About me

For years I could build anything I wanted, and almost none of it moved.

My background in software engineering was both the edge and the curse. Building was never the hard part. Choosing what to build, in the order that mattered, was — and I kept getting that wrong, quietly, for a long time.

So I went looking for the answer instead of doing the work. Guides, courses, subscriptions, the next thing that would finally explain it. What I actually needed was slower and less interesting: work out where I was standing, then go back to the fundamentals of running a business.

At some point I dropped everything and gave myself the time to do exactly that. Things got clearer fast. Most business models do work — but only under conditions the person selling them rarely names. If your situation doesn't match theirs, you will always feel one missing piece away, however much you paid for the course. That is the part nobody says out loud, because saying it was never profitable.

Businesses grow by saving money, not by making more money.

To make more, you spend more. To save more, you get efficient, centralise, and do more of it yourself. That is the whole thesis behind every entry in the portfolio: one database instead of nine, my own tools instead of a stack of subscriptions, and agents doing the parts I used to do by hand.

I am not selling the shortcut, because I do not think there is one. I am building the system I needed, in the open, and writing down what it actually cost.

See what came out of it — 9 entries in the portfolio