It's 2025

Time flies when you're self-funding and you can't build fast enough. I suppose Willowfinch should be considered a "failure", but I haven't stopped working on it - at least not enough to bury it. And, I still use it for myself. To. This. Day. I use the tool to help me solve my budgeting problems and explore the world around me.

I have three years of stories I haven't told, but I'm back here now. I think this is the best platform to talk about the Perils of Building. There are bright spots, I promise. But I write this a day after I severed yet another YC Co-founder match relationship, which again, lasted a year. When my product is dead in the water for automated access because my freemium authentication software blocked admin access. When my DEV is so far out of whack from my PROD that I don't really know what's deployed. When I've gone through (count 'em) SIX front-end developers and only one who knows how to make things work & he's disappeared. When the overwhelming pain of arthritis made it impossible to sit at the screens for more than 30-minutes a day. When said arthritis in my right arm made typing impossible & I went for surgery (am now recover(ing/ed)). When I just found out my FA made an error in the withdraw rate of our investments & - welp - you guessed it, our financial plan collapsed.

Still, the bright spots pull me forward. Whenever I open up WF, users hop on fast & furious. I learn fast. People LOVE to talk about the problem of housing and how much they can afford. They're confused by budgeting. Personal finance calculators have very high hit rates on google search, so I've learned something about my strategy. AI has gotten sufficiently competent in programming that I don't have to learn yet another language, I can hack at building / rebuilding my prototype. I've made some good friends and met some amazingly smart and talented folk. My SO still supports and believes in me.

My brain is still scrambled from the past few months, since I got locked out just as I was about to deploy my V1 Recommender. I'm resetting my goals right now after four months of healing from the shoulder surgery and the shock of the lock-out. I'll be back here to journal about the challenges of the past three years because that's what I plan on writing here - the agony & ecstasy of working on Willowfinch. It ain't pretty, but it's my experience. And while I might be a "Loser", it's just because our story isn't at its end yet.