I build often. The public record is a restaurant POS, a site for finding SaaS products, analytics and simulation tools, an AI practice, research that is still in progress, and a set of ideas that never became products. I do not experience that list as a single company. I experience it as a way of finding out what I think, by making the thing.
Curiosity is a good reason to start. It is a bad reason to keep funding every start with the same attention. The Lean Startup gave me a language for that: an idea is a hypothesis, and the build is not the test. The test is what someone does when the thing exists. I have not published the numbers that would let a reader score these projects. I am not going to invent customers, revenue, or a winner.
The tension I actually feel is between range and concentration. Range teaches me. I learn how a restaurant workflow differs from a research tool, and how an AI workflow differs from both. Concentration is what I owe to anything that starts to show demand. Demand, for me, has to be behaviour I can point at. Interest from friends, or my own excitement, does not count as that evidence.
Distribution is the part I underestimate while I am building. Making the software can feel like the whole problem because it fills the day. Finding the people it is for, and learning whether they stay, is a second project. Several of the things I have shipped are public. Being public is not the same as being chosen.
Some entries in the timeline are still ideas, or still unfinished. ReEngage20 is in progress. FixedSLM is a concept, not a service. I would rather leave them in that state than promote them into successes. Stopping, or leaving an idea as an idea, is part of the same principle as shipping. The point of many experiments is to earn the right to focus, not to keep a museum of half-used domains.
What I want from the next year of building is a shorter list. Not because range was a mistake, but because a notebook full of products is not a substitute for one product whose use I can describe without bluffing.