Quick TLDR (for those who need the highlights)

💸 Money Reality: Started week with $0.41, ended with ~$75.41 across accounts

👥 Users: None

🌲Sub/founding member

📧 Newsletter Subs: None

👋🏾 Outreach responses: Unknown

🚀 What Shipped: Sage Recipe, Inventory, and Meal Planning app

📱 What’s Next: iOS phone video/image cleaner

📆 Starting of My Week

Monday started with me trying to wrap up Sage. Everything looked perfect Sunday night. I tested it. It was deploying clean to staging. I felt good. Monday morning hit and production turned into a mess. Every little thing that could break did break. I spent hours debugging issues that weren’t there the night before.

Just when I thought I finally had Sage stable, Monday night delivered the gut punch. I got an email that Namos Labs, my main domain, would be taken down Tuesday afternoon. My stomach dropped. I had been clever, or so I thought, and built all my 30 in 30 projects as subdomains under Namos Labs to avoid paying for multiple domains. Every landing page. Every pricing button. Every project I’d built so far. All about to go dark.

I think the weight of the past 3 weeks, being sick, in the hospital, coding and trying to get customers while in the hospital, having the flu, having to walk everywhere because I couldn’t afford train fare, doing countless outreach and applying for jobs… I finally broke down. Me, and my very germaphobe self, sat on the floor of a public bathroom crying my eyes out.

I couldn’t afford $18.68 to renew the domain. I had exactly $0.41 in my personal account. I couldn’t afford the $1.45 train fare.

Then to make the moment worse, the underwire in my only bra, broken for two months, finally punched through and stabbed me in the chest.

It felt like the universe was piling on.

The crying wasn’t about the domain. It was three weeks of stacked exhaustion.

But as soon as I let it all out, I got back upstairs and back to work because another moment of tears wasn’t going to solve my problem.

⏭️ Moving Forward

I still had to deal with the fact that I had spent the past couple of weeks sending people to my website that was now down. I had planned to launch the Namos Labs membership on Wednesday, so my focus stayed on that.

I also remembered that I had another non-Namos domain, so I immediately moved all my apps, services, email, everything to that new domain. Of course I had to wait twenty-four to forty-eight hours for DNS propagation and for X, Y, and Z to sort out, and everything finally cleared by Wednesday. In the meantime, by Tuesday, I had put up a Notion page sharing the membership. I just kept going regardless of what happened throughout the week and regardless of how I felt physically and mentally. I told myself I had to keep going, get this all done, and tell people about it.

📱 Week 3 Project

I did not quit. Once everything was resolved, I moved on to the Week 3 project, Video Cleaner, an iOS app I’ve wanted for over a year. The idea came from my own storage problems when I started a YouTube channel. I would record multiple takes, run out of space, and then spend forever trying to figure out which files were huge. The iPhone camera roll doesn’t help. You can’t sort by file size. You can’t see the worst offenders. You’re just guessing and deleting.

Video Cleaner solves one simple problem. It shows your videos sorted by size so you can quickly delete the massive files or move them to your computer. That’s it. No extra fluff. No confusing UI. Just here are your biggest videos so you can manage storage.

I spent the week building it while relying on free AI coding tools. Free tools made everything take longer. I would get halfway through something, hit a rate limit, then wait or switch tools. I went back to an earlier version I coded myself because it worked.

The app is ready to launch Monday. I’m not in the Apple Developer Program yet. Ninety-nine dollars might as well be ninety-nine thousand right now, so it won’t be on the App Store immediately. It still works. It solves a real pain. I’m putting it out.

🎉 When It Finally Turned Good

I was tired and still fixing fires. Then something simple happened that shifted the weight. A real person joined as a founding member of Namos Labs. Just proof that the work mattered to someone besides me. That first yes changed my decision making. I stopped questioning whether to keep going and started asking how to deliver faster. Ship the Video Cleaner on Monday. Get Sage back up. Restore the Namos Labs main site so subdomains work again. One fix at a time with someone already in my corner.

💰 Financial Reality

What I started with:

• $0.41 – Personal account one
• $0.00 – Personal account two
• $0.00 – Business account

Current and upcoming bills:

• $25.00 – Phone bill due next Thursday
• $4.48 – Namecheap hosting
• $18.68 – Domain renewal
• $3.00 – Train fare daily which I skipped by walking

What changed:

• $99.00 – First founding membership sale to business
• $57.00 – Remaining in business after Stripe cleared negative balance
• $18.00 – Coffees to personal

End of week on hand:

• $0.41 – Personal one
• $18.00 – Personal two
• $57.00 – Business
• ~$75.41 – Total

Retry

Claude can make mistakes.
Please double-check responses.

Opus 4.1

🧠 Biggest Lesson

The Video Cleaner app I kept calling stupid solves a real problem I had. The fact that it’s simple doesn’t make it worthless. Some of the best tools do one thing well. I kept telling myself no one would want it while ignoring that last year I wanted it badly.

Another lesson: Perfection blocks shipping. I lost days chasing perfect code through free AI tools when I already had a working version that simply needed tweaking, minor improvements, and to sort out some last few todos.

🔮 What Is Next

Monday is Video Cleaner launch day. Landing page goes live once domains are sorted. I’ll post in the right Reddit communities, email my list, and reach out to past Gumroad customers who bought my tools. No fancy launch plan. Just putting it in front of people who need it.

I’ll rebuild the basics. Get the Sage landing page back up. Restore the Namos Labs main site so subdomains work again. One crisis at a time. One fix at a time.

New process going forward: Every Tuesday I pick the project for the week. By Wednesday I have a live landing page with pricing and a buy button. One project per week. No split focus across ten ideas. I’ll also plan two to three weeks ahead so I don’t lose hours to decision paralysis.

The founding member and the coffee donations were more than money. They were proof that what I’m building matters to someone besides me. That’s enough to keep going. OK, back to working for this Monday launch.