Introducing Lochy.org

Over the last year I've been tinkering with a lot of things.

I've tried writing more, which has lead to mostly-kind-of daily posts on this blog.

For those who have been following along, I greatly appreciate each of you, and thank you for your continued questions and support and attention.

The other thing, the other piece of 2025 where I spent much of my time, was a tremendous amount of energy with AI tools, and figuring out how to integrate them into the products that I build.

Much of the effect of my building has gone into my work at my day job, and eventually I hope to have things to be able to share publicly about all that. But a fun side benefit has been taking my energy and tinkering, tweaking, playing with concepts in the evenings and on weekends to try and improve my skills as a designer.

A few months ago my friend and I launched Trailblazers Trivia, a simple mobile app for asking trivia questions in a group.

That app was a milestone for me, not because of its amazing design or groundbreaking concept—but because we shipped it. We actually got something out the door and available for the public.

Well, last night we shipped another app: Lochy.

This solves a particular itch I've had for the last few months, namely providing private RSS feeds to my premium subscribers. It's in early access right now, so I'm testing it out with a few friends who are kind enough to give me feedback. If you want in on this as well, please reach out and I'll add you to the list.

The concept behind this is simple.

You want to write, and you want some of your articles to be locked behind a paywall. But RSS doesn't really function that way. So the best way around it is to have custom, randomly generated URLs for each subscriber.

And so we set out to build that. And by we I mean mostly my friend Nathan. We've created a whole tool that allows you to manage your users, create feeds, stop feeds, and offer something that Ghost doesn't yet allow.

And we're so incredibly proud of it. I talked about this more on the latest episode of Async for anyone interested.

So we shipped, and that feels so good.

But, for anyone who has built products, you can probably guess what comes next.

Two things.

First, it's a very limited product. It does what I described, but not much more (yet). It also is manual. You can't integrate with Ghost automatically, which requires managing and tracking who is paying currently, and turning them on and off yourself. There's also a dozen other features we want to add to it, but haven't yet.

But, we launched. And we're trying to take a moment to just appreciate that.

The next thing though, is how do we approach actually getting this out there for others to know about. I've been thinking about paid marketing, organic marketing, marketing in general as a tool to benefit people who are curious and not a weapon to demand attention—and it's a lot.

Just like I've spent time trying to understand the mechanics of writing, creating apps, and a dozen other areas of expertise in my life—this is a new one. How do you build something, let people know about it, and then improve their lives as a result.

That does of course beg the question—shouldn't we have done this from the beginning? Shouldn't we have made sure there was interest before all that time was invested into the app?

My answer is a resounding no.

I'd much rather be on this side of things—staring at two apps that we've launched, and being incredibly proud of that, as opposed to still daydreaming and hoping to figure out the marketing aspects of things—and letting those ideas rot on the shelf for another decade.

We launched, did it wrong, are making mistakes actively—but that's just it, we're doing something. And that's not true of a million other ideas I've had in my life.

So for those following along, no we haven't had massive success—but we're learning and having fun along the way. And all these things I'm thinking about can't help but be of benefit to me as a designer in my day job, as I try to think about end users, markets, and all the rest.

Do I hope Lochy takes off? Absolutely.

But what's more important right now is that Nathan and I know that we can take an idea, and get it out there with a limited amount of time available to us.

Here's to 2026, and I hope we can do another 4-5 of these and learn along the way (and also hopefully figure out marketing and what that means).