The Portfolio: Every Project Shipped in the Last Six Months, Graded Honestly

This is the running index for everything shipped, rebuilt, or killed here over the last six months — twelve projects, graded plainly, each with its own full writeup covering what actually got built and what happened once it was live.

The Index

Running as real businesses:

• CollectorHQ — a real Google ranking spike, a real correction two months later, and — if the operator's own account holds up — the thing that actually kept it alive was getting cited by competitors and by Perplexity and ChatGPT, not Google at all
• BulkTrade Guide — ranks in the top handful of results on protocol-branded searches and still can't buy a click; visible isn't the same as chosen
• US Debt Wire — three days from empty scaffold to live tool, and Search Console was already picking up narrow lookup terms within the first week
• Verto — 1,600 pages built across seven verticals, and the only real organic traffic so far is landing on a page about a gig-economy survey app that has nothing to do with any of them

Live, too early to grade:

• Track Down — 73.7% engagement rate in its first week, before Google's even indexed it; the actual story behind why it exists is a competitor quietly adding a paywall
• FeedCutter — two months live, real content depth, zero recorded clicks — not underperforming, genuinely undiscovered
• Merle — content written and load-bearing before the brand existed, structured like a reference book instead of a blog

Internal tools, no public front door yet:

• The Facebook content engine — 75 commits, most of them fixing scheduling-race bugs nobody sees but the cron job, still running unattended on a Raspberry Pi
• Shortformer — caught its own factual hallucination before publish, and now feeds real scripts into another property in this exact list
• Gator Roll — real scoring logic, a real subdomain, deliberately no public front door — publishing how it scores deployers would just teach deployers how to beat it

One confirmed dead, one genuinely uncertain:

• HittinCorners — 869 commits and a full stack migration, and Search Console won't even give permission to check its historical data anymore
• Viral Story Engine — a daily fiction pipeline whose own site now returns a 403 to automated checks; alive or not, honestly unconfirmed

The Approach

More irons in the fire, not fewer, better ones. Most of these were never meant to be The Big Thing — they're bets, and the point of running a portfolio of bets is that most of them are allowed to be wrong. One becomes a real business. A few stay useful quietly. One dies and gets reported as dead instead of scrubbed from the list. That's not a productivity philosophy, it's just what an honest build log looks like once you stop pretending every project has to work out to have been worth doing.

This index gets updated as the actual status changes, not left as a snapshot from whenever it was first published — check the individual writeups for the current state of each one.

The about page has a way to reach out if any of this is interesting from a work or collaboration angle.