Most people get the order wrong. They explain, then ship. Or worse: they explain and never ship. They write the blog post before the product exists. They announce on social media before there's anything to announce. They craft the narrative before there's a story to tell. The explanation comes first, and the product -- if it arrives at all -- comes as an afterthought to the pitch.
Flip it. Ship the thing. Then, if you feel like it, explain what you did.
I built fourteen products before writing a single blog post about any of them. Fourteen working, live, usable websites and tools. Not one had a launch post. Not one had an announcement thread. Not one had a "here's what I learned" piece accompanying it into the world. They just existed. They were live. You could use them. The product was the announcement.
The explanation trap
Explaining is comfortable. It's what strategists are trained to do. It's what the entire advertising industry runs on. Decks, presentations, pitches, proposals. In my fifteen years at agencies, the bulk of the work was explanation. Explaining ideas to clients. Explaining strategy to creative teams. Explaining results to stakeholders. It's a valuable skill, and I'm genuinely good at it.
But explanation has a dark side: it feels like progress when it isn't. Writing about what you're going to build feels productive. It activates the same mental circuits as actually building. You think about the problem, the audience, the solution. You articulate the vision. You feel the excitement of the idea taking shape. And then you close the document, satisfied, without having shipped anything at all.
I know this because I've done it. Spent entire evenings crafting descriptions of projects I never built. Writing about the vision, the audience, the potential. Feeling productive the whole time. And then looking at my portfolio the next morning and seeing... nothing new. The words existed. The product didn't. The order was wrong.
The product is the argument
Here's the thing about a working product: it argues for itself. It doesn't need your pitch. It doesn't need your positioning statement. It doesn't need a three-paragraph introduction explaining why it exists. You send someone a link, they click it, they use it, and either it's good or it isn't. The product makes the case faster and more persuasively than you ever could with words.
When I share Modern Retro with someone, I don't explain the concept first. I just send the link. Within three seconds of the page loading, they understand exactly what it is: modern brands reimagined as 1970s retail stores. The product communicates the idea. The AI-generated images tell the story. No pitch required.
The same is true for CultureTerminal, for Little London, for the London Pub Guide. Each product explains itself through its existence. The name, the design, the content, the experience -- all of it works together to communicate the vision without a single word of supplementary explanation. That's not an accident. That's the result of taste and clarity baked into the product from the start.
When to explain
I'm not saying never explain. I'm writing this blog post, after all. Explanation has value -- but only after the product exists. Only after you've shipped. Only after there's something real in the world that the explanation can point to.
The explanation that comes after shipping is fundamentally different from the explanation that comes before. Before shipping, explanation is speculative. "Here's what I'm going to build and why." It's a promise. After shipping, explanation is reflective. "Here's what I built, what I learned, and what I'd do differently." It's a case study. The second kind is infinitely more interesting because it's grounded in reality, not aspiration.
This blog exists because I built fourteen products and then realised I had things to say about the process. The products came first. The words came when they were ready. Some of these projects shipped months ago and I'm only now writing about them. The delay didn't hurt the products. If anything, it helped the writing, because I had perspective that I wouldn't have had in the moment.
The courage of silence
There's a particular kind of courage in shipping without explaining. In putting something into the world and letting it speak for itself, without the safety net of a carefully crafted narrative around it. Without the pre-emptive defence of "here's what I was trying to do." Without the context that might make people judge it more generously.
When you ship without explanation, the product has to stand on its own. It has to be self-evident. It has to communicate its purpose through its design, its content, its name, its entire existence. If it needs explanation to be understood, that's a product problem, not a communication problem. And you'd rather discover that after shipping than hide it behind a beautifully written launch post.
I think of it as quality control. The product that can survive without explanation is better than the product that needs it. By refusing to explain first, you force yourself to build something that explains itself. And that results in better products.
Ship the thing. Let it exist in the world for a while. Let people find it, use it, form their own opinions about it. Then, when you have something real to reflect on, explain what you did and what you learned. The product is always the main character. The explanation is the director's commentary. Nobody watches the director's commentary first.
