I'll be honest: when I started building Jottings, I wasn't thinking about documenting the journey. I was too busy wrestling with AWS Lambda configuration, debating whether to use DynamoDB or Supabase, and convincing myself that this problem was actually worth solving.
But somewhere between the third architecture redesign and the moment I deployed the first working build to production, something shifted. I realized that all these small decisions—the failed experiments, the architectural pivots, the 2 AM epiphanies—they were valuable. Not just as technical artifacts, but as a complete record of what it actually takes to build something and ship it.
That's when I started documenting everything.
Why Your Journey Deserves Documentation
Here's what most founders don't talk about: the real work of building a product isn't glamorous. It's incremental. It's full of mistakes and course corrections and days where you delete more code than you write.
But that's exactly why it matters.
When you document your indie journey, you're doing three things simultaneously:
First, you're creating accountability. There's something about putting your decisions into words—especially publicly—that forces you to think them through more carefully. It's the difference between vaguely thinking "I should optimize for simplicity" and actually writing "Today I decided to remove the image processing pipeline and push that to the client instead. Here's why it's better."
Second, you're building a knowledge base for your future self. Six months from now, when you're debugging a weird DynamoDB query behavior, you might remember that you documented the exact reasoning behind your schema design. That saved me hours. Multiple times.
Third, you're giving permission to other people building alone. There's a real isolation to indie building. When you publicly share that you spent two weeks on something that ended up in the trash, or that you nearly gave up, or that you made decisions based on incomplete information and had to backtrack—you're essentially telling other builders that this is normal. This is what it looks like.
The Series Approach: Building a Narrative
When I started documenting Jottings, I could have written long-form posts analyzing each major decision. But I found something more powerful: the series format.
Instead of one 5,000-word "how I built Jottings" post, I created a timeline. Each entry was short enough to write quickly but substantial enough to capture real thinking. Early posts were about the problem (why does managing a personal site feel like maintaining infrastructure?). Middle posts were about exploration (which database? which framework?). Later posts were about implementation details and the inevitable compromises.
The key was using tags to connect them. Every architecture-related post got tagged #architecture. Every deployment post got #deployment. Every debugging session got #debugging. This turns a chronological feed into a navigable resource. Someone building their first full-stack app can follow the #architecture tag and see the entire evolution of decisions. Someone struggling with their first Cloudflare Worker deployment can find #deployment posts and see that I struggled too (and how I solved it).
This is where Jottings itself became the perfect tool for this. The chronological format is natural—your most recent realization sits at the top, but everything is discoverable through tags. You're not writing for the algorithm or trying to make evergreen content; you're building a genuine record of what happened and when.
What to Document at Each Stage
If you're going to do this, here's what I found worth documenting:
During ideation: Don't overthink this part. Write about the problem that's bugging you. What's broken? Who else is feeling this? What solutions already exist, and why don't they work for you? This stuff sounds obvious once you're successful, but it's gold when someone else is questioning whether their idea is worth pursuing.
During building: Document your architectural decisions with the reasoning included. Not just "I chose Supabase over Firebase" but "I chose Supabase because I needed RLS policies to enforce data isolation, and their documentation on this was clearer than Firebase's." Include your failures. Especially include your failures. The three-day detour into WebSockets that you ripped out? That's instructive.
During launching: This is where the series format shines. You're probably making dozens of small decisions in the run-up to launch. Each one is worth a quick entry: "Decided to skip email verification for OAuth signups because the friction was too high and the churn risk is low." "Set pricing at $9/month because I found five comparable products at that price point and none lower." These decisions look obvious in retrospect, but they weren't obvious when you were making them.
During growth: If your product gains traction, this is where you document what's actually driving growth. Is it SEO? Is it because you tweeted about it? Is it word-of-mouth? Most indie builders are flying blind here. When you document it, you're building a real case study that helps others.
The Unexpected Benefits
I didn't anticipate how useful this would be for other reasons.
When I'm writing my monthly update, I don't have to reconstruct what I did. I can scan through my tagged posts and see the actual work that happened. The entry count doesn't lie.
When someone asks me a question about my stack or my approach, I can often just link them to a post where I already worked through the exact same question. That's massive for scaling your time.
When I'm feeling discouraged—and there are definitely those moments—I can scroll back through early posts and see how much progress is actually visible. Not in metrics, but in thinking. In decision-making quality. In shipping speed.
And perhaps most surprisingly, this documentation has become interesting to the people using Jottings. It turns out that seeing a founder's actual process—mistakes and all—is more compelling than any polished marketing copy could ever be.
Start Now, Keep It Small
The best time to start documenting your journey was when you had the first idea. The second-best time is today.
You don't need a perfect system. You don't need to write long posts (I mostly don't). You don't need to publish to a huge audience (I haven't). You just need to commit to recording what's actually happening, when it's happening, with the reasoning included.
Use tags to build your own series. Keep posts short. Be honest about what's working and what isn't.
Years from now, when you're deciding whether to build another thing, you'll have a complete record of what this journey looked like. And if anyone else is thinking about building something, they'll have a genuine map of what's possible when you start with nothing but an idea and a willingness to work through the uncertainty.
That's worth documenting.