creative Life Needs More Than a Posting Schedule
How to use the internet to support a side project: join conversations, ask for feedback, and find creative input worth making time for.
BUILD LOG
What Happens to a Project When You Stop for Three Weeks?
I took almost three weeks off from building anything. Here's what I noticed when I came back, and why I think that matters more than daily output does.
BUILD LOG
A Simple 3-Question Reset for a Stuck Project
When a project stalls, the instinct is to build a bigger plan. Three questions work better: what is making finishing harder, what small thing could you start this week, and what is already working that you should leave alone.
BUILD LOG
Think, Make and Learn
Ten days of daily video in, and what's actually holding the habit together: a camera setting, a mindset flip on low views, and a demo filmed off a TV screen because the perfect setup never came.
BUILD LOG
Two Weeks of Daily Video: What I'm Learning
Transitioning from silent carousels to daily videos, navigating the different expectations of Instagram and TikTok, and coping with the psychology of posting to crickets.
BUILD LOG
The Friction of Starting
Why beginning a new creative routine feels so difficult, why we overestimate the embarrassment of our mistakes, and why things start to flow around month three.
BUILD LOG
How to Run a Project Build Day
How I organize and run a single focused day of building, end to end
BUILD LOG
How to make your vibe-coded app not look vibe-coded
Your app doesn't look off because of the code. It looks off because of the defaults you never changed. Here's the checklist.
BUILD LOG
How to Stop Chasing Every New AI Tool (And Actually Keep the Ones That Earn It)
I tried about fifteen to twenty AI tools over the past year. Six are still in my weekly rotation. Here's the three-question framework I use to decide whether a new tool earns a permanent place.
BUILD LOG
Playing the Visibility Game
Algorithmic platforms reward signals that have little to do with whether your product is any good. So I stopped trying to become a content creator and built a pipeline instead.
BUILD LOG
Nobody's Waiting for You
I posted polished content and it flopped. Then I posted a voice note transcript in a teacher subreddit and got 87k impressions. Here's what that taught me about the difference between broadcasting and actually going to people.
BUILD LOG
From manuscript to moving characters: in a few hours, for almost nothing
The pipeline to turn your creative work into video just got short enough for a solo builder. Not because the AI got smarter. Because the right tools finally fit a weekend.
The Work of Giants and the Living Wiki
On the gap between seeing the ruins and understanding how they were built, and what that eighth-century anonymous poet has to do with how we're using AI right now.
What Do You Do When the Ground Keeps Moving?
Every great civilisation adapted to change. But adaptation has real costs and real losers. The Khmer Empire and the AI moment we're living through have more in common than you'd think.
The Bottleneck Moved: What Karpathy's Agent Workflow Means for People Who Build Things Solo
Unpacking Andrej Karpathy's No Priors conversation on coding agents, AGENTS.md files, AutoResearch, and what the shift to declarative workflows means for solo builders.
Two Months Later: What Happened After Zero Signups
In December, I launched to zero signups. Two months later, here's what the pause taught me and what's different now.
I Built a Product, Got Zero Signups, and Learned More Than I Expected
60 visitors, 0 signups. What my first product launch attempt taught me about positioning, landing pages, and iteration.
What Coca-Cola's Turnaround Taught Me About Building Small Projects
Lessons from Inside Coca-Cola that apply to building apps, teaching, and making things work better.