Week 2 Numbers
Transparency continues
Week 1 I shared the numbers. Week 2, same commitment.
Building in public means showing everything—the good, the bad, the mundane.
The metrics
Products shipped: 16 (up from 4 in Week 1)
- Core: Recall, Reflex, Pulse, Signal
- Extended: Vault, Flux, Dendrite, Vision, Synapse
- Platform: Platform
- SDKs: brainzlab-rails, brainzlab-js
- Framework: Hive Core
- Coming: Beacon, Cortex, Nerve, Sentinel (specs complete)
Lines of code: ~45,000
- Week 1: ~8,000
- Week 2: ~37,000 added
- Mostly generated with Claude, reviewed and refined by me
Commits: 247
- Average: 35/day
- Highest day: 52 (the Synapse push)
- Lowest day: 12 (documentation day)
GitHub stars: 0
- Haven't open-sourced yet
- Hive Core will be first
- Building the core before marketing
Revenue: $0
- Still pre-launch
- Building product before selling
- Target: first customer by end of January
Twitter followers: 127 (up from 34)
- Mostly from #buildinpublic posts
- Journey posts getting traction
- Need to post more consistently
Newsletter subscribers: 43 (up from 0)
- Added signup to landing page
- Converting some journey readers
- Small but engaged
What went well
Synapse came together. The AI executive system works. You can actually have a conversation with FORGE about technical decisions and get useful output.
Knowledge Bases shipped. Dendrite's new feature for document management and RAG chat is working well. Semantic search over documents is powerful.
The Stack runs locally. All 16 products run in docker-compose on my laptop. Development velocity is high because everything is integrated.
Vision + Vault integration. Visual testing with secure credential management including 2FA. This combo is unique.
What didn't go well
Beacon isn't started. Planned to begin uptime monitoring this week. Got pulled into Synapse features instead.
Documentation is sparse. Products work, but README files are minimal. Need to invest in docs.
No tests on newer products. Synapse and Vision have thin test coverage. Technical debt accumulating.
Sleep is suffering. Averaging 5 hours. Not sustainable. Need to pace better.
Learnings
AI multiplies velocity, not quality. Claude generates code fast. Making it good still requires thought. The bottleneck shifted from typing to thinking.
Integration is the hard part. Individual products are straightforward. Making them work together smoothly is where complexity lives.
Building in public builds accountability. Knowing I'll report these numbers makes me ship. Can't hide behind "making progress."
Scope is a constant battle. Every product suggests three more features. Saying no is harder than building.
Next week's goals
- Ship Beacon MVP — Basic uptime monitoring, integration with Signal
- Write proper READMEs — Every product gets documentation
- First external user — Even if it's a friend, get someone else using this
- Sleep 7 hours — Sustainability matters
The runway
Started with savings. Runway: 6 months at current burn.
No VC. No debt. Just time and energy.
Goal: revenue before runway runs out.
Pressure focuses the mind.
Following along
These updates will continue weekly. Good weeks and bad weeks.
If you're building something, I hope this helps calibrate expectations. Startups are messy. Progress is uneven. The numbers tell the real story.
See you next week.
— Andres