First, did we do the thing we said we would?

If the answer is “yes, we did the thing” — the second question is, did it work?

If the answer is “no, we didn’t” — the question is, do we like our reasons?

Six weeks ago, I started the Build In Public project as an experiment — as a way to feature four amazing founders, share their stories with the world, and show the impact that using a tool like VisionaryOS would have on them and their businesses along the way.

I imagined something like the first season of Gimlet Media’s Startup — Alex Blumberg recording everything, from the blown pitch to the unexpected victories, with the story finding itself in the accumulated footage.

I imagined founders logging into VisionaryOS every day, checking in on their Daily Top 3s — sharing with me how they felt in real-time as VisionaryOS helped them shape the next stage of building their business. Capturing a real-time record of how their weeks actually went, and of what was coming next.

I imagined having so much material that the hard part would be deciding what to cut.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

This is Week Four of Build In Public with VisionaryOS.

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What I Know Now That I Didn’t Know Then

Here’s the thing about Building in Public: you can’t control what the story turns out to be.

You can have a vision. You can have a plan. You can have four founders with real questions and a tool designed to help them answer those questions.

And you can still end up, four weeks later, telling a completely different story than the one you set out to tell

I thought Alli was going to be The AI Native: the founder who’s already integrated AI into her business in ways most people haven’t figured out yet, building proof that you can grow when the ground keeps shifting and everything is in constant flux. VisionaryOS would be the thing that helped her decide which of the seventeen directions to actually go.

Tharon was going to be The ADHD Service Provider: the founder who can see the whole business at once, every open loop, every client, every ball in the air, but whose executive function gets spent just figuring out what to work on. Her story was supposed to show what business looks like when you stop wasting your best thinking on deciding where to start. Since VisionaryOS was built for exactly that gap, it would help close that gap immediately.

Twist was going to represent The Pivoter and The Reluctant Manager — pivoting her attention to the gold business while learning to let the slides & speaking business run without her. VisionaryOS would help her keep an eye on the agency without needing to be across all the details, while keeping the gold business moving forward. We’d even come up with a throughline together on her first call: she helps others see the value in what’s right in front of them. Would she be able to do the same for herself?

And Jae? Jae was the wildcard. A late addition, because we needed a fourth founder and she was someone I had the most ready access to. Not to mention, the perfect test case: the person literally building VisionaryOS, using it on herself, living inside the experiment from the inside out. She’d said it in her intake: “I start out with the best intentions about using something to track my progress, and then a week or two in, I fall off the rails.”

And for nearly six weeks, we did the thing.

I showed up, gathered material, found the stories, wrote the pieces. The founders showed up too — some with more abundance than others — but they all showed up as best they could. That part worked.

But the rest of it?

Didn’t happen the way I expected.

What Actually Happened

Two weeks in, I knew we had a content problem.

I’d written an intro piece for each founder, based both on their intake submissions and their onboarding calls. But since then, the daily updates I’d anticipated weren’t happening. Alli was out of town, Jae was deep in the weeds of the code, Twist was visiting family, and Tharon had more questions than answers.

All very real. All very true to what it looks like when you’re Building in Public.

All very hard to craft a narrative out of.

So the plan changed.

Rather than writing a standalone feature on each founder every other week, I switched to an ensemble format.

Instead of needing daily updates, I’d ask them for weekly updates: one at the start of the week, with their impressions of how the week was shaping up. And one at the end of the week, with the story of how the week went.

Then every week, I’d take all those insights and find the through line: the single thread that bound all of the stories together. The commonalities about where they were at, and the lessons they were all learning along the way.

That way, there was no pressure on any one person to carry an entire 3,000 word article. One or two good stories from each person, each week, would be enough.

The only problem is, stories don’t advance on a weekly pace just because you have a publishing schedule to meet…

And you don’t magically make progress on things that have had you stuck for weeks, months, or years just because the pseudo-journalist telling your story says it’s time for a new chapter to come out.

What Actually Got Built

The ironic thing is that as I was going back and reviewing everyone’s intake to write this piece, I could see just how much progress each of them did make in the past four weeks:

The AI Native Who Discovered “What’s Next”

Alli came into Build In Public saying she was bored of Retail Ready and ready to build something new. She wanted eight hours a week on the new thing: to run experiments, make commitments, and build it in public.

By week two, she’d realized that the new thing she was building wasn’t so new after all. The AI systems she’d built for Retail Ready — the 93 custom student growth plans, the automated Slack celebrations, the lead trackers and customer service responders — that’s the AI Native story, and it was already there.

And the new thing she was launching didn’t end up being a whole other business. It ended up being Sales Bad-Ass, which opens cart on July 13th. There’s still a lot of work — she’s still doing the carousel slides herself at 11pm — but now the question she’s asking is different.

It’s not what she needs to build next.

It’s what support does she need next, to support the thing she’s been building all along.

“I hate that this theme is I need support,” she told me last week.

She’s right that it’s a theme. She’s also right that she needs it.

The Pivoter Who Built Momentum

Twist came in wanting to scale the gold business to 20 bookings and let the slides business run without her. She said she was finally secure in who she is and what she offers; she just needed help getting it out.

And in many ways, that’s what happened.

She made it to the McDonald’s at 9:45 on a Tuesday night and put $1,200 in the hands of a woman who needed it fast. She set up her cabin alone in 41-degree heat, with (her words) two boatloads of gear. She got the branding done. She hired an intern to start booking towns for the gold and silver-buying business. She opened up to a friend and asked for help in a way she said she doesn’t normally ask.

“It just feels like there’s possibilities opening up,” she said.

The story I wanted to tell about Twist — whether she could see the value in what’s right in front of her — she answered that.

She could. She did. And she is.

It’s a work in progress, and it’s still messy, but it’s happening.

The ADHD Service Provider Who’s Figuring It Out

Tharon came in with the most fully formed vision of any of the four founders. cerebellum™: a coordination-intelligence framework that consisted of a whole ecosystem of connected businesses.

She could see it all from the inside — every wrinkle, every surface, every implication.

What she couldn’t do was tell you what it looked like from the outside.

“I’ve been spending so much time so close to it,” she said, “that I can tell you every wrinkle it has, where it’s shiny, where it’s smooth, what it smells like, if it’s happy in the rain or sad in the rain. But I can’t tell you what the shape of it is.”

Early in the project, she was hearing the language she needed — people describing her work back to her in their own words, plain and unglamorous.

And then things got complicated, and she wasn’t sure where to go next.

Thing is, that’s the kind of thing that only time can answer:

Time spent putting the language out there, and seeing if it resonates. Time spent having more conversations, and seeing how people respond.

Time spent letting others tell her what cerebellum™ is, instead of trying to answer it for herself.

So for now, she’s still living inside the question.

The Wildcard Who’s Almost There

And Jae?

As I write this, it’s Sunday night. She’s sitting on the couch across from me. When I asked how it was going an hour ago, she said she was “this close ” to getting the refactor out.

The story we thought we’d be telling was a version of a victory lap:

She’d started tools and fallen off them her whole life. She’d been using versions of VisionaryOS with clients for years.

This was her chance to show how using the tool she was building really does change everything.

Except we didn’t expect that it would be broken for most of the month, or that fixing it would take so much undoing and redoing.

“It’s like doing a deep spring cleaning,” she wrote in our user community last week, “Going through the house to organize everything for the transition to summer and finding all the nooks and crannies that are holding onto the stuff that isn’t needed or are taking up space, preventing you from using the rooms how they’re meant to be.”

“Without going into all the technical details, one of the ‘dirtiest’ areas has been untangling where [your weekly priorities are] stored, analyzed, and displayed. It’s one of those situations where I pull on one string to straighten it out and find out that it was attached to a whole rat’s nest of strings hiding under the couch... bringing a bunch of dust bunnies with it.”

