280 Reprints, 4 Visits

I built Stacktube for one person: me. When a YouTube channel I follow posts something new, the video turns into a note and lands in my Obsidian vault. That's all it does. I needed that, so I made it.

Then one day a question came up. What happens to a tool you use when you make it usable by other people? What sits between something you use and something you sell? I wanted to find out firsthand, and to feel that difference by building it.

I should admit this runs backward from my own book. In Ship It, I wrote that you should figure out what to build first. And here I was, holding something already finished, going out to look for people afterward.

You can see it in the admin screen. Stacktube's admin page wasn't designed for running a business. It's the same screen I use every day, with a few admin controls stacked on top. Less a shop than my own room, with guests starting to come in.

When development was done, it occurred to me: showing people something you built for yourself isn't entering a market with demand. It's looking for people like you. People who care about the same things, who have similar taste.

Do those people exist?

That's where unstackd started, too — a studio that is really a collection of very personal projects. But what if there's no one out there like me? That would feel strange in its own way. It would also mean no one relates. The two thoughts sat side by side in my head for a while, each nudging the other. (My parents don't count here. Parents back their kids no matter what.)

So I decided to run an experiment. There's a product nobody asked for, but it's finished. Between now and the end of the year, I'll tell people about it and see what comes back. This log is the first entry.

In the first week I put out two press releases — English on Tuesday night, Japanese on Wednesday morning, Seoul time. The distribution report says the English one was picked up by about 280 sites. Visits to the site recorded from both releases combined: four.

Four. I took the number at face value, until I found out a few days later that the counter was only half on. Visits were logged on some pages but not others; anyone who landed straight on the gallery or the trial page went uncounted. I fixed it Friday morning. The two days before don't come back.

So I made a call: the numbers from those two days won't be compared with anything that comes after. The record starts over on September 18. Four isn't a wrong number. It's a number I didn't count properly, and I'm leaving it that way.

One last thing — a rule for this record: if you respond to it, your name goes in the book I'm putting out in December. If you want it there.

Next time: where the emails I sent to strangers ended up.