Last Tuesday I shipped a pub guide for London. It's got about sixty pubs in it, each one hand-picked, with proper descriptions and why I think they're worth visiting. It's live on the internet. I told nobody about it. Didn't post it on LinkedIn. Didn't tweet it. Didn't send it to a single group chat. It just sits there, quietly, like a pub recommendation from a mate that you might or might not ever need.

As I was building it, a voice in my head -- the fifteen years of advertising strategy voice -- kept saying: what's your distribution plan? Who's the audience? What's the hook? How are you going to get this in front of people? And for the first time in a long time, I just told that voice to shut up.

Because here's the thing I've realised, building fourteen-odd products in about a month: the algorithm owes me nothing. And that's the most liberating thought I've had in years.

The entitlement problem

Spend any time around people who make things on the internet and you'll hear the same complaint, over and over: the algorithm isn't showing my content. Reach is down. Engagement is tanking. I put all this effort in and nobody sees it. It's said with genuine frustration, sometimes anger, as if there's a cosmic contract that says: if you make something, people must see it.

There isn't. There never was. Before algorithms, there was obscurity, which was worse. At least an algorithm occasionally throws you a bone. In the pre-social-media era, you could make the best website in the world and absolutely nobody would find it unless you knew how to game early Google or you got linked by someone with traffic. The difference is nobody felt entitled to an audience back then. You made things because you wanted to make them. Discovery was a bonus, not a right.

We've confused distribution with creation. The making of the thing and the showing of the thing are different acts entirely. Somewhere in the last decade, we merged them into one, and it's made us miserable.

I've spent my entire career in advertising, which is fundamentally the business of getting things in front of people. Reach, frequency, targeting, engagement. I've sat in rooms where we've agonised over a 0.2% difference in click-through rates. I've written strategies specifically designed to game platform algorithms. I know this world inside out. And what I've come to believe is that it's made us all slightly insane about the wrong things.

The thing itself

Here's what actually happens when I build something at night, after the kid is asleep, sitting at my kitchen table with a hot chocolate. I get absorbed. Completely lost in it. Choosing the right colour palette for a restaurant guide. Writing a description of a pub that captures why it's special. Getting the spacing right on a card layout. Fiddling with a font pairing until it feels exactly right. These are the hours between nine and midnight when I'm most alive, and not once during them am I thinking about distribution.

The thing itself is the point. The making is the reward. This sounds like something you'd cross-stitch onto a cushion, but I mean it literally. The act of building Trove taught me more about what I care about than any strategy framework I've ever used. The act of building CultureTerminal forced me to articulate what "good curation" actually means. The act of building Modern Retro showed me I have a creative vision that goes beyond advertising decks.

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The fourteen-product experiment: In roughly a month, I shipped a taste engine, a culture aggregator, a wearable tech news site, a pub guide, a restaurant guide, a kid's activity directory, an AI art project, a Japanese learning app, a flash card game, and more. Total marketing budget: zero. Total LinkedIn posts about them: one. The building was the strategy.

Anti-hustle, not anti-ambition

I want to be careful here because this isn't a "just create for yourself, man" lecture from someone who doesn't care about outcomes. I care deeply about outcomes. I'm forty, I'm between jobs, I've got a young family in London. These projects aren't just creative expression -- they're proof that I can build things, think strategically, and ship at pace. I want them to lead somewhere. I want someone to see them and think: I want to work with that person.

But -- and this is the crucial distinction -- I don't want the desire for outcomes to corrupt the making. The moment you start building for the algorithm, you stop building for the thing. You make content instead of products. You optimise for shareability instead of quality. You add a "hook" to the first three seconds because that's what performs. You turn everything into content marketing, and content marketing is the opposite of taste.

The best work I've ever seen -- in advertising, in products, in design, in writing -- was made by people who were obsessed with the thing itself. Not with how many people would see it. Not with the metrics. With the thing. The audience found them because the work was good, not because the distribution was clever.

What the algorithm actually is

An algorithm is a business model disguised as a discovery engine. It doesn't exist to show your work to the right people. It exists to keep users on a platform so the platform can sell advertising. That's it. Your content is raw material for someone else's revenue. Getting angry at the algorithm for not showing your work is like getting angry at the tide for not carrying your message in a bottle to the right beach. The tide has its own physics. It doesn't owe you anything.

Once you genuinely internalise this -- not as a coping mechanism but as an actual understanding of how the system works -- something shifts. You stop trying to please a machine and start pleasing yourself. You stop asking "will this perform?" and start asking "is this good?" Those are wildly different questions, and they lead to wildly different work.

I spent a week on the typography for my portfolio site. A week. On fonts. No algorithm rewards that. No engagement metric captures it. But I know, when someone lands on that page, the fonts are exactly right. They create the exact feeling I wanted. That matters to me. It's a taste decision, and taste decisions are the only ones I'm interested in making right now.

The quiet confidence of just making

There's a specific kind of confidence that comes from having built something, regardless of how many people have seen it. It's different from the confidence you get from a viral post or a successful campaign. It's quieter. More solid. Nobody can take it from you because it doesn't depend on external validation. You made a thing. It exists. It works. You know it's good because you held it to your own standard, not the algorithm's.

I've been in advertising long enough to know what the alternative looks like. People who build their entire identity around performance metrics. Whose mood rises and falls with their LinkedIn impressions. Who pivot their creative direction based on what "works" on social media. It's exhausting to watch and even more exhausting to live. I did it for years. The strategy director in me was always asking: but will it scale? Will it reach? What's the ROI?

Now I sit at my kitchen table at ten at night and build a Japanese language learning app because I want to learn Japanese and thought it would be more interesting to build the tool than download one. Nobody will ever write a case study about the ROI of that decision. But it's one of the best things I've made, and I made it entirely for the joy of making it.

The punchline

Here's the irony, and I'm aware of it. The one time I did post about my projects on LinkedIn -- a single post, almost reluctantly -- it went properly well. People reached out. Conversations started. Opportunities appeared. Not because I'd optimised for the algorithm, but because I'd spent weeks actually building things that were worth talking about.

The work did the marketing. The products were the content strategy. The taste was the hook.

So no, the algorithm doesn't owe me anything. And honestly? I think I prefer it that way. Because the moment you stop expecting the algorithm to reward you, you're free to make the thing you actually want to make. And the thing you actually want to make is almost always better than the thing you think will perform.

Build for the thing itself. The rest is noise.