Week 11: Putting Powr on the Back Burner

Week 11 of Shipping Every Week: for the first time since I started, Powr feels like a failure.

I started building it in March 2025. I got serious about marketing in December. What I have to show for about 15 months of work: $10 in monthly revenue.

I'm tired of pouring in time and money and getting nothing back. And I've spent enough weeks writing honestly in this series that I'm not going to start dressing it up now.

The honest accounting

Here's the thing the previous ten weeks make hard to ignore. The work got better over those weeks, not worse. The video archive got reliable. The screens got good. The architecture got trustworthy. I shipped something real every single week and most of it was genuinely solid engineering. And the revenue line stayed flat at basically zero.

That's the uncomfortable lesson, and it's worth saying plainly because the build-in-public genre tends to skip it: shipping consistently is necessary, and it is not sufficient. You can run a clean loop for eleven weeks, make something you're proud of, and still not have a business. Effort and quality are inputs. A market pulling the product out of your hands is the output, and I never got that pull. Four users from a Reel was the most traction I ever felt, and it never compounded into more.

The trap at this point is the sunk cost. Fifteen months and real money say "keep going, you're so close." But fifteen months of near-zero is itself the data, and the honest read of it is that the thing I should protect isn't Powr — it's my own time and momentum, which are the only assets I actually have.

The call

I'm not officially killing Powr. The app works, it's live, the people who use it can keep using it. But I'm taking it off the front burner and pointing my weeks somewhere with more pull.

What I'm picking up instead: a web design studio. With AI, I can spin up genuinely good-looking, conversion-focused websites in hours instead of weeks. And here's why this isn't a random pivot — it's the same skills, redirected. Eleven weeks of Powr taught me design, customer interviews, marketing, shipping under a deadline, and how to drive an AI agent to build real software fast. Powr was, in a sense, eleven weeks of paid training for the thing I'm doing next, except I paid in time instead of tuition. The skills compound even when the product doesn't.

The other reason: the demand is already there, and visible, instead of hypothetical. My partner needs a site. My sisters need sites. Local LA vendors I've met along the way need sites. That's the pull I spent fifteen months chasing for Powr and never found — people who already have the problem and just need someone to solve it. I'd be foolish to keep digging where the ground is hard when there's a vein right next to me.

So if you're an entrepreneur in LA who needs a website — to book appointments, sell products, or host a blog like this one — hit me up. I'll get you set up.

This is the hardest call I've made since I started. Setting down something you've carried for over a year feels like quitting, even when the math says it's a smart reallocation. If you've ever set down something you cared about to build the thing that actually pays, I'd genuinely like to hear how it went, and how you knew it was time.

What did you ship this week?