one week one idea · build in public
1 week, 1 idea.
one idea, built and shipped every week. i pull a dormant domain off a twenty-year shelf, build it to usable, and ship it by friday — then write up the whole thing here.
the build journal
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Week 8: The flip sprint — what a clever name is actually worth
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I have a domain-buying habit. For years I’ve registered names the way other people buy lottery tickets: see a clever combination that’s somehow still available, grab it, picture the thing it could become. Most of them became a line on a renewal invoice. This week I finally did the thing I’d been avoiding, which is…
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Week 7: gopherguts — the part of a guide that isn’t the writing
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I’ve owned gopherguts.com since a past life and let it sit for years. The name is too good to waste: Gopher for the University of Minnesota, guts for the honest, in-the-trenches version nobody puts in the official brochure. This week it became what it should have been all along — an unofficial guide to being…
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Week 6: Cape Coral Things — three real photos and a fake owl
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I spent part of the summer in Cape Coral, and I came home meaning to build a little firsthand guide to the place. The pitch was simple and, I thought, easy: a running list of what’s actually worth your time down there, written by someone who’d been standing in front of it. Not a listicle…
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Week 5: workspacemarket — a marketplace built from the editor
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workspacemarket.place is a secondary market for daily workspace reservations at Universal Containers. Hoteling means nobody has an assigned seat: you book a desk each morning, the good ones go fast, so the site lets you buy the right to a colleague’s reservation for a day. The window seat the week of the sales convention. The…
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Week 4: exfedjobs — useful to people having a hard week
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I registered exfedjobs.com in January 2025, when it was becoming clear that a lot of federal workers were about to be looking for work. Then, like most of my domains, it sat there. This week I finally built it, and it turned into the most carefully-handled thing I’ve made for this project, because the audience…
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Week 3: Grass Lake — being useful without being in charge
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Most people meet Grass Lake at sixty miles an hour. It’s a shallow 27-acre wetland tucked behind the Highway 62 / 35W interchange in the Kenny neighborhood of southwest Minneapolis — cattails, herons, two feet of water — and thousands of people drive past it daily without knowing it has a name. I walk it.…
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Week 2: airxsun — building the brand before the business
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Some weeks the idea is a product. This week the idea was a maybe. airxsun is a name I’ve been holding onto. Not for a company that exists — for one that might. The pull keeps coming back: somewhere down the road, a small, senior consultancy at the intersection of CRM and AI — the…
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Week 1: burntsto.re — the shortcut that grew a brewery
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Some domains you register because you have a plan. Some you register because the name is too good to let a stranger have it. Back in 2017 I bought three — burntstorebeer.com, burntstorebrewery.com, burntstorebrewing.com — for the second reason. There is no brewery. There never was. There’s just Burnt Store Road: twenty-some miles of Southwest…
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Week 0: Building One Week One Idea
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It felt right to start at the beginning: Week 0 is building this site itself. You can’t run a build-in-public project without a place to build in public. So before any of the dormant domains get their turn, the project needed a home — somewhere to publish the weekly write-ups, lay out the rules, and…