Six months, three apps, one half marathon, and a plan I have no idea will work

On November 29 this year I will run my first half marathon in Seville. I have run races before, but never this distance. Six months ago I could barely run for ten minutes without stopping. The training plan I am following was generated by an app I built myself. I built it because I could not find anything that accounted for my medical conditions, my menstrual cycle, and the fact that I am a complete beginner who does not want a generic plan designed for a different body. So I built the thing I needed. That is also how the other app started. cv-tailor came from doing the same CV adaptation process manually for every job application and realising it was taking an hour each time. I automated it for myself. Two tools built for one user: me. Then I started wondering whether any of them were useful for other people. And I realised I had absolutely no idea how to find out. I am an Engineering People Manager. I am good at building systems, running processes, managing people, and shipping internal tools. I have never sold anything. I have never found customers. I have never taken something from zero to revenue. That whole side of building a product — the market, the positioning, the distribution — I had no exposure to it and no instinct for it. So I did what I do when I do not know something. I read, I researched, I talked to people, and I built a framework. Seven stages from zero to your first ten paying customers. Each stage with entry criteria, specific steps, and exit criteria you have to meet before moving on. Now I am going to test it on FitnessHub and cv-tailor in real time and write about what happens. Not because I think the framework is right — I genuinely do not know if it is. But because testing it on real products in a real market is the only way to find out.

I am not writing this to build a personal brand or position myself as an expert. I am writing it because building in public feels like the honest way to do this — and because if any of it works, this will be the story of how it happened.

By November 29 I want three things to be true. I want to cross the finish line in Seville using a plan FitnessHub generated for me. I want cv-tailor to have at least one paying user who is not me. And I want to know whether my framework actually works — not as a success story necessarily, but as something I learned from. I am a beginner at all three of these things simultaneously. Half marathon distance, founding, and selling. That is exactly why I am writing it down.

This blog publishes weekly. One post, one topic, what actually happened.

This blog publishes weekly. One post, one topic, what actually happened.