(She’s really good at coming up with metaphors. When you see a good one in any of my articles, chances are, her fingerprints were all over it at one point)

The good news is that the refactor really should be finished tonight. Maybe tomorrow. As long as she doesn’t find any more tangled strings.

At that point, she — and I, and the rest of our VisionaryOS users — will be able to go back to using the system as intended.

Because what she figured out this week (and honestly, through this past month) is that you can’t just chase what’s loudest, most obvious, or most urgent.

You need to step back, and figure out why things got tangled up in the first place.

“Do that,” she said, “and the fixes start compounding.”

She is still our most honest possible test case for whether VisionaryOS — as a software — can work for the person that nothing else works for.

The answer is still coming.

The Thing I Got Wrong

I built this project around the idea that VisionaryOS would be the engine that made the whole thing work.

The weekly reviews, the Daily Top 3, the reflections on what was happening as it happened, the visibility into each founder’s week — that was supposed to be the mechanism that made everything work.

None of the founders adopted it, because none of them bought because of the promise of what VisionaryOS could bring them.

It makes sense in hindsight; they were buying the promise of visibility. Something they could showcase to their audience; something they could use to capture their journey as it happened. They got all that, and didn’t need VisionaryOS to make it happen.

But for Build In Public to work for me, that was only one of the four success criteria I had defined at the outset:

1. A great feature for the founders each week

2. A promotional vehicle for VisionaryOS

3. A way to grow our audience and theirs.

4. And something that would be genuinely fun to produce.

Six weeks in, only the answer to the first one is yes.

Time To Make The Call

All of which takes us back to the two review questions I listed off the top.

First, did I do the thing I said I was going to?

For six weeks, yes.

Every week, our four founders answered my questions, and I wrote the weekly pieces from whatever they shared. And the pieces were good.

But writing them without the daily updates and the VisionaryOS “paper trail” I needed meant it was harder than it should have been… and frankly, harder than they were worth, for what the project was actually delivering for me and for them.

Which means the answer to the next question, “Did it work the way we expected?” has to be no.

Technically, that means that we’re ending the experiment early. Running only six weeks instead of twelve; by the time this goes out, we’ll be closer to 50 days than the 90.

Which means technically you could say the answer to the first question — “Did I do the thing I said I was going to?” is actually no. And if that’s the case, then the second question changes to “Do I like my reason?”

It’s similar to a question Alli posed this week, as she was considering whether to keep on one of her team members. She framed it as, “Knowing what I do now, would I choose to hire this person again?”

For me, the equivalent is, “Knowing what I do now, would I choose to run this experiment again?”

Because the truth is, that original vision? The one where we’d have founders using VisionaryOS daily, where that use would shape their experience of running their business, where the story would find itself in the accumulated data?

I’d start that project again in a heartbeat. That project makes sense, for them and for me. That project is worth doing, 100 times out of 100.

But that’s not the project we ended up running. And continuing to run the one we have, at the cost of the one we wanted — that’s a good reason to stop.

So we’re ending the Build In Public experiment.

Not because it failed, but because it taught us what we needed to know.

And in the end, that’s what Building In Public is truly all about.

This summer, Alli, Jae, Tharon and Twist all Built In Public with VisionaryOS. Every week for four weeks, we followed where they’re at, what they decided, and what actually changed — in real time.

Catch up on their journey in the archives, and then make sure to subscribe to make sure you don’t miss what’s coming up next!

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The happy path.

It’s the thing they’re always trying to build — the clean, functional version of the tool. The one users touch. The one where everything works and nothing extra is in the way.

Jae knows what that looks like for VisionaryOS. She can see it from here.

The problem is that every time she goes into the code to try to make it a reality, her brain keeps taking detours.

“My brain basically tries to create a van with all the bells and whistles,” she told me, “when all I need is just a vehicle that runs, that seats six, and that gets decent gas mileage.”

She doesn’t go off-track because she doesn’t know better. In fact, she knows exactly what’s happening — she can name it, describe it, trace the exact moment it starts. Her ADHD brain sees the context, sees what the feature will eventually need to become, and goes: “Well, I’m here, I might as well just build that part now.”

And by the time she’s done, she’s twenty minutes off the happy path.

This is Week Three of Build In Public with VisionaryOS.

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Something Always Gets in the Way

Here’s what fifteen years of helping people grow their business has taught me:

The happy path doesn’t stay clear on its own. Something always gets in the way.

Sometimes it’s your brain: chasing the shiny thing, going twenty layers deep into the edge case, building the whole van when you just needed a vehicle.

Sometimes it’s life: bad internet at the cabin, in-laws arriving Friday, a tax bill that lands the week you were supposed to be heads-down.

Sometimes it’s the business itself: a launch that’s bigger than you expected, a hire that didn’t work out, a platform that changed the rules on you.

It doesn’t matter what it is.

What matters is whether you saw it coming.

Behavioral psychologists call it implementation intentions: people who plan specifically for what will get in the way are dramatically more likely to follow through than people who just intend to.

And the more specifically you’ve anticipated the obstacle before it arrives, the easier it is to keep going when it does.

This week, I watched as Jae, Twist, Alli and Tharon all worked through a pile of things that threatened to take them off the happy path — all in four completely different ways.

When the Answer Doesn’t Sound Like the Answer

Tharon knows she has a visibility problem.

Her entire framework — cerebellum™ — is built around the idea that visibility solves a staggering number of everyday problems. Systems problems. Relationship problems. Coordination problems.

But this week, she couldn’t find Slack on her phone.

“I have over 800 apps on my phone,” she said. “I can’t even locate the original Slack to move it.”

So she forgets it’s there. Doesn’t see it, doesn’t think about it, and even when she does think about it, she can’t find it without spending extra spoons she doesn’t have.

What’s more, she knows exactly why this happens. She built a whole framework around why this happens. She just didn’t plan for it happening to her, on this specific app, this specific week.

That’s the thing about obstacles: knowing they exist isn’t the same as having a plan for when they arrive.

Take last week for example.

When we left things last week, Tharon was excited about the number of places she was hearing people talk about the types of problems she solves. “It’s everywhere,” she said. “You just have to be listening for it.”

But this week, she hit an obstacle: the words she was hearing from everyday people didn’t sound like the words she was expecting to hear. Like the words she wanted to hear.

And because of that, she started to have doubts:

“Maybe my target market — the companies I’ve been working with all these years — maybe I need to lean harder into what they’re saying. Not what everyday people are saying.”

The truth is, of course, that companies don’t talk, but the individual people who work there, do. So maybe the language she had been hearing everywhere has been wrong. Or maybe it’s right — and the fact that it sounds wrong to her ears, is why nothing has worked yet.

I don’t know the answer, but what I do know is that voice of customer isn’t something you ever find by thinking about it harder. It only comes from talking to people who aren’t yet your customers, but one day could be.

The question is: what will she do when the answers inevitably don’t sound like what she was expecting?

The $1,200 She Didn't See Coming

Meanwhile, the thing threatening to take Twist off the happy path this week was much more practical:

A really, really bad internet connection.

She was back at the cabin, wrestling with a Starlink roaming connection that wasn’t working nearly as well as she’d hoped. So when I asked her what decision she could make that would help her make progress this week, she didn’t overthink it.

“Committing to a day to send the info sheet to my contact in Saskatchewan.”

That contact is someone Twist calls her “little sister.” They met when Twist was in college and the little girl was four years old and in search of a big sister. She asked Twist, and they settled on honorary sisters. Fast forward, and that little girl is in her late twenties, living in a tiny rural Saskatchewan community and sitting on all kinds of community boards and committees.

Of course, like all farming communities, there’s always more projects to fund than money to fund them. So Twist made an offer: what if a percentage of every gold purchase she made in that community goes back to a local project of the client’s choice?

That model would make Twist different from every other gold buyer out there.

