Jul 28, 2026 3 min read

Why did I start this site?

I have forgone coming up with a fancy hook to draw you in. The temptation was there, but sometimes you just want to write for writing’s sake instead of trying to optimise this or maximise that.

And as I’m constantly optimising and iterating in my day-to-day life, I’ve given myself permission to just blurt words onto a page, and it’s incredibly refreshing, in fact it's almost cathartic.

Perhaps I should end the essay there, because that is reason enough, but that would be incredibly selfish of me.

Although there is some truth in that last sentence, and If we were being completely honest with ourselves, the vast majority of what we do is a selfish pursuit to improve our own lives.

Is that not why many of us became business owners, founders, creators, makers or indie hackers in the first place?

We rejected what the world was lining up for us, or perhaps we sampled the 9-to-5 life, recoiled and thought: “Not for me, there must be another way”

That was certainly my experience.

I knew pretty early on that working for somebody else would not suit my wiring very well as I hated not being in control. I was rebellious, and I found the day-to-day experience of school lacklustre outside of socialising, chasing girls and playing sport.

Later in life, I could put much of that down to ADHD as my brain works on urgency, novelty, challenge and interest, rather than importance in the way many neurotypical brains seem to.

Already dropping fun facts.

I digress.

Founder life

The pursuit of being a founder, as painful as it can be, is incredibly rewarding, painful, but incredibly rewarding.I felt repeating that would generate more impact, you’ll have to let me know whether it worked.

There is no feeling quite like working through a challenge, figuring something out, hitting a breakthrough, failing, retrying, failing again and then finally winning.

But it's also an incredibly lonely experience.

Very few people understand the day-to-day reality, the difficult decisions, or the fact that you often have to make those decisions with 60%, perhaps 70%, of the information available.

That is simply the risk we accept.

And I want to get back in that seat after spending the last four years of building for others.

So what do I want to get out of this?

When I combine all of that and ask myself the question again, why did I start this site? I think the answer is something like this.

I want to create leverage and expand the opportunities available to me by building a body of work around my name.
I want to own something again, something that I have total creative control over and which direction to point in next.
I want to improve my thinking, clarify my ideas and become better at expressing them.
I want to connect with other founders who, much like me, enjoy eating glass and occasionally question whether they are masochists.
I want to create a public record of my thinking, the experiments I run and how my beliefs or frameworks change over a long enough period of time.
I want to help other founders by providing a real and present view of building, running and acquiring customers for their own products.

Tired of polished BS

And I am genuinely tired of the slop all over the web and social media in addition much of what we read is polished backwards.

The result is already known, the story has been cleaned up and the difficult decisions, uncertainty and wrong turns have been edited out until the whole thing looks inevitable.

Fucking inevitable.

I want to share the present moment instead and all of the uncertainty of the present, you know, how to think about a rapidly changing environment as it's rapidly changing.

What I am doing now, what I think will happen, what actually happens and how I respond when those things are not the same.

I'm going to fuck up, I'm going to miss a publication date, I'm going to publicly make a few large mistakes while sharing the receipts with you.

And as scary as typing that out feels, there is something romantic and strangely addictive about it.

Anyway, less ranting and more focused writing will follow.

But I wanted to explain why I started this site without framing it as a perfectly optimised, entirely selfless pursuit designed to maximise your engagement and goodwill.