Zero to One: What Building in Public Actually Looks Like

Most "building in public" content is a highlight reel — the launch tweet, the revenue screenshot, the clean before/after. This is the opposite of that. We're tracking a handful of real Waymaker side experiments from actual zero, and the first entry in this series starts with something breaking.

The incident that was still open when we started looking

mamabestie.com — a real Expo/React Native pregnancy and baby app, with week-by-week guidance and a no-login shareable registry — had been serving a broken homepage to every new visitor for roughly nine hours before anyone caught it. Here's what actually happened, in order, in UTC:

13:51 — A routing fix ships to close an onboarding-flicker loop. The fix works by deleting the one file Expo Router uses to match a bare "/" request.

13:56 through 22:34 — For about nine hours, mamabestie.com's root URL serves Expo Router's own "Unmatched Route" 404 screen to every guest who wasn't already onboarded. Confirmed by hand with a real browser load, not just a status-code check.

21:42 — A follow-up PR merges, explicitly meant to fix the regression. It restores the missing file and ships new About, FAQ, and Disclosure pages — but the build itself starts failing with ReferenceError: window is not defined, so the fix never actually reaches production. Five more unrelated commits queue up behind it in the next 90 seconds; all five inherit the same crash and fail too.

22:35 — Root cause found: it isn't the router at all. Expo Router's static web export renders every route in Node, which has no window. The app's Supabase client was being constructed eagerly with session persistence turned on, using React Native's storage adapter — which assumes a browser's localStorage exists. It doesn't, mid-export, so the whole build dies before any of the five queued fixes can ship.

22:40–22:43 — A fix ships that gates storage and session persistence behind a real environment check, verified against the current codebase before merging. First green build on that service since 13:56 that morning. mamabestie.com's homepage — hero, registry-sharing widget, and the new About/FAQ/Disclosure pages that had been sitting unshipped for over an hour — is confirmed live three minutes later.

The four, honestly

CodeTeachers — a real product on the wrong code

codeteachers.com — Fully built: AI coding camps for kids 8–14, an AI Ethics badge, real pricing tiers. But right now it's advertising a summer camp session that already ended five weeks ago. The correction exists and has merged — but the live site turns out to deploy from a separate, standalone repo that fix was never pushed to, a silent fork nobody had noticed. No real charge risk yet (no payment keys are configured on that service), but the copy is actively wrong and worth fixing properly rather than patching around.

South Florida AI — clean, but one manual step from stale

southflai.com — A community hub for the local AI scene: events, a jobs board, a company directory. Nothing broken on this pass — real analytics, clean render, no console errors. The risk here is invisible from the outside: this service has no GitHub connection wired up, so pushing to main does nothing on its own. Someone has to remember to deploy it by hand.

MamaBestie — just pulled back from a live outage

mamabestie.com — The deepest product of the four, and the one that most needed someone to actually look tonight. Full writeup above.

The Family Group Chat — the most polished of the four

thefamilygroupchat.xyz — Full nav, category browsing, dark mode, a Black Friday section. It got there by fixing two invisible bugs before tonight: analytics that were installed but silently firing zero events, and a site that was completely undetectable to search crawlers and link-preview bots until a server-side prerender shipped.

What "one" looks like

For scale, not comparison: waymaker.cx and agency.waymaker.cx sit further along the same climb these four are on. Waymaker's flagship product markets itself around turning an idea into income with a paid Accelerator and a Builder DNA quiz; the Agency side leads with real numbers — $100M+ in revenue-impacting work, 20+ years, client logos that include Disney, PBS, and Wyndham. And quietly, CodeTeachers sits in that same logo bar — which is exactly the kind of small inconsistency that only shows up when you actually go look.

Zero to one isn't a straight line

Every property here shipped something real this week — a fixed analytics pipeline, a crawlable homepage, a working registry, a corrected price. None of it happened without something else breaking first, or sitting broken longer than anyone noticed. CodeTeachers has been technically "launched" for months and is currently selling seats to an event that's already over. MamaBestie has the deepest feature set of the four and was invisible to its own visitors for most of today.

That's the actual shape of it. Not a portfolio of finished things next to a portfolio of unfinished ones — four things at four different honest points on the same climb, each one a little further than it was last week, none of them done.

This is a living entry — we'll keep updating it as these experiments move. Last updated September 8, 2026.