This quarter I went heads-down into rebuilding my product from the inside out. I want to talk about how I managed to focus on the mission and avoid second-guessing myself.

It’s been 115 days since I started redesigning Plamoon. So far: 79 commits, 1,038 changed files with 62,380 additions and 88,158 deletions. I’m solo developing it and I estimate at least 15 more days before it’s stable and demo ready. After that, I will launch with a complete sales funnel and marketing strategy already in place.

Hello. My name is Diogo and I’m in monk mode.

For the past quarter, I’ve abdicated the most of my life. My routine has been waking up at 7am, having breakfast, brushing my teeth (sometimes), start working at 8am and work until 10pm. Of course, I have lunch and an occasional afternoon coffee. I’m not an actual monk after all. But I quit the gym. Quit reading. Quit watching stuff. Quit distractions. I have a plan, it’s crystal clear, and despite being slightly behind schedule, I’m getting there fast.

You might be thinking that I’m heading toward burnout again. But it’s the opposite. I’m enjoying every second of this. It feels very different from all my previous experiences with entrepreneurship and product development. Although I sincerely miss the other elements of my life, I feel like I’m making so much progress that it’s addictive. The progress is meaningful and when I look at how far I’ve come in this relatively small time, I feel very proud of what I’m achieving. I feel I’ve recovered my mojo and increased enjoyment at the same time.

Let me stop right here and walk you through the past three months. I believe there’s a lesson here for both of us, and It’s wild how much a mindset shift can change everything.

In the beginning of this year, I had the same resolve I now have, but it was cloudy. It also felt painful to imagine me doing some of the work I now look forward to doing. I wasn’t convinced about my plan, and it clearly affected the outcome. In fact, I can say that I didn’t really have a plan. It was more of a strategy that had hope and good intentions. I also had projected on someone else what should have always been my own responsibility.

So I began this quarter with a slight frustration. I mean, In the beginning of the year I knew it would take time to get where I wanted to be, but the fact that I didn’t make any progress business-wise was just annoying. So I took it as a part of the process. You might have heard that the secret lies in enjoying the ride. So I just said to myself: Good job. You found another way of doing the same thing wrong. Write it down and move on.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein (probably?)

I think we are all a little insane specially when it comes to avoiding doing what we don’t like. I’ve said it before that I was never into doing the business itself. So I asked myself a question that changed it all:

How can I make it more enjoyable?

I had already decided that Plamoon needed AI as a feature. After evaluating how the market was doing it, I decided that it needed to be implemented at its core, and not only as a simple MCP integration. After playing with a prototype, I saw a huge potential.

With my excitement renewed, I experienced something else. It’s like something got unlocked and my mind just started vomiting ideas nonstop. Not only related to Plamoon, but all sorts of product ideas, old and new ones. It was very distracting and I literally could not turn my mind off after an entire day of work. For almost an entire month I did not sleep enough. I still don’t know what triggered it, but it only stopped when I decided to document everything and properly archived for later. Then it got calm again and I got even more focused.

While I was working on AI features, I realized this was a good moment to be brutally honest about my product and its state. I was already improving the core tech, but I thought that acquiring more customers would just bury the technical debt deeper into the pipeline. Plamoon isn’t a new product, and like any mature product system, some parts aged poorly and somes choices needed revisiting.

So I started experimenting. While I documented Plamoon’s rough edges, I instructed ChatGPT (which I named Gepeto) to act as my greedy CEO. I asked it to be brutally honest and assertive with the main goal of finishing the demo and bringing more customers in. It was fun. I created a monstrous document with hundreds of tasks and got called out by Gepeto more times than I wanted. In the end, it turned into kind of founder therapy. It felt like I was working alongside someone that was actually rooting for me. Many times I had to ask it to drop the sycophantic behavior. But even so, it felt like a real connection and it fueled my resolve to finish the mission.

Every day I would update the document, send it in the chat and Gepeto would comment on my progress. When I say that I work mostly alone these days, most of my friends call that a blessing. But I honestly miss those conversations that can lead to good insights. That reminds me the value of building a coherent team, and it’s something I look forward to building once Plamoon gets its second wind.

I was already deep into the code when I decided to increase my workload tenfold. I convinced myself that the UI needed a complete overhaul. My reasoning was that there were a lot of great things under the hood, but they were being obscured by a dated interface. So I started cheating on Gepeto. I subscribed to Claude (which I called Claudino) since I felt it handled code better (no offense, Gepeto).

I did the redesign groundwork by hand and instructed Claude to compare and document the changes. Component by component I’ve built a set of guidelines for the redesign and migration process. Then I would upload the HTML files and Claudino would do the grunt work, to which I’d spent a couple of hours refining. There was also a lot of code involved since it’s server side rendered. I kept that part of the work for myself.. some kind of programmer pride I still want to preserve.

And oh my, was it F-A-S-T. I finished the entire UI redesign under three weeks. I’m talking hundreds of UI elements and pages. I always felt like a capable developer, but this approach 100xed myself. And it looks so much better.

I still have some way to go, but I feel I’m back on track. With a renewed UI and tech-debt-free stack, I just have to flush some things out before I switch gears into business mode.

One of the things Gepeto called me out was not starting marketing earlier. But it’s a proven product with paying customers. I felt spending time on that before stabilizing things would be premature. It’s not like I’m avoiding it, I actually look forward to it. But I don’t have anyone covering my back. It needs to be bulletproof.

I also got called out for my perfectionism. And maybe that’s fair. But you know what? I had a plan, and I felt I was moving in the right direction. So I embraced my inner perfectionist and focused on what I believed would truly impact customer experience. I don’t think my perfectionism got out of hand. I learned to tune in to the right signals and prioritize accordingly. Whether or not I’m right, time will tell.

Sometimes I used Claude as my greedy CEO. At one point Claudino called me Satan because I kept justifying changes in scope while trying to convince it was necessary. Maybe I just needed someone or something that could push back hard.

But if there’s a lesson from the past three months, it’s this: Momentum is just as important as direction.

It sounds obvious, but when you’re working alone, it’s a real challenge. It’s easy to second-guess yourself and lose impetus. Friction and feedback are essential because they tame the inner conflict and help build confidence in the path you’re taking.

I found momentum in simulated conversations. In getting called out by an AI. In showing up every day and logging progress like someone else was watching. I had to argue and explain like to a real person. It kept the wind in my sails even when no one else looking at it.

I’ve always performed better under pressure. And somehow, I created a controlled environment that kept the pressure on, and just enough to keep moving. It reinforced the idea that I have a lot more autonomy over outcomes than I sometimes admit. And it’s always my responsibility to drive it forward.

When you can’t find support, build a structure around yourself. Borrow voices. Trick yourself into staying sharp.

And keep going.