Shipping for the first time

I moved fast and broke some things

I’ve always been curious and creative, but horrible at shipping.

Six years ago I made my first attempt at entrepreneurship: building a real estate platform with a coworker. The real estate market was broken in sunny Barcelona and we wanted to fix it.

It was a fun experience. We were just two tech guys trying to build something cool. Then a business savvy guy came along and made us realize we were clueless about making money with it. We had no strategy, no plan, and no idea how to get users.

As fun as it was, in the end we never shipped. We had some disagreements about money and we ended up quitting the project. Today I still think about it sometimes. It taught me a lot.

After that, COVID happened. I left Barcelona and came back to my hometown, enclosed in the mountains in northern Spain. It was one of the coldest winters I remember, especially because I had just left the mediterranean weather.

So I moved to a heavenly island named Tenerife. From -12 Cº to 22 Cº.

In there I started building something that, looking back, I find quite naive: a dating app based on your musical taste. I spent four weeks perfecting the UI but I never wrote a single line of code.

In all, I love the thrill of starting something new, and I get started very easily. The problem is shipping. Up until now, every time I've started something, I've failed to ship it.

But now that’s changed. Perhaps because this newsletter has helped me build the consistency muscle. Or because AI has increased my productivity by an order of magnitude. I'm finally ready.

The product I’ve built is extremely simple, and I believe it will be useful for Substack writers. It’s not the financial app I mentioned previously. I was almost done with it when this idea came up. I tried to set it aside and focus, but it was beyond my control.

I had to build this.

This is not a launch post though. I wanted to share with you how this process feels, and, in a way, it’s like a rollercoaster.

You pour your soul into something and then you hit the wall: people don’t care. But there are some who do and even like it. Those shape it for future users and that's what makes it all worth it.

The first version is live and the second one is almost ready.

I’ll give you a hint about it: it’s helped me save time writing this post without leaving Substack editor. No tab switching, copy pasting, or writing assistant platforms.

More coming soon.