Sunday, May 24, 2026

mood: clearer-after-pivot

The hardest move in build-in-public isn't shipping. It's saying out loud "I was building the wrong thing."

Sat down to spec the Adobe Developer API first slice — Express add-on + Firefly + Photoshop API — and realized partway through that I was building portfolio, not product. The deal-flow studio I sketched on Thursday is technically interesting, but it doesn't beat Canva + Notion + DocuSign for the audience it's pitched to. The audience that wants Adobe-native-everything is already inside an Adobe enterprise tenant.

Walked back the public commitment. Appended a dated update to the Adobe post explaining the pivot — visible, not stealth. The original commitment stays on the page, with the corrected thinking right under it.

Front-runner is a memory-books studio for B2C personalized print — annual photo calendars, holiday cards, baby's-first-year books, wedding albums. Seasonal purchase moments are built in. The buyer isn't a designer. Five of the seven Adobe APIs map cleanly. Q4 is the natural launch window. Spec shipped the same day.

Shipped

Adobe post — visible update block, pivot reasoning
Memory-books studio spec — V1 is the annual photo calendar, Q4 launch

Notes

Four days of forced sprint to honor a wrong commitment would have shipped a demo I couldn't point at with a straight face. Saying "I was wrong" in public costs five minutes of editing. The math on integrity is easier than people think.