Week 31: Summary

Seven days ago I handed in my notice. Here is what week one actually looked like: the real numbers, the real learning, and the plan for the next seven days.

Seven days ago I handed in my notice. Sold the car. Set myself a target: 28 products shipped by the end of 2026, starting from a folder of 200+ half-finished projects and about three months of runway.

This is what week one looked like.

What shipped

4567 went live. The MVP at 4567.phototypelabs.com is public. Landing page cleaned up, pricing set at $70/year, Linux build uploaded and downloadable. Still editing tutorial videos for the front page, so the full launch push is not out yet. But the path from "someone lands on the site" to "someone can pay me" is real and working.

Talking about 4567 aka doing the marketing. First post went up July 29. I wrote out a full 21-post content strategy: one feature per post, show first explain later. No product-pitch energy. Just me describing what I built and what happened when I used it.

One of the next projects got its iOS fix. The private workspace had a Firebase OAuth issue that broke Safari on iPhone. Fixed and deployed. It is still locked down — this is internal tooling for now, not a public product.

What I built but have not shipped

The 4567 desktop app got a proper, simple GUI. It was terminal-only before. Now there is a native UI window, select or drag-and-drop folder with start/stop controls, status indicators. Linux build is working (35MB). macOS build is ready for testing once I get to a Mac. Windows version testing atm.

No customers yet. The site is up, the price is set, the content strategy is written. Still not posted a single tutorial video and I have not run a single $$$ of ad spend. The distribution side is still the bottleneck. It has been the bottleneck on every project I have ever almost-shipped.

What I learned this week

The biggest thing was not technical. It was realising that "finishing" a product and "distributing" a product are two completely different muscles, and I have been training only one of them for a long time.

I can build a thing. I have done it hundreds of times. The part I keep avoiding, the part that actually determines whether this works or not is posting the video, writing the launch post, spending some budget on an ad, watching the number go up or down, and learning something from it.

That is the muscle. That is what week one taught me.