Stealth

I’ve been working for the last few months on a new project/product, and trying to get the whole family involved. It’s an original idea of Trudy’s, and I thought it would be really fun and interesting to make it real.

Thus far it’s been a lot of organizing and planning on my side and not a lot else - but this week we’re going to an onsite facility to do a pilot manufacturing run. This feels crazy, but definitely the kind of task to categorize as ‘you can just do things.’ More details soon, but of the many reasons I wanted to try this:

• it’s a consumer product that we can sell directly
• it’s physical: it’s got to be made of real material and manufactured in a real place
• it’s local: there is a natural advantage here where we live in Kansas; there are pilot labs and material sources nearby
• it’s fun

If you read between the lines on the first three items, you might wonder: is Matt trying to AI-proof something?

Kind of? Definitely in today’s environment, the side projects that sound most interesting are ones where I can’t imagine Claude replacing it tomorrow. So it certainly makes this project more interesting.

We’ve been working on development but NOT announcing anything yet or sharing process, which is really kind of a dumb way to go about a consumer product. I think it would be smarter of us to be sharing the details on social as we go. So we’ll definitely be recording things this week - but I really need to get us to break the bad habit of working in stealth. People like to see progress!

Anyway: pilot lab day is Thursday.