I recently shipped a pub guide for London. Sixty-odd pubs, each one hand-picked, with proper descriptions. It's live on the internet. I told nobody about it. No LinkedIn post. No tweet. It just sits there, quietly, like a 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 asking: what's your distribution plan? Who's the audience? What's the hook? For the first time in a long career, I told that voice to be quiet.

Because here's what I've realised after shipping over twenty products in a few months: the algorithm owes me nothing. And that realisation is genuinely freeing.

The entitlement problem

Spend any time around people who make things on the internet and you'll hear the same complaint: the algorithm isn't showing my content. Reach is down. Engagement is tanking. It's said with genuine frustration, 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. In the pre-social-media era, you could make the best website in the world and nobody would find it unless you gamed early Google or got linked by someone with traffic. Nobody felt entitled to an audience back then. You made things because you wanted to. 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 the entire creative class miserable.

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

The thing itself

Here's what actually happens when I'm deep in a build. I get absorbed. Completely lost in it. Choosing the right colour palette for Oishii London. Getting the spacing right on a card layout. Fiddling with a font pairing until it feels exactly right. During those hours, not once am I thinking about distribution.

The thing itself is the point. The making is the reward. Building Trove taught me more about what I care about (taste, curation, the architecture of personal knowledge) than any strategy framework I've ever used. Building CultureTerminal forced me to articulate what "good curation" actually means. Building Modern Retro revealed a creative vision that goes well beyond advertising decks.

🛠
The multi-product experiment: In a few months, I shipped a culture aggregator, a wearable tech news site, a pub guide, a restaurant guide, a tube exit finder (First Out), and more. Total marketing budget: zero. Total LinkedIn posts about them: one. The building was the strategy.

Anti-hustle, not anti-ambition

This isn't a "just create for yourself" lecture from someone who doesn't care about outcomes. I care deeply about outcomes. These projects are proof of concept: a strategist can build things, think through product decisions, and ship at pace. I want someone to see the portfolio and think: I want that person on my team.

But the desire for outcomes shouldn't corrupt the making. The moment you build for the algorithm, you stop building for the thing. You make content instead of products. You optimise for shareability instead of quality. Everything becomes content marketing, and content marketing is the opposite of taste.

The best work I've ever seen was made by people 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 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 frustrated with the algorithm for not surfacing your work is like being upset at the tide for not delivering your message in a bottle. The tide has its own physics.

Once you genuinely internalise this, something shifts. You stop trying to please a machine and start building for 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 when someone lands on that page, the fonts are exactly right. That matters. 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 quieter than the confidence from a viral post. 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 held it to your own standard, not the algorithm's.

I've been in advertising long enough to know the alternative. People who build their identity around performance metrics. Whose creative direction pivots based on what "works" on social media. The strategy director in me spent years doing it, always asking: but will it scale? What's the ROI?

Now I build a Japanese language learning app because I think it's more interesting to build the tool than download one. Nobody will write a case study about that decision. But it's one of the best things I've made, built entirely because the problem was interesting.

The punchline

Here's the irony. 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 building things that were worth talking about.

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

The algorithm doesn't owe me anything. I think I prefer it that way. 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.