ToDidIt is built by Jacob McDaniel of &Pixels, mostly solo and in the open. Field Notes is where the decisions get written down while they are still warm.

Why build ToDidIt in public?

For accountability and trust, in that order. Writing a decision down in public forces it to make sense to someone else, and a visible trail of reasoning helps people decide whether to trust the product with their work.

What does ToDidIt share, and what does it hold back?

It shares the thinking behind decisions and the tradeoffs it is still unsure about. It avoids theater: vanity metrics dressed up as transparency, and hard numbers shared only when they flatter.

Building ToDidIt in public

ToDidIt is built by Jacob McDaniel of &Pixels, mostly solo, in the open. Field Notes is part of that: a place to write down the decisions while they are still warm, before they harden into the tidy story founders tell later. This post is about why we work this way, and what building in public actually looks like when you strip out the highlight reel.

Why build in the open

The honest reason is accountability and trust, in that order. Writing a decision down in public forces it to make sense to someone other than me, which is the fastest way to find out it does not. And for a small product asking people to trust it with their work, a visible trail of reasoning is worth more than any feature list. You can see how we think, disagree with it, and decide whether these are the people you want building your task app.

What we share, and what we do not

We share the thinking: why pricing is per account, why the task tree stops at three levels, why Didi stays calm. We share the tradeoffs we are unsure about, because pretending to be certain is how you lose people's trust the moment reality disagrees. What we are careful with is anything that would be theater, vanity metrics dressed up as transparency, or hard numbers shared only when they flatter. If we put a figure in front of you, we want it to mean something, not to perform openness.

What a real month looks like

Less glamorous than the threads make it look. A month is mostly small, unglamorous finishes: a migration that has to be done in three careful steps, a pricing page rewritten for the fourth time, an edge case in the recap that only shows up at month boundaries. The irony is not lost on us that building a tool about celebrating small finishes is itself a long chain of small finishes. Some days the most honest update is "shipped two fixes, untangled one decision, kept the lights on." That is the job.

The stack, briefly

For the curious: ToDidIt runs on Next.js, Supabase, and Tailwind, with an in-app AI partner named Didi layered through the task surface. The current chapter is the founding-100 Lifetime cohort, which we wrote about in why we offer a Lifetime deal. If you want to follow along, the newsletter goes out roughly twice a month, and these Field Notes are where the longer thinking lands.