She’d instantly become the person who shows up and gives something back, rather than a travelling pawn shop just looking to make a quick buck.

The trick, of course, is that in this small Saskatchewan community, she had a contact. In the hundreds of other communities like it across the country, she doesn’t. And there’s only so many communities she can reach, only so many hours in a day.

She needed someone to do it for her — and she found a student willing to take it on for about ten hours a week.

“To spend some money on this,” she said, “and have somebody else who’s really excited about it just makes me feel amazing.”

What I noticed about this story was that Twist wasn’t scrambling, and even though she was coming up with new things to do, they weren’t distractions.

I think a big part of it was that she had a clear focus for the week — the info sheet to send to her contact in Saskatchewan — and the bad internet constrained her from deviating too far.

Which is also why she was able to take advantage of an opportunity which saw her end up at McDonald’s at 9:45 on a Tuesday night.

Turns out, someone in a Muskoka community group had tagged her — a woman who’d seen Twist’s posts, decided to do business with her, and had been tagging her ever since.

This particular night, there was a woman who had jewelry she’d been meaning to sell and a financial emergency that made the timing suddenly matter. Twist showed up, and by the time it was done, the woman had the $1,200 she needed.

It seems like that's actually how this business works best. Not from a detailed plan, but by being available to take advantage of opportunities when someone needs her.

One Decision Down, Another One Emerges

At the end of last week, Alli was wrestling with whether to push forward with the experiment of launching a leadership coaching program, or stay focused on Retail Ready for the time being.

By the time I caught up with her on Wednesday, the decision was made:

“I do not have time to work on any sort of other business this week, next week, or the week after. I am prioritizing our $99 sales bad-ass launch and the goal is to have a thousand people in there.”

So that’s one less thing pulling her off the happy path, but what’s left is still a lot.

Because while she’s done launches like this before, it’s the first time in a long time she’s built one from scratch. It’s an all-new format on an all-new topic. That means two emails a week, three LinkedIn posts, three Instagram posts, an Instagram Live, all of it new. She’s building an affiliate structure. She’s managing the content machine.

And she’s still the one on her phone, typing the text into carousel slides.

The thing is, Alli knows how to get stuff off her plate.

She’s got lead trackers, dropped-leads finders, customer service responders, FAQ tools. She built an AI tool that can help her create a custom student growth plan in ten to twelve minutes — something that used to take her an hour. Her product delivery is down to about an hour a week.

And she knows the stuff that needs to stay on her plate:

The thinking work. The copy. The strategy. The voice.

Nobody can do that for her, and she doesn’t want to hand it off.

But there’s a layer underneath the thinking work that desperately needs to get off her plate, if she’s going to stay on the happy path.

“Why am I literally on my phone typing away the text for the slides?” she said at our end-of-week check-in.

“I need a launch bestie. I need a right-hand woman who is at my side doing all this low-key launch stuff that takes time.”

She knows what she needs. The question is, with the launch happening in two weeks, does she have time to find the right person and make it happen?

The Decision She Already Made

Which brings us back to Jae.

Her in-laws were set to arrive on Friday, which meant between prepping for that and wrapping up some client work, the week was already half gone before it started.

By Thursday, the rental van was sitting in the driveway — with its new, smart wipers — and she was in the code trying to stay on the happy path.

And it made her think about how she decides what gets built.

“The decisions I’m making are basically saying no to the things that are ‘I’m here, I might as well do this,’” she told me. “Because I’m here and I’m making these changes anyway, so I don’t have to come back and make the change again.”

She knows that logic is sound. But she’s also learning that it’s what takes her off the happy path every single time.

That if she’s not careful, she may well end up with a van that is smart enough to detect when it’s raining — but which won’t let her back out of the driveway because the steep slope keeps activating the collision-detector.

That’s the question she’s learning to ask herself: Does this actually matter right now? Will the user even see this edge case?

If the answer is no, it doesn’t go in.

And she’s running an AI agent alongside her to track her against it, which has turned up its own surprise.

“I’m having to catch the AI too,” she said. “The AI wants to go even broader than I do, which is very interesting.”

Two of them, trying to stay on the path.

So when the instinct fires — when her brain says “I’m here, I might as well” — she doesn’t need to fight it. She can just point back at what’s already decided.

“I’ve made the decision that I want just the happy path,” she said. “It’s a matter of actually getting to that point now.”

Where We're Headed Next

Here’s what I’ve observed in these four founders this week:

The happy path doesn’t get easier. It just gets more familiar.

Tharon is still finding her way back to it. Alli can see the next thing she needs to do — she just hasn’t done it yet. Twist stayed focused long enough that the path opened up somewhere she wasn’t even looking. And Jae has stopped trying to fight her way through the obstacles and started making the decisions before she gets there.

Because that’s the thing about implementation intentions.

The research doesn’t say you’ll never go off the path.

In fact, it says quite the opposite: that there will always be things that will get in your way.

But the more specifically you plan for what’s coming — the more clearly you can see the obstacle before it arrives — the faster you’ll find your way back when it does.

So the question isn’t whether something is going to get in the way this week.

It’s whether you’ve already decided what you’re going to do when it does.

This summer, Alli, Jae, Tharon and Twist are Building In Public with VisionaryOS. Every week, we follow where they’re at, what she’s deciding, and what’s actually changing — in real time.

Subscribe now for free to follow their story as it unfolds:

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And for more on how VisionaryOS helps you plan & prioritize your week in a way that works with your brain — visit https://visionaryos.app and try it for free, today.

She’d just finished a two-hour coaching call — one that ran long, in the best way. The whole morning had been dedicated to learning next-level AI strategies with her team, and she’d even knocked out three growth plans she’d been putting off. It had been a full, productive day by any measure.

And she was still back at the same question she’d woken up with:

Retail Ready versus follow your passion.

The business she’s spent twelve years building versus the thing she actually wants to build next.

This is Week Two of Build In Public with VisionaryOS.

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The Busy Trap

We all know the feeling of a full, productive day where you got a lot done.

But I’m guessing that most of us also know the other feeling:

The one that shows up at the end of the day, and asks us, “But did I actually do anything that mattered?”

That’s the kind of week all four of our Build In Public founders had.

Sort of.

Psychology Today calls it the ADHD productivity trap: “constant motion without meaningful progress.”

The principle behind it is pretty simple:

Certain kinds of work — answering emails, reorganizing files, checking things off — provide a dopamine hit that feels like progress.

So every time you do them, your brain gets the reward signal it wants. It doesn’t know that it wasn’t the most important thing to do.

Which is exactly what all four of our founders had to deal with this week.

The One Who’s Generating Data

Jae spent the past two weeks deep in the guts of the VisionaryOS codebase: untangling the mess, rewriting thousands of lines of code, putting it all back together again.

There was only one problem:

Every time she got two-thirds of the way through a plan, she’d hit something else that had to be fixed before she could finish. So she'd fix that first… and then find another layer underneath it. And then another. And another.

“It’s just creating this branching pathway,” she told me. “Oh, there’s this, and then there’s this, and there’s this.”

For two weeks, she went deeper into this cycle. But here’s the thing: it wasn’t two weeks of spinning her wheels. It was two weeks of gathering data.

Every time her plans failed, she learned something. Every plan that didn’t work was data she didn’t have before.

By Thursday night, she’d had enough of it to know something she couldn’t have known two weeks ago: the approach itself was the problem.

She wasn’t fixing the right thing. She’d been trying to tidy up a mess when what it really needed was a deep clean. “To heck with it,” she said. “I’m throwing this all out and I’m going to rewrite and rewire the entire thing.”

She did. And it worked. Mostly — the old mess had already spread into parts she thought were clean, so there’s still more to trace. But she’s making measurable progress now, because the data told her where to go.

The One Who’s About to Get Some Data

Tharon, meanwhile, is doing something I find fascinating.

