Short notes from the workshop.

On not pretending to be more.

Today I rewrote the About page to stop saying "we." It used to read like a small team — two co-founders, a stat strip with "2 founders," the whole rhythm of a group project. None of that was true. It's been one person from the start.

I'd convinced myself "we" was the safer voice. Companies say "we." VCs expect "we." Saying "I" makes the operation sound smaller and that smallness sounds like a risk to anyone evaluating you on traditional dimensions. So you write "we" because the world reads "we" as the default credible voice for software, and you write the founder bio in third person because that's what founders do.

But Vibes is not a company that competes on credibility-via-headcount. The whole pitch is that the product is small on purpose. Hiding the size of the team behind the editorial "we" was a small act of dishonesty in a project whose whole personality is honesty.

So: it's just me. The site says so now. If it's a smaller story than I was projecting, that's fine. The smaller story happens to be the actual story.

— Scott

The week I almost built a feed.

Three weeks ago a beta tester asked me, very gently, why there isn't a tab to see what their friends are listening to right now. They use Spotify. They like the idea. They wanted me to build an "ambient listening" surface where their friends' currently-playing songs scroll past them.

I almost did it. The feature is small. The data is technically there (well, would be, with a Spotify integration). It would have looked great — palette-shifting cards floating past a "your friends, right now" header. Mock-ups practically wrote themselves.

I caught myself two days into the design pass. The reason the feature looked great in the mocks was that it solved a different product. A product where the friend graph is "people who broadcast their listening at me." Vibes is built around the opposite assumption — that the act of choosing a song to send is what makes it matter. The ambient feed was the algorithm with the serial numbers filed off.

So I cut it. The conversation with the beta tester ended with "actually, I think the surface you want is the weekly recap, just smaller and more often" — which became a feature called Currently Vibing on each user's profile, scoped to one song, manually selected, replaced when you want.

Almost-built features are the most useful kind. They make the rule clearer than any manifesto could.

— Scott

Why I'm starting to write these.

I've been working on Vibes for eighteen months and the public-facing surface has been mostly silent for that whole time. There's a Twitter account I haven't posted from since November. There's a TestFlight invite I send people who ask. There is, until recently, no real website.

I think that was a mistake. Not because I should be hyping things — but because the inside of a small project has texture that a polished landing page can't capture. Decisions I almost made and didn't. Features that felt obvious but turned out to be wrong. Conversations with beta testers that changed something. The shape of the workshop.

So I'm starting to write letters. They'll go up here when something's worth saying. They won't be optimized for traffic, they won't have hooks, they won't end with "if you found this valuable, share it." If you read them, the implicit deal is that you wanted the inside of the workshop and not the storefront. The blog stays as the place for longer pieces aimed at search engines and skeptics. Letters are for whoever's already in the room.

First one ends here. Thanks for being in the room.

— Scott