On Saturday morning the new browser extension for Edicek was done. Version 1.0. It opens straight on one question, why this page matters to you, and it finally looks like the share sheet on the iPhone instead of a grey form from a different product.
Then I opened its listing in the Chrome Web Store. One screenshot. A one-line description: "Quick add bookmarks and notes to your Edicek workspace". Version 0.2.0 from July. 6 users. A single rating, and it's one star.
That's what "shipped" has looked like in Chrome so far. In Safari the extension comes with the Edicek app for Mac, and the new version arrives with its next update.
I planned three hours to make people see the new one. It took three days.
TL;DRA feature nobody knows about gets a fraction of the use it could. People find out through what you make of it: an animation, a changelog entry, a picture, a post. I planned three hours for that part and it took three days and about ten things I didn't plan. I underestimated how much of it there is. Not anymore, and it was only three days because the systems behind it were ready.
Marketable moments
Every change I ship gets exactly one chance to be seen. I call those marketable moments, and for most of Edicek's history I wasted them.
The changelog on the Edicek website has 37 entries. 32 of them are a still picture, and 5 come with a YouTube video announcement. Even those pictures were a struggle for a long time, until I had a brand I was happy with and could generate every asset the way I wanted, in the time I wanted. But a picture of the new version can't show what changed. It shows the result and leaves the difference to your imagination. On Twitter it gets scrolled past in half a second.
So this time I decided the change itself would be the thing people see.
Saturday: the plan
The plan was an animation, a changelog entry and a few posts. From ten in the morning to about two in the afternoon, it looked like this.
The animation. 17 seconds of the old popup turning into the new one, built in the video tool I made with Claude Code: a web page with CSS transitions, posed and photographed one frame at a time. The browser slides in, a cursor clicks the Edicek icon, the old popup opens, and then it rebuilds itself into the new one in 13 steps, top to bottom. The title gets deleted and retyped. The link field slides out. The note is saved and the popup closes.
Most of those four hours went into this one. The first version was all at once, which was unreadable. Then the popup was too small to read in a changelog, so a camera now pushes in until it fills 80 percent of the frame. Then the background, which I generated 20 times until it stopped competing with the popup.
A marketing cut. The same animation, but with the tool's timeline visible underneath. That's the version that goes on Twitter, because the tool is half the story.
The changelog entry. Written against the guidelines I keep for every entry: open with a situation you recognise, then the change, no jargon.
The illustration. Edicek has a full brand system at edicek.com/brand, so today this is the cheapest part. I tell Claude Code: here's the brand, look at the older changelog entries, generate ten variants with OpenAI. Then I pick. 22 drafts for one image. The hand clicking the button kept coming out with an arm long enough to reach across the whole picture.
The posts. One on my personal account, an announcement on the Edicek account, this post, and a version for Reddit.
The Saturday part alone ran past 55 messages in one conversation with Claude Code. By two o'clock I thought I was done.
Sunday and Monday: everything I didn't plan
The success state. Animating the old popup into the new one, I saw that the moment after Save was a static picture. Everything else moved. So I animated it: paper cards fall into a stack while the page saves, and a tick lands once it's saved.
"Done done." Then I only had to port it to the iOS share extension. Except iOS also has a loading state, so I folded that into the animation too. Ideally you never see it, only when saving takes too long. It looked great, which meant porting it back into the browser extension again.
A bug. A screen recording of the new popup showed it jumping right after Save. I hadn't noticed it before.
A YouTube video, by accident. I didn't plan one. A real YouTube video takes me a day and a half. But I put an intro line at the start of the animation, the logo at the end like the outros on the Edicek channel, and music under it. That's a regular YouTube video, the one below. For a change this small it doesn't need a voiceover. The video tool learned to play music for it.
The store. When I went to publish, I found the Chrome Web Store description was still that one sentence. Rewriting it took very little time, because the iOS App Store description already said everything. It's 2,506 characters now, with a tip to open the extension with Cmd+E. Then new screenshots for the store, and while I was at it, screenshots for the Mac App Store.
That's about ten things I didn't plan.
Tuesday: launch day
The launch was waiting on two reviews: Google had to approve the Chrome extension, and Apple the new Mac and iOS release. They're separate review processes, and I didn't know when either would come through. So I set the launch for October 5: the changelog entry, an announcement on the Edicek account and a second post about the keyboard shortcut, with its own illustration. Both came through today, so all of it goes out a week early.
This morning I found a typo in the text of the video and in its thumbnail. So both got rendered again, right before the release.
And this post doesn't go out alone. Two more go with it: one about the sheet music store I couldn't keep alive and one about my first hire. The three of them took about four and a half hours with Claude Code, on Saturday, Monday and today. They came with 44 illustration drafts, 62 tweet drafts I still have to go through, and 3 drafts for Reddit. Those will be my first posts on Reddit ever, and I probably won't get to them today.
Ready for the match
Three days instead of three hours sounds like a bad estimate. It was. But without the systems behind Edicek, it wouldn't have been three days.
Every one of those unplanned things landed on something that was already there. The video tool, which only needed music. The brand and the illustration system, so a picture is a request, not a project. The iOS texts, so the store description was an edit, not a blank page. The guidelines for how a changelog entry should sound.
I didn't get through it because I rushed. I got through it because I was ready for the match.
That's why I don't rush the foundation, and why I like putting time into things other people skip. The next time I need an animation with text in it, I'm ready. The next time I need music under a video, I'm ready.
The hours you spend fine-tuning things that look silly get divided between the dozens of times you use them later without touching them again. At most you add another layer on top, and it goes on as easily as the layer before it.
What people see
Building in public looks like a lot of fun. From the outside you see a 17-second animation, a tweet, a picture in a changelog. Isolated outputs. And for each of them you could probably name ten or twenty things you'd do differently, things that would surely work better, or things I missed.
You don't see the three days behind them, the 22 drafts of one illustration, the success animation rebuilt for two platforms, the rent for the studio or the bill from OpenAI. And honestly, I don't blame you.
There's a line I keep reading everywhere: building is easy now, distribution is king. I don't buy it. If you can build a product that people actually like, learning to distribute it is a skill like any other. The other way round is much harder.
But this isn't about which half is harder. It's about which half people find out about. Your users do see the feature, but only once they learn it exists, and that means more work again: a newsletter, an in-app notification, a banner that says what's new. A feature nobody hears about, whether they already use the product or might start, gets a fraction of the use it would get if people knew about it.
The extension took its time to build. Making it visible took three days. Both of them are the product.
