Six Months of Non-Stop Building
The notebook is getting shorter
I've been the person with a hundred ideas scribbled in notebooks, notes apps, random text files for as long as I can remember. Ideas for tools, apps, businesses. Things I wanted to build but never had the time to start. They'd sit there, and I'd tell myself I'd get to them.
Over the past six months, I've been getting to them.
What six months looks like
Between my 9-5 and every hour I can carve out around it, I've shipped more in half a year than I had in the years before it combined. Six websites. A full SaaS product with payments, onboarding, and a real backend. A custom website for my wedding. Two apps with over 5,000 downloads between them. A marketing engine pulling in 10,000 views a week, over 500,000 total so far. An interactive map. Custom tools for tracking my health, tasks, and finances that I use every single day.
I still don't know how I fit all of that in. A year ago, most of those would've stayed in the notebook.
AI changed the equation
AI is the reason any of this was possible. It's a collaborator that compresses the gap between idea and execution. I move faster. I take on things I wouldn't have attempted solo. I prototype, iterate, and ship at a pace that used to require a team.
At my day job, I've been using AI to revamp our internal processes and build tools at a fraction of what they'd cost otherwise. We're building things that would've taken months in a matter of weeks. It's exciting to own more of the stack and have AI right there next to you.
I've been pushing my team to learn it too. I show them through example. I build something, I share how I approached it, and I let the work speak for itself. That's done more than any presentation or training session could.
The thing that keeps me going
I'm obsessed with building things I'd want to use myself. Every tool, every app, every feature, I ask the same question: would I enjoy using this? Is it intuitive? Does it solve a problem I care about?
That matters more now than it ever has. AI makes it easy to ship something. It also makes it easy to ship something bad. The internet is filling up with half-baked apps and generated content that no one asked for. The bar for "it exists" dropped to zero. The bar for "it's good" hasn't moved.
I think the difference between something people come back to and something they forget in a week is whether the person who built it cared about the details. The layout, the flow, the small interactions that make you feel like someone thought about your experience. That's where I spend my time. And I think that's what separates a product from AI slop.
Where I'm struggling
I'm trying to do too much at once. I want to keep every project moving forward, but there are only so many hours. Now that I have the tools to execute on all these ideas, the bottleneck has shifted. I can build anything. The question is whether I should build it right now.
That's a discipline I haven't figured out yet.
And then there's distribution. I have no money for ads. Every view, every download, every user, I've had to grind for. I've managed to build real traction with the marketing engine (500k views and counting), but getting people to care about what you built is harder than building it. By a lot.
What I'm taking from this
I'm proud of what I've done. I also know how much I don't know. Focus. Marketing. Saying no to a good idea because a better one needs my attention.
The tools caught up to my ambition. Now I need my strategy to do the same.