why i'm building in public, from zero

i have a full-time job i genuinely love. i also have an itch i can't shake: to build something of my own, and reach financial freedom doing it.

most people start documenting this after they've made it, once the story is safe to tell. i'm doing the opposite. this site is the record of the climb, and it starts from numbers that are, right now, deliberately unimpressive.

here's the whole plan.

where i'm starting from

no soft lighting. as i write this:

• vibedraft, my main product, peaked at 9 paying subscribers and $171 MRR, then bled to $0 over two months. $152 in real revenue, start to finish.
• this newsletter: 0 subscribers.
• the point isn't the numbers. it's that they're public, pulled live from the source, and i can't quietly edit them when they're ugly.

that's the starting line. everything from here is documented in the open.

where i came from

i didn't come up through CS. i started in finance out of boston, taught myself to build on the side, and worked my way into engineering the hard way. for about a decade now i've built large-scale data systems by day, work i genuinely love and learn a ton from. the itch to build my own thing runs alongside it, not against it.

my first startup, a college social network, died with zero users. i spent a year building it and roughly zero days telling anyone it existed. that failure is the foundation of everything here: distribution isn't a phase that comes after building. it IS the building.

what i'm building

• products. vibedraft (an X writing OS), ideaverify, and whatever comes next. small bets, shipped in public.
• an agentic founder OS. a workspace of AI agents doing my founder chores: analysis, idea validation, signal monitoring, content, posting. the goal is for a solo founder with a day job to operate like a team. i vibe-code most of it with claude.
• experiments. most will fail. all of them get written down.

what i'll document

• the real numbers, win or loss. pulled live from stripe, the x api, and my own database. no grading my own homework.
• what i build, and exactly how. written to be copied, not admired.
• the distribution playbooks. the part that actually decides whether any of it works, and the part i keep having to relearn.
• what i get wrong, in detail, while it's still embarrassing.

the goal

financial freedom through technology. recurring revenue over salary, ownership over hours, built out in the open. not to escape a job i love, but because making something that's mine, and seeing if i can, is its own reason worth chasing.

i publish the real numbers the whole way. currently unimpressive, deliberately public, because the honest record of getting there is the entire point.

come along

one letter a week: what shipped, what the numbers did, and what i'd do differently, including the parts that didn't work. real numbers, win or loss.

if you're climbing the same way, subscribe and build alongside me.