Friday rundown: it's a winning week

The last two weeks were a bit special. My writing slowed down a lot, and I was still recovering from the chaos of moving between homes.

In my last Monday prep post, I was a bit reserved about what I should do, what I could do, and what to expect. I hadn't found my flow again. I still haven't completely, but I'm starting to make up ground on the buffers and the content.

The biggest win: a real customer

The biggest news, of course, is that TWO Docs got its first organic customer. I haven't even started building or mapping out a marketing strategy. I wasn't stressed about revenue, and I wasn't pushing to get it as soon as possible.

Maybe that's why it landed the way it did. Nobody was chased into it. Someone found the product, read their way back to the very first post I wrote about it, and decided it was worth paying for.

So that's the biggest win of the week.

The TWO website is done

I picked up where I left off, as planned, and finished the TWO website on time. Another thing crossed off the list.

His email landed right in the middle of my pricing change, with the lifetime deal only half updated, so he partly helped finish the last pages that same night.

I'll still improve the messaging, and I might narrow down the current ICPs. But the new version is pushed, committed, and live, and I'm extremely satisfied with it.

Splitting my head three ways

The best decision I made this week was balancing three things: development, content creation for the stories, and planning the Mac app.

None of them got my full attention, and I think that helped. When one got stuck, I had somewhere else to go instead of staring at the same problem for hours.

The Mac app was the one that got stuck the most. Planning was not the smooth sailing I thought it would be.

Read also: How do you vibe code a Mac app? Part 3: reset and Claude doing dumb stuff

The Mac app is officially in progress

I pushed through, and with the help of Claude, we mapped out every feature and item we need to build. That's 185 features in 16 sections, as I wrote yesterday, for an app I keep calling minimal.

Today I started building a true native Mac app, following that checklist and leaving no stone unturned.

Claude estimates it'll take me about three to six weeks, testing included, to build a 100% native Mac app. But after a lot of thinking and deliberate planning, I feel far more confident than the first time I tried.

Read also: How do you vibe code a Mac app? Fuck I don’t know.

The first time, I was building toward a vague idea of a Mac app. This time there's a list, and every item on it is either done or not done.

The other win: the Mac app is now on the roadmap page of the TWO website. Earlier this week I wondered whether the checklist should go public.

For now, the app itself is out there, which means it's officially "pressuring me" to build it the way I intended.

Honestly, I'm stoked.

Made a few content decisions

I have so much I want to share and write about on this blog right now. But I need to decide whether to spend my current time writing more, or focusing on my flagship SaaS and, after that, the note-taking app for language learners.

So my targets for my other blogs shifted a bit.

My Life in Taiwan blog stays the same: one post a month.

The Indie Hacker Blog is where things changed. I was dead set on two posts a month, but I've scaled that down to one. I did the math. It's a long-term asset, and I've already written all the content for 2026 for that blog.

An indie hacker post doesn't expire next week. Whether it goes out in November or in March, it does the same job for years.

So publishing slower doesn't cost that blog anything, and it gives me back time I can put into building.

It's not that I don't want to write. It's about giving myself a bit more flexibility. That doesn't mean I won't write anything new there. My pace might change, but technically, I'm done with that blog for 2026. 2 drafts are ready to publish. One for November and one for December.

I think these decisions make sense. I have real customers now, even if it's just one, and I need to build the Mac app and the iPad app.

Sprinting on Story Valley, launched Study Brew

There was a lot to declutter on the podcasting and story recording side, and I'll dedicate a full post to that tomorrow.

The short version: I've been decluttering Story Brew, Study Brew, and Story Valley, and I've caught up on the mess. I now have a buffer of recordings that covers at least a week, maybe more.

I'll go in-depth in that post, because I went back to Apple Numbers to manage the whole thing, the same way I used it to audit the TWO website.

I recorded plenty of content this week, and I kept pushing on YouTube too.

Study Brew is live

The biggest milestone here is that Study Brew is finally live on Spotify and YouTube. It starts with three stories, and I'll slowly add more from there. That was channel number five, the last one that was still empty. It isn't empty anymore.

Just like with my blog content decisions, I want to rethink the planning and buffer for each podcast show.

All the shows now also live on the Study Brew website, each with its own set of characters. That makes them similar, but different.

The legal side

I had to dig into the legal side of things, because mixing kids' stories with standard stories, or with content that's tracked, is a no-go.

Kids' content comes with much stricter rules around data and tracking, and I didn't want the setup of one show to put another at risk. So I had to find a safe solution that still lets me display all the content.

All done, and another win.

Final note

I think I did what I was supposed to do this week, maybe even more than I intended. And that's great.

On Monday I gave myself permission to go slow and keep my goals flexible. I half expected another week of catching up. Instead, TWO got its first customer, the website is done, the Mac app is officially in progress, and Study Brew is live.

I feel good about my progress. I also wrote down a lot of things I need to process over the weekend for my Monday prep.

This weekend, I'll focus on writing some content, recording a few more stories, planning the Mac app even further, and starting the audit of the Study Brew app.

Nothing on that list is urgent, and that might be the best part of this week. For the first time since the move, I'm ahead of things instead of chasing them.

I'll call that a winning week.