She started the week really struggling to figure out where to start. She’d bought the Mom Test audiobook, and was trying to figure out how to apply it to her own business.

“I haven’t quite figured out how to talk to everyday people yet,” she told me when she checked in.

But eventually, she just dove in. After all, she doesn’t need perfect data; she just needs data. And that led her to a theory: that the language her potential clients use — the words that would let her actually reach them — might actually be hiding inside LinkedIn job listings.

She started looking for employers posting for roles they can’t quite name, describing problems they don’t have words for. Once she did that, she started noticing signals popping up in other places, too: a therapist who complained about meetings that should have been emails, a colleague who called what Tharon does “solutioning.”

All of a sudden, she realized she was already having four or five “Mom Test” conversations a week, without looking hard.

“It’s everywhere,” she told me. “You just have to be listening for it.”

The One Who Needs To Sit Down And Decide

Unlike Tharon, Twist came into the week knowing exactly what she needed to do.

She’s been hard at work planning the cross-Canada road trip for the gold business — mapped the route, built the travel kit, identified the towns. She even took time off to visit family in Saskatchewan, and managed to fit in disco bingo in a town called Cabri, stayed in a tiny house in Swift Current, and visited a yarn store where she finally found the yarn she'd been looking for.

But there’s one thing that would actually move the gold business forward that she’s stuck on:

The branding.

The decision that would make a stranger understand immediately what she does and why it’s different from every other gold buyer out there just keeps not getting made.

“I need to just sit down and actually make the decisions,” she told me, “rather than thinking about making the decisions.”

Until she does, her data is limited.

The road trip doesn’t quite make sense to run without the branding. The branding doesn’t get done until she sits down.

And she can’t know if the branding is right until she puts it out there and sees what happens.

Twist’s experiment is waiting for her to start it.

The One Who Keeps Getting In Her Own Way

And then there’s Alli.

She’s been so focused on trying a new experiment with Retail Ready, that the eight hours she’d planned to put into the new coaching venture just … never happened.

Which technically means she doesn’t have any data yet at all.

But the more I think about it, the less sure I am about it.

There’s one moment in particular that makes me wonder.

It was on Friday, after Alli had finished a full week of her offline morning routine. For five days in a row, she’d spent the first hour of her day in meditation; journaling and reflection, no phone, no tech.

“I realized that I do have a narrative,” she told me. “I keep telling myself that it’s not safe to change, and when I change it disappoints people and lets them down. I’ve made a promise to people and I’m obligated to fulfill that promise for the rest of my life.”

In other words, she’s got data. A pattern of behavior that’s telling her something about her experiment.

Does she actually want to start another business? Or is it something that would be better if she let it be without needing to turn it into something bigger.

“90 days from now, are we actually going to have solved that?” she said. “Who knows.”

Where We're Headed Next

So here’s where we stand:

Jae’s experiment is in progress. She’s already got some data, changed course, and is moving forward.

Tharon is also running hers. The data is coming, but it’s not ready to use yet.

And Alli and Twist? They’re doing real work. Hard work. Work that matters for the businesses they already have.

But they’re not yet running the experiments that would tell them what they actually need to know about the businesses they want to have.

And until they do, the question they’re each sitting with — is this the right direction, should I change, what should I build next — can’t be answered.

Because at the end of the day, being busy isn’t the same as making progress.

Oh, sure, they feel the same from the inside.

You’re working, you’re checking things off, you’re showing up for the things that need showing up for.

But there’s a difference between doing work that generates data, and work that just keeps you moving.

Only one actually tells you something about whether you’re going the right direction.

This summer, Alli, Jae, Tharon and Twist are Building In Public with VisionaryOS. Every week, we follow where she’s at, what she’s deciding, and what’s actually changing — in real time.

Subscribe now for free to follow their story as it unfolds:

Subscribe now

And for more on how VisionaryOS helps you plan & prioritize your week in a way that works with your brain — visit https://visionaryos.app and try it for free, today.

“You clean the inside and you notice how dirty the outside is. So you clean the outside. But then you can see clearly enough to notice everything you missed the first time.”

She paused.

“Every time you clean one side of the window, you see all the stuff that got missed the last time.”

That’s the feeling Jae Joevenazzo experiences almost daily right now as she reworks the code behind VisionaryOS.

Like she’s constantly cleaning, each time only to reveal more mess.

The Person You Didn’t Know Was There

Jae Joevenazzo co-founded Visionary CEO Academy with me more than fifteen years ago and has been the head coach ever since.

If you’ve been a VCA client, you know what that means: Jae was the person in the room with you. Not handing over a framework and wishing you luck; she’s the one actually working through what it looks like when your business model is creating problems two layers down in your operations, or when your priorities are eating your strategy.

She’s operationally driven, detail-oriented, the person who finds the through lines. “Breanne makes the big connections,” is how she describes it. “She brings the big ideas out. And for me, I take the big ideas and find the connections between those big ideas.”

So it only makes sense for Jae to be the fourth founder I’m following in the Build In Public series, alongside Tharon, Twist, and Alli. Like those three, Jae will be tracking 90 days of business experiments, decisions, and results inside VisionaryOS.

But unlike them, Jae won’t just be tracking things within that system.

She’s actually the one coding it … while also doing the coaching that’s keeping the lights on while we do it.

The Silent Sounding Board

For most of those fifteen years, though, the role was harder to explain than “head coach.”

It started, she said, as something closer to a silent sounding board — the person I’d come to when an idea was half-formed, who’d find the thread running through it.

Over time, as the work grew, so did Jae’s role. She took on more thought leadership. More client work. More of the operational detail that holds the bigger thinking together.

“I like context,” she’ll tell anyone who listens. “I’m pulling all of these bits and pieces together and finding through lines.”

So for the better part of fifteen years, that’s what she did:

Watch all the bits and pieces, find the through lines in them, and see where things were about to break.

“Sometimes,” she added wryly, “[Breanne] doesn’t see it until a couple years down the road. But then eventually she gets it. Maybe.”

Then the market shifted.

The Death of the Middle-Class Business

In 2024, more small businesses reported a revenue decrease than an increase. Business coaches saw some of the steepest confidence drops, with close to 20% of experienced practitioners anticipating income declines — and VCA was no exception.

Jae, of course, had seen the writing on the wall long before that point.

“I’ve been telling you for years,” she said when I asked her about the pivot. “We needed to put this stuff into code.”

Because while the frameworks worked — fifteen years and hundreds of clients proved that — they weren’t always easy for people to learn. Coaching had always been our solution, with Jae directly helping the clients apply the methods to their situation.

But that level of coaching expertise required a budget not everyone had. And often, the people who needed what VCA offered most the ones who could least afford it.

“I am Métis,” she said. “And I know that opportunities for Indigenous business owners are far more limited. Same thing with other minorities. It's something that I've always wanted to have more of an impact in, especially locally. We just haven't had the financial ability to do that, because in order to make the model work the way it was, we had to do it at a higher price."

Software changes that math.

“I’m really excited,” she told me. “Yes, the death of the middle-class business is forcing us down this path, but it’s really exciting.”

Pause.

“And stressful, I’ll be honest. And stressful.”

“I Read the Word Dog and I See a Dog”

So that’s the economic reason for the pivot. But it doesn’t explain why, of all the frameworks and tools Jae helped build over the years, VisionaryOS is the one that made it into the software.

For that, you need to understand something about how Jae processes the world.

She has dyslexia, and she taught herself to read not by sounding words out but by learning their shapes. When she reads the word dog, she doesn’t hear it.

She sees the shape of the word.

And then sees a dog.

“It’s almost like I’m watching a movie in my brain,” she told me. They’re not sharp pictures; more like strong impressions. Her natural language is experience and image, not words.

Which means every time she has to communicate, she has to take steps most people don’t:

Translating words into experience, experiences into images, images into language, and language into words.

