I added an Idea Bench to my blog

I was writing a post about whether I should pause, shelve, or burn some of my current projects and ideas, and somewhere in that mess, the Idea Bench idea came up. Not a metaphor, a page.

Think of it as the embarrassing outlier of building in public. Except instead of documenting what I'm already building, it documents the ideas I've had or still have, with write-ups behind them.

I've been putting things out for a while now, and this is the newest strange addition to that pile.

The page is live now, with three entries.

What's on it right now?

Stupid Hit, a website I built in a weekend that's as dumb as it sounds, which I also wrote about a while back.

Read also: $12, a typo, and the dumbest website I've built

Equity, which is currently in progress. I'll explain the reasoning behind that one separately once I've written it down.

Random Facts, another dumb idea in the same spirit as Stupid Hit, except instead of terrible ideas it'll be hundreds or thousands of random facts from around the globe.

My reasoning

I've been thinking about my builder's journey lately. How to balance the blog with the frustrations of building, my podcast's growth, and the real builds, my SaaS docs editor, the note-taking app for language learners, and so on.

But then I remembered I'm also building OnPoint VC (the operating venture from Ryoka Group), which has an experimental arm built for absurd projects.

So I figured, why not combine real content creation with the dumb or genius ideas that pop into my head anyway?

More often than not, I ask Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT to throw out random ideas, and once in a while, one sticks. But until now I'd just take note of it. Never write about it, never act on it.

Read also: Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT and Kimi: how I labeled them and use them

I do think that kind of stupidity, or genius, belongs on my blog. Partly because I love writing. Partly because writing is how I figure out if an idea is good or just noise.

So this kills a few birds at once.

No idea goes unrecorded anymore. I get to write about it and process the thought, then decide whether to pursue it. And it builds a real archive I can go back to, in case I want to revisit something I shelved and decide to pull the trigger after all.

It's also just a benchmark for myself. A reference point I can check a new idea against before I commit real time to it.

My main goal here is building that track record. And if one of these turns out to be genius, boring, or plain stupid, and it fucking ships, it still ends up in my project portfolio either way.

Why I'm starting clean (kinda)

I purposely didn't add most of my past builds or current projects to the page yet. It would've been easy to backfill everything I've shipped or half-shipped over the last few months in my vibe coding honeymoon phase.

But I think it's better to start kinda clean and let the list grow from here, rather than dump my whole history into it on day one.

My biggest fear

If enough people end up reading this blog, and let's be honest, right now I'm mostly writing for myself, someone might steal or copy an idea from here. I think that's fine.

I'm still focused on my two major SaaS builds. Once I have a decent playbook, a framework for going from idea to write-up to execution, I should be able to move fast enough that by the time anyone else catches up, I'm already ahead.

Read also: September focus, two builds, everything else is content: update #10

Even with the sillier ideas, or the more serious ones, I don't mind the competition. I could add a lag between writing an idea up and executing it, in case this ever gets out of hand.

But I don't think it will. Nobody can copy the process or the archive behind it, hundreds of posts deep eventually, and that's the part that's going to give me an authoritative edge, I think.

I'll probably tag these posts "Idea Bench" and write down whatever I'm thinking about at the time. It's raw thought first. Maybe, like everything else, it turns into a genius build. Or a unicorn. Who the fuck knows.