Progress, a brand doubt, and where I lost focus: update #9

It's been a productive week. Real progress, real thoughts that move things forward. But I also hit a few friction points, and I want to stay honest here about what went wrong and where I still have doubts, not to mention my attempt at vibe-coding a Mac app, which I covered separately, because that deserved a dedicated post.

I'll start with the positive things, because the more I write, the easier it gets to find clarity.

Pinterest

Pinterest is finally on track. I'm slowly building out a full archive of everything published on this blog, one Pin every two days. That's a reasonable pace for now. I don't need high volume, but once Echo Room is live and I'm recording podcasts regularly, I'll think about moving to a daily Pin, once I find the right balance between blog content and audio content.

Right now I only need to update the schedule once a week. That takes about an hour, start to finish.

Content creation for flagship MVP

This was harder than I expected. For weeks I had no marketing plan for my flagship SaaS. That's fine; I'm in no rush to acquire customers, but having no plan at all felt just as bad as doing nothing.

I'm planning for slow growth: nurturing organic traffic, and blogging is the obvious first move. As a self-declared content creator, that should have been easy, but it took me a long time to find direction.

After some thought and planning out my September roadmap, I finally landed on one. I had to deconstruct my ICPs again and figure out how to build content without overdoing it.

And there's no better angle for me than writing about blogging, writing, and content creation from my own perspective. It's literally the fucking largest market I'm after, and it's right in my wheelhouse.

Three published blog posts later, I can finally define a content roadmap: more specific, more in-depth, respecting the rules of niche blogging. Conquer that niche first, then branch into other topics for different markets.

The content is aimed at beginner bloggers and people who want to write, and I resonate with that because I was there too. Writing this kind of content is low-friction for me, but still valuable for readers.

My goal isn't conversion now. It's credibility and authority, and I had to pick a starting point. Since this content is "easy," I'm treating it as a warm-up: one to two blog posts a week until I've built up enough to lean on.

Another goal checked off, right on track.

Unexpectedly popular

If you remember, I built the dumbest thing possible last weekend and spent twelve bucks on it. No monetization, no paywalls, nothing but pure stupidity, with a stupid awards ladder that counts the live votes.

I mentioned it twice in a Reddit comment. Right now there's a flood of "what are you building now" threads, and I couldn't resist showing off my pride and joy.

Somehow that was enough. Two comments pulled in the most traffic I've seen yet, over 600 new visitors on a site that's barely out of inception.

That got me thinking about whether I could turn this absurd project into some kind of funnel. We'll see how that goes.

I also added a "for sale" page, priced at a ridiculous 2 BTC, around $130,000 USD at current market value. Might as well lean all the way into the stupidity and ask for a sky-high price. You never know; someone might actually be dumb enough, or rich enough, to buy it.

Language learning app

First, I need to freakin' smack myself, because I wasn't planning on building anything else this week. But I was in flow and heavily inspired, so I started on the note-taking app for language learners.

The inspiration came from another attempt at learning Traditional Chinese. I hit an actual "aha moment" mid-self-study this week, and it clicked how I wanted the tool to work.

The strange part is I ended up embedding features no other app has right now, and I was on such a roll that half of my weekly Claude limit went straight into this project.

I need to pull back, though. My other MVP still comes first. I need a better content baseline there and to focus on getting my first 50 beta users.

Brand struggle

For some reason, I started doubting the direction of my main brand, and I couldn't shake the idea of a pivot.

Mostly because I struggle to communicate my real goals: what I'm trying to do, how it's all self-funded, with the occasional acquisition mixed in.

I also want room for absurd ideas and failed experiments, and that's hard to do under a name like "Ryoka Group," which reads as mature and buttoned-up.

It's a strange mix to explain: part self-funded VC without LPs, part micro-PE firm, part experimental studio that builds software and stupid ideas for the hell of it.

Something like a baby version between Tiger Global, the now-defunct Fail.vc, and a standard micro-PE firm.

Even writing this, I'm still working through the positioning, but I'm leaning toward a full rebrand, one that leans more into venture capital, except founder-led and self-funded.

That deserves its own post. For now, I just wanted to get the thought down without giving away the new brand name or the pivot itself.

I'm building an MVP site for it, and I think once I pull the trigger, Ryoka gets repositioned. Now is the right time. Six months in would be a much harder pivot to make.

What I lacked this week

If there's one takeaway, it's that I lacked discipline this week. I'm ahead of schedule, which is good, but I should be fucking focused on content creation: prepping the podcast, recording stories for English B1-B2 learners, and building a content bank for my personal podcast.

I published the Echo Room episode schedule I plan to record, but I haven't actually recorded them yet.

Being ahead made me relax more than I should have, and that's the trap. Once you start drifting, it's hard to pull back. So this write-up is the reminder: refocus on content creation and get ready for September.

That's where things stand. Good momentum, a few open loops, and a brand decision I'm still sitting with. Next week I want less building and more writing, planning, and recording.