“There’s an extra translation phase that my brain has to go through,” she said. “And that takes a lot of executive function.”

It’s that kind of load that standard productivity advice misses, and why adding coding into her day-to-day coaching load has been tougher than anticipated.

"I enjoy coding,” she told me. “I can get into a flow state and I can go and go and go and go. But that also means that I don't have as much spoons for later in the week (or later in the day or the next morning) because I burnt them out earlier on."

A Great Case Study

Right now — literally as I write this — Jae is deep in the weeds.

Sorting through layers of spaghetti code, rewriting the mess left behind by a well-meaning co-founder who didn’t bother to actually check the AI assistant’s work… (Hi, it’s me…)

Cleaning the windows from the inside, only to find more messes on the outside.

And it made me curious what happens when the current cleanup is done and VOS is stable enough that she can actually use it herself for day-to-day planning.

She paused, and then told me about the systems she’s tried before.

The planners, the apps, the trackers.

“I start out with the best intentions,” she said. “And inevitably I fall off the rails.”

She knows that the frameworks powering VisionaryOS work; she helped build them.

But will they work when put in front of a person who's tried every calendar, every app, every planning system — and abandoned all of them, not because of anything personal but because the tools weren't designed for how their brain works?

Especially when there’s not a coach there, helping you to use it?

"Since I'm the one doing the coding, I get a chance to basically dig in and figure that out for myself," she said.

“I’m a great case study for that.”

This summer, Jae is Building In Public with VisionaryOS. Every week, we follow where she’s at, what she’s deciding, and what’s actually changing — in real time.

Subscribe now for free to follow her story as it unfolds:

Subscribe now

And for more on how VisionaryOS helps you plan & prioritize your week in a way that works with your brain — visit https://visionaryos.app and try it for free, today.

Her team has everything under control: delivery is handled, clients are winning, and all of the day-to-day operations of Retail Ready® are moving smoothly — exactly the way they’re supposed to. They’ve done more than $5M in revenue…

And Alli Ball is bored.

Oh, there’s still things for her to do: she still coordinates the sales and marketing, still leads the team, still thinks about the big picture vision.

But the truth is, she could put together a Food Biz Wiz launch in her sleep at this point. She knows what levers to pull when something needs to be tweaked. Her team doesn’t need her to keep things running.

And now, she’s bored.

Meet Alli Ball: Serial Entrepreneur

Alli is the founder of the longest-running sales training in the packaged food and beverage industry. Her company has helped over 3,500 food and beverage brands figure out how to get onto store shelves and make more than $1B in sales.

Doing the math on margin, having buyer conversations, closing the gap between having a great product and having a retail-ready one? She can do it in her sleep.

She has, after all, been running this business for more than 12 years — in many ways, she’s the big fish in her industry; the OG when it comes to helping people make the transition from the local farmer’s market to the dizzying world of national grocers.

She’s also a certified leadership coach, a breathwork facilitator, and a self-proclaimed Business Witch.

If you’re not entirely sure how those two things fit together, you’re not alone.

Even Alli recognizes the irony:

"I'm someone who gets so much stuff done. My tenacity is incredible (and very annoying to my husband)… and I just want to be floating on a pool floaty, doing a coaching session. I could do that all day long."

That contradiction is at the heart of why Alli is the third founder I’m featuring in this season’s Build In Public series. Over the next three months, I’m tracking what she’s deciding, what she’s skipping, and what’s actually changing… in real time.

Do I Actually Have It in Me to Start Over?

Most people who’ve built one successful business will tell you: yes, obviously, you should keep going.

Build more, build bigger, keep going.

It’s the “right” answer.

It’s also easy to say when you haven’t done it.

Alli has. She knows what “starting something new” actually means. Building Retail Ready® was real work, for a long time, across a lot of hard seasons, and she’s not delusional about what building a second thing would ask of her.

“I’ve built Retail Ready® to a seven-figure product,” she’s said. “I know how much work it took. Do I actually have it in me to build something new — or should I just ride Retail Ready® into the sunset?”

That’s the question she’s living in, and it’s harder than it sounds, because Alli isn’t naïve. She’s not wondering if building something new will be difficult. She already knows.

And that’s the problem.

What Retail Ready Actually Became

In the glory days — 2020 through 2023 — Retail Ready® was grossing around $1M a year.

Then the market shifted. The economy slowed, revenue dropped, and Alli had to make some hard choices. She finally landed on a business model change that most founders would’ve been too scared to try: she converted from a traditional program purchase to a one-time activation fee plus an ongoing monthly membership.

A couple of years ago, she saw the writing on the wall and added a custom suite of AI-powered tools to the program. Now, while everyone else is playing catchup, she and her team have been all-in on using AI to support their students for years.

So revenue has stabilized, profit has come back up, and now, they’re growing again. The business is projected to do around $600k this year.

That's down from the peak, but she's okay with that.

What she’s less okay with is the part where it mostly runs without her. Not because she wants to be more involved; she spent years getting the business to the point where it doesn’t need her, and it feels good to have accomplished it.

No, the problem is that now that she’s been freed up … she keeps finding reasons to put herself back down in the weeds.

Anything to avoid using that freedom to build the thing she wants to be building.

The Business Witch Behind the Scenes

See, while Retail Ready® took all the headlines for the past 10 years, Alli was also doing something else.

Not publicly, of course.

There was no landing page, no sales page, no official offer.

Just Alli, behind the scenes, coaching women who would come to her. Leading in-person breathwork circles. Guest coaching in other people's seven-figure programs, way outside the food industry. Helping them learn to radically trust themselves.

It’s been good. She’s enjoyed it. She keeps thinking she should “do something with it.”

And yet, she says yes to Retail Ready® things because that’s what’s paying the bills. She’s got renovations in progress, her team needs to get paid — that’s all real, and she’s not pretending otherwise.

But she also knows she invents reasons for Retail Ready® to need her more than it actually does. Because honestly? Retail Ready® is easy. A Food Biz Wiz launch generates a quick, reliable result in a way that building something from scratch doesn’t.

The dopamine hit is immediate, whereas the next thing has no guaranteed hits at all.

So there’s always a Retail Ready® reason to defer.

Meanwhile, her personal LinkedIn page still hasn’t been updated. “These are ding dong things that would take an hour,” she’s said, “and I’m not doing it.”

She could spin up the podcast, write the sales page, build the audience — for Alli, that’s the easy part. It’s all been living fully formed in her head for years.

And yet, her LinkedIn bio still hasn’t been updated.

The Experiment Defined

So for the next 90 days, Alli has decided to run an experiment.

Because she’s seen the way that women have started to reach for AI tools before they know what they actually think — and she knows the risks that come when they start handing the tool their agency along with their prompt.

Because women use AI at a rate 25% lower than men on average — and she knows that the jobs women hold are three times more likely to be automated.

And because she knows that this isn’t a technology adoption problem — it’s a self-trust problem; one that’s only going to get worse before it gets better.

So for the next 90 days, Alli is devoting 8 hours a week to this work. Not stepping away from Retail Ready® — she’s clear that this isn’t a pivot, and she’s not leaving it behind. More like making the new thing a real priority instead of a permanent back-burner project.

The first experiment: a $97 multi-week container around building self-trust before outsourcing to AI. She wants to find out if there’s a real community for this work, and whether she can lead it publicly rather than just privately.

And if it works? She’ll be opening enrolment for something larger in the Fall. What exactly that is… well, that’s part of what she needs to figure out.

Eight Hours a Week

A phrase has been circling in her head for a few weeks now. She said it to a coaching client — almost as a throwaway — and it came back to her:

“Expansion requires exposure.”

So that’s the commitment she’s making: eight hours a week, for 90 days, on the work she says she wants to do.

