Another three months have passed, 2026 is officially here, and I just turned 40. This post is a reflection on time, progress, and what I expect from the year ahead.

I hope you enjoyed your holidays. I took the past week off to disconnect and recharge. It was harder than you’d think. When you’re staying at home, work is right there calling to you from the home office.

While catching up, I came across this post on LinkedIn that said:

If your product’s MVP takes more than 6 months to build, it’s already obsolete.

It stung a little. I mean, it’s been more than 9 months since I started reworking my product. And while this sort of statement is designed to be engagement bait, I couldn’t help but give it a second thought.

The idea behind an MVP is that you maximize your chances of winning by shipping fast, catching the attention, seducing customers (and VCs), and testing the market sooner. But in reality, chances are that anything rushed out in less than six months can be crushed by a well-established competitor that eventually implements the same features with better stability and distribution. Startups often lack the market perspective and naively offer an unsustainable product.

Logistics is a different kind of game. I consider it to be a mission-critical domain. Downtime, half-baked features, and automation hiccups become liabilities. This is an industry where toys shouldn’t be allowed.

In the past three months, I repeatedly questioned myself whether our strategy and direction were correct. Should I really be this precious about Plamoon’s rewrite?

The realization is that Plamoon is not an MVP. It’s an iteration of a battle-tested product with nearly a decade of real-world use. Rewinding it into an MVP mindset would actually damage the long-term strategy. A fast pace is desirable, but rushing into it will backfire when customer demands start coming in.

The hardest part for me has been resisting insecurity. So my current mindset is simple: hold my breath and finish the mission. But I’m also aware that it’s time to shift gears and start showing the work.

2025 Q4 evolution

I won’t be apologetic here. Measured by my own expectations, progress in the last three months sucked. Two reasons:

First, I dropped backward compatibility. That meant removing features that were harming more than helping, updating core dependencies and a gazillion references, and fixing some DB choices that no longer made sense. Painful work.

Second, I needed thinking time. It became clear to me that any company offering a pure AI/LLM logistics product is offering a toy. So I also spent time refining Plamoon’s market positioning and offer. I thought about the architecture to ensure the product is in line with our positioning.

There may be perfectionism here. Definitely some hesitation. But I’m also in a privileged position. Plamoon has customers, it’s self-funded and I control my time. That allows me to take my time and inject years of accumulated experience directly into the product. And I’m sure our future customers will have their say soon enough.

What about the competition, you ask? I’m thinking about competition another way. If I’m right, logistics is entering a new phase altogether.

2026 expectations

2026 will be as busy as 2025.

The immediate goal is to release the beta in mid to late Q1. Starting now, the priority shifts toward visibility. There is no product without marketing.

I have been following many people building in public. Although I have experimented with it before, now I’ve gotta step up. It’s intimidating but the discomfort is familiar and necessary.

This year is about finishing the work and letting it be seen.

I wish you a wonderful time in 2026.