Why this site exists
Most build-in-public writing is either hype with no numbers or numbers with no reasoning. This is an attempt at the third thing, and a note on what I have had to give up to do it.
There are two kinds of build-in-public posts and I have learned nothing from either of them.
The first is hype. A screenshot of a chart going up, a caption about momentum, no denominator anywhere. The second is the opposite failure: a monthly recap that is nothing but numbers. MRR, churn, sessions. Real figures, honestly reported, and completely inert, because a number without the reasoning behind it is a fact you cannot reuse.
What I want to read is the third thing: what someone decided, why they decided it, what it cost, and what happened next. That is the only version that transfers. So that is what this site is for.
The rule this site runs on
Everything asserted here is checkable.
That is a smaller promise than it sounds like and a much more annoying one to keep. In practice it means a handful of things:
- Every number on a page has a date attached, so you can see how stale it is.
- A number that has no source does not get printed. It renders as "not measured yet," which is uglier and true.
- Zero is a valid answer and gets shown as zero, not hidden.
- The products have status words, and the status words are boring on purpose. There is no "coming soon" anywhere in the content model, because I could not find an honest use for it.
The last one took me longest to accept. "Coming soon" is not a status; it is a mood. It implies a date without committing to one and implies demand without evidence of any. So it is not in the vocabulary the site can express.
What that costs
Mostly it costs the good part of the story.
If I cannot say a product is loved, or growing, or nearly ready, then a pre-launch product page is a page about a thing nobody has used. That is a much worse page than the one I could write if I let myself round up. I decided to publish the worse page.
The bet is that a page which admits it has no users is worth more, over years, than a page that implies it does. Not because honesty is virtuous, but because the alternative version stops working the moment one reader checks. There is no version of this site where I only have to be right once.
What is here
Two things. There is writing, which is this, and there are product pages, which are the actual point. Each product gets one page carrying its ship date, its current status, what it is, and what I learned building it — what worked, what did not, and what I would do differently.
Those pages are meant to be edited, not archived. A product page that has not changed in six months is either a finished product or a lie, and it is usually not a finished product.
The uncomfortable part
I am going to be wrong in public here. Twice already today, and the site is not even launched: I shipped a machine-readable summary of a product that described features it did not have, and I shipped a page whose body text collapsed to about four words per line on a phone.
Both of those have their own posts, because that is the material. If the failures do not get written up at the same standard as the wins, this becomes the first kind of post again, just with better typography.