The question? Whether those hours will be easy to protect or constantly fought for. Whether Retail Ready stays as easy to deprioritize as she’s planning for, or whether it creeps back the way it always has. Whether the $97 offer finds its audience on the first try or requires a few iterations. Whether she can get out of her own way long enough to do the hard thing she wants to do, instead of the easy things she usually does.

“I want people to see an example of someone changing,” she wrote, “EVEN WHEN things are going great on paper.”

We’re about to find out if she’s that someone.

This summer, Alli (Instagram | Website) is Building In Public with VisionaryOS. Every week, we follow where she’s at, what she’s deciding, and what’s actually changing — in real time.

Subscribe now for free to follow her story as it unfolds

Subscribe now

And for more on how VisionaryOS helps you plan & prioritize your week in a way that works with your brain — visit https://visionaryos.app and try it for free, today.

It was from a woman in Edmonton. Her mother-in-law has silverware she wants to sell.

“I don’t know how they found me,” Twist told me. There’s no ads, no newsletters — just one Facebook post a few months ago, and however many people have mentioned her name in a conversation since then.

That’s been the whole marketing strategy.

She has no idea how this stranger in Edmonton got her name.

But she adds the city to her list; by the time she gets to Saskatchewan, she’ll be halfway there anyway.

At Kitchen Tables Across Canada

Alyssa “Twist” Light has two main lines of business:

The first one builds presentation slide decks for professional speakers — TED-style talks, keynotes, corporate presentations, the works. She’s got a five-person team, clients that range from an NFL director to professional speakers and everywhere in between. Her credentials stretch out for days; a Hall of Fame speaker with the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers once called her a National Treasure.

And so she travels across North America from her home base in Ontario, speaking to professional associations, meeting speakers along the way, and running a business that feels more-or-less built at this point.

So why exactly is she packing up her suitcase to travel across the country to visit small towns in the middle of nowhere?

Because Twist is a storyteller; a magician at finding value in the mundane.

And it turns out, one of the best ways to collect stories is to go into people’s homes, sit down at their kitchen table, and listen.

That’s the second business: Let It Go Gold & Silver.

She buys old gold and silver from people who want to let it go — mostly women 45 and older. People with no one to pass things on to, kids who aren’t interested, estates that need to be handled before or after someone dies… or sometimes, people who just need money: for a medical bill, a trip, tuition, something they’d never otherwise be able to afford.

The stuff has been sitting there, they figure. It could be doing something.

The only problem is, they have no idea what it’s worth.

That’s where Twist comes in — and where our story begins.

This is Build In Public with VisionaryOS. If you’ve listened to Gimlet Media’s Startup — where producers followed a founder through the actual, unglamorous process of building something in real time — that’s what we’re doing here.

(Except in writing, without a big budget, and instead of Silicon Valley, she’ll be places like Brandon and Moncton and Edmonton.)

Twist is our second featured founder this season.

I’ll be tracking what she’s building through VisionaryOS — and sharing the story as it unfolds.

The Silverware That Was Worth Double

On the surface, Twist runs a deceptively simple business model:

She goes to people’s homes, sits down at their kitchen tables, and listens. They tell her about their grandmother’s brooch, their late husband’s cufflinks, the silverware they’ve had in a drawer since 1987.

They tell her they don’t think it’s worth very much, and then she tells them the truth.

Take, for example, the woman who came to Twist with a pile of old, mismatched silver utensils.

A travelling buyer had already looked at them, and offered her $300.

Twist paid nearly twice that much: $581.45.

The difference wasn’t charity. The travelling buyer was working a volume model, his only goal to make as big a profit as fast as possible. And the woman with the silverware could tell; he was “snotty” she said, just there to make a quick assessment, a fast offer, and then move on.

Twist, on the other hand, is trained as a goldsmith. She spent years working the bench, and that means she knows the hallmarks, the weight, what the silver content actually means in dollars. The value of gold and silver has been making headlines for months, and people all over the country are opening drawers they haven’t touched in decades without any frame of reference for what’s in them.

“One hesitation people have is ‘I don’t think I have much,’” Twist told me. “What they don’t realize is how fast it adds up. I often give people $2,000 or more for their metals.”

That woman walked away with almost twice what the other buyer offered her.

But for Twist, the money is only part of the equation.

Who Even Goes To Moose Jaw?

Here’s what I noticed when I started digging into Twist’s backstory: she’s spent a lot of time helping speakers find their stories. The right scene, the right structure, the specific moment that makes an audience lean forward. She was collecting stories then, shaping them into something people could give to a room.

She still does that. Just at kitchen tables now instead of conference rooms.

It’s ironic, really, because most travelling buyers are the type to specifically seek out hotel conference rooms. They rent them for a weekend, run a newspaper ad, and buy whatever walks in. They hit the big cities, work the volume, move on.

Meanwhile, Twist heads to Swift Current. To Cabri. To Moose Jaw. To Brandon and Parksville. To Edmonton and Moncton.

She books appointments, flies into cities, rents a car and drives out to towns a travelling buyer would never bother with. She’s specifically interested in visiting seniors communities — the places where someone has been collecting silver since 1965 and their kids don’t want any of it and they have no idea who to call.

“I go to tiny towns, not just major cities,” she told me. The people in those tiny towns don’t have a specialist they can reach, so they wait until the travelling buyer comes through with a low offer, or they drive two hours to a pawn shop.

Or they find Twist.

And then Twist finds their stories.

Worth Their Weight In Gold

Twist was describing a recent buy — a coin — when she stopped mid-sentence.

“To me, this isn’t just a gold coin,” she said as she held it up for me to see. “It’s a little fella named Thomas. This coin is his first investment money; that’s why he sold this to me, so he would have his first thousand dollars to invest.”

She has a hundred stories like that, she said.

The person closing an estate before a parent passes, trying to get ahead of the grief to make it easier on everyone later.

The woman in her eighties whose kids have made it clear they don’t want the silver, they’ll never want the silver, and it’s been sitting in a box for fifteen years doing nothing for anyone.

Women who’ve spent decades accumulating things and have no one to pass them to, and at some point the stuff becomes a problem instead of a legacy.

Twist sits down with them, listens to their story, and then tells them what it’s worth.

“I help other people make money while I make money myself,” she told me. “And if those two things don’t happen, it’s just not in alignment. We all have to win.”

Westward Bound

This week, Twist’s team is finishing slide decks for a half-dozen clients.

Meanwhile, she’s packing. Headed to the Canadian Prairies, with a goal of hitting twenty new gold bookings before the summer is out.

How exactly she’ll get those bookings is still a bit of a mystery. She’s been buying gold for 20 years — but this version of it, where she’s flying into cities and driving out to small towns across the country, is about a year old. So far, it’s run entirely on word of mouth, but word of mouth moves at the speed of other people’s conversations, and twenty bookings isn’t going to happen by waiting.

So she’s trying to figure that out, supporting her team as they keep building more decks, and packing. All three, at the same time, with a million other things running in the background — because that’s just how her weeks go.

Meanwhile, the email from Edmonton is still there.

A stranger, her mother-in-law’s silverware, and no idea how they found her.

Saskatchewan is first. Edmonton is next. When she gets there, she’s hoping to meet the woman with her mother-in-law’s silverware.

What happens after that, she can’t say. She has more than a handful of cities on the calendar, and strangers finding her without being asked.

She doesn’t know exactly yet how it will all come together.

But she does have a plane ticket.

This summer, Twist is Building In Public with VisionaryOS. Every week, we follow where she’s at, what she’s deciding, and what’s actually changing — in real time.

Subscribe now for free to follow her story as it unfolds

Subscribe now

And for more on how VisionaryOS helps you plan & prioritize your week in a way that works with your brain — visit https://visionaryos.app and try it for free, today.

One of her cousins does hair. Another’s a bartender. Ask them what they do and you know in an instant.

