Shut Up and Build

On the importance of showing, not telling

Starting April 6, for the next 30 days, I’m writing a brief essay every day and posting it to my Medium account in an effort to get off social media and focus on doing something good for me, both personally and professionally. To read my last essay, click here.

Like anyone who fancies themselves an “entrepreneur,” I have a lot of ideas.

From a business — aka money-making — perspective, some of them make a ton of sense. From an ideological perspective, some of them match my beliefs and values, things I want to enact into the world and influence what I believe to be positive change. And from a creative perspective, some of them appeal to my intrinsic desire to constantly be making things, whether it be with handheld tools, through a camera lens, or on a computer screen.

Yet there’s only so much time in a given day, and only so much elbow grease you can put into different ideas before spreading yourself too thin. Therefore, the white whale I fervently chased in the fall of 2019 was Coffeehouse, a Tinder-like platform dedicated to building community and connection through “pickup” conversations.

I arrived at this grand idea by conducting user interviews and deducing a problem: People (specifically, looking at Gen Zers) do not feel like they have…