Here’s the skinny: Internotes is live right now. You can head over to internotes.app and sign up and I’ll mail you over a magic link.
You would think that I would be really excited about this and yelling from the rooftops and such. That would be the normal reaction to hitting a big milestone with your first big solo project.
It’s Alive! It’s Aliiiiive! In the name of God, now I know what it feels like to be God!
— Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein (1930)
But here’s the other thing you ought to know: it sucks. Like, I don’t want you to think that I think that it’s good. It’s not. It is, to put a more generous spin on it, a “research-quality” prototype.
The app actually went live a few weeks ago. I kept quiet until I could figure out the right way to share it around. So before I get too far into the weeds, I have a favour to ask:
Into the weeds
As for the rest of this post, let’s explore why it’s been such a shambles so far, and why I’m uncharacteristically optimistic about 2026.
2025: Mistakes were made
Evolving an app from prototype to production is hard, and only gets harder the longer you leave it. It’s why we often Plan To Throw One Away. Throwing away an app that I had spent 2 years gradually chipping away at seemed stupid, so I tried to morph a terminal-based app that Works On My Machine™ into a more robust production-ready web app. That was tough.
Could I have gone faster rewriting from scratch? It’s hard to say.
The current structure seems obvious in hindsight, but I don’t know whether I would have been able to arrive at those outcomes without the pain of gradual iteration and many, many mistakes learning opportunities along the way.
This is also my first time running a business. I haven’t had to deal with a ton of Business Stuff (perhaps the only perk of having zero revenue) but the admin does stack up. The Bank and the Lawyers and the ICO and Companies House and various vendors all chip away at your time and enthusiasm. I can see why techies tend to pick a non-technical co-founder. Independence has plenty of advantages, though, and going solo was the right call for Internotes.
The other big struggle with going it alone is the lack of accountability. Perhaps more than any other reason, that was why I felt I needed to get the app launched in its current “pre-PMF” state. My natural impulse was to retreat back into my shell, shifting from “starting a business” to “taking a research year”. But sometimes you gotta suck it up. Get over yourself. Ship the damn app.
2026: The open road
Sure, it’s been a frustrating few months, but I feel good about what lies ahead.
The codebase is in great shape. Building a lot of things from scratch meant it was slow to get started, but it has allowed me to retain ownership over a lot of the stack. That gives me a lot of freedom to change the parts that aren’t working. I’m starting to uncover new patterns, and starting to ship features faster.
On the business side, I’ve dealt with many of the unknowns. I’m sure more things will come out of the woodwork, especially when it comes to accounting and marketing, but those are things I am comfortable outsourcing.
As for accountability, I need to change my current approach. Writing a changelog on a regular cadence should keep me focused. If I gaze too far into my navel then I will have to ’fess up and share that with the world. (Maybe no-one will actually read those things, but it’s enough to know that somebody might.)
The other change I need to make is to focus on one “killer feature”. Something that begins to differentiate Internotes from the bajillion other apps out there. I’ll spare you the gory details (he says, 800 words in) but I know the direction of travel. There’s one missing piece that feels especially urgent and valuable. I’m hoping this first wave of user feedback will give me some ground truth to test against. This feature should make the product much more useful, while also helping to communicate some of the longer term vision. “Show, don’t tell”.
But all that can wait. For now, it’s time to switch off and recharge the batteries. Stress levels have been high, mostly self-inflicted. That’s beginning to level out. Many thanks to everyone who’s helped me gradually de-stress in the build-up to Christmas.
Enjoy your festive snacks of choice. Here’s to building cool things in 2026.
And finally, a song to wrap up. There were a few Newton Faulkner tracks I could have picked — Uncomfortably Slow and Pulling Teeth both fit the bill nicely. But I figured Brick by Brick was a little more optimistic.
My best-laid plans are washed away
No time to make ’em all again
Sometimes life gets in the way
We’ve got to keep on breathing
Look how far we’ve come
Look what we’ve made
Started from nothing, building
Brick by brick by brick by brick by brick by brick by brick