“I can’t be on the street saying ‘I do coordination intelligence, come and get it,’” Tharon Stephens Holloway told me. She laughed when she said it. But she wasn’t kidding.

Tharon has spent 30 years walking into organizations and fixing things nobody else could see were broken. She’s made teams of five act like teams of fifty. She’s done it at Fortune 500 companies and mom-and-pop shops; at publishing houses and creative agencies.

And she’s never — not once — been able to explain what she does in a way that would fit on a business card.

So she decided to try. She’s building a framework, calling it cerebellum™…

And the first thing that happened is she hit a wall.

Welcome to Build In Public

If you’ve ever listened to Gimlet Media’s Startup — where producers followed a founder through the messy, unglamorous process of actually building something — that’s what we’re doing here.

(Except in writing. And without a big budget. And instead of Silicon Valley startups, we’re following service providers who are at an inflection)

Tharon is our first featured founder this season. I’ll be tracking what she’s working on through VisionaryOS — same tool she’s using to plan her weeks and keep her projects from evaporating into the ADHD ether. I can see what she’s doing, where she’s stuck, what she skipped; she sends me voice memos when something happens.

Then I write the story.

And Tharon’s story hooked me because of something she said in our first call. She told me her Achilles heel is putting her ideas on paper. “I had a project in elementary school. It wasn’t until high school that I figured out how to do it because nobody knew what I was saying in elementary school. Then it took me until college to figure out my high school project.”

She’s ADHD. Likely autistic. Dyslexic. Near-genius IQ. She went to Georgia Tech for human factors and systems engineering, aka the study of how people actually interact with systems.

And the brain that makes her brilliant at fixing organizations is the same brain that makes “write a clear description of what you do” feel like translating a symphony into a spreadsheet.

Over the next 3 months, we're going to find out if she can get it out.

How Do You Sell Something Nobody Has a Category For?

For most of her career, Tharon thought she was doing project management. Then she thought it was consulting. Then she spent three months talking to ChatGPT every day — she calls it “Chat,” refers to it as “she” — until they finally landed on a name.

“We kind of got it simmered down to, this is basically what you’ve been doing, and it looks different everywhere you went, but it’s the same thing.”

Coordination Intelligence. That’s what she calls it now. I’m still working out what exactly it means — and honestly, I think she is too, at least in terms of how to say it to someone who isn’t inside her brain. But when she talks about the actual work, you start to get a sense of it.

She told me about a client who lost a piece of heavy machinery. Not the paperwork… the actual machine. “How do you actually lose something that big?” And the answer isn’t that someone was negligent. It’s that nobody owned the coordination: nobody was tracking which equipment was where, whose job it was to know, what the handoff looked like between shifts. The pieces were all there; the connections between them weren’t.

She told me about a Fortune 500 company where teams were scheduling meetings just to have time to work. The coordination overhead had literally consumed the thing it was supposed to coordinate. And a publishing house where the contract promised two revisions per page but production was averaging eight. She was the only person who wanted to know why.

“Nobody else wanted to know that. They only wanted to know was it going to be done on time.”

I think that’s the thing. In every one of Tharon’s stories, the problem isn’t that people are bad at their jobs. It’s that the system connecting them — the timing, the handoffs, who knows what, who owns what — is invisible and broken.

Tharon sees it the way some people see typos. She can’t not see it.

But she also can only see things the way she can see them. Which is why her therapist once told her, “You go into a team like everybody’s invested like you are.”

And Tharon’s response was, “You mean they aren’t? I mean, really? I didn’t know.”

The Prettiest Cathedral Nobody’s Ever Going to See

So the work is real. She’s got thirty years of stories to prove it.

But I still couldn’t write you a clean paragraph explaining what coordination intelligence is as a product. And neither can she. Not yet. She described the framework to me as “almost like cotton candy — like it’s real but it’s not really real.”

Her lifelong friends can’t say what she does. “They say she worked for such and such.” And cerebellum isn’t even one thing — it’s the spine of six different businesses she’s been carrying around in her head for decades: Gift experiences. Legacy storytelling. Educational methodology. Consulting. “If you can see the spine of the coordination intelligence in it, it all makes sense,” she told me.

If.

At one point, she told me about the coffee pot she’s got at home. She doesn’t even drink coffee; like me, she thinks its disgusting. The thing is, she couldn’t figure out how to turn the darn thing off. So she’d been been unplugging the machine to stop it since Christmas. Months. Then she found out you press the “start” button to make it stop. “All they had to do was say Start / Stop.”

She studied human factors at Georgia Tech. She’s spent her whole career fixing exactly this kind of mismatch — the label doesn’t match the function, so people unplug the whole system and build workarounds. She can see it everywhere. In other people’s organizations, she fixes it in weeks.

On her own work, she’s been stuck for years.

The Clock Is Ticking

When I re-read Tharon’s application before we hopped on that first call, I could tell she’d used ChatGPT to help her write it.

Not just because of the normal AI tells — the extra emdashes and endless tricolons —

(And yes, I see the irony in that sentence. I’m keeping it.)

No, I could tell because while the ideas were right, but the words were wrong. It was using words like “Interface choreography” and “Emotionally durable keepsakes.”

Words that sound good but don’t actually mean anything. At least not to someone outside her brain.

Then I got on the phone with her and heard the front-end loader story, the coffee pot, and the way she says “Coordination Intelligence” like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. And I realized, that gap? The one between how she writes and how she talks — is the whole problem in miniature.

And the clock is ticking. She’s got a magazine feature in July — a full page to advertise. She was feast-or-famine for years as a contractor because she’d get so focused on the current client she’d never line up the next one. She can’t keep doing that. “It can’t just come out half first,” she told me about cerebellum. “It’s got to be a pleasant experience to interface with it.”

ChatGPT told her she has “the prettiest internal cathedral, and you’ve got all this information that’s just sitting in you.”

The Assignment: Stop Explaining, Start Listening

So that’s where our story begins.

Tharon has spent 30 years knowing what coordination intelligence is from the inside. Now, she’s about to find out what it looks like from the outside.

Not more framework building or more ChatGPT sessions polishing the language. She’s been compressing outward for months, trying to squeeze 30 years into the right sentence, and it hasn’t worked.

So month one’s goal is to find the words. Not hers; other people’s words. To do that, she’s running a Mom Test — Rob Fitzpatrick’s method for customer discovery.

The goal is simple: talk to real people about their actual problems and find out what category they put her in. Not what she calls the work, but what they call the problem.

Month two: test those words. And then in Month three: build the place to put them.

By September, either she can explain it to a stranger... or she knows why the current version doesn’t land.

I don’t know how this ends. That’s the point.

What I do know is she’ll be tracking the whole experiment in VisionaryOS — every milestone and every next step — so we can follow what she’s doing each week, and where she’s stuck.

And so that’s the other side of this story: watching how VisionaryOS helps her ADHD brain make progress on cerebellum while keeping everything else moving, too.

This is week one.

Tharon’s Build In Public journey begins now.

This Summer, Tharon is Building In Public with VisionaryOS. Every week, we follow what she’s deciding, what she’s skipping, and what’s actually changing — in real time.

Subscribe now for free to follow her story as it unfolds

Subscribe now

For more on how VisionaryOS helps you plan & prioritize your week in a way that works with your brain — visit https://visionaryos.app and try it for free, today.

If you’re new here: VisionaryOS is a weekly planning and execution system built for neurodivergent service providers. It helps you turn mental load into a clear week, and a clear week into daily action.

Our #DevDiaries take you behind the scenes of how we’re building it: the decisions, the tradeoffs, and what we’re learning along the way.

Subscribe now

Back when we were doing done-for-you ops work, my mornings always started the same way:

Open the first client’s project tracker. Try to remember where things left off. Scan the tasks. Piece together what’d changed since Thursday. Check whether that milestone was actually done, or just marked done. Cross-reference it against the KPIs in a spreadsheet that may or may not be current.

