Week 1: Why I Started Shipping Every Week

You need to ship more.

That's what I keep telling myself. I've told myself for months. And here's what I've learned about telling yourself to change: it does almost nothing. The intention is real, the resolve feels real, and then a week passes and the only evidence that anything happened is the resolve itself, slightly fainter than before.

Telling yourself to change is vastly different from making real, measurable change. So I'm done relying on the version of me that promises things in private.

The commitment

This marks Week 1 of Shipping Every Week. The rule is simple: no matter how small or unrefined, I have to ship something every week. And I'm doing it in public so I can't quietly let it slide.

That last part is the whole mechanism. A private goal has exactly one stakeholder, and he's also the one who decides whether missing it counts. A public goal has witnesses. Once I've said "every week" out loud, on a feed where people can see the gaps, skipping a week stops being a private renegotiation and starts being a thing that visibly didn't happen. I'm not trusting my discipline. I'm engineering a situation where my discipline doesn't have to carry the load alone.

The other reason for "no matter how small" is that the most common way these commitments die is the bar. You set out to ship, you decide the thing you have isn't impressive enough yet, you hold it back to polish, and the streak breaks before it starts. So I'm explicitly lowering the bar to anything that counts as shipping. Momentum first. Quality compounds later, but only if there's a streak to compound on.

What I shipped this week

I sent out the first in a series of emails about powerlifting to everyone on the Powr waitlist.

If you're a powerlifter with 400+ form videos clogging your camera roll, that's the app — powrtrainingapp.com. The waitlist is people who've raised their hand and are waiting for a reason to come back. A newsletter is me giving them one.

I eventually plan to fully automate this newsletter with Claude Code — drafted, scheduled, sent without me touching it. But that's not what week one is for. For now I'm doing the thing that doesn't scale: writing it myself and sending it by hand.

There's a well-worn piece of startup advice from Paul Graham about doing things that don't scale, and it gets quoted so often it's easy to miss why it's true. The point isn't that manual work is virtuous. It's that early on you don't actually know what works, and the slow hand-built version is how you find out before you spend weeks automating the wrong thing. I'd rather send one email by hand and learn what people open than build a sending pipeline for a message nobody wants.

That's the whole point of week one. Not a big launch. Not a milestone. Just proof to myself that the loop runs — that I can decide to ship, and then ship, and then say so.

What did you ship this week?