Then do it again for the next client: log out, log into the next account, adjust to the slightly different layout and the slightly different way of tracking the same things…

If I was lucky, they’d all at least be in the same system.

More often, it’d be Asana for one client. ClickUp for another. A Notion board for the third.

By 9am, I’d have six more new tabs open and I hadn’t sent a single message yet.

And then came the real work. Switch to Slack — or email, or Voxer, or whatever this particular client preferred — and write something useful.

Not a status dump, exactly, but something that actually told them: here’s what got done, here’s what needs your attention, here’s what to focus on next.

Something that showed I’d been paying close attention.

Because, of course, I had been.

It was just scattered across five platforms and my own short-term memory.

I don’t do DFY anymore. But I still have people to check in on: every user that uses VisionaryOS gets personal check-ins from me a few times a week.

And I wasn’t about to do the six-tab morning again, but this time with dozens of users.

So I built the thing I wished I’d had back then.

Here’s what it looks like now:

I log into one screen, and every VisionaryOS user’s workspace is on a single board.

Green, yellow, red. I can see who’s on track, who’s drifting, and who needs me right now, without opening anything else.

Each card shows what actually happened:

• Tasks completed

• Reviews submitted

• Milestones hit or missed

• Wins accomplished

• Next steps remaining for the rest of the week

So when it comes time to run the check-in, I don’t start from nothing. I know exactly what’s happened so far that week, specific to that person. And within 3 minutes, I can send a personal message that sounds like I’ve been paying attention — because I have been.

Now I just have a system that makes it easy.

Ye Olde Official Release Notes

🎉 What’s new

• Email reminders. Daily Top 3 reminders and weekly review prompts, delivered to your inbox — personally handwritten by me! — to keep you accountable and on track with what comes next.

• 10-minute Quick Start. You can now purchase VisionaryOS with a single click and — within 10 minutes — have your full first week planned and ready to go. No manual onboarding, no delays, and no “set up your account” headaches.

• VCA Knowledge Base. All of the core curriculum from Visionary CEO Academy is now available inside the VisionaryOS knowledge base, meaning no need to log into multiple systems to access the tools and templates that make your business easier to run.

✨ Improved

• Post-purchase experience. New buyers now set up their password before onboarding starts, so nobody gets locked out five minutes after paying.

• Red KPI guidance. When you’ve got a KPI that’s red, the system now explains what’s going on and what to do about it instead of just stopping you.

• Demo experience. Cleaner layout, corrected CTA copy, and more consistent components across the demo flow.

🛠️ Fixed

• Recurring planners no longer get stuck in a redirect loop before reaching the dashboard

• Knowledge base guides now point to the right content instead of outdated references

• Lots and lots of other small fixes behind the scenes

🚀 Upcoming

• Better project planning. Tell ECoS what “done” looks like and what you’ve already got in place, and get back a milestone plan that reflects your actual reality, not a generic template.

• Multi-week guided onboarding. The guided flow won’t stop after week one. We’re building an experience that gradually takes you from “flying by the seat of my pants” to having actual space to breathe — one week at a time, without overwhelming you in the process.

VisionaryOS is now in open beta.
Get all the details and sign up here:

Claim Your Beta Spot

If you’re new here: VisionaryOS is a weekly planning and execution system built for neurodivergent service providers. It helps you turn mental load into a clear week, and a clear week into daily action.

Our #DevDiaries take you behind the scenes of how we’re building it: the decisions, the tradeoffs, and what we’re learning along the way.

Subscribe now

Every system works for two weeks.

You know this. You’ve lived it. The new planner, the new app, the new framework you built in Notion at 11pm on a Tuesday because this time it was going to be different.

Week one: you’re in it. Fully. It’s new, it’s working, you feel like a person who has their life together.

Week two: still going. A little wobbly, but you’re catching yourself.

Week three: it’s gone. It’s not that it flounced of dramatically into the night or anything. You didn’t decide to quit. You just... didn’t check in one morning. Then two. And by the time you remembered it existed, it felt like too much work to go back.

We’ve been building VisionaryOS for half a year. And the whole time, the question underneath everything has been simple:

What if week three is different this time?

Here’s the thing about week three:

It’s a nightmare for ND brains.

By week three, you’ve got tasks you deferred from week one still living in your head somewhere. Projects that moved but nobody updated. A KPI you were tracking that you haven’t looked at in ten days. And when you sit down to plan your week, you’re starting from a blank slate — again — because the system doesn’t remember what happened last time.

So you’re not just planning, you’re also reconstructing.

That’s what kills so many well-intentioned systems. Not the weeks when things go wrong, but the cognitive overhead of re-entering a system that doesn’t know you yet.

We built the weekly review to fix that.

When you come back at the end of the week, VisionaryOS already knows what happened.

It knows what you finished. It knows what you didn’t. The tasks you deferred don’t disappear into a graveyard — they come up automatically in your next brain dump. The projects that need attention are already flagged. The KPIs you were tracking show you where things actually stand, not where you last remember them being.

You don’t have to reconstruct anything. You just have to show up — for 10 minutes — once a week.

That’s what this release is. Not a new feature, exactly. More like bringing all the prior features together, so week three isn’t where everything falls apart.

Ye Olde Official Release Notes

🎉 What’s new

• Weekly Review. Each week VisionaryOS shows you what you finished, what you didn’t, and what needs attention next week — without you having to reconstruct any of it. That information feeds directly into your next brain dump.

• Deferred task resurfacing. Anything you punted this week shows up automatically in next week’s brain dump. No task graveyard or needing to remember; it’s just there when you come back.

• Dashboard. Your Top 3 progress is now on the first screen you see when you log in, and you can mark priorities as done directly on the dashboard.

✨ Improved

• Top 3s are now fully integrated. Your Top 3 is generated from your actual projects, KPIs, client load, and available hours — not just the demo sandbox. The plan, action list, milestones, deferrals, etc. persist between sessions.

• KPI consistency. RYG (red/yellow/green) labels now mean the same thing everywhere they appear. Previously they were calculated differently depending on which view you were in. That’s fixed.

• Milestone tracking Milestone status is now linked to the Top 3 widget. If a milestone is at risk, it shows up as part of your plan so you don’t lose sight of it.

• Onboarding. New users now get a guided workflow that creates their first weekly plan in under 10 minutes. No more opening the app for the first time and figuring it out from scratch.

• Top 3 Demo. The demo now sends you an easy-to-digest PDF of your weekly priorities, rather than an ugly email. It’s the small things.

🛠️ Fixed

• Logged-in users now land on the dashboard, not the marketing page

• KPI and brain dump tasks no longer disappear when switching between views

• Re-entry handling: if you close the tab mid-planning and come back, you no longer lose your place

• Brain dump project field now correctly holds focus

• Busy/progress cursor states on Top 3 dashboard rows

• Top 3 capacity KPI saves correctly on Friday-aligned weeks

🚀 Upcoming

• Email reminders + calendar integration. Daily Top 3 reminders and weekly review prompts, delivered to your inbox and calendar so you don’t have to remember to check in.

• Better project planning. Tell ECoS what “done” looks like and what you’ve already got in place, and get back a milestone plan that reflects your actual reality, not a generic template.

• Multi-week guided onboarding. The guided flow won’t stop after week one. We’re building an experience that gradually takes you from “flying by the seat of my pants” to having actual space to breathe — one week at a time, without overwhelming you in the process.

The Road To General Availability

Finally, this release officially marks our transition from closed to open beta.

Not because it’s done — it isn’t. There’s a long list of things still to build (the upcoming list above is just a snapshot!)

But the only way to know if week three is actually different is to let real founders get there.

So that’s what we’re doing.

If you’ve been watching from the sidelines, now’s the time.

VisionaryOS is now in open beta.
Get all the details and sign up here:

Claim Your Beta Spot